Data is key to both understanding and enhancing the customer journey. The more data points you have, the better you can tailor communications to your customers. For omnichannel retailers, offline transactional data (point-of-sale data) is a data source that can add a wealth of information to your customer experience strategy.
In our 21one features release, dotdigital has released a new insight data importer. This new feature makes it easy to get point-of-sale (POS) data straight into the platform without building an integration, and every merchant with a physical store presence should be taking advantage.
Especially now, as stores across the globe remain shut to curb the spread of COVID-19, the time is right to get your data together. Turn a negative into a positive and ensure you have the customer insights you need to deliver superior customer experiences.
What is insight data?
Insight data is storable information related to your customers’ purchasing histories and habits. It allows you to store collections of data against your contacts.
Why should I sync POS data to my marketing automation platform?
A common challenge faced by marketers is how to integrate their offline data to maximize their customer experience. Many have ecommerce marketing down pat, but a lack of visibility into in-store shopping behaviors poses a challenge when formulating relevant marketing messages.
What can I do with my POS data?
Once offline transactional data is stored against your contacts, you can use our segment tool to segment your contacts using this data and create new address books. This will enable you to send targeted, personalized campaigns based upon your contacts’ transactional history, habits, and preferences.
With insight data imported into your marketing automation platform, you can enhance and complement the data syncing from your online store to gain a complete view of your customer database.
Acquisition
Use your physical stores as a channel to acquire new subscribers and drive further conversion opportunities online. Your offline customers represent a whole new group of potential subscribers that you may not previously have had the means to easily sign up to your newsletters. Your “welcome” journey is your chance to introduce your brand and your online store to your offline customers.
Post-purchase Marketing – don’t let them get away!
You may have heard the old adage “it’s cheaper to retain an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one”. It’s true! It’s generally accepted in the industry that it’s 5X more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to nurture and retain an existing customer
With POS data imported into the platform, you can enroll new and existing offline customers into a special post-purchase customer journey and use email marketing and social retargeting to encourage further purchases, whether offline or online. This also opens up the possibility of including customers in loyalty programs and rewarding them for ongoing purchases.
Personalization
You can segment customers based on whether they have shopped in store or online (or both) and use dynamic content to target them with relevant information based on their preferred stores. For example, you may have a special event or a product launch at one of your physical store locations, so you can invite previous customers of that store to attend. You can also send important location-based updates to your in-store customers.
If your brand prides itself on your excellent in-store customer service, you can even use dynamic content to sign off emails with the name of the store person who served your customer.
Reporting
Your customer dashboard groups customers based on RFM modelling and can be used to easily identify risks and opportunities in your customer base. This dashboard is designed to provide segments that you can target based on their shopping behavior, by rewarding frequent customers and employing re-engagement strategies for your inactive customers.
Without POS data, your RFM segments may not tell the whole story – for example, an Inactive online customer may still be making purchases in store, so you really don’t want to be including them in your reactivation program. With the reports pulling data from both online and offline shopping behavior, you get a fuller picture of your customers’ actual shopping habits.
You might find that you have a larger group of “Loyal” and “Champion” customers than you thought, and you can include them in your loyalty strategy to retain them as long-term customers!
Retail Dashboard
Your retail dashboard is where you can see valuable information about your revenue, orders, and customers.
You can also filter this dashboard to see only in-store orders, or only online orders, as long as you have an attribute signifying the source of each transaction.
Product recommendations
Enrich your “bestsellers” product recommendation by including data from in-store sales to get a truer view of bestselling products. Our AI recommendations; “also bought”, and “best next”; can also be enhanced by combining online and offline data and giving the platform more behavioral information to learn from.
Tips for making offline transactional data work for you:
To make the most of the benefits of syncing POS data, there are a couple of points to keep in mind.
1. Decide which data you want to sync
You might not need to sync every order attribute, but there are some fields that are mandatory in order for product recommendations to work. This article outlines the standard transactional data schema, including mandatory fields
2. Make sure there is a way to differentiate between online and offline customers
In order to personalize your communication for each customer group, we recommend adding an attribute that identifies the store name
3. Encourage your in-store staff to collect customer details for subscription to your mailing list
A consistent instore sign up strategy will maximize your chances of increasing your subscribers and making the most of your data
Maximize the opportunities ahead and discover how to unite your online and offline data as physical stores around the globe prepare to re-open. For further information, reach out to your Account Manager or Customer Success Manager.
