Retailers today have to think about the future of their business and their customers. The digital age has changed the way consumers buy products and services, making them more demanding than ever. They expect a seamless experience anywhere, anytime, and from any device.

Present day, the shopping experience has become the key influencer in a buyer’s mind. It is the age of experience economy, hence retailers need to invest in creating personalized experiences that are in sync with the brand salience.

When the economy is in a crisis like the present pandemic-induced market Salesforce CRM helps retailers in gaining the competitive edge they so much desire.

Salesforce is a singular platform, well equipped to take care of the business needs while enhancing the comfort and speed at which customers can shop.

Salesforce allows for collecting and harnessing customer data and then analyzing the customer data for making marketing and sales decisions while taking customer service to the next level.

Also, customers demand transparency from sellers about the origin and sustainability of the products they buy.

With an increasing number of shoppers turning to online marketplaces such as for their purchases, retailers need an omnichannel strategy that gives them a competitive edge.

Salesforce’s retail solutions help retailers get organized, capture data efficiently, streamline processes across departments and drive customer loyalty with marketing technologies so you can focus on growing your business today.

Capabilities of Salesforce for the retail industry

Retailers are looking to use artificial intelligence (AI) to understand consumer behaviour and preferences, improve the supply chain and inventory management, and increase revenue by recommending products or services to customers.

With Salesforce, retailers are leveraging these capabilities to enhance customer service, provide faster checkout, increase their product assortment, and optimize their sales, marketing, and operations.

The new technologies and innovations are driving the retail industry. Marketing – AI functionality to help retailers get the most out of their marketing campaigns by understanding consumer buying behaviour and preferences and predicting future buying trends.

Retail will play an important role, especially during the consumer journey where artificial intelligence and machine learning help retailers reduce friction points and make interactions more seamless.

Analytics will continue to enable retailers with insightful information about their customers and performance.

Sales and Marketing Automation

Retailers can increase the effectiveness of their sales and marketing initiatives by leveraging automation.

With Salesforce, retailers can create campaigns and nurture leads, manage their inventory and make it easy to buy products.

With Marketing Automation, you can create personalized messages based on detailed customer data, automate email marketing and social media campaigns, and develop personalized landing pages.

Marketing Automation allows you to create campaigns that are triggered by certain events, such as a customer making a purchase, or visiting your website.

You can use these campaigns to send targeted messages to your prospects, engage them with personalized content, and nurture them towards making a purchase.

The Salesforce marketing cloud helps segment customers efficiently. The range of segmentation services is specialized for retail.

You can use this detailed segmentation based on demographic, geographic, behavioural and spending habits to arrive at insightful marketing decisions.

All this helps to design the customer journey and marketing impact. The same is true of customized customer communication that can be used to improve the company’s conversion rate as it builds a very strong bonding with the customer.

Salesforce marketing cloud also helps your manage the regular promotions, discounts, rewards schemes and loyalty programs with ease thereby increasing the customer base and ringing in more sales.

Supply chain and merchandising automation

Retailers can get a complete view of their supply chain by integrating their systems with Salesforce.

By connecting their logistics system to Salesforce, retailers can have a single source of information related to their customers, orders, inventory, and more.

Inventory is an essential component of retail operations. Retailers can use Salesforce to manage their inventory, oversee orders, and ensure that their stores have sufficient stock.

Retailers can also create forecasts to determine potential future demand for particular products and their ability to meet that demand.

With Salesforce, retailers can manage their entire supply chain, from procurement and vendor management to inventory management and logistics, and everything in between.

Cloud-Based Employee Recruiting and Onboarding

Retailers need to be able to attract, engage, and retain employees to continue growing their businesses.

With Salesforce, retailers can improve their recruiting, onboarding, and performance management processes.

With recruiting, retailers can create engaging job advertisements, source candidates, and manage their hiring process. They can also track the progress of candidates through the hiring process.

With Employee Engagement, retailers can create and manage employee reward programs, and simplify the process of taking vacation and benefits.

With Performance Management, retailers can manage the performance of their sales reps, managers, and entire teams.

Easy and seamless collaboration

Apart from the core marketing operations, Salesforce allows you to run the entire business operations by integrating the various departments.

Along with the marketing department, Salesforce solutions allow for seamless collaboration between Sales, Services and Finance departments too.

It facilitates the smooth flow of data across the organization which helps the team perform better under all circumstances.

The CRM solution provides tools for cross-functional efficiency and teamwork.

The Conclusion

Retailers are increasingly reliant on technology to keep up with consumers’ changing expectations, as well as their competitors’ ever-increasing capabilities.

A sales and marketing automation platform can help retailers bridge this gap by enabling them to act faster, improve their customer experience, and optimize their sales and marketing activities.

The future of retail is being shaped right now, and technology is at the heart of it. Retailers who want to stay ahead of the competition need to act now to implement proven technologies that can empower their sales, marketing, and operations teams to be more effective.

If you are among those retailers like the one mentioned above then you have the right partner to help you implement the Salesforce system and get ahead.

You have the expertise and experience of the Virtuenix team to make the whole process easy and efficient. Just contact our representative and get ready to experience the Salesforce advantage.