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For a recent article featured in RetailTechNews, our Planning Director, Danny Crowe highlighted the struggles for retailers in the current economic times, and what they can do about it.
Pre-Christmas spending was down this year during October, and even Black Friday sales did not reach expectations. When these peak sales periods fail to deliver, it's more important than ever for retailers to be understanding and interacting with their customers in meaningful ways.
Reports from PWC and Cognizant have shown that customer-centricity and relevant offers are the best way to build relationships with customer. Ignore this to your detriment, as customers have been seen to become indifferent to retailers when given irrelevant information and promotions.
Retail marketers instinctively know that acting on consumer insight is essential, but what's missing is context. One of the best ways retailers can add context to their customer insight is to use life event data. Moving home, retiring, having a baby and many other important stages all have a huge impact on consumers purchasing behaviours.
For example, using homemover data we have found that there is an interesting correlation between moving home and wine buying. Many people run down their wine supplies for several months before they move, then post-move they stock back up again. Knowing this means that the retailer can hold off sending annoying promotions and communications in the run up to the move, and target them again once they're in their new house.
This new element of context brings a new spin to CRM - instead of "customer relationship marketing", it can now be seen as "Conversations that are Relevant and Measureable". This is now about giving customers what they need according to the bigger picture of life events.
For retailers that have woken up to the power of life event data, it is often viewed as the secret weapon that shouldn't be overlooked in these uncertain economic times.
To read the full article, click here. To read more about TwentyCi's homemover data and life event work with other retailers click here.