Retail is increasingly built around the individual customer. How does this place new demands on the retailer?
With use of ecommerce and social media platforms constantly growing, there are more and more opportunities for retailers to reach audiences than ever before, but that means several other voices are competing for your audience’s attention. Producing high-impact pieces of content that will stand out in this saturated market ultimately means personalisation.
Of course, in line with calls for more targeted strategies, the ecommerce market is growing, so there are more and more people to reach. That means the demands on the retailer are around finding ways to reach out to audiences with these tailored messages at scale, ensuring they aren’t just sending ‘blanket’ messages to all customers.
What new technologies will be important to help retailers speak personally to customers?
For retailers to create campaigns that feel personal to each individual and contain content relevant to their place in their purchasing journey, a couple of steps are needed. First, the retailer needs to have – and to be able to analyse – a lot of data to understand customers and prospects, before deciding which content they should be sent. Then, once that’s decided, retailers need to get those messages in front of the customer. But how? Manually ‘dragging and dropping’ different messages to different audiences? That simply does not scale – something most marketers are acutely aware of.
This is where artificial intelligence (AI) is such an essential tool in helping retailers speak more personally to customers. AI can not only work out which messages will resonate most with which customers, but can also predict what a customer will do in the future, understanding what message will produce the best outcome. Imagine being able to work out which promotions, offers and product selection will perform best when offered to individual consumers? That’s far too big a job for any marketer to do manually,
but it’s exactly how AI can help.
Customers are increasingly using smartphones, does this change things?
With our phones at our fingertips most of the day, mobile is one of the most critical components in the customer journey – if not the most essential. Marketers across the retail industry must therefore deploy mobile strategies as one of the best ways to reach consumers – whether that’s building a mobile app or creating a mobile-friendly web page.
Acknowledging mobile is important. After all, marketers can get to truly understand and engage with their audiences if they can capture data directly from their customers’ mobile device. Tracking the way consumers interact and behave while using their mobile not only provides unparalleled insight and knowledge about specific target groups, but also allows marketers to measure the performance of their customer engagement strategy and the impact it has on their business.
However, mobile marketing tactics do need to be integrated with the brand’s overall omnichannel marketing strategy, as that will allow customers to move seamlessly from the online website to their mobile app without skipping a beat, thereby ensuring a frictionless and engaging customer experience.
Emarsys in brief
Date launched: 2000.
Global reach: 17 global office locations, serving more than
2,000 clients in 140 countries.
Customers: eBay, Toys ‘R’ Us, Nike, Canon, Volvo, American Express and L’Oréal.
Employees: more than 700.
Contact: for further information contact Emarsys via Twitter , Facebook, Linkedin or website
