Retail Marketing - Building Trust and Loyalty

The basic need of every retailer is to satisfy customers needs, meat and resolve the customer’s problem by offering an adequate product or a service and maintain a certain margin on the products/services that will lead to profit. Retail Marketing is the leash that connects the retailer with the customers having in sight the retailer's business objectives and goals.

Now days so often we walk into a store that has a shop keeper that knows nothing about so many of their products and knows nothing about those that can help you solve the problem that motivated you to get into that store. That kind of sales people just discourage the customer that a solution can be found at that store and make them leave. This is exactly what the shop owner would not like to happen.  So how to keep the customers and increase footfall and sales?

The basics of every good sales process is building trust. Once a retailer manages to build up the trust that a customer has in his services and products, it is very likely that that customer will buy and return for more. That is the way to build up customer's loyalty towards the retailers store or to a certain brand of products and services. That is one of the basic requirements for every good retail marketing agency. Every campaign and every action the agency plans has to have this as one of the long term goals in order to be successful.

So let's talk about some of the actions that the retail marketers can arrange in order to achieve this goal.  every retail marketing plan should contain activities like loyalty cards, gifts, coupons, special awards in order to build up customers' loyalty towards the product.

Loyalty cards can be used to express the customer's belonging to a certain special group of customers that the retailer wants to award with a special status and discounts for the loyalty and the business they have done in the store over a period of time.

Reward programs will include a special gift for the buyer included in every purchase that has been made in that store, or a special occasion gift like every third home appliance bought by one customer can be accompanied with a additional appliance for free, upon customer's choice.

Sales promotions programs are made to build up a well established relation with the customer and that is the basic of all great retail marketing services. Not so long ago this bonding process and loyalty was not taken into such consideration and it was so often that customers were migrating from one brand to another. Results have shown that building customers' loyalty is not an easy process and it takes time and money to invest into retail  marketing activities to achieve e this. But result also have shown that this money is well spend since it provides profit over a longer period of time and long lasting effects.

All well established retail marketing companies will offer you a sales promotion plan that will include building customer loyalty activities as part of the whole process. If they do not, do not hesitate to ask about it and include it for the benefit of your own retail business.