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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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With Tapad, part of Experian, technology, AdsWizz AudioMatic is the first Audio buying platform to offer cross-device identity resolution across the U.S. and EMEA NEW YORK and LONDON, July 17, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Tapad, part of Experian and a global leader in digital identity resolution, today announced a new joint capability with AdsWizz , the leading technology provider for digital audio advertising solutions. The partnership combines Tapad's digital cross-device technology with AdsWizz's AudioMatic buying platform, enabling the ability to connect audio ad experiences across screens. AudioMatic, AdsWizz's audio-centric buying platform, supports programmatic audio buying and entirely new audio ad experiences for listeners. The integration of The Tapad Graph onto its platform enables new opportunities for marketers to reach, engage and measure each interaction with their desired consumers on digital radio and podcasts channels, and across devices. This partnership makes AdsWizz the first audio buying platform to offer this enhanced cross-device identity capability in the US and EMEA markets. "Marketers need privacy-safe digital identity resolution to reach their consumers," says Tom Rolph, VP of EMEA at Tapad. "With audio becoming an increasingly powerful medium for engagement, it's important that our technology extends to this channel, which is why we are excited to announce our integration with AdsWizz's AudioMatic platform." Digital audio is experiencing high growth, with 84% of advertisers and agencies saying it will play a bigger role in their media plans in the future. Today, 60% of digital audio is consumed via a mobile device.* The Tapad Graph is the largest digital identity resolution graph with differentiated global scale. The partnership enables audio advertisers to leverage The Tapad Graph for enhanced attribution, analytics, and targeting. Alexis van der Wyer, CEO at AdsWizz, added, "Digital audio is increasingly becoming ubiquitous in our media consumption and in our daily digital interactions, and because of that, audio advertising offers tremendous opportunity to personally interact with consumers in every moment of their daily lives. By integrating with Tapad, we enable our advertising partners to increase the effectiveness and the relevance of their marketing messages across audio channels." To learn more about Tapad and our digital identity resolution products, visit our identity solutions page. *Digital Audio Exchange, "The Rise of Digital Audio Advertising," https://thisisdax.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/DAX-Whitepaper.pdf Contact us today! About Tapad Tapad, Inc. is a global leader in digital identity resolution. The Tapad Graph, and its related solutions, provide a transparent, privacy-safe approach connecting brands to consumers through their devices globally. Our one-of-a-kind Graph Select offering enables marketers the flexibility and freedom of choice to correlate devices to varied objectives, driving campaign effectiveness and business results. Tapad is recognized across the industry for its product innovation, workplace culture and talent, and has earned numerous awards including One World Identity's 2019 Top 100 Influencers in Identity Award. Headquartered in New York, Tapad also has offices in Chicago, London, Oslo, Singapore and Tokyo. About AdsWizz: AdsWizz has created the end-to-end technology platform that is powering the digital audio advertising ecosystem. AdsWizz powers well-known music platforms, podcasts and broadcasting groups worldwide with a comprehensive digital audio software suite of solutions that connect audio publishers to the advertising community. From dynamic ad insertion to advanced programmatic platforms to innovative new audio formats, AdsWizz efficiently connects buyers and sellers in digital audio. AdsWizz is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with an IT Development hub in Bucharest, Romania, and presence in 39 markets around the world. About AudioMatic: AdsWizz Demand Side, audio-centric DSP and audio buying platform, AudioMatic, enables programmatic audio buying and entirely new audio ad experiences that are proven to be more engaging and more effective, and have delivered measurable results for agencies and their brands all over the world. All the biggest ad agencies have used our programmatic trading platform, including Omnicom, GroupM, Havas, Publicis, Mobext, and more.
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.
For decades, financial institutions relied on direct mail marketing and mass media for credit card offers and invitations to apply (ITA) for loans. Today however, credit marketing is going digital. In fact, according to Statista, financial services ranks 3rd in total digital ad spend this year. Lenders need to deliver relevant credit offers to consumers in the spaces and platforms where they interact. Below are three best practices to help financial services marketers make the most of their digital budgets and strategies. 1. Test new acquisition channels Consumers are no longer just in one place. They are constantly moving around and business strategies need to encompass that. Today’s consumers have multiple devices – a mobile phone, a TV, a laptop, a smartwatch, etc. and each of these devices uses a different tactic to attract consumers. Marketers need to reach their audience across all the channels with which they are engaging. To maximize performance and profitability, lenders need to leverage multiple channels to target and re-target their intended audience. They need to expand the reach of tailored prescreen ad campaigns by adding email, digital display ads, or other online channels to the traditional direct mail channel. This will help increase response rates, decrease length of time to conversation, and provide insight on consumer behaviors and preferences that cannot be achieved with a direct mail offer alone. 2. Target an audience that is right for you. Through a streamlined credit criteria selection process, and Experian’s expertise in audience creation, you now have the power to target the best consumers for your business needs in a fully customized approach. Financial services marketers should isolate appropriate populations – enabling you to make unique offers for different consumer segments and target them in the channels they leverage. In addition, you need to ensure your data is accurate and compliant. Fresh, accurate data enables you to pre-select the best prospects for your business need—right when they are most motivated to respond—and avoid making preapproved offers to nonqualified consumers. Also critical is that while we are able to use regulated data sets to reach consumers, we need to do so with extra caution while meeting FCRA guidelines. It is imperative to honor consumer opt-outs across all channels and ensure you have audit rights with media publishers. The Experian Ascend Technology Platform gives financial institutions the power to integrate client data, industry-specific data feeds and the power of Experian’s unique capabilities in data, analytics, machine learning and advanced AI to deliver enhanced opportunities throughout the customer lifecycle, including lending offers to acquire new customers and cross-sell to existing ones. 3. Test and adjust your campaigns Before the world of digital, it was difficult for financial institutions to track campaign impact on audiences. By employing online promotions, lenders can see how much interaction consumers are having with their promotional media. Financial services marketers should take processes and campaigns that have worked in the past and perform small, iterative tests using different channels. We believe that by adding a digital touch to a client's direct mail prescreen campaign, there is the potential to experience a lift above direct mail response rates; decreased length of time to conversion, and we can provide insight on consumer behaviors and preferences that cannot be achieved with a direct mail offer alone. It is important to test and optimize accordingly. Experian is also at the forefront of the digital credit revolution with Amplified Prospecting™. Experian’s Amplified Prospecting empowers lenders to deliver relevant firm offers of credit to prescreened consumers via multiple digital channels, including email, online display advertising and social media. Simply put, it allows you to timely engage the most desirable consumers where they’re increasingly consuming information and media today – improving your response rates and return on marketing investment. Experian is a leader in the credit revolution, offering more ways for consumers to secure credit including the industry-first Text for Credit™, which allows users to initiate and complete the credit application process within minutes with a simple text message. In addition, Experian recently introduced Experian Boost, a revolutionary new online tool that can instantly improve your credit scores and help the 100 million Americans that don't have access to credit today, either because their credit scores are too low, or because they don't have enough credit history. With faster, more efficient data integration and processing you can more accurately target leads, achieve better response rates, and optimize your marketing spend. To learn more about Experian’s Financial Services solutions, contact us at (877) 902-4849 or experianmarketingsolutions@experian.com to learn more!