Five steps retail media networks should consider when choosing a data partner

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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