With just a week until the most important five-day shopping period of the year, retailers and marketers are putting the final touches on their holiday campaigns. Once again, the most important tool in their arsenal – and the closest thing they have to a crystal ball – is big data and analytics.
As shoppers become more comfortable using both their fingers and feet to lock in the best deals, the challenge for marketers is to use real-time analytics to give customers a personalized, seamless experience regardless of how they browse and buy. The rise of mobile devices as the new digital shopping assistant is putting pressure on marketers to understand not just their mobile habits but how it impacts other in-store and online behavior. From browsing on a tablet before Thanksgiving dinner to using a smartphone to comparison shop on Black Friday while standing in the store, customers today expect the retailers they do business with to understand their unique preferences and behaviors.
I had a chance to catch up with
Q. What are some of the challenges that marketers face in analyzing the massive amounts of customer data that’s available today? How is IBM helping?
A. Marketers are drowning in data and many do not have access to easy-to-use or integrated analytics tools that give them a comprehensive view of real-time trends and behaviors. IBM released a study earlier this year, based on interviews with more than 500 Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs), which showed that the vast majority – 82 percent – say they are not prepared to use analytics to unlock that deeper customer insight. The problem is not just collecting or compiling the data but quickly dissecting and analyzing it so you can act in the moment.
The most important component is to make data actionable. Broad strokes aren’t enough, marketers must understand the individual. What is their unique shopping journey from device to in-store? Where do they source social recommendations? How do they prefer to browse online? How much time and money are they spending on your site? This is one of the reasons we’ve continued to expand our Benchmark platform across more than 370 detailed performance indicators. To be relevant, it’s not just acting with speed but understanding every nuance that comes into play to successfully engage each unique shopper. When you get that right, marketing becomes a value-added service that increases both sales and loyalty.
Solving these challenges is the focus of IBM’s Smarter Commerce initiative, which helps clients put their customers at the center of everything they do. The initiative combines everything we’ve learned from 35,000 client engagements with IBM’s ongoing investments in analytics, cloud, design and recent acquisitions like Silverpop and Xtify. Benchmark is just one example of how we’re delivering new innovation and data-driven insight to retailers and marketing professionals.
Q. What new tools have you developed to help marketers gain faster and better insight?
A. In our seventh year reporting holiday shopping trends, one of the big things we wanted to do was put our real-time analytics directly in the hands of interested marketers, retailers and consumers. We just launched a new free online app called IBM ExperienceOne Benchmark Live, which allows users to do their own analysis of online shopping trends across dozens of variables. It pulls real-time data from our core Benchmark platform and gives users a highly visual way to filter through each trend with year-over-year comparisons. It also allows users to build and download a host of graphs, datagrams, charts and other shareable assets. Anyone can check out the new tool today at www.ibm.com/benchmark.
We’re also expanding the breadth of this year’s campaign to report on holiday shopping trends not only in the U.S. but in the UK, Australia, Germany, France and other countries. While Thanksgiving is uniquely American, the pre-holiday shopping rush is a major global event. We did some of this last year in the UK and Australia, which was a big success, so we’re excited to expand things this year to share these insights in other local markets.
Q. IBM predicts strong growth for online, mobile and in-store sales this year. How can marketers capitalize and what will be their keys to success this year?
A. We talked about the importance of big data and analytics earlier, which is the only way marketers can achieve personalization at scale across thousands or millions of customers. But it’s about more than marketing. You also have to understand the customer journey across sales and service touch points.
This year’s winners will be those that embrace diverse, high volume data – from traditional enterprise systems to social networks – to deliver consistent and relevant shopping experiences. It’s not a question of ‘do I have a mobile plan’ or ‘do I have a social plan.’ It’s about bringing together those experiences to deliver seamless, personalized and compelling engagements across channels, and doing so with speed and agility. This means being prepared to act in real-time, such as sending a mobile push notification with a tailored promotion for a shopper standing in-store that’s using their smartphone to research and browse social recommendations.
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