The Retail TouchPoints Network

Identifying And Engaging The Connected Customer

By Alicia Fiorletta, Senior Editor

Countless research reports and studies have reaffirmed that consumers don’t see channels – they just see brands and experiences. They hop between devices on a whim, and can start browsing on a laptop, and end up purchasing on their tablet device.

But retailers face quite a conundrum with these more sporadic and non-linear shopping behaviors. It is becoming increasingly difficult for them to track the overall path-to-purchase and enable digital attribution analysis.

Social sign-on, however, is helping to tackle this challenge, according to a new report from L2. Facebook is one company that “has been a market leader in developing a cookie-less technology that ties anonymized user-based data from registration to rich behavioral data from social sign-on, the social graph and third-party sources to deliver on the promise of one-to-one marketing."

Other companies, such as Apple, Twitter, Yahoo and Amazon, are trying to address this new business opportunity, as well. These companies are helping retailers connect the "data dots,” so to speak, and collect valuable social information about their customers. All of this information can be integrated to create that comprehensive customer profile we’ve been talking about for some time now.

Of all social networks, Facebook is the most popular form of social sign-on, with 25% of beauty brands offering Facebook Connect. Approximately 19% of retailers offer it, while 18% of sportswear brands and 13% of personal care brands do the same. Facebook also has acquired 46% of social sign-on share, followed by Google (34%). Twitter (7%) and Yahoo (4%) are merely blips on the radar.

Many marketers also are investing in new technologies to integrate and leverage data from disparate sources to improve marketing campaigns and communications. Top investments include: