2 Ways Retailers Can Harness Customer Data More Effectively Right Now: Holiday Readiness Series

Harnessing data from Holiday 2017 and these past quarters to compile profiles of your buyers and brainstorming themes for the upcoming holiday season is imperative. Unfortunately, most brands are only going to use a fraction of their data when formulating their Holiday 2018 strategy thanks in large part to legacy systems, siloed databases, sporadic automation, and unclear objectives of what they are looking to achieve. However, these don’t have to stand in your way and you don’t need to completely transform before holiday in order to gain access to all this data. While working towards improving on those items you can still harness and better utilize more of your data easier than you might think to enhance personalization and segmentation efforts this holiday season by following two simple rules.

Remove Company Silos

Often times the information you need can be found in another department. At Echidna, we often see clients with specific information isolated to a single department of their organization and not visible to others who may be able to utilize it. By setting clear expectations of the data that is needed to succeed for Holiday 2018 and making those expectations company-wide, you will be surprised who comes out of the woodwork to help or say “we have all that”. Some of the information you will want access to includes:

These pieces can all create a strong story about buying preferences and help you build your Holiday 2018 strategy more thoughtfully.

Establish Clear Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

What do you want to even do with the data? Do you have clear goals that are known across the company? By measuring the results of your efforts and providing insight into progress toward accomplishing your merchandising and marketing goals you will be able to more effectively understand what data you need and be able to execute. KPIs offer an objective perspective into how your business activities result in real value. Some KPIs provide insight into a customer’s willingness to consider what your brand offers (email open, ad click-through, site visit, etc.), while others represent the ultimate goal of that engagement (order placement, average order value, repeat visits, etc.). As an organization, learn how your day-to-day activities affect these KPIs (and the value they indicate) across your entire customer base and, additionally, what unique tactics affect the personalized segments in that community. Create visualizations of your KPIs at all levels to align the organization on expectations and to memorialize historic performance in that visual medium.

“At Echinda, our team has found that by making such visualizations a core reference in every conversation about performance, companies share a much more unified and clearly articulated vision of the future”
- Mike Pierce, CTO at Echidna

FINAL THOUGHTS

When you are able to align your organization and set forth clear KPIs for this holiday season, you will be able to bring forth data you might not have realized you had access too or known what to do with at first. These are two ways you can immediately act on gaining insights into your customers. When you use these insights appropriately, we often see retailers being able to transform their ability to success and also mature digitally with ease.

Every brand is going to be a different digital-maturity and data-maturity level at any given time. Regardless of how far along your company is, you surely have valuable customer data assets that could be more actively used to improve your customers experience. With the right resources and leadership backing this strategic initiative you don’t have to wait until after Holiday 2018 or until you have the ideal systems or technology in place. These two foundational blocks alone can open up a wellspring of opportunity over the holiday season.

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