Retail
The Challenges of Cross-Channel Data Integration
Source: eMarketer, Feb 21, 2012
Marketers fail to deliver real-time customer-targeted brand experiences
Increased consumer demand for more personalized and relevant brand experiences has made customer segmentation and targeting an imperative for companies.
According to a November 2011 survey from Acxiom andDIGIDAY, though the majority of US advertisers and agencies were able to identify and segment their customer base, few were capable of doing so in a way that delivers a personalized experience in real time and across multiple channels.
More than half (58%) of advertisers and 39% of agencies said they were able to track and segment their best customers. However, agencies were more than twice as likely (12%) to be able to incorporate both online and offline data into the segmentation process, compared to just 5% of advertisers capable of this more advanced approach.
By segmenting customers, brands can create the more personalized, relevant experience that consumers now demand—especially from retailers. April 2011 data from the e-tailing group and MyBuys showed 50% of US cross-channel shoppers expect to be offered promotions or merchandise that reflect their past online shopping behavior and purchases. More importantly, 46% of shoppers reportedly would buy more from retailers that personalized the shopping experience across channels.
To accomplish the goal of delivering a truly personalized experience in real time, brands must be able to track activity throughout the customer lifecycle and act on this data immediately across channels. But Acxiom and DIGIDAY found advertisers and agencies have yet to make this work—though many are well on their way.
Less than a third of agencies and 37% of advertisers said they had neither the capability to deliver real-time, personalized customer experiences nor to do so across channels, though nearly half of advertisers and 28% of agencies had the ability to at least perform one of these two tasks.
In December 2011, the Winterberry Group and Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) found many marketers hoped to do better in the coming year. Most marketers worldwide planned to focus more closely on customer behavior analysis, and offer optimization and cross-channel touchpoint optimization—tactics required to meet the goal delivering real-time experiences to customers across channels.
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Check out today’s other articles, “Super Bowl Viewers Had Smartphones Firmly in Hand” and “Social Network Users in Brazil, China More Likely to Engage with Brands Online .”
Integrated Marketing on a Shoestring Budget
Advertisers now expect each integrated marketing campaign to stand out, be attention getting, relevant to their audience, perceived as cutting edge and able to drive action or response all with the same campaign. I have heard it called a tactic, sometimes amarketing strategy, depending how well fleshed out the plan is, but there is a low-cost way of bridging the gap between print and digital and shows your customers that you are making an effort to communicate with them in the mediums preferred by them. Try using a QR code on your branded materials. QR codes are a good way of involving consumers by making an ad interactive. At the very least it will achieve more recognition of the advertisement and more traffic to the website or wherever the link of the QR code leads to.
QR codes took over NYC in June of 2010 when the Thompson Reuters Building began putting QR codes on the face of the building in Times Square so passersbys could use their smart phone barcode scanning app to scan the QR codes — which were featured in an animated sequence on the buidling from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. When scanning the QR codes, it lead to information relating to specific agencies including 311, NYC Department of Transportation, NYCulture Calendar, NYC Business Express and City of New York Parks and Recreation.
Dubai is dedicating the entire exterior of one of their newest hotels to the movie industry,The CODE UNIQUE HOTEL athttp://holtermanndesign.com/blog/qr-code-unique-hotel-dubai-studio-city/. The entire exterior of the building is a huge QR code. Reality is that the use of QR codes need not be on such a grand scale to be effective. Each anticipated result would drive different implementations.
Macy’s Fall Backstage – QR Code Campaign – Scan for a chance to win a $500 Shopping Spree is their latest integrated marketing campaign. They’ve integrated social media, video, mobile, and the “What’s in it for me” factor is a chance to win a $500 Shopping Spree. What more could you ask for in an integrated marketing campaign that has customer interaction?
We know you can buy awareness and customer interaction, even results with bold tactics. You can test and prove that you can get increased attention and greater customer intimacy on a shoestring, if you have good knowledge of the product, audience and market by linking the web with your ad or direct response piece with a QR code, keeping your message and offer relevant and monitoring the result.
We know that timeliness is key in advertising and direct response. So offer something to your prospects that they want or need, tell them the offer won’t last forever and make sure that you give them the opportunity to respond via the medium that they find most comfortable to use by employing even just one integrated marketing tactic, using a QR code. It makes it just a bit more convenient for your audience just that much easier for your customers to reach out to you. See a video on Macy’s backstage pass campaign using QR and SMS.
Mobile Devices Influence Purchases
Our two cents:
As a retailer you are constantly being tasked with deciding on which mobile technologies to invest in and what kind of overall customer experience to create. When in doubt, our advice is to focus on creating a great research experience, the last touchpoint before the purchase. Sure, there are all sorts of shiny new technologies that vendors will claim add to bottom line sales. But those technologies often suffer from low adoption rates and we know that almost everybody is using their phones to research product information. So make sure that your mobile website and all supporting tactics, e.g., Search, SMS etc., allow the customer to easily research products.
Source: Online Media Daily Mark Walsh, Yesterday, 3:22 PM
New findings from Google suggest that consumers are using smartphones, tablets and desktop computers throughout the purchase process. Based on research conducted with Ipsos, Google found that people use smartphones in particular at different points as they move toward a purchase.
Nearly half (46%), for instance, said they researched an item on their smartphone before going to a store buy it. And 37% researched an item on their phone before buying it online. Four in 10 people who use their mobile phones to shop said they had made a purchase through the device itself.
While people use all three devices- — phone, tablet and PC — to research purchases, some activities are more popular on specific devices. Tablet owners, for instance, read product reviews and looked for product information more from their tablet devices than from their PCs or smartphones (77% compared to 67% and 70%, respectively).
Consumers favored smartphones for contacting a retailer. That’s a natural outgrowth of the ability to make a call directly, as well as retail sites and ads including click-to-call buttons. At the same time, people preferred PCs for comparing prices and looking for discounts and promotions by a fairly wide margin (roughly 20 percentage points).
That indicates that consumers are mostly checking prices and deals before even leaving the house, rather than waiting to do so in-store via mobile. When it came to comparing product information, however, tablets came out slightly ahead of PCs and smartphones — at 65% to 60% and 61%, respectively.
The study suggests that people are relying on mobile devices more for shopping. Among consumers who used their devices to shop last year, 80% of smartphone shoppers and 70% of tablet users said they used their device more frequently this year.
The Google/Ipsos results were based on a pair of surveys — one involving 615 U.S. holiday season shoppers who made a purchase in at least one of 13 retail categories and another of the same size composed of mobile and desktop consumers who made retail purchases across the same range of categories.
Retailers’ Apps Must Decide Strategy: Enrich Or Engage
Source: Online Media Daily, Mark Walsh, Feb 9, 2012, 5:57 PM
Most retailers have stumbled out of the gate when it comes to mobile strategy, creating weak, fragmented apps and mobile properties in their haste to gain a foothold in the mobile space. The problem is that companies have focused on the means — mobile — at the expense of the end — transactions and customer engagement, according to a new report from digital consulting firm Altimeter Group.
The key for retailers going mobile is to figure out which of those two goals — sales or building customer relations — is their main objective, and then build applications accordingly. While the report warns against rushing headlong into mobile development, it underscores that smartphones are rapidly turning consumers into mobile shoppers.
The average smartphone user spends over an hour a day interacting with the device, and one of the top three activities is shopping. “Smartphone users expect to be able to turn to their devices for every informational need and have it met immediately. When shopping, this means finding the quickest route to products and pricing,” states the study authored by Altimeter mobile analyst Chris Silva.
The report specifically pointed to apps by Abercrombie & Fitch and Longhorn Steakhouse as examples of offerings that are long on design and mobile tricks (3D graphics and motion-based effects) but short on utility and shopping-centric tools. Conversely, brands such as Starbucks and Best Buy have developed apps that aim to solve customer problems, like cutting in-store wait times or making product information widely available.
Altimeter boils down what approach retailers should take in mobile to two basic options: enrich or engage. The former is a strategy focused on driving transactions and measured in overall purchases, purchase size or frequency, and same-store metrics.
The other is geared toward building brand affinity. “The focus is on bringing shoppers closer to the brand to drive interaction — not just spend,” the report states.
Altimeter identified four types of apps that successfully either enrich or engage consumers: informational, buy/ship, multichannel “lite” and multichannel “heavy.” The first refers to apps designed to enrich the experience by providing information on retail outlets, high-level and non-product-specific information. Brands with apps in this category include Century 21, Hilton Hotels and Toyota.
Buy/Ship apps allow buyers to look up products and purchases for later offline home delivery. This is the most common type of app, and strong brands in this area include Amazon, Wine.com and Zappos.
Multichannel apps are designed to assist in-store shoppers, with “heavy” ones allowing deeper interaction and the option of purchasing products through the app. In addition to Starbucks and Best Buy, the two multichannel categories include apps from Walmart and Walgreens.
Retailers Try to Thwart Price Apps
By Dana Mattioli, WSJ, Friday Dec 23, 2011
The smartphone boom is unleashing a new era of pricing transparency to consumers able to use wireless apps and search engines on their mobile devices in stores to check if they are offering the best deal. But retailers are fighting back harder than ever to prevent their stores from becoming mere showrooms.
Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203686204577114901480554444.html#ixzz1hP4Jg8hv
Behavior and insight on this holiday season’s mobile shopper
Our two cents:
It’s certainly no surprise to learn of the compound growth rate of research and purchases for mobile shoppers. While some retailers made early bets in mobile that have in some cases yielded 20% increase in online sales, most are still trying to define an overall mobile strategy. So when the IBM says things like “Retailers are going to have to do a really good job in targeting their messages and promotions for mobile users” we can’t help but shed some light on what exactly that means for most retailers. Below are a few key points to “getting it right” for any retailer:
- Remember that mobile shoppers are surgical shoppers. And just as importnat, remember that shopping on a retailer’s mobile site means visual shopping, especially for ESL shoppers. Therefore, keeping copy to a minimum and getting multiple (and easily downloadable) images on the site is key. With the average mobile device shopper spending about 4 minutes on a site, it becomes imperative for retailers to quickly serve up ONLY the most relevant content. Furthermore, mobile shoppers also tend to do less browsing and look at fewer products when they shop, making it more imperative for retailers to personalize messages and content. Simply put, shoppers go to websites to get ideas, but they go to mobile sites to get what they want.
- Use social networks to drive engagement and sales online. Social networks are an important factor in retail. According to IBM Coremetrics data, 9.2% of consumers in October that came to a retailer’s web site from a social media site made a purchase, compared to 5.5% who visited the store site directly. Retailers should not walk away from this fact thinking that adding a social networking step to the shopper journey is the right way to go. “Liking” or “following” a brand on a social network is a non-linear action for shoppers and not part of the traditional sales funnel. Therefore, retailers would be ill-advised to treat it like any other media channel.
- Invest in mobile search. This is one of the few silver bullets retailers have in mobile and not nearly enough of them use it. The simple fact is that everyone uses mobile search and with google now running a mobile-specific algorithm, retailers must respond with mobile-specific SEO and SEM strategies.
Clos du Bois Winery teams up with Banana Republic for QR code campaign
Our two cents:
Good example of a QR code-based campaign in the wine and spirits category that goes beyond simple product information. It’s importnat to note that the strategic idea was in place at the onset, which will likely contribute to the overall success of the campaign. Furthermore, there is a clear value exchange between brand and customer, a concept that is paramount for any mobile endeavor.
