Apparel retailers invest heavily in advertising and promoting their products to maintain a strong connection with their customers and foster brand loyalty. Clothing retailers are constantly in competition to attract new potential customers while retaining their existing ones. Increasing foot traffic and achieving higher sales are top priorities for both online and offline retailers. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software offers a strategic approach to achieve these goals by providing better customer analysis, enhancing customer satisfaction, and improving overall revenues.

CRM has become an essential tool for retailers to navigate the intense competition in the industry. Customer orientation, relationship marketing, and database marketing are at the core of CRM. It is a software system that integrates various aspects of an organization, including inventory management, customer communication, sales, and marketing. The CRM process involves acquiring, differentiating, and evaluating customer data. This enables apparel retailers to gain customer-centric insights and analyze customer behavior. The gathered information is then used to enhance customer satisfaction and optimize productivity.

To understand how CRM software operates, it's crucial to recognize the touchpoints between customers and retailers or the company. Whenever a customer interacts with the brand, its people, products, or the company through different mediums, that interaction becomes a touchpoint. The product itself is the most evident and significant touchpoint. In addition to this, traditional channels like television and print advertisements, direct mail, and SMS also serve as touchpoints.

With the rise of digital marketing, mobile, internet, and social networking have also become effective communication mediums. Touchpoints have the power to influence, attract, and impact a customer's decision to purchase clothing. CRM software integrates with these marketing tools to manage customer touchpoints effectively and capture customer attention.

Considering the evolving influence of fashion trends and changing customer needs, CRM systems offer a multi-channel approach. The software can be seamlessly integrated with retail point-of-sale systems, online retail platforms, and physical stores. It stores various customer details, including names, addresses, demographics, along with specific data on buying influences, behavior, economic backgrounds, interactions, and feedback.

Once all the data is collected, CRM software helps retailers understand and analyze this information. The evaluation reveals which products customers are interested in, how much they are willing to pay for specific items, the factors influencing their purchase decisions, and insights to improve product shortcomings based on customer feedback. Additionally, it provides specific information about prospective, frequent, and loyal customers. Interpreting data through CRM software enables apparel retailers to better understand their customers and devise strategies to promote and increase sales of their products.

CRM differentiates data based on parameters decided by the company or retailer. Hence from heterogeneous groups it filters the data into homogeneous groups of customers based on categories like socioeconomic background, demographics, etc. By segmenting customers in specific categories, apparel retailers can design their plan of action for sales, marketing, and customer services. Moreover, with information and analysis so precise, an apparel retailer can improve the standard of business and increase its brand loyalty. Based on such results, apparel retailers can also tailor strategies to target different customer groups.


With software upgrading continuously to meet requirements of frequently changing technology, the latest versions integrate with social networking mediums to derive better analysis. Social CRM merges with the networking profiles of customers providing useful insights about popular trends and changing preferences.


Mobile CRM is another emerging system, which is very different from the traditional CRM, and lets sales associates in a store access a customer's purchase history. It also helps manage the inventory of a product and easily check if a certain garment or style is available in another outlet of the brand. Besides this, CRM software available in the market are well advanced to merge seamlessly with Point of Sale (POS), Supply Chain Management (SCM), and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. Apparel retailers are also demanding special designed CRM software according to their requirement.


However, using a CRM is not just about installing and implementing the software; it also requires changing business processes of the company. Failing to do so, will not help achieve the desired results.



CRM arms apparel retailers with information about their customers on their fingertips. Marketing strategies can be designed depending on the results derived from different touch points. CRM provides a 360 degree view of customers, leaving retailers with ample amount of resources to analyze. It helps in building improved customer value, retaining old customers, lower costs of promotions, and increase revenues. With the assistance of customer centric software like CRM, apparel retailers can maintain a track of their customers; keep their online or in-store aisles buzzing and the cash registers ringing.


References:


1.      Crmsearch.com

2.      Ijcem.org

3.      Apparel.edgl.com

4.      Cmai.in

5.      Situationalreasoning.net