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7 Questions Every Retailer Should be Asking Itself About Ecommerce and Shopper Loyalty

Continually mining and employing data is essential if retailers — and their brand partners — are going to meet shoppers’ expectations of seamless, omnichannel shopping experiences. And it’s by meeting those expectations that brands and retailers will create measurable ROI, drive sales and generate loyalty.

Today’s non-linear and highly complex shopper journey is only illuminated through data that provides measurable insight and activation capability.

The collection, preparation and use of data in retail is a “core business.” Ecommerce first promised consumers convenience, but in the last decade it has also brought increasing value to market by combining its transactional data with shopper journey data — offering manufacturers near-real-time metrics on campaign performance.

Retailers today are often sold “best in class” component software platforms, as if they are the answer to success. But simply buying all of those platforms — CDP, POS, Loyalty, Promotions, Ecommerce, package payment terminals, and pricing and inventory management software — doesn’t automatically put retailers on the path to success. Because first they need to understand exactly what they’re trying to achieve and why they’re trying to achieve it.

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Before implementing any e-commerce solution, retailers need to ask themselves the right questions.

  1. Do I have the right data strategy to drive shopper loyalty?
  2. Do I have a data strategy that can be used to measure path to purchase, campaign efficacy, CLV?
  3. Do I have a strategy that will stay compliant with the changing privacy laws like the CCPA?
  4. Can I achieve on- and off-platform data monetization that enables my business to grow share of trade and advertising dollars based on measurable impact on conversion?
  5. Am I providing my CPG partners access to a data platform where they willingly bring their promotional and advertising dollars because of the intelligence it provides them on how their dollars work?
  6. Does my data strategy integrate easily with third parties today? Tomorrow?
  7. Am I doing all of this while maintaining control?

For brands, the opportunity in digital media is clear. Replicating traditional media campaigns without the direct (not inferred) real-time data connection to conversion, CLV and impact on customer journey is playing the piñata game. To know how trade and marketing dollars are working in a transformed retail environment with connected data is the only way to take off the blindfold and maximize ROI.

In retail, the risk of not being able to say “yes” to these questions is ceding the opportunity to upstarts that promise to bring in their point solution for “coverage.” And because these technology companies are well aware where data value lies, they are tapping the transactional data flow and bringing their own media products to market. This is more bad news for ill-equipped retailers as brands, wanting to seamlessly engage with their shoppers, will quickly gravitate toward those providers and platforms they perceive as capable of enabling the shopper engagement needed to drive product sales across channels.

The COVID pandemic has accelerated trends that were already underway. In just a handful of years, retail media revenue at Amazon is already at 20% of Facebook’s entire annual revenue. The value of combining conversion with journey via activatable data, a value every transformed retailer can provide, is proving irresistible.


Greg Kerr serves as Inmar’s President, International Strategy and Chief Innovation Officer.  Prior to joining Inmar, Kerr served as VP, Software Development, for AuthenTec, where he was responsible for defining software strategy and leading the company’s technical Mergers and Acquisition teams. Before AuthenTec, he was VP of Engineering, Sonic Solutions, where he led the integration of engineers located across six countries in Europe, Asia and the U.S. Kerr also founded several successful software development companies. He holds a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with Honors in Physical Chemistry.

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