CRM Essential To Successful Retail Marketing

Casual Male Retail Group implemented a CRM (customer relationship management) and business analytics solution to improve its direct marketing efforts, getting closer to one-to-one marketing.

Virtually every retailer is gathering demographic and customer data at the POS, but very few are using this data beyond blanket e-mail and direct marketing campaigns. For some retailers, housing a database of customer data and only parsing it based on geographic location to blast marketing collateral is sufficient. However, if you want to differentiate your customers by shopping behavior, style preferences, and even physical characteristics, you need to implement more sophisticated CRM systems.

Specialty men's retailer Casual Male Retail Group has found this to be true. "If you're someone like Abercrombie and Fitch, with an established customer base and brand, where you can just open mall locations and watch people come in, you're not going to focus on CRM," says Dennis Hernreich, COO/CFO. "But if you're in a competitive environment, or if you have a market share that's difficult to get to, CRM is extremely important. You need to know who your customers are, where they are, and how they behave. The more you know about the customers, the more you can cater to them specifically." Casual Male has recently implemented a CRM database and business analytic solution from NSB and SAS, respectively, to gain this more insightful customer knowledge.