For many retailers, retail media networks are new and unfamiliar territory, but it’s a marketing field rife with opportunity for those who are able to execute successful strategies. To maximise revenue from retail media, retailers should prioritise strengthening their existing relationships with customers, ramping up off-site advertising to reach new consumers, and making sure they have the right tools in place—and the wherewithal to use them—to leverage first-party data.
Here at Epsilon, we help retailers build effective marketing and retail media strategies that are more lucrative and cost-effective. If you’re looking to boost your own retail media network revenue, we’ve put together a handy guide to how you can get started doing so.
What is a Retail Media Network?
Retail marketing could be the door that opens your business to a whole new realm of revenue.
At the fundamental level, retail media networks are essentially the digital equivalent of in-store advertising displays from outside brands that businesses have employed for decades.
These days, with retail media networks, advertisements can be strategically placed at key points of a user’s ecommerce shopping journey, such as above or between search results, or alongside recently-viewed products. Additionally, with the help of customers’ first-party data, products and advertisements can more easily be targeted to reach the right audiences at the right time.
And it’s certainly the right time to grow revenue with a retail media network.
Leading investment company GroupM projected in early December that spending on retail media in 2022 would reach $110.7 billion, more than its $101 billion prediction in September.
While that alone sounds impressive, there are plenty more gains to be made. A previous GroupM report notes that while retail media already accounts for 10.7% of ad spending worldwide, it could grow 60% by 2027. Retail media networks aren’t just appealing; in the coming years, they figure to be essential to remain competitive with other businesses.
The benefits of a Retail Media Network
The age of the retail media network is still dawning, but businesses across industries are quickly recognising its value and adopting their own strategies at a rapid pace. When strategies are executed effectively, the following are just some of the ways that retailers stand to benefit:
- New revenue sources — For businesses who have yet to adopt a retail media network strategy of their own, this represents an entirely new, as-yet untapped revenue source.
- Right place, right time — With the aid of first-party data, advertisers can reach their key customer demographic in a space where they’re already prepared to make purchases, making your site and/or app extremely valuable advertising real estate.
- Advertisers’ offerings can supplement your products and services — Partnering with the right advertisers could expand your offerings and turn your business website and/or ecommerce application into a one-stop shop for your users, personalising the customer experience and making the shopping process more enjoyable.
Those who are able to successfully implement their retail media network approaches early on can carve out space in their industries and refine approaches to maximise revenue before they become increasingly competitive.
How to maximise revenue from Digital Retail Media
Boosting revenue is one of the key benefits of a successful retail media network.
Once you’ve established the foundational elements of your own retail media network approach, the following are some best practices that can help you maximise your strategy’s ROI over time.
Prioritise customer relationships
The value of any retail media network is entirely dependent on the retailer’s relationship with its customers. The more consumers there are who engage with a business, the more appealing its retail network is to prospective advertisers.
Creating loyalty programs is one way that retailers can collect information about individual shoppers to improve their experiences while also offering them additional incentives and ways to save, further solidifying the retailer-consumer relationship.
But that rule also goes the other way.
When a retailer makes decisions that isolate customers, lower trust, or harm the quality of their shopping experience, a shrinking or disengaging customer base will make it less tempting to advertisers and therefore more challenging to grow revenue from a retail media network.
Invest in off-site advertising and SEO
Keeping existing customers engaged is key to maximising retail media revenue—and so is expanding that base. That means prioritising off-site advertising and search engine optimisation strategies to drive traffic and attract new consumers is a must. Use every tool at your disposal.
Gather the data — then put it to use
Access to first-party data is yet another aspect that makes retail media networks appealing to advertisers. Sharing unique customer insights with advertisers—while complying with privacy standards and ethics, of course—holds value for a number of reasons:
- It allows them to more effectively target advertisements to the right audience.
- Advertisers can easily assess the success of current and future campaigns.
- You can substantiate claims about the value of your network with numbers.
In summary, providing advertisers with the right data can build the confidence necessary to keep them re-investing in your media network. But monitoring website and application data is also important for your own purposes.
Understanding how people interact with your website will help you understand key information:
- How users find your site?
- How they use your website or application?
- Where the most effective advertising spaces may be located?
- How to improve usability issues (i.e., page load speeds or a confusing multi-step checkout process) as they arise so the site doesn’t needlessly drive away traffic?
Study other Retail Media Networks
Studying other retail media networks can help retailers gain insight on what works and what doesn’t as they hone their own strategies. Of course, what works for one business can be very different from what works for another. Still, it’s still important to remain up to speed on how competitors are approaching their own networks. Be sure to ask questions like:
- What do ads communicate about the retailer’s understanding of its customer base?
- How engaging are advertisements? What kinds of strategies are being executed?
- Where are ads placed (on-site and off)? Is placement effective?
- What, if any, new or creative methods are being explored?
Grow your audience
To reiterate one of the points made above, growing your audience means growing your potential retail media revenue. The larger your audience, the more valuable your retail market network is to advertisers. Partnering with the right marketing agency can help you develop and improve strategies to widen your audience.
Grow your media market revenue With Epsilon
When you have a wider consumer audience than your competitors, you stand to command more revenue with your retail media network. Epsilon can help you make that happen.
Epsilon can help you grow and engage the right audiences in the right places at the right time. And if you’re interested in setting up a fully managed retail media network of your own, Epsilon has the tools and expertise you need to go live and multiply your reach in just days. With hundreds of brands already a part of Epsilon’s network, you can already begin bringing in revenue before your promotional strategy gets underway.
Care to learn more? Get in touch with us today!