Top holiday e-commerce challenges facing retailers
As the holiday shopping season kicks into high gear, online retailers must tackle a host of challenges, including on-time delivery and reducing returns.
Now that we’re into the thick of the holiday season, how can businesses make the most of the shopping surge? Consumers expect more in every aspect and in the saturated market, it can be hard to stand out. The secret to more sales is retail personalization.
Brands must provide relatable and tailored content to each and every customer to ensure consumers fall in love with them not just during the holidays, but forever. But how?
This is where all that data businesses collect about their customers comes into play. Let’s look at the challenges and benefits of leveraging customer data for personalized retail experiences.
Retail personalization challenges
Customer data is a double-edged sword for businesses. Stringent regulations are prescriptive on how organizations can collect, process and use a customer’s personal data. Non-compliance can result in hefty fines.
Transparency in how a brand handles customer data is now the benchmark of success in a rapidly evolving digital marketplace.
If retail businesses want to wow shoppers this season with bespoke, personalized experiences that will make them swoon – first-party data is crucial. Companies must rely on data they collect themselves from their customers. The days of relying on third-party data are quickly fading.
There are more hurdles, however. Trying to create personalized, good customer experiences can lead to disconnected islands of data. This makes compliance even harder when collecting, recording, and tracking consent from consumers across every channel and platform. Not to mention expensive.
With no centralized customer data platform in place, custom code and connectors are required for each technology integration, as well as additional storage, servers and maintenance costs.
Advanced systems can learn about customers while following consent preferences and they’ve become a business imperative.
How a customer data platform unlocks the power of personalization
The power of personalization, powered for business: Customer data platform (CDP) solutions help brands build on foundational insights to go beyond marketing and impact the full customer journey.
The benefits of personalization in retail
So what can be personalized? A multitude of content, including:- Product recommendations
- Online advertising
- Email marketing
Grab consumers’ attention by directing your advertising and marketing at them as individuals.
Many consumer habits and behaviors are largely predictable, which makes personalization more powerful, and understanding data more valuable.
While personalization helps retailers monetize their online engagements throughout the year, it’s particularly valuable during the holiday season.
Personalizing sales offers with tailored content and seamless customer experiences is a gamechanger for engagement and retention and a huge competitive differentiator.
First-party data collection: Examples, benefits, and best practices
With cookies going away, marketing today is all about first-party data. Explore best practices and use cases for first-party data collection.
Connecting the dots for real results
How then, can a retail brand transform into a true customer-first enterprise, enhancing and personalizing user journeys while respecting customer preferences and privacy?
By automatically unifying data into permission-based profiles for each customer, you can centrally govern, manage, and analyze those profiles to drive trusted digital experiences without tying up excessive development resources.
New technology solutions can help you build better relationships with your customers through transparency and trust. Highly secure, cloud-based technology provides a foundation for agile innovation while saving development resources and getting you to market in a fraction of the time required for a DIY implementation.
This means you can seamlessly connect customers with brands across devices, channels, and regions, through flexible and secure registration and authentication screens and flows. You can also easily and transparently collect, track, and manage preference and consent data across the entire customer lifecycle.
Finally, you can also maintain a complete history of consent and communication preferences for audit purposes, while giving customers control over their information and experiences.
The other great benefit is retail hyper-personalization – engaging customers using data-driven real-time insights, thanks to a unified view of your customers’ data. This is essential for delivering relevant engagements on preferred channels and driving new revenue.
