By POS Software expert Don Fornes

Retailers have started to suffer as consumers tighten their purse strings in this rough economy. While some businesses will fail, those that survive can exit the downturn a much stronger business.

One of the key things to focus on during an economic downturn is getting to know your customers better. Through effective customer relationship management (CRM), you can not only maximize your near-term sales, but also build loyalty in the long-run.

With those goals in mind, here are my five steps to best practices CRM using a POS system like Aralco.

1. Plan your marketing strategies. Before you even start using new CRM features or collecting data, plan what types of marketing will work best for you. Do you want to cross-sell at the point of sale? Reward loyal customers with discounts? Promote your sales events? Plan what you will do with the software or data before you begin.

2. Build customer profiles. Once your marketing strategy is planned, now you need to put in place the software and processes needed to collect and manage the right customer data. POS systems can manage a wide range of valuable customer data like contact info, purchase histories and preferences. Determine which data is critical to your CRM strategy and start ensuring that your employees capture that data in the system (membership cards can make data capture easier).

3. Train your team. With more and more data in your customer profiles, you will be able to personalize your interactions when customers return to your store. However, you will need to train your employees to review the customer data during the point of sale and use that information to sell more and improve the customer experience. Working on the team's script, what they actually say to customers, will be critical.

4. Interact beyond your four walls. CRM is not just for managing interactions when the customer visits the store. It can me most effective if used to bring the customer back into the store or guide them to your e-commerce website. Develop an email marketing campaign strategy that personalizes each customer's email or newsletter with special offers and mentions of past purchases.

5. Analyze the results and adapt. Implement a detailed and repeatable process for analyzing your CRM efforts. As you conclude each campaign, measure how effective it was in generating sales. This requiring learning to use the right reporting tools and determine how you will track the campaign to match sales to campaigns. Of course, these five steps merit far more that one blog post. However, the most critical step is to start thinking about your CRM strategy. Chances are that your POS system has capabilities you've not even begun to explore.

This latest post comes from Don Fornes, one of the POS Software experts at Software Advice.