Your shoppers aren’t clicks and likes and dollars—they’re people.
They go to work or go to school or care for their kids or parents. (And sometimes all three.) They eat Indian or Italian or American food. They watch classic movies or sci-fi or game shows. And they like weird things like stinky cheese and chartreuse shoes and 45-minute YouTube videos of people organizing their spice drawer.
Shoppers expect the brands they do business with to understand these situations, preferences, needs and desires in order to offer them beautifully personalized experiences; in fact, 76% of shoppers are frustrated when this doesn’t happen, according to McKinsey research. Yet, many retailers see their shoppers as stick figures drawn with demographics rather than as the unique portraits they are.
Enriching your retail shopper data—and analyzing it for new insights—not only helps you optimize the customer experience, but it also benefits your brand. Brands that know their shoppers enjoy a 500% improvement in MROI, a 10% to 25% lift in sales and 40% higher conversion rates, according to McKinsey.
People who have a positive experience will spend 140% more than those who had a poor past experience. As a bonus, happy shoppers will also refer people to your brand, lowering your costs of acquisition. (Think of it as a BOGO sale: You pay to attract one shopper and get the second one for free.)
However, many retailers face one of two problems:
Not enough data. Seventy-five percent of transactions take place in stores where little may be known beyond what was purchased and the payment method used. As a result, transactional data alone is often not rich enough to let retailers recognize who the person is or what they need to know to connect with the shopper in a relevant way.
Not the right data. It can be challenging to understand your shopper only with information from your POS. Transaction data is important. But if you want to know the person, not just the transaction, you need descriptive data about the person, too.
So, how can retail brands learn enough about their shoppers to create the personalized experiences they crave? By leveraging the first-party data they already have, enriching it with third-party data, and then using the combined information to make an emotional connection to the individuals behind the transactions.