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3 October 2019 / Opinion

Why brands need a flexible strategy in retail

Catherine Kelly / Managing Director, Performance & Media Science

Retailers have recorded the lowest sales growth for June and July since records began, according to the British Retail Consortium. The retail industry is going through a period of unprecedented change and the rapid, ongoing transition towards online sales is taking its toll on brands.

While the costs continue to rise, the demands of consumers continue to grow. And as digital spend is on the brink of overtaking bricks and mortar, the question is: How will you adapt and succeed?

Successful retailers will need a robust, yet flexible strategy to keep up with the evolving retail environment. Inevitably, many will struggle to stay ahead.

The secret to survival will be keeping a close eye on your customers’ changing needs and behaviours, and proactively using this knowledge to transform how you do business with them.

Stop the guesswork

Despite aggressive media transparency drives from some of the biggest players in retail and FMCG, a study from AlixPartners reports that firms are seeing low ROI when it comes to online investment.

Many companies have simply thrown money at the growing digital market. But without a sophisticated marketing effectiveness approach, this has inevitably led to millions in wasted investment.

Media spend shouldn’t be a guessing game. And with data-driven attribution, it doesn’t have to be.

How can Jaywing’s data-driven attribution help?

Jaywing’s attribution considers the impact of all possible marketing touchpoints on behaviour, across the entire customer journey. This allows you to understand which campaigns, channels, and activities are working, and when – from initial awareness to desired actions, purchase and advocacy.

This clearly highlights which journeys are driving which responses, helping you determine their relative value, and providing you with the intelligence you need to guide marketing investment decisions.

Creating a more personal experience

This individual-by-individual approach to attribution also opens up brand new opportunities to personalise communications – by effectively bridging the gap between the more strategic view of attribution (i.e. how marketing budget is best deployed across channels) and a more tactical communication-based approach aimed at customers.

To succeed at personalisation in retail, you need access to the right data. Data collection could be as simple as asking permission to send an email copy of the receipt to each customer that makes a purchase, online and in-store.

With full sight of in-store visits, social media interactions, online behaviour, email engagements, and purchase data, you can gain visibility of the entire customer journey and use data-driven attribution to optimise it.

The key to implementing personalisation effectively is to maintain consumer trust, and ensure the product offerings and messages communicated are relevant, taking into account everything you already know about the customer.

Where do you start?

While this might all seem overwhelming to tackle head-on, our team of experts can help you tailor incredibly sophisticated customer journeys, using a tried and tested step-by-step approach.

We’ll start by making small changes to improve your capabilities and personalisation performance over time, gathering the necessary data and building your CRM foundation. Then, once we have the basics in place, you can begin to scale your personalisation capabilities incrementally.

Success is driven by data

As the marketplace shifts further towards online, the success stories will be those who have the confidence to adapt and make bold strategic decisions that leave nothing to chance, using solid data to track the full path to conversion and optimise marketing spend accordingly.