EXCLUSIVE: Curacao personalizes marketing with AI
A West Coast department store chain takes a customer-focused approach across channels.
Ariela Nerubay, chief marketing officer at Curacao and adjunct professor at the University of Southern California, recently sat down with Chain Store Age to discuss how the Los Angeles-based omnichannel department store retailer maximizes the personal impact of its marketing efforts.
Curacao operates 13 locations in California, Nevada and Arizona as well as an e-commerce site. Its 100,000-plus-sq.-ft. retail stores offer a selection of electronics, fashion and home products. Through proprietary financing models, Curacao offers customers credit they can use for purchases.
What is Curacao’s marketing strategy?
My team and I are focusing on Curacao’s digital transformation. In addition to all the traditional ways to reach customers online – ads, social media, SEO – we are also harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to get deeper insights into our target audiences. This results-orientated approach allows us to use data and technology to understand the best and most effective strategies for finding, acquiring, and retaining customers.
How do you ensure personalized customer engagement?
We use first-party data enrichment from our existing customers to tailor our interactions based on their preferences, purchase history, and browsing behavior. Recognizing the importance of privacy, we adhere to strict data security measures to protect our customers’ information.
For example, we know that 90% of our retail transactions utilize our private-label credit card. So, we can learn what people buy, their shopping habits, cadence, and more.
Not only does this allow Curacao to provide personalized purchase recommendations, but it also allows us to personalize marketing campaigns and outreach based on their interests.
In addition, we encourage opportunities for feedback, such as surveys or research, from our customers willing to give us their thoughts. We utilize the feedback from our customers to our advantage so we can customize their experience with us.
How do you align the online and in-store customer experience?
Curacao has a Customer Advocacy Department, which is part of our Curacao Cares Initiative for shoppers. This initiative includes an enhanced customer bill of rights and educational programs to help ensure customers shop smarter.
We created this department to review all offline and online customer journeys at every step, so we can actively identify experience gaps that could be a source of frustration and then update the processes and policies causing those gaps so that all customer touchpoints are enhanced and improved.
These can be online and in-store, from purchasing on our e-commerce site to returning an item at one of our brick-and-mortar locations. The Curacao Cares initiative and ongoing staff training programs ensure that customers receive a consistently high level of service whether they’re shopping online or in our physical stores.
Can you provide details on any upcoming marketing plans for 2024?
We are constantly working to find unique, new ways to reach shoppers, especially because the way people buy things is evolving rapidly. It’s all about being as frictionless as possible, zipping through checkout with minimal hassle.
A blend of physical and digital experiences is in all our futures. It’s not enough for a brand to have a website and physical storefront anymore. We want to make these two spheres work in tandem so smoothly that you’ll hardly notice when you’ve switched from one to the other. Beyond being convenient and affordable, we want to create shopping experiences that are so cool and unique that customers feel like they must come back.