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.
Latest posts
As many folks within the email eco-system probably know by now, Spamhaus, an organization known for compiling several widely used anti-spam lists, has been extremely active this week. Over the past week, Spamhaus has listed a number of potentially hazardous IP addresses used by some of the world’s largest email service providers due to the way their newsletters signups are set up. According to most of the listings, Spamhaus has stated: Unfortunately, the said newsletter service is not verifying the email address of new subscribers. Due to this, the service can be easily abused to "listbomb" internet users. Problem resolution ============================ The newsletter service needs to clean up their email address list and ensure that bulk emails are only being sent to recipients who have verifiably subscribed to their bulk email service. In addition, the newsletter service should take appropriate actions to prevent further abuse of their service: a) Implementing CAPTCHA to prevent automated subscriptions b) Implementing Confirmed Opt In (COI) to prevent abusers from adding random email addresses to the newsletter service that are not owned by the subscriber For the most part these listings should not directly impact marketers’ current ability to send their campaigns and reach their customers as they are listed as “warnings” within the Spamhaus system. What is important to understand is that these types of listings will likely continue to happen as Spamhaus has seen a dramatic increase in malicious use of newsletter sign-ups to "email bomb" various addresses, especially government (.gov) domains. While we understand that implementing CAPTCHA, or COI into any marketing system is not something that can be done quickly, Experian Marketing Services has recommended that our clients begin to investigate how they can potentially implement this process into their newsletter sign-ups. By asking customers to simply perform the CAPTCHA check, it will not only protect marketers from adding addresses from automated signup systems, but will also reduce the possibility of being listed with Spamhaus for these types of issues in the future. Some additional resources: Massive Email Bombs Target .Gov Addresses Subscription bombing, ESPs and Spamhaus, August 15, 2016 by laura in Best Practices Comment on the latter blog post on WordtotheWise.com from the CEO of Spamhaus: Excellent well summarized article Laura. No, we’ve not changed SBL policy to require COI. It’s something we very strongly advise but we cannot make a requirement. We’ll have to consider it if list-bombing of this magnitude cannot be kept in check by list managers. This incident involved a large number of government addresses belonging to various countries being subscribed to very large numbers of lists in a very short space of time by scripts run by the attacker(s). Most of the lists hit by the attack used COI and therefore only sent confirmation requests and did not subscribe any addresses. The attack undoubtedly also hit lists which used Captcha in addition to COI and thus did not even proceed to COI (those list admins deserve some sort of community ‘hi 5’ award, since one can imagine how hard it is to convince one’s management to implement COI let alone put Captcha in front of it). The issue is the badly-run ‘open’ lists which happily subscribed every address without any consent verification and which now continue as participants in the list-bombing of government addresses. These we are trying to address with SBL listings to prompt resolution by the Senders. As you noticed, most of these particular incident listings are for IPs ending “.0/32” which does not cause any mail issue to the Sender and is deliberately used where we have a good relationship with the Sender and know they will act quickly on the alert. Steve Linford Chief Executive The Spamhaus Project
Five Norwegian startups selected to establish U.S. presence NEW YORK, Aug. 15, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — Tapad, the leader in cross-device marketing technology and now a part of Experian, has announced its new entrepreneurial mentorship initiative, the Propeller Program. Five early-stage startups from Norway have been chosen by Are Traasdahl, native of Norway and Tapad’s CEO and founder. The selected companies will share Tapad’s New York City workspace, receive C-level guidance and help establish a U.S. presence. The following companies have been selected to participate in the inaugural Propeller Program – a 12-month program beginning September 19, 2016: Bubbly – Developers of a platform that enables in-store customer feedback with dashboards and tools that facilitate real-time store response BylineMe – A marketplace for freelancers, publishers and brands to connect for content creation and distribution services Eventum – A property-sharing group that digitally assists in securing venues for meetings and corporate events Socius – A content provider for publishers to tell stories using social media Xeneta – A database that organizes the best contracted freight rates in real time and on demand “We are supporting startups that we feel represent the future of service offerings,” said Traasdahl. “It is with incredible pride that we invite these entrepreneurial teams from Norway to join us in New York Citythis year. Mentorship opportunities for early-stage companies are so important, particularly for those based outside the U.S. I look forward to giving the Propeller Program participants access to the expertise of my seasoned team and to our wide network of resources. Hopefully, it will be a game-changing year for many of them.” Contact us today!
As partnership deals mount, aggressive hiring underway for unified cross-screen technology leaders NEW YORK, July 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — Tapad, the leader in cross-device marketing technology and now a part of Experian, has announced plans for aggressive expansion in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region. This move capitalizes on Tapad's exceptional performance for brands and marketing technology companies in North America and Europe. With it's proprietary Tapad Device Graph™, the company will enable global, regional and local clients and partners to understand, monetize and measure marketing to users across screens. The Tapad Device Graph is recognized as the most accurate, scalable cross-screen solution in the market today. The decision to expand into APAC was based on increased demand from global, as well as local, brands and clients, many of which have a strong market presence throughout the region. In addition to expanding its roster of world-class data partners, plans include building a world-class team in Singapore. Over the next few months, Tapad APAC will also establish local entities in additional markets. To accelerate its ramp-up, Tapad APAC is actively recruiting in many areas, ranging from skilled and experienced solutions engineers to seasoned sales and marketing professionals. "Tapad is thrilled to be answering the call for cross-device excellence in APAC," said Pierre Martensson, GM of Tapad APAC. "Our Device Graph is adding millions of devices daily and achieves unmatched levels of scale and accuracy while protecting consumer privacy. This meets a critical need in the region." Tapad appointed Martensson as General Manager of Tapad APAC in May, kicking off expansion in the region. Martensson comes to Tapad with nearly a decade of operations experience throughout APAC, having transformed, developed and grown global organizations. To learn more about partnership and employment opportunities available with Tapad in APAC, visit www.experian.com/careers. Contact us today!