Bob Hale, CEO SDL Campaign Management & Analytics
The retail market is evolving. Customers have more access to information than ever before and their expectations for how retailers will interact with them have changed. Today’s customers are in control of the retail experience. Retailers will gain from letting their customers take the lead. How customers engage through traditional, online and digital media and how they interact in retail, online and digital purchase channels provides an understanding of their path to purchase. The insights and intelligence gained from customers’ interactions with a brand create a road map for building meaningful, lasting connections with them.
Today’s most successful retailers use a single view of their customers to understand how they want to engage with their brand. By following the customer’s lead, these retailers initiate meaningful interactions that generate lasting, high-value relationships.ustomers’ interactions with a brand create a road map for building meaningful, lasting connections with them.
Retailers succeeding in today’s evolving marketplace follow three simple steps:
Step One: Listen. Create a single view of the customers. Customers maintain a dialog with the brands they engage. Interactions through social media, loyalty programs, ecommerce and in-store contact provide vital information that tells retailers how to build lasting, high value relationships with them. The key to developing those relationships is taking action on what’s been “heard”.
Consolidating and analyzing the information gathered through customer touch points enables retailers to truly understand their customers across all of their interactions with the brand.
Step Two: Understand. Appreciate how customers interact with the brand.
No two customers are the same and interactions with them need to address their individual differences. How customers interact with a brand is meaningful and defines their path to purchase.
Understanding each customer’s individual path to purchase provides information and insights needed to truly connect with them. Reaching out through the touch points customers prefer builds awareness and motivates purchase.
Step Three: Engage. Take action on new customer intelligence. Effective customer communications are highly individualized and offer personal value across a customer’s preferred channels.
Consistent, coordinated communications delivered across relevant touch points initiate and propel customers along their chosen path to purchase.
In January 2012, SDL acquired Alterian, now the SDL Campaign Management & Analytics division. Newly acquired expertise with analytically-driven, intelligent marketing enables SDL to deliver solutions for Global Customer Experience Management (CXM). The combination of customer analytics, campaign management and email software with other technologies, such as SDL Tridion for web content management, delivers a personalized online customer experience that complements direct customer interactions.
According to Forrester Research, Inc., providers in multiple solution categories are converging on the emerging practice of CXM, and doing so with overlapping capabilities. Product and service approaches vary based on vendor’s area of expertise. SDL has assembled and integrated best-in-class technologies, now including analytics-driven intelligent marketing, to deliver Global CXM solutions.
SDL Campaign Management & Analytics easy to use, web-based marketing software provides retail marketers a powerful solution for:
- Consolidating data from various sources to provide a single view of the customer
- Analyzing data to gain a better understanding of customers
- Engaging with customers to create a high value, full-channel experience
SDL’s suite of retail marketing software, offers an intuitive campaign management tool powered by advanced analytics so that marketers can interact with customers through highly personalized campaigns driven by our dynamic email and SMS capabilities. SDL’s intelligent marketing software specifically addresses the needs of retailers so they can effectively interact with customers and acquire, develop and reactivate their most profitable customers.
The SDL Campaign Management & Analytics solution specifically addresses the needs of retailers. We enable retailers to understand their customers and engage them in meaningful interactions that promote purchases from new, existing and lapsed buyers.
More than 35 data assets are designed to enable retailers to analyze and report on vital business initiatives:
- How effectively do customer acquisition programs generate firsttime buyers?
- What drives repeat purchase among first-time buyers?
- What defines best buyers and which interactions keep them engaged?
- How are past interactions with lapsed buyers used to reactivate customers?
The tools required to address each of these questions are standard components of the solution, and are designed to minimize retailers’ time to value.
