With the right strategy, tools and a little imagination, data has the potential to transform the retail model from end to end to provide better service and accelerate revenue growth.
To get there, leading brands are adopting an omnidata approach that leverages vast amounts of data from multiple online, offline and non-marketing sources. This data can be used to envision specific business outcomes, uncover insights and drive a more holistic strategy across the entire enterprise.
So far, however, retailers have tended to use data and analytics to do what they’ve always done, except faster and more efficiently.
In a re-envisioned, omnidata future, retail brands should move to embed analytical insights into all parts of the ecosystem from the factory floor, to the supply chain to the retail outlet. With omnidata as the foundation, retail marketers will finally be able to deliver the seamless journeys that customers expect.
Omnidata in action
For example, Gartner, Inc. predicts that by 2025, many major global retailers will leverage contextualized real-time pricing to manage and adjust in-store prices for customers.
This refers to the retailer’s ability to manage prices and facilitate competitive price matching and returns for customers in real-time, across all channels. Such an approach helps brands stay continuously competitive on pricing and build customer loyalty.
Advances such as this, however, require privacy-compliant customer identity solutions and unified marketing measurement and insight capabilities.
Opportunities in privacy–led customer identity
What many brands don’t yet realize is that new data privacy regulations create the opportunity to market more effectively to customers who opt-in to engagement. But due in part to inadequate data collection capabilities, many retail brands fall short of being able to deliver truly personalized experiences. Working with a partner that has specialized, regulatory-compliant experience in identity can accelerate such efforts.
Look for partners that take an opportunity-driven approach to identity and can provide valuable services and solutions to fill a need created by regulation and technology shifts.
For example, any approach to identity resolution should ensure security and control over identity assets, which gives brands greater confidence in identity-centric marketing activities like targeting, measurement and data management.
Similarly, new regulations limiting the use of cookies should serve as a positive step toward a truly identity-centric marketing ecosystem. An identity-centric approach to marketing leads to high-quality, privacy-controlled data management, activation and measurement. And that’s good for both consumers and brands.
Forward-looking retailers should use this opportunity to refocus KPIs on identity-centric metrics and the ethical use of customer data for advertising in addition to accelerating the introduction of offline identity-based marketing technology. They should also focus on establishing leadership and differentiation in the customer relationship by utilizing explicit permissions for engagement.
Create opportunities through better measurement and insights
Unified measurement uses multiple analytic approaches (including both strategic and tactical measurement from MMM and MTA) to measure marketing performance across the entire customer journey. Retail brands that have adopted unified marketing analytics are learning how to translate some of the data-enabled efficiencies they’ve perfected in the online world for the offline world.
This provides retail marketers with a complete, holistic view of not only marketing performance, but of customer engagement in totality, that can be used to help personalize and thus deepen customer relationships.
As they reimagine retail, brands should seek out data and analytics technology partners with strong customer identity assets and walled-garden data relationships that can provide the confidence and capabilities to truly measure across devices, platforms and touchpoints—even after cookies vanish.
In the new privacy-led, omnidata retail world, brands must actively respond to customer needs by developing hyper-relevant products and experiences.
The retail sector may well be in for more aggressive change as customers expect even more fully personalized shopping experiences. Such expectations unlock tremendous opportunity for marketing teams to uncover even deeper customer engagement insight.
As retail continues its rapid evolution, making marketing’s analytical capabilities and outputs available company-wide will help your brand deliver the type of hyper-personalized experiences customers expect.
