First came brick-and-mortar retail stores. Then, vendors embraced the innovation offered by the internet, setting up websites and offering customers opportunities to browse their catalogs and even make purchases. In those days, online shopping was a discrete experience, separate and distinct from in-person browsing and purchasing. On their own, neither of these options is sufficient any longer. Today’s consumers expect a seamless omnichannel experience that accompanies them from in-store to online and back again, meeting them where they are and guiding them to where they want to go.
Now, more than ever, customer data is the key to omnichannel retail success. By mining data and leveraging it to create personalized experiences for each customer, retailers can stay ahead of the competition. With a well-defined strategy for collecting, storing, organizing, and analyzing customer data, retailers can gain valuable insights into their customers’ wants and needs. This information can be used to show shoppers items that reflect their styles and preferences and to develop tailored messages, offers, and promotions that drive customer loyalty.
By relying on data—rather than guesswork—retailers have an unprecedented opportunity to win and retain customers through excellent experiences that no competitor can match.
The Different Kinds of Data
Omnichannel retailers have an enormous opportunity to collect large amounts of customer data from a variety of sources, including physical stores, e-commerce sites, social media, and mobile apps. This data can be used to understand customer behavior and preferences. Types of customer data that can be collected include:
Personal data includes any details about your customer including age, gender, income level, education background, marital status, and where they live.
Preferential data may include purchase history, buying patterns, product reviews, website visits and clicks, loyalty program memberships, opt-in communications programs, social media interactions, shipping information and more.
Online browsing data is the information customers leave behind when they visit a website or use an app. This data can include website visits, product page views, add-to-cart activities, purchase history, and more.
Customer feedback is critical to understanding customers’ desires and expectations. By collecting customer feedback, retailers can gain valuable insights into the customer experience, identify areas of improvement or opportunity, and tailor products and services to meet customers’ expectations. Furthermore, by actively incentivizing customers to provide feedback (e.g., offering rewards or discounts), retailers can foster a more engaged customer base and increase customer loyalty.
Improving Customer Experience with Data
Leveraging customer data-driven insights in an omnichannel environment enables retailers to gain a competitive edge and maximize revenue potential. Retailers who effectively collect, analyze, and apply insights can use what they learn to gain a deeper understanding of their customers, including their purchasing patterns, style preferences, and budget. When they understand their customers better, businesses deliver more tailored, personalized experiences that drive customer loyalty, satisfaction and lifetime value. One example of this application can be found in cart abandonment rates. The Baymard Research Institute recently released a study concluding that most businesses have to cope with a nearly 70% online shopping cart abandonment rate. Data-driven personalization leads to fewer abandoned carts and a better close rate online and in-person by creating a customer experience that delights and inspires shoppers. More comprehensive data also leads to better decisions about product selection, pricing, marketing initiatives, inventory, and supply chain management, and other strategies. By analyzing customer data, retailers can also identify new opportunities for growth or improvement in the form of product development, targeted promotions and other strategies.
Three Tips for Maximizing the Value of Your Data
- Use data to personalize CX. 50% of consumers say personalization based on their interests and past purchases have influenced their decision to purchase from a brand over the last year. Shoptelligence’s personalized email marketing solution, STyleMail, uses AI-powered learning to make the right recommendations to help shoppers discover more of your assortment, according to their own preferences, goals, and budget.
- Deliver personalized communication that reflects what you know about your customer. Use emails as an opportunity to build stronger relationships with their shoppers and deliver the enjoyable CX that keeps them coming back. STyleMail leverages customer data to send personalized emails based on shoppers’ past browsing and purchasing history, ultimately increasing conversion, average order value, and customer lifetime value.
- Create unified customer profiles and train staff in their use. A unified customer profile aggregates data from multiple sources to create a single view of each individual customer. With a unified customer profile, your associates can leverage the data gathered online at the same time that your website provides a thrilling shopping experience that leverages data collected during an in-person visit. STyleMail gathers information to get to know every shopper onsite and generates individual STyle Profiles for each to understand their preferences and deliver recommendations that match.
The Best Way to Mine and Leverage Customer Data
Studies have shown that, despite a pervasive concern about their privacy, the vast majority of consumers are willing to exchange personalized information for a personalized shopping experience. Retailers can capitalize on this paradox by employing systems that mine as much data as possible and then using it to offer CX that beats the competition.
Shoptelligence’s STyle Reasoning platform is a proven AI-powered solution that integrates quickly and easily with your existing channels. Businesses that partner with Shoptelligence typically achieve quick ROI in less than 60 days thanks to 6X increase in time spent on site, 150% increase in conversation rate, 35% increase in average order value, and 33% lift in revenue per buyer. Shoptelligence CEO Laura Khoury reports, “Traffic across all of our clients is up threefold, which is great, but now we’re actually seeing conversion rate boosts well over three times (the average) and in some cases eight times.”
Get the most out of customer data at your business. Schedule a product tour today.
