How Luxury Retailers Build Customer Engagement with Digital Solutions

When it comes to building customer engagement, luxury and fashion retailers have long relied on traditional marketing and in-store shoppers. But when lockdown measures led to a decisive and dramatic shift in the business landscape, luxury retailers needed to shift with it.

The closure of brick-and-mortar shops meant that engaging customers in new ways and on new channels became a top priority for retailers, and on this uncertain frontier of the New Normal, the businesses with the right digital solutions will be the ones riding off into the sunset.

How Digitalisation is Reimagining Luxury Retail

At a time when 80% of publicly listed fashion companies in Europe and North America could be in financial distress due to the repercussions of extended lockdown measures, digital solutions that can be scaled and deployed rapidly for quick wins are non-negotiable. The fight for survival is real for many organisations, but the ones that adopt the right measures will emerge on the other side more resilient, agile, and intelligent than ever before.

Here are just a few of the bold, new, and innovative ways that Isobar, a Global Digital Experience Agency, is building engagement and differentiation for retailers and brands using the power of digital platforms:

• Using AR to build interactive journeys and drive deeper engagement
• Using influencers to reach a built-in audience eager for their products
• Crafting in-browser experiences with 3D modelling
• Creating social commerce experiences
• Live-streaming premium shopping and concierge services, turning them into must-see TV

But how can more traditional luxury retailers better engage in the new climate?

Europe’s largest luxury watch retailer is building customer engagement in the New Normal

Founded in Lucerne in 1888, Bucherer is Europe’s largest luxury retailer, with a focus on watches and jewellery. They’ve always offered outstanding personalised service, and their sales associates were on a friendly basis with most of their customers. But as the world changed — and ways of shopping changed with it — Bucherer realised that they had to adapt. They required agile digital solutions that were user-friendly and could rapidly capture data insights.

Bucherer, supported by Isobar, turned to Salesforce products, including Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and Datorama, to build customer profiles and share them across all of their boutiques. Then they established a central CRM database to store all assets and transactions, which could be accessed by in-store customers around the globe.

For the next phase of its digital transformation, Bucherer turned its eye towards creating a multi-channel experience. Instead of waiting for existing customers to walk through their doors, they reached out and found new ones online. They set up mailing lists for product launches and made it possible for prospects and customers to order Bucherer products and CPOs directly through their site.

In the background, Datorama was tracking everything, enabling their marketing team to analyse the effectiveness of their campaigns. In seemingly the blink of an eye, Bucherer had gone from a traditional luxury retailer relying on long-time shoppers stopping by brick-and-mortar locations to a forward-thinking modern business that can build customer engagement in a variety of ways, wherever and whenever they choose. This agility is especially important in the New Normal when there’s no such thing as ‘ordinary’ ways of doing business.

Three ways Bucherer is going digital to build customer engagement

Here are three other ways Bucherer is using digitalisation to build customer engagement and navigate the current climate:

• Using CRM tools to reduce wait times and deliver tailored personalised in-store experiences. Using digital tools to augment or optimise traditional in-store shopping is a great way to reach customers who still enjoy the tactile experience that luxury boutiques offer.
• Repurposing their Marketing Automation platform to send targeted communications across different channels, reaching prioritised audiences.
• Focussing on their digital commerce site, which will be re-platformed to offer more opportunities for online selling. This has already been a win for Bucherer, and they should only move from strength to strength going forward.

The quickly changing business landscape has certainly presented its fair share of challenges, but thankfully we have our Trailblazers to chart a new course. And whether you want to use AR to put the customer in the middle of your world, or introduce CRM tools to reach a prioritised audience, finding new ways of building customer engagement will help you triumph in the New Normal and beyond.

View the webinar to hear more insights and tips from our conversation with Isobar and Bucherer and check out Salesforce solutions to see how our tools can help you build customer engagement.