The retail landscape is evolving at an exponential rate and retailers are under constant pressure to adopt the right approach for targeting and communicating with their customer base. It is evident that online spending is becoming more prolific, with e-commerce deemed to be the fastest growing retail market in Europe*, with total combined sales for 2014 expected to reach £111.2 billion. Similarly, 17.6 per cent of these online retail sales are expected to be made via mobile devices in the UK. As a result, retailers are under growing pressure to ensure their online and mobile services work seamlessly.
The challenge for retailers in 2015 will be to connect and interact with consumers in a personal manner, while ensuring their communications to customers are relevant across apps and online channels. For instance, when a customer enters a physical ‘bricks and mortar’ store, a shop assistant is able to provide an interactive service to assist the customer in purchasing the right item. The retailer that can successively recreate this personalised shopping experience through web-enabled devices will inspire customer loyalty and succeed in the online-retail market.
With the rise in connected devices, it has become difficult for retailers to manage communications collectively across all online channels. For example, unless customers were specifically logged into a brand’s website, they were faceless individuals that could not be tracked and therefore providing a personalised service was impossible. Even if customers had logged in, if they logged out or returned later on a different device, they would be treated as a new user each time.
According to recent research by Juniper Networks, technology is now viewed as crucial to meeting rising consumer demand, with nearly half (44 per cent) of the UK retailers surveyed saying that learning more about their customers’ buying habits is the biggest advantage. To meet this growing need for retailers to learn more about their customers’ preferences and behaviours, we will see an increasing number of brands gather information about their customers through connected ecosystems and networks to provide a transformed shopping experience.
Connected networks of this kind can be built into websites, apps and the mobile-web, to make it possible for brands today to identify customers across each device and maintain the tracking, regardless of whether they remain logged-in or not, while providing retailers with full insight into all of the actions a consumer performs on their website. In addition to third party tracking data, these new functionalities allow brands to build a more complete picture of consumers’ preferences and behaviours, to cater for them individually.
Combined with the growing presence of advanced tagging networks, together these technologies will enable a connected approach so that when a customer is recognised they are treated consistently across all channels regardless of the method of access. Furthermore, building an Over-The-Top (OTT) network into a brand’s e-commerce platforms will allow two-way messaging between brands and customers. This will ensure that a personal connection is maintained and the consumer always has the option to interact with the brand in a comfortable and efficient way that make them feel valued.
Everything from beacon data to Internet enabled devices around the home could potentially be utilised to provide data that would personalise a service for the user, from discounts on the items that have run out in your fridge, to a voucher for the shoe section where you spent 20 minutes deliberating yesterday. This scenario creates a mutually beneficial arrangement which increases sales and also provides customers with deals which are relevant to them.
Only through the introduction of multiple connected consumer touch points, across all online channels, will retailers be able to understand and communicate with users as individuals rather than just the users of individual devices. OTT networks will facilitate individual two-way communication between customer service teams and consumers, as well as providing targeted campaigns that can be triggered by a number of specific activities across devices. For example, browsing for shoes on a phone could lead to a triggered discount when you next log on to the computer; or out of all of the items viewed across a week, one item could be selected as the most likely to be bought and be included in a message sent through the app’s built-in OTT network to encourage completion of the purchase.
While many aspects of these technologies already exist, they have previously been too siloed into different areas, with a lack of interconnectivity between web teams and mobile teams and so on. 2015 will see the broadening of approaches to include all of these areas and the technology to do that, which will lead to the connected future that consumers’ expect today.
*UK, Germany, France, Sweden, The Netherlands, Italy, Poland and Spain
By Paul Putman, Chief Executive Officer of Donky.
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