TL;DR: In this article, we will explore the role of Customer Intelligence in Lifecycle Marketing and its intersecting points with three business-critical retail outcomes: customer acquisition, share-of-wallet, and retention. We’ll conclude with how the OpenINSIGHTS Customer Intelligence platform addresses these opportunities – with no ongoing subscription or software fees.
Customer Intelligence Primer
At the core of our efforts to craft (or create) a single shopper view is a collection of business goals that require us to move beyond the data to “understanding.” Customer Intelligence is the application of machine learning to provide insights that are not collected but crafted through data science. These insights are best viewed as building blocks that, when stacked upon each other, bridge your strategic business goals to marketing execution.
Customer Acquisition
Look-Alike Audiences (or Look-Alike Advertising) is a simple concept. You pull a list of customers, send them over to Facebook, Google, or almost any other advertising partner, and say, “Find me people who look like these,” – and voila, your ROAS just ticked up by 70%. Yes – this is the fabled convergence of advertising and marketing.
Acquire customers, not simply transactions, through Customer Intelligence driven Look-Alike Advertising
Customer Intelligence driven Look-Alikes. Customer Intelligence provides new opportunities to expand the value of Look-Alike marketing substantially. By focusing on look-alikes based on high predicted value, bound to specific stores and regions, and what products this group will most likely purchase in the near term, your acquisition efforts move from tactical to strategic, supporting physical stores and digital sales channels.
Share-of-Wallet
Share-of-Wallet Maintenance (Continuity/Repurchase). People buy the same products. Whether cosmetics or the same pair of running shoes, whether seasonally the same yard care items or products from your spring fashion line – their propensity to purchase products similar to what they know is undeniable – our challenge has been unlocking it.
Knowing not simply what, but when a shopper will repurchase, creates an opportunity to get in front of the transaction – share-of-mind that secures share-of-wallet.
Customer Intelligence driven Continuity. Share-of-Wallet Maintenance programs aren’t simply about putting the products we know the shopper loves back in front of them if they happen to come to the website (this isn’t product recs) – it’s about doing so proactively. This is managed through targeted marketing, triggered email where appropriate, and display where required and justified (see predicted customer value within the product line).
Share-of-Wallet Expansion/Prospecting identifies shoppers who are highly predicted to purchase in a product line or category they’ve never transacted in. While it’s a chance to win an existing customer into a new product line, it is also essential for reducing churn risk.
Blending repurchase and prospecting allows highly targeted up-selling to more profitable lines…no guesswork required.
Retention
Customer churn risk. It’s hard to know churn risk – let alone churn risk in product lines, in stores, and across your retail brand. Most retailers view churn as a light switch being flipped off – that there is an arbitrary time horizon that when a shopper crosses, they are lost.
In Customer Intelligence – churn risk programs factor in predicted shopper value. Why? How do you respond when you don’t know what’s at stake?
Customer Intelligence driven Churn. Customer intelligence transitions churn from a light switch to a dimmer switch, tracking levels of churn risk. For products where there are known continuity patterns, churn can be tracked at the line level, managing towards sustained share-of-wallet in addition to programs focused on store/site/retail brand churn events.
Winbacks. For most retail brands anywhere between 30% to 70% of their customer database is filled with lapsed shoppers. By treating these customers as “gone, but not forgotten,” we can do more than throw the occasional discount at them in the hopes of re-activation.
Continuity and prospect opportunities are uniquely identified for your shoppers in higher levels of churn risk / winback states.
Customer Intelligence driven Winbacks. Attrited (winback) shoppers still have predicted to purchase signals. Through their inclusion in predicted product purchase insight generation (uniquely), you can construct re-activation programs that are more than throwing discounts at them but have product-focused conversations and CTAs that align with the shopper’s preferred sales channels.
About OpenINSIGHTS Customer Intelligence
Customer Intelligence is the core of why we created OpenINSIGHTS. Yes, it is your single shopper view/golden record. Yes, it is the industry’s most “analytically advanced” depiction of your shopper relationship – but that wasn’t our goal.
The single view of the shopper isn’t the destination, it’s a required way-point on your path to value realization.
All of that was cost-of-entry to create the insights that we, as retailers, need to manage our shopper relationships effectively. Our machine learning (neural networks, predictive analytics, statistical models) was engineered backward – from goal to supporting data sets with the singular goal of “granularity” – allowing them to become the insight-based building blocks of dozens of programs (not merely the handful here). That said, it’s not just about the audience.
More than Audiences – Content Intelligence. It’s not a marketing program without content. OpenINSIGHTS supports “thematic individualization” – it’s a new form of personalization that allows you to define a theme (Men’s Running) with individualized merchandising that aligns with each shopper’s predicted product purchases in the category. You also receive both offer and marketing spend recommendations that unite the shopper’s churn profile to their predicted value…all shared program by program with your existing marketing and advertising partners.
OpenINSIGHTS supports store level product availability and CTAs
Be your own Marketing Hub. Get your head out of their cloud and put it in your own. Customer Intelligence is a small part of a much larger opportunity. Your ability to unite your marketing vendors together while optimizing costs and increasing efficiency of deployment is a core part of the OpenINSIGHTS vision.
Customer Intelligence is the glue that allows you to unite and cost optimize your marketing ecosystem
In Closing. We built OpenINSIGHTS to modernize marketing, liberate your data, and give you a strong foundation for not simply your single shopper view but to realize your business goals behind it. OpenINSIGHTS was truly built for you.
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