In the past few years, organizations have had to completely rethink the way they conduct business. The changes that the global pandemic has brought on are unprecedented, and now more than ever, it is important to recognize that “business as usual” has taken on a new meaning.
Customer relationship management has always been at the forefront of many industries, but much more so in retail. E-commerce saw a huge boom in sales since the pandemic, with many consumers turning to online shopping instead of visiting brick-and-mortar stores. Since that pivot, organizations have had to change the way they market their products.
How do retail companies establish or maintain customer relationships with less personal interaction? It’s not an uncommon question.
The onset of increased online shopping has made analytical solutions focused on customer behavior even more important to consider. With that in mind, organizations turned to various solutions, including smart analytics. With a smart analytics solution, retail businesses can uncover and understand what customers are looking for, which then leads to a more personalized shopping experience.
From ad performance, email campaigns, and website behavior, a smart analytics solution can leverage consumer data to understand the expectations and motivations of customers, and how to retain them with brand loyalty. Here’s how a smart analytics solution can help personalize consumer offerings.
Start with Unifying Customer Data
Retailers have the chance to connect with consumers at various touchpoints throughout the customer retail journey. Touchpoints like digital advertisements, email newsletters, and website engagements all serve as valuable areas to analyze customer data. However, retailers miss out on opportunities to engage at the right time due to siloed data processes.
Siloed customer data presents a major challenge in a complete 360-degree view of a customer’s journey.
Therefore, it is important for retailers to build customer profiles that are unified in order to create personalized retail offerings. With multiple streams of data across different systems, it may be difficult to find actual value in what the data showcases.
Cloud-based smart analytics solutions available via the Google Cloud Platform are the perfect way to build those granular views of the customer journey in a unified approach. From there, retailers are enabled to create individual personalized customer experiences based on specific and detailed data points.
Predicting Customer Interactions
By utilizing smart analytics tools, organizations are able to track what customers may be interested in purchasing in the future. In the past, the customer journey was guided by past historical factors to predict future decisions. Yet with predictive analytics, organizations can view real-time behavior to anticipate what action a customer will take.
This, in turn, allows for retailers to determine the most relevant recommendations with a higher probability of generating a sale. From targeted advertisements to an email campaign with specific coupons, businesses can better personalize retail offerings with smart analytics
Omnichannel Experiences
There is no one size fits all approach when it comes to personalizing retail offerings with smart analytics. Which makes an omnichannel effort that is much more important. Customers aren’t just solely searching for items using a single channel, device, website, or location. Utilizing smart analytics can better assist marketing teams and retail organizations by mapping out channels that lead to the most conversions and identifying which channels drove brand awareness efforts.
Bridging the gap between different channels allows for retail organizations to meet customers where they are in the journey. Leveraging the omnichannel customer experience also benefits the organizations to better inform where and when to allocate digital advertising investments and more.
How Retailers are Leveraging Smart Analytics to Personalize Offerings
There’s no question that the retail industry has had a difficult past few years. With the focus turning more towards data-driven and digital experience for customers, businesses had to find a way to leverage consumer data more efficiently.
Customer relationships are important to establish and maintain, especially online. With smart analytics solutions, organizations can foster those relationships better.
With large enterprises, it can be difficult for marketers to sift through the mountain of customer data collected and uncover useful data. And most legacy systems aren’t capable of handling such a robust need to better personalize the customer experience. But with cloud-based smart analytics solutions, retailers can truly understand what customers expect, motivates, and retains them as loyal customers.
For example, Designer Brands Inc. faced the challenge of a vast pool of customer data that required a more robust system to better understand their consumers and personalize offerings.
With the aid of Pandera and Google Cloud Platform solutions, Designer Brands Inc. was able to create a personalization engine that created prescriptive analytics available for self-service research, integration into digital channels, and leveraged in campaign systems.
As a result, Designer Brands Inc. was immediately able to achieve an increase for click rates of channel interactions of 57% from their baseline.
There’s no question that retailers are leveraging smart analytics to personalize offerings. With the state of the industry and the bigger focus on customer relationships, retailers can utilize tools that help them stay competitive and data-driven.
If your organization is looking for actionable insights and smart analytics solutions, Pandera is here to help! With our Google Cloud Platform expertise and a team that is dedicated to data and analytics, you too can build better customer experiences.
Get in touch with us today to learn more about our analytics services and solutions!