By Chen Katz, Vice President of Sales at Sagarmatha, www.sag121.com
As a retailer, your goal is to maximize the value of your investments, be it employee development, higher quality produce, or larger variety across your stock. So what are you doing with your data? Think of it as buried treasure.
Loyalty programs aren’t new. They’ve been around for decades. Beyond creating a target audience for your coupons and sales, how are you leveraging it? You might know who is buying, what they are buying, and when. If you have multiple locations, you know where they are buying. If you’re especially clever, you might know their preferred communications channels. After all, it’s all buried in your data. Even if you know some or all of this, what are you doing with this information?
Right now, the data within your loyalty program is your greatest asset.
For many years, it wasn’t possible to analyze the volume of data you have. You could basically figure out that every third week, certain customers bought lemon-scented floor cleaner. So, you sent them coupons every few weeks for whatever detergent on which you were basing a campaign.
Data analysis and data-driven decision making are your new best friends, allowing you to finally use your data as a key factor in promoting your success. Using research science and data-driven machine learning, you can optimize your shoppers’ personal experiences, increasing visit frequency and long-term share of wallet.
The best approach to take is to “Think Segmentation, Act Personalization.” Those floor cleaner buyers aren’t all the same. While they do purchase the same exact floor cleaner every third week, Sally also buys expensive cheese, fine wine, and organic produce. Betty buys frozen dinners, bagged fruit, and beer.
You have this data. You’ve always had it. Now you can finally use it. By fully understanding your data, you can take segmentation to the next level. What content—offers, messages, news, recipes, and more—is best for Sally? What about Betty?
It’s time to fully analyze your data to simplify and streamline the complicated initiative of one-on-one personalized shopper communications, targeting individuals, not segments. Now you can communicate directly with Sally and Betty, individually, through their preferred channels.
Full data utilization lets you transform un- or underutilized existing shopper data into valuable insights, triggering shopper action and strengthening relationships, including with the most profitable shoppers, one at a time. Leverage the power of existing loyalty programs and their data volumes by engaging the members of your loyalty programs with mutually beneficial content (offers, news, etc.) and general brand and retail communications personally and individually.
Being able to focus on your data means that you can finally measure and maximize ROI of your loyalty programs. Now you can finally control, optimize, test, analyze, and measure multiple parameters of each campaign individually—sales, product mix, conversion, category, store, inventory, timing, past engagement, channels, rules, basket, relevancy—to determine which shoppers will deliver the desired results. With the right data analytics, you can finally measure ongoing communications efforts, shopper by shopper.
Remember, knowledge isn’t power, applied knowledge is. It’s also very profitable.
Chen Katz is Vice President of Sales at Sagarmatha, which delivers data-driven insights that allow for 1:1 marketing via multiple communications channels. www.sag121.com
