3 Ways Retailers can Connect with Their Consumers

The secret? It’s something marketers have wanted for years! Today’s consumers are expert scrollers, skimmers, and pitchers (as in, pitching direct mailers in the trash). But, as a retail marketer, it’s your job to stop them in their tracks. To “Wow!” them. To put an offer so irresistible in front of them, they pause…think…and act. 

The trick is personalization. 56 percent of customers say they expect their offers to always be personalized. While 62 percent admit they expect companies to anticipate their needs.  This is what every retail marketer should be working toward. 

However, this is no ordinary article about personalizing your purchase offers.  Here, we’re unveiling a new way to know your customers better than you ever thought possible. That way you can craft mouth-watering purchase offers they can’t ignore. 

Convert your offers into heat-seeking missiles. 

No matter how personalized or captivating your offers might be, you’ll get nowhere, fast, if you don’t first connect with the customer. You need to understand which marketing channel(s) your customers value most. Then prioritize those channels in your marketing strategy to ensure your offers find their eyes, hearts and minds, like a heat-seeking missile. 

Their preferences vary by age, gender, income-level, education, and more. For instance, some customers might like printed coupons, while others prefer scannable mobile offers. The same principle goes for social media promotions. Most customers will have a favorite social media platform. 

For this, you need third-party data about customer channel preferences integrated into your customer data feed. By  prioritizing the channels they prefer or respond to the most—maybe a mix of online, email and social media, or simply website and direct mail. Then using those channels to connect with and engage the customer, your offers will have a far better chance of being viewed, and accepted.   

Strike a nerve by speaking their language. 

Once they see your offer, you need to seize their attention. To do this, you need a more holistic view of the customer. One that looks beyond their purchase and account history with your company. You need to see how they’re managing and spending money elsewhere, where they live, who they live with and more, so you can better expect their wants and needs.

This is where personalization gets exciting. Today, a plethora of relevant consumer data is available to help you better understand customers. Things like consumer income, wealth, and lifestyle insights that reveal discretionary income, spend capacity, purchase behaviors, and preferences. Demographic data for individuals and households, along with identity and location data to tie it all together. 

These insights help you build targeted, customer-centric offers based on a much deeper understanding of their present life and future trajectory. For example, you could learn that a customer is a runner in his mid-20s and present him with a mobile offer for your top-selling running shoes. Or, if your shoe store sponsors races, you could promote a race discount to that customer when he visits your website and  social media channel. The data gives you the predictive power you need to present customers with timely, right-priced offers that align with where they are in life.  

But there’s something else. Something that retail marketers have wanted for years: the ability to integrate your underutilized credit card transaction data into your CRM data flow. 

Yes, you read that right. 

Your internal credit card transaction data can be integrated in a highly secure, anonymized format via exclusive integrations with your payment processing platforms. It’s the missing link you need to connect the dots and better understand customers by tying together all credit cards owned by an individual consumer, or even at the household level. 

Operationalize your offers by choosing the right partner. 

It’s one thing to use differentiated data to know your customers better and personalize your offers; but, when you can personalize retail offers at scale, you move to next-level performance.

According to global consulting firm, McKinsey: 
Personalization at scale (in which companies have personal interactions with all or a large segment of their customers) often delivers a 1 to 2 percent lift in total sales for grocery companies and an even higher lift for other retailers, typically by driving up loyalty and share-of-wallet among already-loyal customers (for whom data are more abundant and response rates are higher). These programs can also reduce marketing and sales costs by around 10 to 20 percent.

Knowing this, the importance of choosing the right data and analytic partner cannot be overstated. While some companies provide data, others provide integrated solutions that organize and make sense of the data. With this, you can remain focused on what you do best: moving the sales needle. 

At Equifax, we developed Consumer Insights for Retailers to do exactly that. Not only does it offer all the data you need to personalize your purchase offers—channel preferences, wealth and lifestyle insights, demographics, identity data, and more—but we work with your payment processing platform to integrate the potent mix of your internal credit card transaction data directly into your CRM data flow. 

This bears repeating. Everything is integrated directly into your marketing and sales data flow. 

That means, it's all magically there at your fingertips, 24/7, with little to no effort on your part. Just like that, you’re primed to power more personalized offers, at scale. 

It is time to stop customers from scrolling and skimming past your offers, and instead, stop them in their tracks with the right offers at the right moments over the right channels. To learn more about Consumer Insights for Retailers, check out the informational sheet.