why your retail data strategy is failing

Why Your Retail Data Strategy is Failing—And How to Fix It

Discover how AI-driven tools empower e-commerce and retail brand marketers to unify customer data, drive personalized experiences, and enhance omnichannel engagement. Learn from industry experts Brendan Witcher and Janet Jaiswal about integrating real-time insights to optimize marketing strategies.

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Speakers:

Megan Billingsley: Hello and welcome to the webinar, "Why Your Retail Data Strategy is Failing... and How to Fix It." My name is Megan Billingsley, and I'm excited to moderate this discussion today.

Today, we'll be talking about how AI-driven tools can empower e-commerce and retail brand marketers to unify customer data, drive personalized experiences, and enhance omnichannel engagement. This discussion will cover strategies for seamless data integration across channels, utilizing AI to enhance one-to-one customer engagement, and real-world examples of successful omnichannel campaigns.

And with that, let's meet our speakers. We are thrilled to be joined today by two industry experts. We have Brendan Witcher, VP and Principal Strategy Analyst at Forrester. Brendan is a renowned expert in digital customer engagement and personalization, helping brands redefine their customer journeys.

And we're also joined by Janet Jaiswal, Global VP of Marketing at Blueshift. With a proven track record in driving growth, Janet brings expertise in AI-driven marketing strategies that deliver results.

In this webinar, Brendan and Janet will discuss integrating real-time insights to optimize marketing strategies and share practical insights and actionable strategies to elevate your e-commerce and retail marketing efforts and stay ahead in a competitive landscape.

Janet Jaiswal: So, let's talk about why cross-channel success matters. Consumers have certain expectations when they're interacting with a business. As you can see, 90% of customers expect a consistent interaction across all the different channels and platforms. And that's because they're using a lot of touchpoints through which they engage. On average, consumers use about six touchpoints when making a purchase.

So, what's the impact when a company has true cross-channel marketing? Well, several.

So, again, very important and why cross-channel marketing matters. BlueShift works with marketers from many brands, and we've seen that they face a few challenges when it comes to cross-channel success.

  1. Fragmented data and silos: The amount of data collected and stored is growing, but not all companies are able to leverage it effectively when engaging their customers.
  2. Inability to deliver personalized real-time engagement: Competition is a click away, and attention spans are tiny. It's important to meet them on their terms and where they are.
  3. Difficulty measuring ROI across those channels: Insights are needed, not more data, to truly understand the impact of each channel, regardless of which one the customer converts through.

Brendan Witcher: Thank you, Janet. You know, what’s really interesting about the way the consumer has shifted, it really comes from what happened three years ago and just before that. When we were going through the pandemic and all those sorts of things, consumers began to become more digitally savvy, and they also became more channel agnostic.

Since that time, we've also digitized more parts of our lives because we were forced to for a long time. It used to be that when you went to yoga class, you would just go to the class. When you went to go shopping, you would typically just go into the store. When you would go to a doctor's office, you would just go into the doctor's office. Now, in this day and age, consumers have digitized more parts of their lives, from doctor's visits, even things like dating, even hailing a cab. Everything has been digitized.

So, what's happened is these digital channels have become ubiquitous, not just in commerce, but in all parts of our lives, which has made the marketer's challenge even more difficult because it's become more complex as the consumer is everywhere.

Janet Jaiswal: So now let's talk about the impact of data in cross-channel marketing. Studies from Workday show that companies that leverage customer data alongside omnichannel strategies see a 9.5% increase in annual revenue. And that impact is across the company. So, for example:

So, what does this data tell us that might not be so obvious? Well, without capturing the right data about customers, the engagement that a brand has with its customers might be limited.

Brendan Witcher: Janet, if you don't mind me jumping in there on one thing. I think it’s really important to note, I mean, that really needs to be underlined quite a bit. Really, what a lot of companies are working on as well is that idea of not only creating these cross-channel experiences, but personalizing those experiences, right? I was covering personalization at Forrester for many years. And what I started to realize is my clients didn’t have personalization problems. They had data problems.

Now, that was a very unsexy topic to try to shift to, right? Everyone likes to talk about personalization. But at the end of the day, it’s sort of ridiculous to say, "You know, we’re going to create great experiences for customers we barely understand," right? That doesn’t make any sense.

Janet Jaiswal: Great. Thank you. Okay. So, let's talk about the six-C strategy. Can you elaborate more on that?

Brendan Witcher: Yeah. You know, a little bit of history here, if nobody minds listening to it. You know, I was going to all these conferences. I’ve been an analyst for about 11 years now. And so, I’d go to these conferences, and I’d listen to CEOs get up on stage, and they’d say, "You know, oh, we’re delighting the customer, we’re surprising the customer, we’re making them happy." You hear it on the earnings calls all the time.

So, I said, "Wait a minute. This is kind of a light bulb moment for me as an analyst." And I said, "Let’s dig into this." We spent about a year and a half interviewing consumers, interviewing companies, interviewing psychologists, and what makes us us, what makes us feel understood sort of thing.

And what I found was that we are just scratching the surface of what a customer needs and wants. And so, what came out of it was this 6C strategy. What it means is that customers today are more than just their characteristics. They’re more than their age, their gender, their zip code, the last product that they purchased. They’re way more than that.

So, if you want to create differentiation, you’ve got to get into level four or three and four, curiosities and conditions.

  1. Considerations.
  2. Curiosities.
  3. Conditions.
  4. Context.
  5. Conceptions.

Janet Jaiswal: No, no. You bring up a good point. It is difficult to collect all the right information, but that’s step one. You’ve got to do that, right?

Brendan Witcher: Absolutely. But then you start to say, "Well, I love the word that you use there, which is the right information." So, left-hand side, talk about the depth and whether or not the stuff’s going to be valuable. But it also has to align with your business, right?

So there are four questions regarding the reliability of data:

  1. Is the data reliable enough to trust it represents customers clearly?
  2. Can it be used to directionally predict customer behaviors?
  3. Is it actionable enough to improve our marketing engagement strategies?
  4. Is the data relevant for supporting our company’s priorities, goals, and objectives?

If the answer is no to any of those questions, you shouldn’t be going after that data.

Janet Jaiswal: Great. Thank you! So talking about AI, right? So once you have the data, what do you do with it? What’s your recommendation?

Brendan Witcher: Thanks. Yeah. AI is a really interesting space right now. Companies are starting to say, “We’re doing this, we’re doing that. We’re actually executing,” but it is mainly using AI to create better knowledge workers in the organization, being able to take action on certain things, gain better insights.

Now, why is that important? That’s important because even things like personalization, which we all talk about, like everybody’s doing personalization. In fact, you can see the stat here that 92% of companies say we've made significant investments in those personalization and related technologies. And yet only 33% of consumers say that companies do a good job of creating relevant experiences for me.

So, we need to go back to the drawing board and get a deeper understanding of the consumers.

  1. Workplace productivity and efficiency.
  2. Messaging.
  3. Market and buying research.
  4. Content development.
  5. Competitive analysis.

Megan Billingsley: Excellent. Thank you both for that helpful context. I would like to now move into our discussion. And the first topic that we’ll be discussing is data overload.

Brendan Witcher: Well, that’s a good question. You need to ask yourself not only do they have the capabilities of doing this, but do they have the vision for the importance of this?

Janet Jaiswal: Yes. And a lot of data definitely can lead to inaction because oftentimes, you know, marketers are overwhelmed. But our company has even patented its predictive capabilities. And so, what our AI does is make sense of all of that data.

Brendan Witcher: It’s very important to prioritize across channels.

Janet Jaiswal: Definitely a collaboration for success and leveraging the right tools to make sure marketing reaches its goals.

Megan Billingsley: Excellent point and a perfect one to end on. So thank you so much, Brendan and Janet, for that insightful presentation.