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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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Since joining Experian as Chief Research Officer, and now as General Manager of Consumer Insights, I have driven our organization — already known for our trusted consumer insights — to move even more aggressively on innovations in measurement science, whether that is through self-reported consumer surveys like our Simmons National Consumer Study or passive data collection like our Hitwise online intelligence data. Consumers are being profoundly affected by rapid changes in technology and we are committed to being at the forefront in developing new research approaches to ensure that our data accurately and reliably reflects consumer decisions, behaviors, attitudes, lifestyles and media preferences. Experian Marketing Services was well represented at this year’s AAPOR conference both among attendees and presenters. In fact, six exciting topics from Experian were presented at the conference based on the work we do here every single day. Having this level of recognition from our research peers and the AAPOR organization is an outstanding accomplishment that speaks to our commitment toward research quality and innovation. It’s these types of insights that will help propel the industry forward. At the conference, I was delighted to present, along with my colleague Gerry Dirksz, findings from a successful initiative that Experian Marketing Services recently undertook to produce higher response rates to our Simmons National Consumer Study. Declining response rates are an obstacle facing nearly every player in our field and one that has real implications on data quality. Because certain key segments of the population (e.g., Millennials, Hispanics, etc.) are disproportionately less likely to respond to or participate in research studies, marketers and others who rely on such research may be handicapped by potential blind spots in the resulting data which prevent them from fully understanding important consumer audiences. To prevent such blind spots from occurring in our data, we tested a new two-phased dynamic incentive program that took into consideration an individual household or specific respondent’s propensity to fall into certain “hard-to-reach” segments. With this information in hand, we were able to offer different (often higher) incentives to “hard-to-reach” respondents from the start in order to improve response rates of those segments. Compared to control groups, response rates among those whose incentives were determined by the dynamic model were significantly higher. Having now rolled out this successful process for our entire sample frame, we have seen overall response rates improve markedly. While Experian is not alone in testing new initiatives like these, we are most definitely pioneers in the space and are setting an example for others to follow now that we have demonstrated results. In this regard, I look forward to blazing new trails based on well-thought hypotheses from our expert team. This will ensure that our data continues to be the gold-standard for helping our clients better understand consumers so that they can create more relevant and engaging interactions. Other topics presented by Experian at AAPOR include: The effects of total navigational burden, length of instrument and page complexity on item non-response This paper examined item non-response for long surveys which is a major topic of concern for survey researchers, particularly those looking to collect a large number of measurements from a single source. Specifically, binary (yes/no) questions were studied and potential factors that might contribute to item non-response were identified for further exploration. Patterns of response and non-response to sexual orientation measures In this presentation, relationships and patterns of item non-response among non-Hispanics to a measure of sexual orientation contained within the Simmons National Consumer Survey were explored. Since 2009, item non-response to the sexual orientation question has declined by a rate of 26 percent with a decline among 18-34 year-old respondents of 43 percent. U.S. Hispanic receptivity to self-reported measure of sexual orientation This paper examined the effects of adding a question on sexual orientation with respect to mail survey instrument return rates and item non-response rates among the U.S. Hispanic population. A key finding from this research was the pronounced, significant difference in item non-response rates which were disproportionately higher for Hispanics compared to non-Hispanics and significantly higher for Spanish-language Hispanics versus English-language Hispanics. Does providing an email address in an initial contact study indicate respondents will be cooperators in a subsequent online panel study? This study examines how the cooperation rate for a future study differs between individuals who are willing to provide an email address in the initial phase and those who are not. Results indicate that respondents who provide an email address in the initial contact study are more cooperative in joining a subsequent online panel than those who do not provide an email address. Patterns of non-response to health, diet, nutrition and apparel measures conditioned on body mass index This study examines the relative response of overweight or obese individuals to questions concerning diet, nutrition, health and even apparel in comparison to those individuals classified in the normal range for BMI. 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