Did you know that according to the Database Marketing Institute that a customer’s email is worth $19.36 annually to a retailer. Imagine if you could collect the emails of just a fraction your in-store traffic. That could substantially benefit your bottom-line. Frustratingly, I see these revenues squandered through poorly integrated legacy systems or worse yet, retailers using NetSuite with a poorly integrated point of sale solution.
Retail anywhere, omnichannel retail, or unified commerce has become an industry in itself and NetSuite appears to be leading the charge in the mid-market space. NetSuite for Retail is a single platform for all your key systems. A single version of the truth that can manage both your inventory and your customers across channels on a single platform. This makes retail anywhere or omnichannel retail possible and most importantly lets you grab that $19.36.
Simply follow these rules to collect valuable customer information at your NetSuite POS and you’ll be changing your in-store focus to retail anywhere lens in short order:
- Make it easy for your customer: Customers simply don’t want to waste the time adding lots of info about themselves. Data collected at the POS should be relevant and necessary. The POS for NetSuite should allow some customization of which CRM fields to expose. Also if that emails worth $19.36 to you, why not share that benefit with your customer.
- Make it worthwhile for your Sales Associates: Incent store associates to collect accurate CRM data. Without upside for a store associate, why should they bother? Particularly if sign-up metrics aren’t being tracked by Sales Associate.
- Make the data accessible for your Marketers: You’re marketing folks are not trained in POS systems or extracting data from a POS. Get the data to your CRM / ERP for them accurately and in real time
These 3 points are far from rocket science. It’s simply a case of getting information frictionlessly from the customer at the point of sale into the CRM and marketing department. With a single platform like NetSuite and extended by point of sale solutions like Suite POS (Natively Integrated NetSuite POS Solution) that’s easy. It’s when custom integrations or even connectors between a POS and NetSuite are used that the chain breaks down and you leave that $19.36 on the table.
Ask yourself, does my POS integration pass the sales rep and cashier to NetSuite? Probably not. Does it matter?
Let’s take point 2 above, namely, incenting store associates to collect emails. How much of that $19.36 per email do you burn through collecting the data necessary to incent store associates? You need to dump the data out of the POS, import the emails into Netsuite, cross reference that customer data with the associate who collected the information. It’s a lot of work. Trust me, I’ve done the custom integration thing and have the excel scars to prove it. In short, the efficiency gains in a deeply integrated solution are worth their weight in gold.
Let’s now think about the customer experience. I mentioned sharing that $19.36 with the customer to reward them for their information. How about a promotion if they give you their e-mail? Seems fair. But can your system pull it off? Will it remind the associate that the customer could save money here? Furthermore, even if your loosely integrated POS could do that, how would the marketing department know if the promotion was effective at incenting sign-up? Typically an integration, even a good one, won’t tell which promotion was utilized. Maybe the customer just used a 20% off coupon that was being run at the same time. The old adage goes – if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – this is no different.
Bottom line, The above trifecta of points are solved with a truly native NetSuite POS solution like Suite POS for Netsuite or SuiteCommerce In-store (for the right type of lower volume retailer). That’s the value add – you empower Netsuite to facilitate this retail anywhere or omnichannel ethos.
