In the ever-evolving world of retail media, one thing is abundantly clear: The industry is still in its infancy. In the spirit of progress, brands and retailers are evolving strategies and making plans to succeed in the future.
To address these questions, we'll explore three essential pillars that brands and retailers need to anchor their retail media strategies in, providing some clarity and direction to navigate the uncharted waters of this rapidly changing industry.
1. Maximize first-party data
Epsilon retail media research reveals that most retailers (58%) are still leaning on traditional, indirect monetization tactics, like coupons and emails.
While it's understandable to start here, these tactics should be combined with newer, more innovative strategies to reach a more finely-tuned target customer base at scale.
The future of the retail media industry is leveraging first-party data, both onsite and offsite, backed with attributed reporting and measurement. With the right strategy, first-party data empowers retailers to better understand their customers, enhance personalization, comply with data privacy regulations and gain a competitive advantage. By investing in data collection and analytics capabilities, retailers can position themselves for success in the evolving retail landscape.
2. Embrace data collaboration
Data collaboration is one of the most important priorities for brands and retailers in retail media. In the Epsilon study, 70% of brands and retailers said that data collaboration is highly important to their advertising strategy, with 47% actively developing data collaboration partnerships and 37% already having existing data collaboration partnerships.
Data collaboration allows brands and retailers to harness the power of data to understand, target and engage customers more effectively in their retail media efforts. It also fosters collaboration, adaptability and innovation, enabling businesses to stay competitive and drive growth.One data collaboration technology that’s particularly effective is clean rooms. Clean rooms give brands and retailers access and infrastructure to unlock powerful deep data insights in a secure, controlled anonymous and privacy-compliant way. By establishing a trusted environment for data sharing and analysis, clean rooms empower businesses to build a better picture of the consumer, and ultimately create more personalized, accurate and efficient retail media strategies.
3. Take an omnichannel approach
It almost goes without saying—the more opportunities marketers have to connect with shoppers, the more likely they are to sell more product. According to Omnisend, marketers using three or more channels in a campaign earned a 494% higher order rate than those using a single-channel campaign.
Omnichannel is also good for customer experience. In a world where consumers expect a seamless and consistent experience across offsite, onsite, or in-store, an omnichannel approach ensures that their journey is smooth, cohesive and satisfying.
What’s more, an omnichannel approach allows brands and retailers to allocate their advertising budgets more effectively. They can identify which channels and campaigns yield the best results and optimize their spending accordingly.
Despite the clear upsides of omnichannel, our research found that only of 37% of retailers currently offer offsite programmatic advertising as part of their retail media/monetization strategy. Looking forward, the winners in the retail media space will be those who capitalize on opportunities for channel expansion For example, new offsite channels like online video and connected TV can be used to reach consumers wherever they are, then to pull them back into the path of purchase, whether on the website or the physical store.
Drive the future of retail media
By prioritizing these three key pillars for retail media, brands and retailers will be able to seize the amazing opportunities retail media affords in 2024, and beyond. If you don't want go it alone, Epsilon's retail media experts are here to help. And for more insights, download our retail media research.