July 28, 2021 
Marketers have always faced the difficulty of standing out from the crowd. Brand survival today depends on it. Across the many touch points, both online and offline, your message must not only be delivered correctly, but it must also occur at the right time in your customer’s journey.
70% of shoppers complete their transactions through multiple channels. You can boost acquisition and conversion by understanding your customers’ omnichannel retail patterns, whether that’s in-store and online, or even catalogs. These three strategic factors can bolster retailers’ bottom lines through data analysis.
Understand a Single Customer View
Understanding your customers’ preferences for various touchpoints and retail channels is not enough. Every stage of the customer journey should offer an experience that fulfills each desire of an always-connected and reachable customer. To accomplish this, retailers will be required to integrate location data that will help build Single Customer Views and respond to customer dynamics.
The Single Customer View is the summing together of all meaningful and reliable data from all customer touchpoints. To better understand customers’ points of view, these data can help create actionable representations of their experiences. When you use the right tools, troves of data can be gathered and analyzed to create a Single Customer View, which helps you make better decisions about your business. Data about location can be integrated or used in isolation with another data source to reveal insight into:
- Digital World Touchpoints
- Favorite social media platforms
- Brand and number of connected devices
- Content consumption
- Search patterns
- Physical World Touchpoints
- Commute patterns
- Home location
- Mobility rating
- Search patterns
- In-store visits
Analyzing each of your customers’ touchpoints can give you insights into why they choose your competitor over you or what led them to choose you. A user acquisition analysis like this could highlight areas in which small changes could have a dramatic effect.
When collected and appropriately utilized, a Single Customer View can aid in making strategic decisions from the top down. Here’s a great example from Black Friday 2017. In-store footfalls are most successful among fashion retailers, based on the data. In the days that followed, footfall decreased to almost normal levels except for Forever 21. Those data alone don’t provide sufficient insight into a customer. Still, when combined with a Single Customer View, they can help create a comprehensive strategy that might last beyond a single shopping day.
Forever 21 can determine the best channels of engagement and communication to reach and engage customers for conversion by looking at Black Friday data trends together with a single customer view. Following up on social media advertisements and extending in-store promotions on popular items could be innovative strategies for increasing foot traffic.
Measure Offline Attribution
Customers shop in stores, and this data is essential for Omni-channel marketing. While e-commerce is booming and growing, many people prefer to shop at physical stores rather than online. It does not mean the physical and digital worlds are incompatible. Ads on the internet are increasingly influential in influencing offline purchases – another reason why location data is crucial for a holistic customer experience.
It is possible to determine shoppers’ preferences by parsing offline attribution data. Researching online and purchasing in-store is a preferred method for some people, whereas others head to multiple stores before buying. By leveraging location intelligence, you can find out what your customers like to shop and how to market them in real-time. With the ability to get real-time insights during a campaign, it’s possible to make changes to the campaign based on the customer journey. Hence, You can make good ad spends during the right time, not afterward, when the opportunity is lost.
Leverage New Technology to Increase ROI
With the power of new technology like AI and offline data, marketing campaigns can optimize real-time data feedback and avoid failure. As new technologies are developed, adopting and implementing them is a critical component of any successful business. Analyzing data, visualizing info, and engaging audiences create measurable results. A company with an international presence set two goals: to acquire greenfield customers and target specific customer profiles. To test the effectiveness of various shapes before launching the entire campaign, AI curated segmented pilot campaigns based on email, ad IDs, and mobile cookies.
These pilot campaigns will help final tailor advertising spend into targeted segments with context-specific content based on the data for greater conversions. Expected results will indicate that AI’s data was effectively used: with 33% more traffic and 140% more unique visitors compared to the benchmark, it successfully narrowed the scope of ad spending. By reducing the impact of frequency caps, ROI can be dramatically increased. Further, the data collected will be incorporated into future data collections so that every marketing dollar spent is continued to be optimized.
