Leader
Summer 2022
The retail industry is feeling the squeeze of slowed growth and compressing margins, supply chain issues, and increasing inflation. Consumer response is wary, bracing themselves for things getting worse, with many people pulling spending back, or reallocating discretionary funds towards the rising price of essentials.
Challenging climates happen. Retail has weathered headwinds like this before. Preparation, efficiency, agility, and customer empathy can go a long way to developing the resilience needed to weather these storms. But as a result of the worsening economic climate, many brands have been forced to take a hard look at their overall spending and budget, and one area that will likely be under scrutiny is existing tech investments.
Technology can unlock growth and retention – so even though teams are feeling the pressure to cut costs and drive efficiencies – It’s crucial that retailers are smart in the way that they evaluate their capabilities and costs.
It’s not the climate to tolerate limitations or complexities, but it’s also not as simple as just cutting down on tech.
To stay competitive, at least, and cutting edge at most, you need to have and maintain solid technology foundations in place to deliver on customer experience.
1. Lack of control over frequency management
If you have no ability to manage the frequency of communications sent because they’re coming from different solutions, it’s impossible to create the perfect cadence, and there’s a high risk of over-messaging.
2. Lack of control over the cross-channel journey
Your channels need to work together to deliver a smooth and consistent experience across every touchpoint.
If you struggle to join these channels cohesively across the customer journey then the reality is disjointed messaging, and send frequency across platforms is really difficult to moderate.
3. Personalization errors
Without real-time insights powered by a comprehensive view of each customer, the risk of personalization errors is high. As a result, brands without reliable customer insight often end up being forced to play it safe and avoid the kinds of sophisticated personalization that will level up their CRM.
As customers become less and less tolerant of irrelevant messages, or worse, poorly executed personalization, retailers that can’t keep up will get left behind.
4. Inability to achieve real-time marketing
When the customer experience isn’t powered by real-time customer data, customer experiences can become disjointed and delayed.
Being unresponsive or slow to respond to customer behaviors (for example, sending someone 10% off for a product they’ve just bought) can leave customers feeling frustrated.
Far from compromising the customer experience, ‘rightsizing’ your tech stack can be absolutely key to it. Our advice for ensuring that you retain key capabilities for achieving customer experience excellence now, and in the future?
It comes down to three things:
1. Being able to easily leverage customer data in real-time to achieve relevance
2. Being able to join up the customer journey across a range of channels and touchpoints
3. By choosing a provider that specializes in the retail industry, with expertise, data, and retail-specific capabilities you can boost your strategy and approach.
Examples:
• Having a standalone CDP that pushes segments into point solutions
• Having multiple point solutions across, for example, broadcast email, automation, SMS, push etc.
• Any setup where the orchestration and execution of the customer experience don’t come from one place.
The by-product of having a streamlined tech stack is less time spent troubleshooting or getting solutions to play nicely together; more time doing what you love: marketing.
Ometria helps industry-leading brands plan and launch their most profitable campaigns in half the time, increasing their customer loyalty and CRM revenue with personalized marketing messages all throughout the customer journey.
Designed exclusively for retailers, Ometria combines the data unification and customer insight of a CDP with an experience platform so that retail marketers can easily and efficiently create experiences their customers love across email, mobile, on-site, social, direct mail and more. Hear our retailers’ success stories, or speak to a member of our team to find out how to unlock more growth and efficiencies from your tech stack.
56% growth in email contribution to revenue
96% Revenue uplift from email
18% increase in 12-month customer repeat rate
Take the first step toward smarter customer marketing