The Email Marketing – Point of Sale Dream Team

Some of the greatest forces in history weren’t individuals – they were teams. Where would Lewis have been without Clark? What about Hall without Oates? Peanut butter without jelly?

When it comes to business, one of the best automation duos is the Email Marketing – Point of Sale (POS) dream team.

Email marketing is part of a greater marketing automation program. Marketing automation yields many proven benefits. It can help a business owner save time and cut out unnecessary stress. One of the most efficient tools for retail automation is the use of email marketing. What began as a means of quicker communication is now one of the best marketing techniques out there. Email consistently ranks up there with the highest and most successful marketing techniques. Automating part of the marketing aspect of your business can and should be simple with POS email marketing.

In a nutshell, customer information provided by the point of sale system during the sales process makes the connection seem more natural. One of the most important numbers in email marketing is the Click-through-rate (CTR) of the email – how many people open your email versus how many emails were sent out. Targeting emails based on customer history and preference increases the CTR of those campaigns.

Well, any POS System that has an integrated email marketing program that interfaces with it collects certain pieces of information during the POS sales transaction. These pieces of information can include product choices, amount spent, birthday, or email (just to name a few). That information can subsequently be harnessed by the integrated email marketing software to create campaigns. Here are some campaign ideas:

• Time-sensitive sales: For all retail POS users (for example, Garden Center POS users, Apparel POS users, Gift Shop POS users, etc), even having the customer in a database can enable a company to alert customers to time-sensitive sales, whether they are related to holidays, seasons, or just general sales.
• Spending segmentation: Having a detailed record of the customer’s transaction history can enable businesses to target them for additional sales. A business could easily segment customers based on how much they spend, and offer additional discounts to the big spenders. In addition to offering sales, good email marketing software can also enable a retailer to send emails that contain suggestions to those big spenders.
• Recurring campaigns: Businesses can use recurring email campaigns for either ongoing sales or to specifically target certain customers. A common example of this is set up automated campaigns to target customers that haven’t visited the store in a certain amount of time. Automating these campaigns means that the initial time spent setting them up is an investment that will continually contribute to your business.

All of these tools enable businesses to build stronger relationships with their customers. Here the Email Marketing – POS team reveals itself as a bridge-builder. Integrating in-store data with out-of-store marketing operations heavily contributes to building rapport and long-lasting relationships with customers. Having the right combination can help you take your customer-business relationships to the next level while improving your bottom line.