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The questions that keep retail marketers up at night have evolved significantly over the last decade. It wasn’t long ago that marketers would spend their time debating which highway to place their billboard on, whether or not their next TV commercial should be comical or heart-tugging, or even what the optimal time of day was to blast an email campaign to their entire customer list. In 2024, retail marketing has new challenges on the radar.
The rise of omnichannel retailing
The modern, digital-savvy customer expects a flawless and interconnected shopping experience across touchpoints — one of the many reasons omnichannel marketing is on the rise. Research shows that over half of B2C consumers engage with between three and five channels whenever they make a purchase. For businesses, omnichannel engagement is a lucrative opportunity; McKinsey reports that customers who engage across channels shop nearly twice as much as those using a single channel and usually spend more money.
However, the rise in omnichannel engagement also presents several retail marketing challenges, such as the complexity of managing vast amounts of data and piecing together an accurate picture of consumer behavior.
Data and identity-related retail marketing challenges
Today’s data-driven environment has turned the retail marketing landscape on its head, and businesses have a whole new set of struggles that revolve around identity and data. We identified the top five retail marketing challenges and how to solve them.
1. Knowing what data to capture
In the omnichannel era, online and offline data is abundant. When a customer shops at a physical store, they create data points like:
- What items they purchased
- What time they visited
- How long they were there
When the same customer shops online, they create a whole new set of data points, such as:
- What device they used
- Which items they browsed but didn’t purchase
- How long they spent on specific pages
The vast available data can overwhelm retailers and make it a challenge to determine which data points to prioritize. Start by identifying the challenge you’re addressing. By defining your problem, you can better decide which data is most relevant. For instance, if you’re optimizing the timing of incentives, analyze when customers shop most frequently and customize offers based on individual behavior patterns.
How Experian’s Activity Feed can help
Experian Activity Feed connects online and offline data to promote precise targeting and measurement across mobile, web, connected TV (CTV), and more. We provide addressable insights that work across all channels by integrating real-time device IDs, cookies, and IP addresses. Our case study with Cuebiq, found here, discusses how we used Activity Feed to deliver in-store lift analyses to Cuebiq’s clients.
Because our impressive breadth of addressable data works across channels, we’re perfectly positioned to be your comprehensive identity solution, as we’re capable of addressing the entire U.S. population. With access to over 250 behavioral and demographic attributes per individual, our data fills in audience gaps to help you create a complete customer profile.
2. Understanding customer behavior
The complexity of modern consumer behavior is growing, and one of the biggest retail marketing challenges is merging all this information into a single unified customer view. With consumers moving seamlessly between devices like tablets, mobile phones, and laptops, retailers face the grueling task of keeping up with their fragmented journey.
For instance, a customer may spot a pair of shoes in-store, add them to their cart via mobile due to long cashier lines, and finish the purchase later from their laptop. However, if they cannot be recognized across these touchpoints, they may abandon the purchase out of frustration. Retailers need solutions that link offline customer relationship management (CRM) and purchase data with a customer’s online activity, regardless of channel or device.
This is where Experian identity resolution and Graph come into play.
How Experian’s Graph and identity resolution can help
Experian’s identity solutions help brands resolve disparate data by merging fragmented identifiers into a singular customer profile for a 360-degree view. We ensure each touchpoint is connected, whether the interaction happens online or offline, across mobile apps, or in-store. This enables retailers to recognize the same customer across various devices and enhances the customer experience by keeping items in their cart and personalizing their journey across platforms.
With Experian’s identity graph, brands can further enrich these customer profiles with digital identifiers that span hashed emails (HEMs), cookies, mobile device IDs (MAIDs), IP addresses, universal IDs, and CTV IDs to create a more accurate, actionable view of consumer behavior. We rebuild the graph weekly, which ensures persistent and refreshed connections between households, individuals, and their devices. This ongoing linkage allows for precise targeting and measurement over time and aligns with privacy standards and compliance obligations.
By organizing identity into households and device IDs and enriching them with marketing data, brands can gain deeper customer insights, addressability across devices, and the ability to measure the impact of their retail marketing strategies.
3. Building trust between consumers and your brand
Trust is the foundation of online relationships, and consumers who trust your brand are likelier to share their data. To establish this trust, retailers must collect customer data transparently and respectfully.
According to Experian data, 80% of consumers believe more transparency around the use of their information fosters greater trust in a business. Additionally, the same data revealed that 56% of companies plan to invest more in transparency initiatives, such as consumer education, clearer terms of communication, and consumer control over personal data.
Experian’s commitment to data accuracy and transparency further strengthens this trust. Our data is ranked #1 in accuracy by Truthset, which means you can power smarter insights, targeting, and measurement using the highest-rated, most reliable data to build customer profiles.
4. Establishing customer loyalty with retail marketing
Today’s consumer has many opportunities and choices available at their fingertips, which makes it harder for retailers to build and maintain customer loyalty. Signal loss and the rise of omnichannel media consumption have made it even more of a challenge to keep loyal customers.
By using data and insights to interact with people more meaningfully, you can overcome these difficulties to provide a more personalized, relevant experience and establish loyalty. Experian’s new Digital Graph and Marketing Attributes solution makes it easier to do just that.
Experian’s Digital Graph and Marketing Attributes solution
Using our Digital Graph and Marketing Attributes, you can gain comprehensive insights into consumer behavior by combining offline and digital data through our Living Unit ID (LUID). Our Digital Graph provides robust digital identifiers like MAIDs, CTV IDs, HEMs, and universal IDs, while our Marketing Attributes offer detailed consumer insights spanning age, gender, purchase behaviors, and content consumption habits. With this data, you can create relevant messaging and informed audience segmentation to enhance your personalization and targeting efforts across all digital channels.
Using our solution can help you deliver what customers need when they need it — like winter gear before a ski trip or swimwear before a beach vacation. These personalized experiences drive additional revenue and build lasting relationships that keep customers coming back, establishing a strong foundation of loyalty in an increasingly competitive market.
5. Finding your technology solution
Retailers need to integrate technology to make their data actionable and use it to streamline the customer experience. They need to integrate data storage platforms with fulfillment and reporting solutions, such as email service providers, display networks, and marketing intelligence tools. Whether retailers are exploring the industry or gearing up to make a substantial investment in the right technology partner, it’s vital to ensure you evaluate potential partners equally and consistently.
Experian works with major platforms, marketers, and agencies, meaning we have existing partnerships across the ecosystem for you to connect with that can bring your consumer data to life and meet your needs. Our offline and digital graphs are baked into partner integrations so customers can achieve higher match rates that improve addressability.
Strategies to help you overcome retail marketing challenges
When it comes to modern retail marketing, you’ll need to take a strategic approach to handle emerging challenges. Here are five retail trends of 2024 to consider integrating into your retail marketing strategy:
- Use predictive analytics: Data can be overwhelming, but you can analyze historical purchase patterns to capture and prioritize the most relevant data for your retail marketing efforts.
- Optimize omnichannel campaigns: Cross-channel data integration can help you ensure consistent messaging, provide a seamless experience, capture a unified view of customer interactions, and improve engagement.
- Personalize experiences with AI: Utilize AI data capture across touchpoints to create personalized recommendations and tailored experiences that resonate with individual customer preferences and behaviors.
- Adopt dynamic pricing: Use real-time data to adjust prices based on customer behavior and market conditions so your pricing strategies align with current demand and maximize revenue.
- Invest in customer experience tech: Virtual fitting rooms, augmented reality, and other advanced technologies allow customers to engage with your brand across platforms, which can improve their shopping experience.
Utilize Experian’s retail media network (RMN) solution
Experian’s solution for RMNs is another tool for overcoming retail marketing challenges. We empower RMNs to better understand their customers with unified views of online and offline behavior across channels and extend their reach across environments.
Using our top-ranked identity and audience services, we can help RMNs access expanded customer insights, enhance cross-channel audience targeting, and improve real-time measurement and attribution to enable precise, streamlined, personalized omnichannel campaigns. Our solution’s integration with major platforms improves data match rates and addressability so retailers can overcome data fragmentation and optimize their retail marketing strategies.
Experian can help advance your retail marketing strategies
Experian can help retailers effectively use data and insights to interact with customers and prospects meaningfully. Our data and identity solutions help you deliver relevant, impactful messaging to ensure the customer who puts shoes in the cart at the store is the same customer who wants to finalize their transaction later that evening online.
As the holiday season approaches, it’s time to refine your retail marketing strategies and connect authentically with shoppers. With over a billion consumers preparing to shop, Experian offers 19 new syndicated audiences available for activation across major ad platforms, including TV and programmatic, to help you reach the most relevant prospects. Whether you’re targeting discount seekers, last-minute gift-buyers, or frequent travelers, our audiences align with diverse shopping styles and preferences. Choosing the right audience segments aligns your holiday marketing efforts with consumer expectations and maximizes impact.
With our tools, you can seamlessly connect with the same customer across various channels, whether they’re shopping in-store or online. Embrace the holiday season confidently, and let Experian help your retail marketing strategy shine.
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Experian, the leader in powering data-driven advertising through connectivity, is thrilled to unveil our latest solution, Digital Graph and Marketing Attributes. This joint solution supplies marketers and platforms with the insights and connectivity needed to understand who their customers are and reach them across digital channels. The uncertainty around third-party cookies in Chrome and the overall decline in signal complicates the industry’s ability to reach the right consumer. Omnichannel media consumption results in scattered data, making it harder for marketers and platforms to understand consumer behavior and reach them across channels. These challenges call for a comprehensive solution. Our Digital Graph and Marketing Attributes solution addresses these challenges by providing identifiers for seamless cross-channel engagement. By adding Marketing Attributes, like demographic and behavioral data, marketers and platforms also gain a better understanding of their customers. This solution uses Experian’s Living Unit ID (LUID) to combine offline and digital data, giving customers deeper insights into consumer behavior, greater audience reach, and improved cross-channel visibility. Benefits of Digital Graph and Marketing Attributes Both our Digital Graph and Marketing Attributes provide value to clients as standalone products. When clients license our Digital Graph and Marketing Attributes joint solution, they have more data at their fingertips, unlocking: Consumer connectivity: When clients license Experian’s Digital Graph, they get access to digital identifiers like mobile ad IDs (MAIDs), connected TV (CTV) IDs, hashed emails (HEMs), and universal IDs so they can target the right consumers with the relevant messages across all digital media channels. Consumer insights: Experian’s 5,000 Marketing Attributes provide our clients with detailed consumer information and insights, such as age, gender, purchase behaviors, and content consumption habits. Marketing Attributes help clients create more relevant messaging and informed audience segmentation. Client examples How OpenX offers richer targeting and more connectivity with Experian OpenX is an independent omni-channel supply-side platform (SSP) and a global leader in audience, data, and identity-targeting. With industry-leading technology, exceptional client service, and extensive scalability across all formats, including CTV, app, mobile web, and desktop, OpenX has a legacy of innovating products that enhance buyer outcomes and publisher revenue while addressing complex challenges in programmatic. In recent years, OpenX has licensed Experian’s Digital Graph with identifiers, contributing to the SSP’s largest independent supply-side identity graph, which offers advanced audiences to buyers and improved data resolution to content owners. More recently, OpenX licensed Experian’s Marketing Attributes to enrich its supply-side identity graph, which includes IPs, MAIDs, and client IDs, with a variety of attributes. This strategic move has helped OpenX’s clients benefit from enhanced consumer insights and addressability, in turn delivering greater reach to the demand side and higher revenue for publishers, despite industry signal loss. "We built on our long-term partnership with Experian to enrich our digital IDs with Experian’s Marketing Attributes, which help provide buyers better insights to audiences, thereby helping our publishers monetize their inventory. With partners like Experian, OpenX effectively facilitates the value exchange between demand and supply, ensuring our partners are able to drive results for their business in the era of signal loss"Craig Golaszewski, Sr. Director of Strategic Partnerships, OpenX How StackAdapt licenses our product bundle to address three different use cases StackAdapt is the multi-channel programmatic advertising platform trusted by marketers to deliver exceptional campaigns. They drive superior results through a variety of solutions, like contextual and first-party targeting, brand lift measurement, and optimization through insights. StackAdapt licensed a similar yet unique product combination, our Digital Graph and our Audiences. StackAdapt uses the Digital Graph to allow clients to onboard their first-party data in a seamless, self-serve manner that allows them to further segment their data using Experian Audiences. “StackAdapt has been recognized as the most trusted programmatic platform by marketers, and with the integration of Experian’s Digital Graph and Audiences, we are strengthening our leadership in the space. This partnership improves our ability to deliver precise cross-channel segmentation, reach, and measurement, helping advertisers run more successful campaigns. Our collaboration with Experian allows us to offer a differentiated solution in the market and ensure our clients can deliver the most precise and impactful ads to their audiences.”Denis Loboda, Senior Director of Data, StackAdapt We recently announced a new partnership with StackAdapt. This collaboration brings the power of Experian's identity graph, syndicated and custom audiences directly to the StackAdapt platform. Read the full details in our press release here. Four ways to use Digital Graph and Marketing Attributes When these two products come together, our clients have a 360-degree view of their consumers, which helps them power four critical use cases: Analytics and insights: Learn more about your consumers by connecting our Marketing Attributes with our Digital Graph's identifiers. For example, a retailer can discover that their recent customers over-index as pickleball fans and players, leading the retailer to sponsor a professional pickleball event. Inventory monetization: When supply-side partners know their audience better, they can attract advertisers in search of that audience. For example, a publisher might find out that their audience is full of pickleball fans, leading them to reach out to brands that want to reach this audience. Activation: Companies with access to more digital identifiers from our Digital Graph can reach more people, while controlling frequency across channels. A company might know that they want to reach pickleball fans. Now, they have the digital identifiers needed to reach pickleball fans across all digital channels where they consume content, leading to increased reach. Measurement and attribution: Use the Digital Graph’s support for various digital identifiers to understand all consumer touchpoints, from media impressions to conversions. Then, lean on our Marketing Attributes to determine who your messaging resonated with. For example, a company uses our Digital Graph to know if it was the same individual who was exposed to an ad on CTV and converted via e-commerce. On top of that, the company can use our Marketing Attributes data to find out that the people who purchased were overwhelmingly pickleball fans. Connect with us to learn more about how our Digital Graph and Marketing Attributes joint solution can provide the data and insights you need to create, activate, and measure cross-channel media campaigns. 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After a six-month beta period, collaboration in Snowflake Data Clean Rooms using Experian's offline or digital graph is now generally available for all clients. As part of this, Experian is excited to announce that Experian's identity graph will be integrated into Snowflake's Data Clean Rooms. With the growing importance of data privacy and marketing efficiency, this partnership builds off of Experian's previously-announced integration into Snowflake's AI Data Cloud for Media. Adding Experian's identity graph to Snowflake Data Clean Rooms helps advertisers, advertising platforms, and measurement partners work more effectively. Built upon Experian’s rich offline and digital identity foundation, with support for various identifiers across platforms, collaboration in Snowflake Data Clean Rooms helps clients maximize the value of their data and meet the diverse needs of modern business: Collaborate with partners for richer data insights Achieve higher match rates Improve audience building Produce more accurate and complete reports Ensure data privacy Seamless integration of AdTech and MarTech platforms Regardless of the identifier type you are looking to collaborate on, Experian has the identity data in Snowflake Data Clean Rooms to support you and your partner. This leads to higher match rates and more resolved data for you to use to benefit your media initiatives. "Integrating Experian's identity graph into Snowflake Data Clean Rooms marks a transformative leap for digital marketing. This collaboration empowers advertisers, programmatic platforms, and measurement partners with unparalleled accuracy, privacy, and efficiency. Together, we are excited to provide innovative solutions to meet the evolving needs of our clients."Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, Head of Data Clean Rooms at Snowflake The Experian and Snowflake partnership showcases how collaboration can enhance scalability and cost-efficiency. Data clean rooms provide a secure environment where multiple parties can share, join, and analyze their data assets without leaving the clean room or exposing the underlying data. By integrating Experian's identity graph within Snowflake's secure platform businesses of all sizes can receive advanced data collaboration and identity tools without the high costs usually involved. The integration prioritizes consumer privacy and data security. Backed by Experian’s Global Data Principles, Experian's deep roots in data protection and security provide customers with the most trusted way to share data and protect consumer privacy. With Experian's graph in Snowflake Data Clean Rooms, customers will get a solution that respects customer consent, safeguards sensitive data, and ensures that processing occurs with the utmost respect for user confidentiality and preferences. Further, Snowflake Data Clean Rooms uses advanced methods to preserve privacy, such as differential privacy and secure computations on encrypted data, enabling data security and integrity. Together, these methods prevent unauthorized access by keeping sensitive data within the secure confines of the cleanroom on a strict, collaboration-to-collaboration basis. The collaboration between Experian and Snowflake significantly enhances data matching and identity resolution within the Snowflake Data Cleanroom. Experian’s identity solution uses digital identifiers like hashed emails, MAIDs, and CTV IDs and offline identifiers like name and address. This allows advertisers to reach more consumers and enrich their data. Marketers can easily use their first-party data in the cleanroom, and with Experian's Graph, they get higher match rates for more accurate targeting and campaign measurement. The continued partnership between Snowflake and Experian provide advertisers, platforms, and measurement providers a secure and effective way to collaborate. This sets the stage for continued innovation in programmatic advertising, ensuring that our solutions evolve in step with our clients' needs. If you're not utilizing clean rooms for collaboration but have advanced identity needs, you can license our Graph and seamlessly integrate it into your Snowflake account. Reach out to our team to learn more Latest posts
With U.S. brands expected to invest over $28 billion in connected TV (CTV) in 2024, balancing linear TV and CTV is now a top priority. Advertisers need to integrate these platforms as the TV landscape evolves to reach audiences with various viewing habits. A successful strategy requires both linear and CTV approaches to effectively reach audiences at scale. We interviewed experts from Comcast Advertising, Disney, Fox, Samsung Ads, Snowflake, and others to gain insights on the evolving landscape of linear and CTV. In our video, they discuss audience fragmentation, data-driven targeting, measurement challenges, and more. Watch now to hear their perspectives. Five considerations for connecting with linear TV and CTV audiences 1. Adapt to audience fragmentation With consumers' rapid shift toward streaming, it's easy to overlook the enduring significance of linear TV, which still commands a large portion of viewership. According to Jamie Power of the Walt Disney Company, roughly half of the current ad supply remains linear, highlighting the need for brands to adapt their strategies to target traditional TV viewers and cord-cutters. As streaming continues to rise, ensuring your strategy integrates both CTV and linear TV is crucial for reaching the full spectrum of audiences. "I don't think that we thought the world would shift so quickly to streaming, but it's not always just all about streaming; there's still such a massive audience in linear."jamie power, disney 2. Combine linear TV’s reach with CTV’s precision Blending the reach of linear TV with the granular targeting capabilities of CTV allows advertisers to engage both broad and niche audiences. Data is critical in understanding audience behavior across these platforms, enabling brands to create highly relevant campaigns tailored to specific audience segments. This strategic use of data enhances engagement and ensures that the right viewers see advertising campaigns. "The future of TV is really around managing the fragmentation of audiences and making sure that you can reach those audiences addressably wherever they're watching TV."carmela fournier, comcast Advertising 3. Manage frequency across platforms Cross-platform campaigns require managing ad frequency to avoid oversaturation while ensuring adequate exposure. With a variety of offline and digital IDs resolved to consumers, our Digital and Offline Graphs can help maintain consistent messaging across linear TV and CTV. This approach allows advertisers to strike the right balance, preventing ad fatigue and delivering the right audience reach for campaign impact. "You've got to make sure that you're not reaching the same homes too many times, that you're reaching everybody the right amount of times."justin rosen, ampersand 4. Focus on consistent measurement Linear TV and CTV offer different data granularities, necessitating tailored approaches for accurate cross-platform campaign measurement. Bridging these data gaps requires advanced tools that streamline reporting for both mediums. As the industry moves toward consistent measurement standards, advertisers must adopt solutions that provide a comprehensive view of campaign performance, enabling them to optimize their cross-platform efforts. "Where I think there are pitfalls are with the measurement piece, it's highly fragmented, there's more work to be done, we're not necessarily unified in terms of a consistent approach to measurement."april weeks, basis 5. Align with shifts in audience behavior The success of cross-platform campaigns hinges on staying agile and responsive to shifting audience preferences. As CTV adoption grows, advertisers must proactively adjust their strategies to align with how viewers engage across linear and streaming platforms. Ideas include: Regularly updating creative Adjusting the media mix Utilizing real-time data insights to ensure campaigns remain relevant "At Fox we were a traditional linear company, and essentially what we're trying to do is merge the reach and the scale of TV as well as the reach and the scale of all the cord-cutters and cord-nevers that Tubi possesses." Darren Sherriff – Foxdarren sherriff, fox As streaming TV rapidly changes, brands must stay ahead of trends and shifts in consumer behavior to tap into CTV's growing potential. By focusing on these opportunities, advertisers can blend linear TV and CTV, ensuring their campaigns reach audiences wherever they watch. Connect with Experian's TV experts As a trusted leader in data and identity services, Experian offers the expertise to help you succeed in television marketing. With our strong partnerships with key players in the TV industry, we provide access to unique marketing opportunities. Learn how Experian’s data and identity solutions can deliver outstanding results in advanced TV advertising. Partner with us today to enhance your marketing strategies using our Consumer View and Consumer Sync solutions. Connect with our TV experts Latest posts