In an omni-channel world, retailers are under immense pressure to differentiate themselves from competitors and deliver a consistent customer experience across all channels at every stage of the buyer’s journey. That’s a tall order for marketers that are limited by legacy technology that can’t distinguish between Customer A and Customer B in time to trigger a tailored response to each individual. Fear not though because real-time unified, actionable data that drives customer experience and deeper brand loyalty isn’t just the stuff of fairytales or the far off future anymore. The emergence of the Customer Data Platform (CDP) is making all that and more a reality. Still skeptical? Keep reading to learn five CDP uses cases for retailers!
Personalized offers for e-commerce purchases
Sending customers any old offer is not an effective way to gain their loyalty or yield strong conversion rates. Rather, in order to motivate customers to purchase merchandise from your brand’s website or mobile app, it’s crucial that brands send personalized offers based on a customer’s purchases and engagement patterns. CDPs make it possible for brands to do just that.
For example, a CDP would enable you to send a push notification or email to profiles that have never made an e-commerce purchase with a discount for an item related to previous purchases or by displaying a personalized offer–like something related to a brand or product category affinity–in the mobile app via mobile inbox, push notification, SMS or in a feed.
Advanced CDPs can leverage machine learning algorithms to take historical purchase data and calculate the next best offer, or products a consumer is most likely to purchase. You could then create campaigns within the CDP to send offers to a user based on the calculated values.
Personalized offers for in-store purchases
It’s equally as important for brands to send customers personalized, real-time offers to drive them to make a purchase at the most appropriate retail location while they’re on the premises. In an in-store campaign, offer codes can be uniquely generated and tied to a customer profile with redemption being verified at the POS and tied back to the customer profile for attribution and campaign completion metrics.
Cart abandonment
Cart abandonment is a big issue for e-commerce marketers. Many brands have the standard “You forgot something” follow up email in place to send to consumers that have added an item to their cart, but have not completed their purchase. That’s just child’s play though.
With a CDP, brands can take it one step further and send a push notification or email to customer profiles that have not completed their e-commerce purchase with an offer for an item related to previous purchases or monitor those offers and take additional actions based on results, marking each profile as responding to the offer or sending follow up communication or another offer to profiles that haven’t responded after a certain number of days. For example, offer free shipping if the customer’s lifetime value is over $10,000 or give a 10% off discount if the person hasn’t made a purchase in the previous six months.
Surveys
Hearing directly from customers what they liked or disliked about their experience with your brand is the best way to inform what’s working and what needs improvement, not just from a marketing standpoint, but also a customer service and product one.
With a CDP, brands can trigger a survey about the store experience as a customer exits the premises or trigger a survey corresponding to a customer’s completed purchase. For example: send all users in southern California a post-visit survey with creative X and send all users in Boston DMA a post-visit survey with creative Y.
Custom content
According to RetailMeNot and Forrester’s The State of Mobile Apps For Retailers report, “Retailers must understand that consumers are extremely picky about the retailers apps they use, demanding convenience, speed, and a personalized experience from those apps. Apps that do not meet expectations are quickly removed or replaced.” In order to earn a coveted spot as a permanent fixture on customers’ homescreens, brands must ensure that the in-app experience is tailor-made to each individual’s interest and behaviors. CDPs enable brands to not only deliver personalized offers to consumers based on purchases and engagements, but also display content within the app that is relevant to the end user based on what is known about that user.
By integrating with a CMS, a CDP gives brands the ability to show all content in a customer feed while weighting certain content higher as it pertains to customer behaviors, preferences, or attributes. Marketers can build rules within the CDP that match profile data with content metadata. For example, if a consumer’s brand preferences include Nike, then weigh Nike content higher in the feed.
In order to establish deeper, long-lasting customer relationships in today’s competitive marketplace, it’s crucial that retailers ensure customers are receiving personalized experiences that are consistent across channels. The right CDP empowers brands to take back control of their data and spread their wings beyond loyalty that is solely based on the total amount of a transaction.
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