Your customers are the lifeblood of your business. They are everywhere, and it doesn’t matter if you are working with distributors, partners, retailers, or retail media networks – someone else has already staked claims on who owns the customer and decides what’s best for them.
Additionally, brands have seen more chaos over the last three years than collectively in the previous 10 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, shutdowns, restarts, more shutdowns, labor shortages, inflation, constant regulatory changes, Apple’s ATT, Google’s decision to deprecate third-party cookies, the proliferation of customer data platforms with varying capabilities, and this list could go on.
The fact is that brands are on a journey, and the faster you realize that the road is not always straight, but it also has different speed limits in some areas, and perhaps a little construction is needed in others to be fully prepared for the unknown. I hate to sound cliché because I have been guilty from time to time of not having a map and losing time on my road trips, but did you create a plan before you started driving? If not, you need to pull over and do so.
There are two areas I want to focus on where brands can and should take more control, sooner versus later, and they both live in a world of the anonymous and unknown.
“Mark Xavier”
Managing Director
“Mark Xavier is an Enterprise Managing Director in Xmilie Agency focusing on start-ups. He has more than two decades of experience helping Brands develop winning go-to-market strategies by leveraging data, identity, and technology. Mark is a co-founder of Gudvil Nexus and Ornda Agency.”
Anonymous Website Traffic
On average, 98% of the visitors to your website are anonymous.1 This means they have yet to authenticate or completely share with you who they are . But even if you don’t know them, 13% of people will tell 15 people or more if they have a negative experience with your brand’s website.2
COVID-19 accelerated the number of people who research before they make a final purchase. So, remember, no matter if research, word of mouth, or what other interaction brought them to your website, your priority is to engage them, keep them and nurture them. Start small by encouraging them to authenticate for offers by inputting their email address or mobile telephone number. You can also use the power of QR codes to create an experience with them while capturing critical information about them or allowing them to receive additional discounts by sharing the QR code with family or friends.
Should the person do the research and take their knowledge to one of your distributors and authenticate there, they may purchase your product, but they are different from your customer. You cannot extend the next-best offer to them, understand what drove the purchase, or create a lifetime value or engagement strategy. But you will continue to pay others to potentially engage them on your behalf.
There are solutions that can help brands, in real time, understand who is on your website and, within milliseconds, allow you to engage with them in a more customized and personal way. You shouldn’t rely on cookies or tags. Instead you are able to take the IP address and match it against a Zip11, leveraging hundreds of demographic and behavioural data points to know more about what matters to the household and in real time help the brand provide a more compelling offer and better experience.
In addition, your owned media (website, blogs, social media, channels, and emails) should always have a first-party tag you control and own to capture anonymous and known visitors to feed back into your first-party graph. This pseudonymous graph removes the doubt of who knows the most about your website visitors – you will!
Anonymous In-Store
Loyalty programs are hit or miss, with many brands only knowing about 15% to 20% of the people who buy something in their stores and about 43% using guest checkout when they make purchases via e-commerce.
Again, solutions are available that can help fix this, allowing you to convert 40%-60% of these unknown trans actors into real people, more than doubling your known first-party data. An immediate by-product of this is that you reduce wasted media spend by deterministically targeting people in your paid media. Other benefits are the ability to reconcile to an individual while improving the overall quality of your first-party graph with enhanced hygiene.
Once a brand has identified these individuals, performing shopper insights for analytics provides them with meaningful insights to build response models for increased purchases or create look-alike models to find more consumers to engage with.
According to a study by Consumer Goods Technology, 82% of shoppers want a consumer brand’s value to align with their own.3 This means the more you know about people and what matters to them outside what they initially spent with you, the more likely you will keep them happy, engaged, and continuing to do business with you.
