It is another trade show focused on the future of digital retail and the room is buzzing with the latest trends in online marketing. When asked about the biggest pain point of their business, none of the executives attending the show will mention the failure of the latest marketing fad or an unsuccessful holiday campaign. What used to be a dirty secret of omni-channel retailers is now being shouted from the rooftops. They say, “We have too much data and we don’t know what to do with it!”
How come the brightest of business leaders are still keeping massive amounts of data their company is generating locked away in disjointed warehouses without a clear plan of making it actionable?
Most of the retailers have mastered the first part of the data lifecycle:
- Collect
- Store
- Protect
- Analyze
That’s great! You have your online and offline purchases, you spin off a dedicated IT team to make sure your data is uniform and flows unobstructed to your in-house collection pool. A few years ago you might have stopped there but now leadership is demanding that we “Do something with all that data!” So you hire a BI team to slice/dice and analyze the numbers in order to derive cohorts of customers who are most important to your business, those you should entice with new offers as well as those who will purchase regardless. That data is sitting in both your CRM and a data warehouse. But what do you do now?
You need to unlock the full value and potential of your data and make it “work” for you. For those clients who have been in-store VIPs for many years and are finally shifting their behavior to online shopping, create an air of exclusivity and increase their purchasing cadence. If someone is a credit card holder with your brand, entice them to increase their order value for additional benefits if they are paying with your loyalty card. For customers who recently had a return in-store or through a call center, but haven’t replaced the item, enhance your site to encourage that next step.
The world of digital commerce allows marketers to craft an experience that is highly personalized based on a number of data points. From social, to loyalty, to procurement: the wealth of data that can be leveraged to increase conversions and order values is staggering.
It’s time to get your data out from under your mattress and bring it together in an actionable customer profile – one that is available to almost every touch point with the customer. You have the information and the power to transform the consumer experience in an instant – delighting your customers, building customer value and empowering new brand advocates. Make your data work for you.
“Activate your data, now!” is Part I of a series on “Making your Data Work for You”. Stay tuned for more Monetate insights on making the most of customer data.
Confused Data Illustration courtesy of Shutterstock