Learn more about how fashion brands capitalize on new digital consumer behaviour - post lock down and beyond, by watching Amiee Stroud's presentation at IMRG Fashion Connect 2022.
Customer behaviour has evolved dramatically in the past two years as a direct result of Covid-19. The pandemic has forced more and more shoppers online and both retailers and brands have reacted by closing branches, reducing in-store inventory to protect profitability and building out their omnichannel sales channels. These seismic changes have created both challenges and opportunities for retailers and brands.
Why is this important right now?
Omnichannel retail generates a wealth of customer data, enabling retailers and brands to build close on-going relationships with their customers – understanding what they want and how best to market to them. The challenge however is identifying individuals online – especially as third-party cookies are being phased out – and connecting up the disparate online data points shoppers generate during their path to purchase.
Deeper dive
Amiee Stroud, Business Development Director, recently explained at IMRG Fashion Connect that physical brick-and-mortar retailers have traditionally struggled with identifying customers and delivering personalised experiences to them.
Amiee said: “With offline retail you know where your stores are located and what sells well in specific areas and at what times. Retailers who have optimized e-receipts or loyalty programmes will receive additional information, but generally data is very limited, and it can be really difficult to identify trends that can be used to plan out the next 12 months to five years of marketing.”
Ecommerce, however, provides constant customer data streams from two sources; the shoppers who have logged in to a retailer’s website to carry out an activity, such as making a purchase or returning an item, and non-logged-in shoppers who may be browsing products.
Logged-in shoppers are very much in the minority. They provide a rich stream of actionable data, for example their identity, information about their family, their purchasing history, the devices they use, purchase frequency and the products they buy. This information can be used to create ID-based marketing strategies that drive planning, marketing and business growth. But with a non-logged-in shopper, there is a whole wealth of information that is inaccessible and cannot be connected together.
Solving the online identity challenge
Amiee explained that the best way to solve this online identity challenge is to develop a strategy that starts with the customer and helps explain everything that happens between and leads to purchases, increases in purchases, increases in AOV, increases in margins and even new customer acquisition.
Amiee said: “This can strategy be achieved by building a unique omnichannel identity for every customer and connecting together all their different devices, emails and other touchpoints that will help identify them and then connecting this identity to the available customer data. This data can be fed into a decisioning platform to leverage data and increase sales across all channels.” This approach can revolutionise the way retailers and brands work with each customer.
The bottom line
Amiee explained that Epsilon already has an ID-based marketing solution that can connect and leverage customers’ online data – and it does not rely on third-party cookies. Epsilon’s solution achieves an average of 3.5 touch points per customer and 4.5 emails per customer ID. This enables Epsilon to link personal email addresses, work email addresses and specific publisher sites that customers use. This customer-specific data can then help retailers and brands build on-going relationships with individuals, serving them the right content in the right place and at the time to nurture them to purchase.