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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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It’s the holiday season! For some, this is the time of year for family, friends and reflection. For the other 97 percent* of us, it’s time to shop! America’s obsession with Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the rest of the holiday shopping season has never been stronger. Or weaker? Or something? All I know is that you should be skeptical of anything you see regarding the Thanksgiving weekend performance. And now, I will tell you about the Thanksgiving weekend performance We’re not discussing revenue in this post. Instead, we’ll dive into the weekend’s email subject lines – more specifically, how “percent off” deals affected email open rates. As everyone knows, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the days for deals. Juicy “percent off” offers motivate customers to buy, buy, buy. But is the conventional wisdom, that “a deep discount will get people to engage with my brand,” actually right? A few weeks ago, my counterpart in the UK published an analysis of how percentage off discounts influence open rates. Taking the cue from Karl, I wanted to expand this analysis into the U.S. market, paying special attention to Thanksgiving weekend. To begin, I gathered data on a few thousand mailings from our largest retail clients. To determine the baseline expected open rates, I averaged each brand’s performance in the 6 weeks prior to Black Friday. I then analyzed all the mailings sent on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, dividing the subject lines based on the appearance of a percentage off offer. Interestingly, percentage off offers were less prominent than I expected: And when percentages off were present… their values were all over the place: Higher volume doesn’t lead to improved performance Conventional wisdom would suggest that advertising a discount more frequently would lead to better performing discounts. The data, however, doesn’t support that idea. When I looked at volume distribution and relative performance for each advertised discount, I found a relatively strong negative correlation of -0.63. So the more frequently a discount was advertised, the worse it tended to perform. We can see this visually in the chart below: On average, advertising discounts did not significantly improve open rates. What happened? The first thing to note here is the wide spread in the data – some percentage off discounts worked very well! Overall, though, shouting about a discount wasn’t what convinced customers to open emails during the holidays. But maybe it wasn’t just the percentage off discounts that faltered this season – perhaps all opens were down? As you can see in the histogram above – this wasn’t the case. The average mailing not touting a percentage off discount did ever so slightly better than the baseline average. Still, the spread of data is very wide, with a lot of variation in results. It could be that the dispersion of results was a product of each brand’s initial baseline; brands that normally had great engagement would see positive gains for percentage off discounts while brands with poor engagement would see little to negative lifts, or vice versa. But this hypothesis was also proven incorrect, as the relative starting place for each brand versus the discount performances had a correlation approaching zero. No matter which way I sliced it, the performance of discounted subject lines were more or less random. Ultimately, this last point is the most important. The subject line, for all its ubiquity and focus, is probably a lot less influential than we tend to believe. Sure, a subject line can be optimized, carefully crafted to invoke the greatest lift in response possible, but the baseline expected performance is influenced by a much larger conversation – the one between the brand and its customers. If the brand relationship has been cultivated and refined through intelligent interactions and sophisticated targeting, the open rate is likely going to be higher. If every marketing message simply shouts, DISCOUNT, DISCOUNT, DISCOUNT, and there is no larger value-add, engagement probably won’t be great. Advertising a discount in a subject line might really help get people involved – or it might not. So what is the future of the subject line? Are they worth the disproportionate time and energy that marketing organizations tend to spend on them? Or should we recognize that their importance is probably minimal? The truth is, it’s a little bit of both. Subject lines are important – they are the first impression and often the first interaction of the day with a customer. But their importance is likely inversely related to the strength of the brand (the “from” line, if you will). The stronger the relationship is, the less important the subject line becomes. Maybe that’s the ideal – a perfect “from” name, one that tells you more about what’s inside the message than a subject line ever could. *Not a real stat Connect with Jacob Davis, Senior Analyst, on Twitter: @davisj2007.
Before we get to the gift guides, here’s a brief update on the hottest products from the week including Cyber Monday. This week’s biggest movers and new additions to the list are a clear sign that Christmas is upon us. “Star Shower,” a laser light that bathes your house in festive lights without having to untangle cords, jumped to second place, up 49 rank points from the week prior. Likewise, the return of “Elf on the Shelf” to the hot products list coincides with his return to the homes of children nationwide. Otherwise, things seems to have stabilized with Fitbit showing no signs of falling from first place and Pie Face game being this year’s sensation. Toys Shopkins remains the toy to beat this season followed by Pie Face game, which remained in second place after skyrocketing interest during the week of Thanksgiving. Toys new to the top 10 this week include some old favorites like the Easy Bake Oven and Paw Patrol toys as well as the new entrant Glammin Salon Vanity. Keep checking back each week for the latest hot toys. This chart shows the 10 most searched for toys and games based on search clicks to Toys “R” Us – USA. Gift guide insight When it comes to buying presents for the holidays, some individuals are easy to shop for while others require a bit of inspiration. And when consumers need inspiration, consumers turn to the Web. Searches for “gifts for,” “gift guide” and “gift ideas” grow increasingly common as we get closer and closer to Christmas with peak search activity around this topic typically observed during the last full week before Christmas, which this year would be the week ending Saturday December 19th. Some of the most common gift recipients mentioned in gift guide-related searches are: “men,” “guys,” “her,” “mom,” “dad” and “girlfriend.” But shoppers are also frequently looking for suggestions on the perfect gift for someone very specific interests, such as “hunters,” “gamers” and “beer lovers” as well as specific types of gifts, like “tech” or “personalized.” The following gift guide insights, derived using our new AudienceView platform, were designed to highlight for you, as a marketer, the interests and preferences of key consumer segments so that you can more effectively tailor your campaigns to be more relevant and engaging. But if it also helps you, as a consumer, come up with the perfect gift for that hard-to-shop-for person in your life, then even better! Each gift guide contains a representative mix of search terms that were performed at above average rates by each audience segment during the four weeks ending November 28, 2015. They include a mix of product and retail brands and provide a good idea of the interests, style preferences and lifestyles of each audience. Learn more about how AudienceView can deliver unparalleled insights into your consumer audience so that you can deliver a better brand experience.
It’s October, and you know what that means; leaves are changing, sweaters are being pulled out of the closet, pumpkin-flavored items are taking over coffee shops. For many marketers, this is the most exciting (and stressful) part of the year. Holiday marketing is ramping up, and it will only increase in intensity as the weeks go on. Luckily, we’re hard at work here at Experian, analyzing data from past holiday seasons to bring you the insights you need to make your holiday marketing programs successful. We’ve examined search and email behavior to compile a list of the most important days to email and trends that will help you delight your customers from now until the New Year. You can access all of these insights in our Holiday 2015 Marketing Insights Calendar, which covers marketing trends from October through December. Holiday marketing tips for October With Halloween fast approaching at the end of the month (and Thanksgiving/Black Friday/Cyber Monday not far behind), marketers should use October to solidify their plan for the holiday season. Here are three things you can do to optimize your impact this month: 3 ways to optimize your holiday marketing programs in October Target reactivation campaigns to last year’s holiday-only shoppers to maximize active subscribers this season Perform a data cleanse and email verification to ensure message delivery. List health is key to a successful holiday season, and now is the time to double check. Consider offering Halloween-specific products for the little ones. Costumes for newborns and toddlers are on the rise, so don’t forget about the youngsters! Want more holiday marketing insights? Don’t miss our upcoming webinar, Check your list twice: Last-minute marketing strategies for the holiday season.