Originally appeared on Total Retail
Retail media networks (RMNs) continue to demonstrate how they can be a powerful monetization driver for retailers, creating a win-win-win for everyone involved. Retailers can monetize their valuable first-party data as well as their online and in-store inventory, while customers benefit from timely, relevant content that enhances their shopping experience. At the same time, advertisers can reach highly targeted audiences at critical moments near the point of purchase
Achieving this type of success requires overcoming challenges around fragmented and incomplete first-party data, which can limit a retailer’s ability to organize and use their data effectively. Additionally, many RMNs lack the analytical capacity to generate customer insights, build addressable audiences, and accurately measure success. To realize the full potential of their platforms, RMNs need partners that provide complementary data, strong identity solutions, and the expertise to transform insights into actionable strategies. This allows RMNs to drive winning outcomes for themselves, marketers, and their customers.
Here are the five steps an RMN should consider when selecting the right partner.
1. Build an identity foundation
First, the right partner needs to be able to organize and clean customer data. Given the millions of customer records and data points that a retailer has, RMNs need to make sure their data is highly usable. Whether it is a known customer record or an unknown customer with incomplete data, partners should fill in missing information and connect fragmented customer records to a single profile. For example, RMNs need to know that a purchase made in-store is by the same customer who bought online. The best partners will then organize those profiles into households since targeting (and purchasing) is often done at the household level. Without a strong identity foundation future steps of segmentation, insights, audience creation, and activation will not be successful.
Experian identity
Experian’s identity solutions provide RMNs with a comprehensive and accurate view of their customers across both offline and digital environments. We clean an RMN’s first-party data and organize their customer records into households since targeting is often done at the household level and purchases are made at the household level.
Using Experian’s Offline and Digital Graphs we work with the RMN to fill in the missing information they have on their customers (e.g. name, address, phone number or digital IDs like hashed emails, mobile ad IDs, CTV IDs, Universal IDs like UID2 or ID5 IDs). This ensures that the retailers’ entire customer base can be reached – and measured – across devices and channels.
2. Segment your customers
An RMN’s ability to segment its customer base and derive insights depends on the availability and usability of their data assets – not to mention some serious analytical chops. Some RMNs will split their customers into different product segments based on what’s relevant to an advertiser. For example, a home improvement retailer may segment customers by who is buying DIY supplies versus improvement services. Other RMNs may develop custom segments from their customer data and third-party data sources, so that advertisers can personalize their marketing based on life stage, age, income level, geography, and other factors. Either approach is effective but requires working with a partner who has high quality data and deep analytical expertise to develop those segments.
Segment with Experian
Experian Marketing Data helps an RMN learn about their customer beyond their first-party data. With access to 5,000 marketing attributes, RMNs can fill in the holes in their understanding of a customer. We provide them with demographic, geographic, finance, home purchase, interests and behaviors, lifestyle, auto data and more. RMNs can use this enriched data set to create addressable audience segments.
3. Generate actionable insights about these segments
Once the RMN determines how they will segment their customers, they can utilize demographic, attitudinal, interest, and behavioral data from a trusted partner to develop a customer profile that compares its customers against a relevant sample of consumers. Here, the RMN will gain insight that will help them answer questions about its customers. Examples include:
- What age and income groups are more likely to purchase my product?
- What is the current life stage of my customers – do they have children, are they married, are they empty-nesters?
- Is price or quality more important to customers in their decision-making process?
- What sort of activities do my customers enjoy?
- How frequently do my customers shop for similar merchandise?
- What media channels do my customers use to get their information?
Expanded insights with Experian
With Experian’s advanced customer profiling, RMNs can go beyond basic customer segmentation. We build detailed customer profiles by utilizing accurate, attribute-rich consumer data, so RMNs can gain a more comprehensive understanding of their customer’s preferences, life stages, and purchasing behaviors. Having this insight enables the RMN to:
- Design a targeted email campaign promoting home essentials to recently married new homeowners.
- Develop a social media post announcing the opening of a new hardware store to users within a specific location interested in do-it-yourself products.
- Create brochures and flyers at a local community event tailored towards parents with small children that promote equipment for youth sports leagues.
4. Create high quality lookalike audiences
The RMN now knows what distinguishes their customers from other consumers and can create audiences that enable advertisers to run personalized marketing campaigns at scale. RMNs can do this in several different ways:
- Work with a data provider who can create custom audiences for the RMN (e.g., Ages 40-49 and Leisure Travelers and past purchase of travel item)
These custom audiences are created by joining multiple first- and third-party data attributes found to be significant in the customer profile or using machine learning techniques to develop a custom audience unique to the advertiser.
Custom audiences with Experian
With an enriched understanding of their customers, RMNs can create addressable custom audience segments, including lookalike audiences, for advertisers.
5. Expand addressability of audiences and activate on multiple destinations
Once audiences are created, RMNs will want to increase a marketer’s reach across on-site and off-site channels. With the right identity graph partner, an RMN can add digital identifiers to customer records that enable activation across media channels, including programmatic display, connected television (CTV), or social. RMNs should work with identity providers that are not reliant on third-party cookies. They should select partners that offer more stable digital IDs in their graph like mobile ad IDs (MAIDs), hashed emails (HEMs), CTV IDs, and universal IDs like Unified I.D. 2.0 (UID2).
Experian powers data-driven advertising through connectivity
Using Experian’s Digital Graph, RMNs expand the addressability of their audiences by assigning digital identifiers to customer records. Marketers will be able to reach an RMNs customers onsite as well as offsite since Experian provides several addressable IDs.
Audiences can be activated across an RMNs owned and operated platform as well as extended programmatically to TV and the open web through Experian’s integrations across the ecosystem.
Maximize your RMN’s revenue potential with Experian
Organizing customer data, segmenting customers, generating insights, creating addressable audiences, and activating campaigns are all critical steps for an RMN to realize that revenue potential. RMNs should select a partner that provides the data, identity, and analytical resources to create the winning formula for marketers, customers, and retailers.
Experian’s data and identity solutions are designed to help RMNs maximize their revenue potential.
Reach out to our team to discover how we can support your path to RMN success.
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Experian Marketing Services Consumer Expectation Index shows positive outlook for 2012 holiday season Today we released the newest Experian Marketing Services’ Consumer Expectation Index (CEI) analysis of the first half of 2012. As noted in the release, during the first six months of 2012 we reported that consumer optimism has reached an all-time high over the last four years, beating 2008 by 8 index points. The CEI provides us with unprecedented insight into our economic outlook by who we are; men versus woman, age, household income and employment status, to name a few of the 60,000 variables that we have access to. What’s most striking about today’s release is that optimism is up across the board among men and woman and all age groups; even the unemployed increased their economic outlook from an index of 87.6 to 88.0 from the first half of 2011 to the same period this year. As we approach the holiday season, the latest CEI figures indicate a strong seasonal performance for retailers. The CEI figure for the week of Sept. 3, 2012, (the most recent single week for which data is available) was 7.4 points higher than it was at the same point last year and higher than it has been heading into the holiday season since 2008. This holiday season also could be very good for brands and retailers with big-ticket items to sell Further, key consumer groups are even more optimistic. On Sept. 3, the CEI of those adults who made an online purchase in the past year was 2 percent higher than the national average and 8.1 points higher than the CEI recorded for online shoppers at this time during 2011. This holiday season also could be very good for brands and retailers with big-ticket items to sell, since the CEI among adults planning to make a big-ticket purchase hit 117.9 the week of Sept. 3, 2012, compared with 103.5 the same week in 2011 and 100.5 in 2010. In fact, a CEI above 100 indicates that consumers are more confident than they were during the base line period, which was the first half of 2004, years before the recession began. Perhaps it’s all the talk of the looming fiscal cliff that makes today’s release appear to be counter-intuitive. In fact searches for “fiscal cliff” increased over ten-fold comparing last week to the week ending November 3rd. However, if we look for what people were searching for using search term variations, the top searches were “what is the fiscal cliff” and “fiscal cliff definition,” showing that consumers are still learning what the fiscal cliff is and what it means for them. Hitwise "Fiscal Cliff" Search Term Variations Rank Search Term Percent Volume 1 fiscal cliff 48.07% 2 what is the fiscal cliff 6.74% 3 fiscal cliff definition 6.58% 4 fiscal cliff 2013 6.28% 5 obama fiscal cliff 2.83% 6 what is a fiscal cliff 2.40% 7 the fiscal cliff 1.13% 8 what is fiscal cliff 1.06% 9 fiscal cliff looms 1.03% 10 fiscal cliff defined 0.77% Note – data is for the 4 Weeks Ending November 10, 2012 Source: Experian Marketing Services As the population becomes more educated on the looming crisis, we’ll keep tabs on any resulting changes to consumer optimism, specifically which demographics are most concerned. Learn more about the CEI here.
It is time for us to polish off our crystal ball and give our predictions straight from consumers’ fingertips for the hot products of the 2012 holiday season. Gadgets will reign across many ages Tablets including LeapPads, Tabeos, iPads, Kindles and others will continue to be a popular gift this year, with more choices than ever. On the list of top product-related search terms driving traffic to the Retail 500 category of sites, Kindle Fire HD and Windows 8 top the list as new products. Additionally, Meep!, a child friendly tablet appeared in the top fifteen. Accessories for both phones and tablets will also be popular, especially as the variety grows for iPhone 5 and iPad Mini. A reoccurring favorite gift for the holidays is UGGs which shows a decrease year over year. However, another brand with a similar product is Bearpaw, which is in the top ten searches and has seen big growth year over year. Source: Experian Hitwise Dolls, video games and Furbys, oh my! To identify the popular toys for gifts this year, we researched product-related search terms driving traffic to ToysRUs.com compared to last year’s holiday season. We uncovered trends in the doll category, Doc McStuffins as number one on the list, along with the classic Barbie, which saw a growth in searches year over year. The Furby is making a strong comeback at the number two spot with a reboot and new features. Another trend here is tablets, from branded searches like LeapPad and Kurio there is also the generic term ‘tablets for kids’. In the video game category, the new Wii U that is debuting just in time for Black Friday and should be a big gift this year, along with searches for PS3 games and the Nintendo 3ds xl are all in the top 20 searches. Source: Experian Hitwise Keywords of the consumer to identify demand Beyond product names, it is important to understand the actual way people search, using key phrases and questions. Last year, for example, there was a lot of activity around ‘in-stock’ products, such as the LeapPad explorer, which was hugely popular and quickly sold out in many stores. Retailers and marketers should monitor this throughout the season and make sure to optimize for in stock if there is a popular product that they have available. Source: Experian Hitwise Consumers also focus on what is the ‘best’ – so we see search activity around ‘best place to buy’, particularly around electronics. Questions such as ‘where to buy a’ specific product are also common, such as ‘where to buy a kindle’. These phrases offer opportunities to boost search campaigns by considering how consumers phrase their questions to ensure to capture these searches. Source: Experian Hitwise Quick tip: In the retail category there will tend to be a lot of retail branded store terms but to keep up with holiday search behavior and help make analysis quick, create portfolios of branded terms to easily exclude those from a certain category. When you strip out all the variations of that term you are able to gain insight into product searches that are most popular to a certain site or category. For more insight on the hot product trends for this year from our Hitwise trend-spotters, watch our webcast.
The holiday season – a most wonderful time of the year for retailers – is underway and marketers are tweaking their campaigns for better customer engagement and enchantment. There are many channels in which to reach top customers and prospective customers, and the new holiday season is a great time to refine strategies and tactics to ensure success. To help marketers in their quest, Experian Marketing Services recently conducted a market research study and learned that email marketing trumped all other tactics as the most successful initiative during the 2011 holiday season. Of the 84.2 percent who used email marketing, 95.8 percent reported that their campaigns were successful. Ninety-three percent said they planned to increase or maintain the same level of investment for the 2012 season. In addition to email, the study showed that paid search and online display advertising were the next most successful marketing tactics of the 2011 holiday season, with 48.9 percent naming search and 34.8 naming online display advertising as extremely or very successful campaign tactics. Our internal experts are currently looking at real-time data around these and other marketing channels and will present what they’ve learned during a live webinar on Thursday, October 25th at 1:00 p.m. EST. This information should prove very helpful to marketers who want to improve their campaigns based on current trends and results. Register for the holiday webinar and you’ll receive all of the survey data in the form of a 2012 holiday marketing white paper. Here’s to a joyous and profitable holiday season!