For more than a decade I have had the opportunity to work closely with both grocery retailers and CPGs , deep diving into market trends and shoppers’ behavior to help them understand their customers better, define strategy and impact their business.
In the past couple of years, I’ve learnt that when it comes to granular individual level analytics and recommendations this is when it starts to be more complex but also how great an impact you can bring while using state of the art technology and a team of experts.
The retail market is saturated, I recently read an article from Forbes stating that the acquisition of a new customer costs 5 times more than retaining an existing one and that’s why each retailer must ensure they create experiences that focus on engagement and returning customers – and that is why individual level personalization is crucial.
The importance of personalization in retail has never been greater, with online shopping becoming even more ingrained since the pandemic and the need to understand shopper behavior even more integral.
So, what should retailers do?
Expertise is crucial for effective personalization, you need great technology to analyze shopper behavior on an individual level but also – someone who understands your business goals and
helps you achieve them. We offer this great combination which showcases great results year over year – our innovative technology combined with a team of experts work on strategy with defined
KPIs and marketing priorities in mind.
Let’s look at some more of the statements made in the Forbes article:
42% of marketers said the top challenge within data management is working with internal data scientists/BI teams who don’t understand marketing priorities, while 38% cited a lack of data skills among marketing talent.
So what can we deduce from this? There are some great personalization tools out there – but it is not enough – business priorities and marketing goals must be taken into consideration
while defining targeting strategies, and this is where an expert can help, someone who can actually take the data and turn it into actual results – at Sagarmatha we have been providing
this to our clients for 20 years – we have grown from the early days of personalization to understanding our clients’ needs on both a technological and marketing level.
The bottom line: These examples show that there is a different way to achieve real and meaningful personalization.
It’s not just about gathering more and more data and then figuring out what to do with it. It’s first about having the right strategy in place and then gathering the right data (and that includes asking your customers) to help achieve that strategy.
Doing things this way will, in turn, help alleviate some of the skills gaps that brands face.
So, what do you need to establish a personalization strategy?
- Who is the team that oversees personalization – does it include both the technological side as well as marketing experts?
- What tools do you already have that support the strategy and business goals of your organization?
- Does your software provider have a team that is there to help your organization fine tune, learn and adjust to reach your business goals?
- What is your success criteria? KPIs need to be decided on together with your personalization provider and be aligned from the get-go.
Before deciding what tool you use and if it aligns with your business goals and operational capabilities, you also need to make sure that you have the resources, a team of experts to support
you and to prioritize it in your daily work plan, so you can move – to real, measurable outcomes.