Over the last few months, Experian has released new syndicated audiences to most major platforms supporting retail and travel. In this blog post, we’ll highlight some of these new audiences and how they can be used with other data from Experian to build the perfect audience to reach your customers and prospects.
Household Expenditure audiences
We’ve created new predictive audiences to help retailers reach consumers across 35 categories likely to spend within that category. A few categories include Apparel, DIY, Health, and more.
With the launch of these new audiences, we will retire our existing Household Consumer Expenditure, Online and Retail category audiences in the November Digital Master update.
Who these audiences are for
Our Household Expenditure audiences use data from multiple sources, providing brands with highly accurate purchase predictions and data that scales for digital execution. Household Expenditure audiences are an excellent solution for brands with new product lines or where targeting based on historical purchases lack signal brands seek.
Building data from multiple data sources helps ensure high performance and accuracy and can illuminate trends in consumer shopping patterns. These trends can be used to help predict future shopping behaviors.
How to refine our Household Expenditure audiences
To refine your audience, you can combine this data with Experian’s demographic and household expenditure audiences to ensure you are reaching consumers. For example, suppose you’re an apparel brand launching a new line aimed toward women over the age of 40. In that case, you can use Experian’s demographic data to reach those women and layer in ourhousehold expenditure purchase predictor segment for women’s apparel to reach their new target audience.
Mobile Location audiences
We’ve expanded our location database to include more locations and points of interest. With this new data, we could strengthen our existing mobile location audiences to broaden the reach, improve accuracy, and increase performance.
We’ve created 11 new mobile location audiences with our new dataset that supports the retail and travel verticals. These new audiences include new shopping behaviors, including high-income and high-end shoppers and travel and entertainment behaviors, including visiting sporting arenas like MLB, NBA, NFL, and university stadiums.
Who these audiences are for
These audiences are for brands that want to reach consumers based on their location behaviors. Often valid for retail, travel, and entertainment brands, Mobile Location audiences provide brands with highly accurate data that shows previous intent and interest in critical locations.
How to refine our Mobile Location audiences
To refine your audience, you can combine your Mobile Location audience with Lifestyle and Interest data. For example, if you are creating an advertising campaign for a hotel near a university stadium for the largest game in the season, you could combine university stadium visitors with sports enthusiasts and in-market for travel to find consumers most likely to be interested in your campaign and staying at the hotel.
Purchase-Based Transaction audiences
For use cases where predictive audiences aren’t the best fit to reach the right consumer, such as targeting consumer’s historical purchases, we’ve created new purchase-based transaction audiences that utilize opt-in consumer transaction data across 29 retail categories, including apparel, home, lifestyle, health, food and beverage, and more.
Who these audiences are for
These audiences are a perfect fit for brands trying to reach consumers based on previous purchases. These audiences can be broken out by their spending patterns – frequency of purchase and high spenders – and their response to advertising, including direct mail, email, inserts, and digital.
How to refine our Purchase-Based Transaction audiences
Combine these new audiences with Mosaic to fine-tune your audience based on their purchasing and lifestyle patterns.
Suppose you are a brand with a new line of home décor products launching and will utilize influencers to endorse your product line. In that case, you can use Experian’s purchase-based transaction audiences for high spenders in home décor and layer our Mosaic audience Influenced by Influencers to find consumers who are most likely to purchase and trust an influencer.
We can help you discover and activate your perfect audience
Our audiences are available in most major data and execution platforms. Visit our partner page for more information.
Don’t see our audiences on your platform of choice? We can help you build and activate an Experian audience on the platform of your choice.
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Marketers: personalization is our duty Customers willingly give brands a lot of information. Some brands collect names, birthdays, message preferences and location in addition to contact information like email address, phone number and physical address. Brands that connect through Facebook and other social media accounts gain access to even more information – a person’s likes, friends/followers, age, demographics and more. Why are so many consumers willing to share this information? In a recent webinar, Ed Kowalski, Senior Director of Strategic Services at Experian Marketing Services refers to this phenomenon as the equitable exchange – customers provide companies with personal information because they believe it will enhance their brand experience. In return, marketers have a duty to responsibly use that data to benefit the customer. Personalization is an oft-discussed strategy in marketing, but many marketers struggle to make it a reality. In fact, a recent study found that 94 percent of companies have challenges relating to personalization. Yet marketers continue to collect more customer data – without a clear plan to utilize any of the data in a personalized context. Consider a brand that collects birthdate as part of its subscription process. As a consumer, I will only provide my birthdate if I can imagine a benefit to doing so. And I can – the brand may send me personalized well-wishes or even a special offer on my birthday each year. Because I’m willing to share my birthdate, I expect that the brand will use that data to engage me on a personal level. If they don’t, I’m likely to feel that the data I shared was not used productively, which will damage my perception of the brand and make me more reluctant to share information with them in the future. This concept extends to behavioral data too. Consumers often realize that companies may have data on their past purchases, browsing behavior and more. With this assumption in mind, they expect this data to be used to create more relevant brand experiences as well. Remarketing campaigns like abandoned cart emails and display ads targeted by browse behavior are increasing in popularity, as 69 percent of marketers in our most recent survey run these types of campaigns. This means customers are coming to expect them. So what does this mean for marketers? Not only is it a best-practice to personalize messaging based on customer data, but it’s often a requirement. Consumers are saying, “Show me that you know me.” As marketers, we need to make good on the unspoken promise of this equitable exchange. It doesn’t need to be hard. Check out the slides below or watch the webcast to learn how brands can begin to implement more personalized, relevant messages today.
John Fetto, our Senior Research and Marketing Analyst, explored the top five lessons from the 2014 holiday season and provided tips to help marketers revamp their 2015 holiday campaigns. 1. Move over desktops, consumers are using mobile to search for deals Deal seeking is moving to mobile where consumers have access to pricing and coupons while they are on-the-go and closer to making a purchase decision. In fact, searches for “mobile coupons” are up 14 percent since July when mobile search data was incorporated. As for timing, peak deal-seeking searches typically occur during the holiday shopping season, but the past two years, holiday and back-to-school were nearly equal. For marketers to not leave money on the table, it is critical to target deals and discounts strategically to consumers who need and want them most. 2. The must-have gifts of 2014 2014 was the year of the "Internet of Things," the rapidly growing trend in devices — beyond smartphones, tablets and computers — that connect to the Internet. In particular there was a big leap this season in searches for portable fitness devices and smart watches were up 235 percent year-over-year. Additionally, searches for smart televisions were up 30 percent and searches for smart home automation devices were up 67 percent year-over-year. Savvy marketers will use these insights to reach customers in a myriad of new channels in 2015. 3. Reach consumers later in the week It’s no surprise that the three busiest shopping days this past holiday season were Cyber Monday, Thanksgiving and Black Friday, each capturing more than 225 million online visits to the Hitwise Retail 500. Diving deeper into significant peak days in December, we found that Tuesday and Wednesday earned top spots as key online shopping days. This gives marketers the ability to reach consumers with more relevant messages later in the week and drive in-store sales for the weekend ahead. 4. Email is the second biggest driver of traffic Email continues to be a strong driver of online traffic. In 2014, search engines drove 41 percent of the traffic to the Hitwise Retail 500, followed by email with 8.15 percent. Looking at the performances by key peak days, email was a strong driver of traffic on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, and social media drove the most traffic on Cyber Tuesday, the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. 5. Mobile is a strong driver of traffic to retail sites Much of the mobile activity on retail sites comes from browsing while shopping, whether it’s for price comparison, inventory analysis or to find store hours or locations. In fact, a new study from Experian Marketing Services found that 83 percent of cell phone owners now engage in shopping activities on their phone immediately before, during or after visiting a store. In addition, 53 percent of smartphone owners visit shopping websites from their phone during a given month versus 41 percent who use shopping apps during the same time frame. While mobile apps are great ways for marketers to interact with existing customers, mobile web is critical for reaching potential new customers. Marketers who focus their mobile efforts on developing mobile apps at the expense of mobile optimized sites are likely missing the opportunity to attract new shoppers. Learn more about the 2014 holiday season to prepare for next year Watch the Five things we learned this holiday season webcast for deeper insights into these trends: What branded products and product categories were hot this season Mobile shopping trends, including how much consumers are shopping and buying online Consumers’ deal-seeking tendencies and the trend of omnipresent sales, discounts and coupons Analysis of the peak online shopping days and seasonal traffic trends Which retailers were successful this season and the digital channels that were effective in driving traffic