Data-Driven Communications Become Even More Critical
Times are changing in retail marketing. So we've examined today’s one-to-one communications in the mass retail market and determined a few key trends for this year.
• The paper circular distribution continues to decline Many of our clients are telling us that they’d like to eliminate printed materials altogether in favor of electronic communications via channels that customers engage with, including email, web and mobile. Plus, it’s become clear to them that personal pricing initiatives are better enabled via 1:1 assets.
• Retailers look toward more collaborative relationships with their suppliers, driving mutual investments in loyalty and personalization. Technologies such as Sagarmatha’s APEX, which provides real-time shopper data, give retail marketers and their CPG counterparts the ability to easily analyze marketing spending and its impact on key shopping groups. With these types of in-depth data insights, retailers and CPGs can work together to optimize their joint marketing investments to increase effectiveness and ROI.
• Relationship-building through personalized soft content combined with offers increases long-term customer loyalty. The volume of data from loyalty programs can not only be used to determine the best offers, but also to provide personalized content that makes shopping easier and more pleasant, encouraging future spending. For example, by looking at a shopper’s history, retailers are able to determine whether they enjoy drinking wine and can then send them an invitation to a wine tasting event at a store nearby, combined with a stretch and spend offer for a category of wines that they enjoy.
• Optimization across channels will be more critical as touchpoints to shoppers increase. As customers’ electronic presence grow, the channels via which they can be targeted grow accordingly. Today, a retailer may focus much of its targeted marketing via direct mail. However, technology now exists that enables much more frequent targeting via the shopper’s preferred channel of choice - including email, mobile apps, web portals and social - and measures response by channel on an ongoing basis to optimize for future campaigns.
• Loyalty programs will evolve to offer more than discounts, as retailers increasingly are seeing the value in capturing CRM data to build 1:1 communications programs. Retailers have been collecting “big data” long before it was ever possible to use it. With modern, data-driven analysis and customized algorithms, retailers will be able to fully leverage existing data to drill down into the best ways to communicate with their individual customers.
• Optimizing marketing spending per individual shopper is becoming standard operating procedure. The more marketers are able to act on insights about their customer’s behavior on an ongoing basis, the better they will be able to reach and exceed their sales and margin objectives. The scale of data and frequency it updates - combined with the need to communicate multiple times per week over various communication channels - present real challenges, so highly automated solutions will be key.
Our more innovative retail clients are measuring and optimizing impact on the individual shopper level in terms of sales, margin contribution and loyalty for every dollar spent via personalized marketing, something they simply cannot do with traditional mass media spending. The high ROI they are achieving via this data-driven approach is helping them allocate marketing spending much more effectively.
• The paper circular distribution continues to decline Many of our clients are telling us that they’d like to eliminate printed materials altogether in favor of electronic communications via channels that customers engage with, including email, web and mobile. Plus, it’s become clear to them that personal pricing initiatives are better enabled via 1:1 assets.
• Retailers look toward more collaborative relationships with their suppliers, driving mutual investments in loyalty and personalization. Technologies such as Sagarmatha’s APEX, which provides real-time shopper data, give retail marketers and their CPG counterparts the ability to easily analyze marketing spending and its impact on key shopping groups. With these types of in-depth data insights, retailers and CPGs can work together to optimize their joint marketing investments to increase effectiveness and ROI.
• Relationship-building through personalized soft content combined with offers increases long-term customer loyalty. The volume of data from loyalty programs can not only be used to determine the best offers, but also to provide personalized content that makes shopping easier and more pleasant, encouraging future spending. For example, by looking at a shopper’s history, retailers are able to determine whether they enjoy drinking wine and can then send them an invitation to a wine tasting event at a store nearby, combined with a stretch and spend offer for a category of wines that they enjoy.
• Optimization across channels will be more critical as touchpoints to shoppers increase. As customers’ electronic presence grow, the channels via which they can be targeted grow accordingly. Today, a retailer may focus much of its targeted marketing via direct mail. However, technology now exists that enables much more frequent targeting via the shopper’s preferred channel of choice - including email, mobile apps, web portals and social - and measures response by channel on an ongoing basis to optimize for future campaigns.
• Loyalty programs will evolve to offer more than discounts, as retailers increasingly are seeing the value in capturing CRM data to build 1:1 communications programs. Retailers have been collecting “big data” long before it was ever possible to use it. With modern, data-driven analysis and customized algorithms, retailers will be able to fully leverage existing data to drill down into the best ways to communicate with their individual customers.
• Optimizing marketing spending per individual shopper is becoming standard operating procedure. The more marketers are able to act on insights about their customer’s behavior on an ongoing basis, the better they will be able to reach and exceed their sales and margin objectives. The scale of data and frequency it updates - combined with the need to communicate multiple times per week over various communication channels - present real challenges, so highly automated solutions will be key.
Our more innovative retail clients are measuring and optimizing impact on the individual shopper level in terms of sales, margin contribution and loyalty for every dollar spent via personalized marketing, something they simply cannot do with traditional mass media spending. The high ROI they are achieving via this data-driven approach is helping them allocate marketing spending much more effectively.
Chen Katz is Vice President of Sales at Sagarmatha, the technology that allows you to optimize shoppers’ personal experiences using research science and data-driven machine learning applied with a human focus on the front and back end. www.sag121.com