Webinar recap: Key takeaways for peak season success

Sunny days are finally here, but if you’re like many e-commerce and retail marketing professionals, you’re already looking ahead to the festive period.

To help marketing and CRM teams get the most out of the Golden Quarter, we recently hosted a webinar exploring how fit-for-purpose customer data foundations can drive peak season success. If you missed it, watch the full recording below or check out the podcast.

Short on time? Here are the highlights.

What should you expect from a fit-for-purpose data platform?

When evaluating your data foundation, keep these 7 considerations in mind to ensure you’ll be able to achieve the tactics that are most important for your brand:

• Data breadth
• Data depth
• Matching ability
• Future-proofing and resource management
• Accessibility
• Ease of integration
• Latency

For a deeper dive on each of these topics, read our free data foundations guide.

What use cases can a data platform enable for the peak trading season?

A fit-for-purpose data foundation opens up endless possibilities for new strategies to reach the right customer with the right message at the right time this Q4.

Here are a few tactics you can add to your arsenal before the holiday shopping season to turbocharge retention and customer growth:

• Campaign targeting: During the busiest time of year, it’s important that your campaigns cut through the noise. Leveraging data to ensure you send only the most relevant offers and promotions to your customers is an important step in achieving this.
• Agile reporting: Identify and react quickly to the trends and signals unique to your customers. This not only helps protect market share but will also provide valuable insights, like which trade areas need support and which customer groups need incentives or nudges to click that ‘buy’ button.
• Capturing and converting intent: During peak season, you’ll probably be laser focused on keeping cost per acquisition (CPA) low and return on investment (ROI) high. This becomes much simpler when you’re able to identify which customers are likely convert and project the potential value of each customer to optimise those conversions.
• Message and markdown targeting: Don’t waste time and promotional spend on customers who are likely to make a purchase without intervention. Develop sophisticated strategies around price and message based on customer behaviour (both real-time digital behaviour and customer history).
• Intelligent personalisation: Santa shouldn’t be the only one with little assistants during the Christmas season. Help your customers curate the perfect gifts (for their friends and family or for themselves) with pre- and post-purchase personalisation. Whether they leave a browsing session or abandon a basket, many of your customers will benefit from receiving personalised nudges, including recommendations of alternative products they may prefer based on previously-expressed preferences. On the other hand, if they’ve already made a purchase, a timely complementary product recommendation could make their gift even more special (and give a boost to your incremental revenue). Don’t miss out on this very important window of opportunity post-sale.
• Retention: Sussing out which shoppers are one-off gift givers versus potential lifelong customers can be a challenge. But with robust data capture and measurements in place, you can better understand the different types of customers who are showing interest in your brand over the peak period. Being able to identify the customers who are likely to come back after the holidays is important, and further predictive future value modelling can help you focus your future efforts on the new customer segments who are most likely to make the biggest impact to the business long-term.

How can you address gaps in your capability now so you can benefit in time for peak (and beyond)?

To achieve fast time to value that lasts, consider a solution with a modular approach like Unilyze, Plinc’s customer data technology platform.

Especially as marketing budgets are being increasingly scrutinised, marketing leaders need to make investments that will support their programmes during and beyond Q4. Solutions that support both short-term and long-term goals (unlike many point solutions on the market) and can be implemented quickly (unlike large platform implementations) will be the ones that make the biggest difference for marketing and CRM teams this holiday season and beyond.

See how easy it can be to level-up your marketing ahead of peak.