In retail media, there are easy-to-reach shoppers, and there are hard-to-reach shoppers.
The easy-to-reach shoppers:
A marketer's dream, right?
Well, not so much. Just like with picking mostly low-hanging fruit, there are problems with over-reliance on these easy-to-reach shoppers.
In this blog, we'll explore the pitfalls of this common issue—and help you get to the much higher-value fruit (i.e., those hard-to-reach shoppers that aren't just coming to your site every day) sitting at the top of the money tree.
Over-reliance on easy-to-reach audiences comes with two significant drawbacks.
First, if one retailer can easily identify a shopper, so can every other retailer—and every media vendor trying to fill audiences for their advertisers. These poor shoppers end up in every third-party audience segment on the market and get flooded with ads. They are targets everywhere, from retailers’ onsite retail media to retargeting media and everywhere in between.
And, boy, are they tired of the ads. They are overused, over-messaged and less likely to respond to offers.
The same goes for walled gardens. If one retailer can dump ad dollars into the ecosystem to drive more impressions, so can every other retailer. Pushing impressions does not equate to reaching more people. Compounding the issue is the fact that 70% of retail marketers are considering additional spend in walled gardens to make up for deprecating cookies, further flooding the limited audience with ads.
The result is more annoyed, over-messaged consumers and wasted ad spend.
The second drawback of over relying on easy-to-reach shoppers is simple: missing out on everyone else.
Most shoppers' natural behaviors and preferences actually make marketing more difficult by:
Today, more than half of U.S. web activity occurs on browsers with consumer privacy practices in place. For example, a good chunk of consumers surf the web on Safari (about 18% of global browser usage) or Firefox (2.5% browser usage), which are not conducive to cookies. Safari deprecated third-party cookies in 2017, while Firefox followed suit in 2019, sweeping up the trackable crumbs—and making it harder to reach anonymous shoppers.
Consumers are also spending about twice as much time on the open web as they are within walled gardens (66% of time online versus 34%, respectively), rendering advertisers’ walled garden spend less effective.
And unfortunately, all that time on the open web doesn’t automatically translate to more traffic to retailers’ websites. Epsilon proprietary research shows that, on average, 80% of retail shoppers don’t visit the retailer's website—they’re browsing on the open web, and buying in person. And while at this point most retailers have expanded their retail media efforts beyond onsite advertising to the open web, not all offsite retail media advertising is created equal. It takes connected, person-level identity to ensure you're able to reach the right shoppers, wherever they are.
Despite being harder to reach, these shoppers are just as loyal and likely to purchase. In fact, they may be more receptive to retailers’ messaging because they’re not suffering from as much ad fatigue as their easier-to-find counterparts.
Plus, let's not forget that Apple device users may be considered "hard-to-reach," because they're operating on devices that don't allow for third-party cookie tracking. We know this set of users is often some of the most valuable consumers, but are often neglected by adtech partners who don't have the identity resolution capabilities to locate them sans third-party identifiers. And many partners just write off being able to serve ads on Apple products entirely, assuming it's an impossible feat to accomplish.
This all begs the question: How can retailers reach the (nearly) unreachable?
A disjointed mix of cookie-based retargeting, loyalty programs and walled gardens doesn’t cut it in today's retail media landscape.
To reach all high-value shoppers across the open web, retailers need two capabilities:
Person-level identity resolution enables retailers to see their shoppers wherever they are, in a privacy-centric way, no matter what browser or device they're operating on. This means no more guessing and no more over-serving ads to a small subset of an audience base. With full visibility, a retail media network is able to reach the exact right, loyal shoppers at the right time with the right messaging.
With Epsilon Retail Media, shoppers can be resolved to a single identity across devices, emails and other signals. A unified attribution methodology captures in-store purchasers an attributes the impact of media on those sales, and advertisers can feel confident they are identifying and reaching the right shoppers with the right message and the right time with real-time first-party shopper data from Epsilon's network of over 1,000 publishers.
It's all underpinned by COREid®, the industry’s most accurate, stable and scalable identity solution (which has never relied on third-party cookies!).
We combine COREid with AI-driven, SKU-optimized targeting and person-first ad serving that always reaches the right shopper with the best message at the most effective time across onsite and offsite channels.
With this approach:
It’s time to stop over-relying on your easy-to-reach audiences. Epsilon's Retail Media solution helps you connect with all of your shoppers—including the highest-hanging fruit.
Learn more about Epsilon Retail Media today.
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