Understand your customer

To set your brand apart from the competition (and thrive!), you need to get to know and communicate with your customers on a more personal level—this means knowing more than just their email or mailing address. It means building a relationship with them to turn them into loyal customers who keep coming back. To make this happen, retail marketers must engage with customers across all verticals and invest in true data-driven advertising. Consider the following: What do my customers do? If you know more about your customers’ lifestyles, interests and spending habits, you will have a better understanding of how they choose to spend their money and free time. Once you understand your core customer base, you can move on to how and when you should reach them. This starts with segmenting your customers and then reaching them across their preferred channels. You should then learn what motivates your customers in order to understand their buying behavior. Do they buy items spontaneously or do they spend a lot of time researching? Do they only buy things with a coupon or is free shipping more important? Lastly, determine what marketing is showing ROI so you can optimize your marketing campaign. To ensure your efforts are showing results and your marketing budget is getting the most bang for the buck, attribution is critical. Retailers should strive to get more value out of existing data, supplement it with third-party sources, and find better ways to manage it and extract valuable insights. Experian’s Customer Data Engine is the perfect solution to assist retailers with this challenge. This customer data platform helps provide you with a complete picture of online and offline customer engagement and delivers the data, tools, and insights needed to make decisions on reaching customers and lookalike prospects. Customer Data Engine is a centralized platform where first- and third-party data is managed and updated on an ongoing basis in a secure environment, providing retail marketers with analytical tools, lookalike prospects, campaign management, audience distribution and closed-loop measurement. Once retail marketers have a deeper understanding of what they need to know about their customers, they can create customized audiences using this data. Retailers value first-party data and often look at it first. Usually, this refers to online data about customer activity on a website or app, and can come from form and email submissions, views of merchandise or devices and things people searched for online. Although first-party data is gold, there is almost always additional information needed to fill in gaps. For instance, the need for recency, frequency and monetary (RFM) data is crucial. RFM data is a way for retailers to analyze their customers by using recency (how recent the customer made a purchase), frequency (how often a customer makes a purchase) and monetary data (how much money a customer spends on purchases). It gives the retailer the details of when the last time the customer made a purchase, how often does the customer make a purchase and how much did the customer spend. With this information, they will know who their most valuable customers are and be able to create customized audiences. To get a deeper understanding of your customers, solutions such as Experian’s ConsumerViewSM database can be leveraged to provide you with demographics, life event triggers, purchase data, lifestyle segmentation data and more. With thousands of data attributes available, it can take any business to the next level. According to global research firm, Coresight Research, retailers in the United States have announced 5,994 store closures in just the first 15 weeks of 2019. Changing consumer demands, and a volatile economy have made it difficult for retailers to keep pace. However, retail is not going to go away, and brands just need to be smarter about how they conduct business. Making sure you know and understand your customers is one of the ways to ensure repeat visits and set yourself apart from the competition. By enriching your data with 3rd party data from Experian, Customer Data Engine allows you to know and target your customer the same way that Direct to Consumer brands and retailers can and provides you with a full 360-degree view on what your customers are doing and how they are interacting with your brand. To learn more about Experian’s Customer Data Engine, contact us at (877) 902-4849 or experianmarketingsolutions@experian.com to learn more.

  The concept of identity resolution has emerged over the years as a strategic imperative among marketers and technology vendors. A report by Forrester contends that accurately establishing and maintaining customer identity is one of the most perplexing challenges facing marketers today. Customers have footprints in the offline and online worlds and tend to seamlessly transition across various channels and devices – presenting a unique challenge to truly understand who they are. But the ability to stitch these disparate components of information together means marketers can make better decisions and have more meaningful interactions with their customers. And for customers, this means an experience with personalized advertising content more likely to resonate with them.    Why should marketers prioritize identity?  The ability to accurately identify customers is the most basic prerequisite for marketing analytics, orchestration and execution. As such, it is becoming increasingly important for brands and marketers planning to link together disparate systems of audience insights and engagement to foster a more seamless and personalized omnichannel customer experience. For example, if an advertiser can identify a customer’s interests, as well as how that person prefers to consume information, then the advertiser can create and deliver messaging that will resonate with the customer. However, like most competitive differentiators, the mission critical components to accurately determine an identity reside within the suite of identity management tools at the marketers’ disposal and the expertise required for proper execution – a struggle for most marketers. But when properly implemented, a comprehensive customer identity strategy can be among a brand or marketer’s most valuable and proprietary assets.    Where to begin with identity resolution?   With the convergence of CRM platform data, cross-channel online touchpoints, offline record linkage management, probabilistic cross-device graphs, and data onboarding—evolving from point solutions to unified platforms—marketers are faced with an increasingly complex set of challenges in addressing and solving for customer identity management. To properly implement from the get go, and to avoid having to bolt on disparate technologies down the road, emerging industry trends and success stories suggest marketers need a neutral technology service provider that can provide each of these solutions via a single, unified platform. A vendor that can build a solid identity management foundation comprised of omni-channel targeting and attribution, cross-device resolution, online-offline linkage management, and data onboarding form the nexus of a cohesive identity strategy, built to last.    Experian helps connect consumer identity   As a trusted name in data and information services for more than 40 years, we are committed to privacy by design and the responsible usage and security of data. Whether you’re a brand, agency, or publisher, Experian has the wide-ranging toolset to help you put people at the heart of your business and make better marketing decisions. By harnessing the power of the sum of these parts, fusing both offline and online identifiers and attributes, Experian has established a leadership position in identity management. If you're ready to begin building your identity foundation, contact us and get started today!  Learn more about why identity matters to marketers and consumers, here!   

Digital Marketing Challenges Are you new to digital marketing? If you answered yes, then you may already know this is a complex world made up of cookies, pixels, attribution, and unique KPIs. With nearly 10 years of advertising experience, Experian is familiar with the challenges advertisers face as they prepare for their first digital marketing campaign. Those challenges include: determining a target audience, justifying data fees for targeting, sending a consistent message to every channel and measuring the success of a campaign. Of these challenges, creating an accurate, data-driven target audience and understanding the attribution process are the two most common. Coincidentally, these two challenges tend to be the most difficult to overcome and have the highest impact on a campaign’s success.  1.) Creating an accurate, data-driven target audience Understanding the basic demographics of your customer is the first step in the audience creation process. Your next step should be to understand your customers’ lifestyles, purchase behaviors, and current interests. By truly knowing your customer, you are then able to build out a multi-channel targeting strategy comprehensive of not only basic demographics and past behavioral data, but current behavioral trends that lead to individuals who are in market for a product or service. This reduces irrelevant marketing to individuals who may have the demographic characteristics, but are not yet in market. Overall, creating a relevant target audience saves media spend by focusing on targeting tactics that have a higher potential for success.  2.) Understanding the attribution process Now that you have your target audience, you need to determine how to measure the success of your campaign. Is your goal to increase online purchases? Drive store visits? Or, do you want your overall revenue to grow by a certain amount? Before launching your campaign, make sure you have a clear goal as well as a plan for measuring whether or not you meet your goal. Most digital marketers will judge the success of a campaign by online events, such as site visits, form completions, or online purchases. However, you may also want to measure offline metrics like phone calls or in person visits to a brick and mortar store. Offline metrics are essential to campaign performance, but are frequently over looked. Experian’s OmniActivation Strategic Services recommends having one clear goal that can be accurately measured. This ensures your campaign’s target audience and optimizations support the metric that will ultimately determine the success of your campaign.

Every day it seems, mobile device fragmentation increases. With consumers spending their time online across multiple devices - phones, tablets, over-the-top TV devices, gaming consoles, a nascent, yet growing internet-of-things, and a variety of other internet connected devices – the challenge of keeping up with consumers continues to be a daunting one. The industry has, of course, adopted many different identity solutions and cross-device technologies. Perhaps you’ve adopted some of them. Perhaps you feel like they are working. But perhaps you feel you could be doing a better job at connecting the dots. Marketers require solutions that can truly unify identities across channels and devices in order to understand consumer behavior, predict intent, and ultimately reach them with relevant communications. The easier it is to do that, the better. So, consider a couple scenarios and see how well are you doing. Within your core CRM data, are you able to connect your email subscribers to your in-store customers, all without relying on a loyalty program? Can you do this all the way down to an individual level? And are you leveraging this connected identity information to inform future online targeting? This kind of PII-based identity management is foundational to consumer engagement! Next scenario. Are you an app publisher? Or a media platform? Or any other type of organization that has a steady stream of device data? How much do you know about the consumer behind the device? Behavioral information is certainly a step in the right direction. But what about known consumer insights? How deep is the profile of information you’ve built for each device? Does it include both online and offline insights? Done in a compliant manner? There are a myriad of different techniques and approaches available to you to keep up with consumers. If you’re considering implementing a new strategy in the near future, or have questions about your current ones, contact Experian  and we can help assess the opportunities available to you.

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