Get ready retailers, Xmas is coming…

With the UK basking in glorious sunshine and the kids just breaking up for the summer holidays, it is hard to imagine that now is the time for retailers to prepare for the Christmas period. But over at IBM they are doing just that, with the release of the Fourth Annual UK Online Retail Christmas Readiness Report.
Based on IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark, the report provides a detailed analysis of the Christmas 2013 season and details five areas (below) where marketers should look to improve their strategies.
“While online retail is undeniably growing, the average amount people are spending remains flat and the number of items they are buying per transaction is actually decreasing,” said James Lovell, IBM’s smarter commerce retail consultant for Europe.
“What’s more, attention metrics show consumers have no patience for underwhelming retail experiences. If websites are not optimised for mobile, for example, shoppers will quickly give up trying to browse. Retailers need to understand consumer shopping ‘journeys’ – that is, gain a clear understanding of which technologies they are using, how and when they are using them and how these merge with the store.”

Understand your customers
If you knew your customers as well as their family and friends, you would know their needs and interests. You’d have a good idea of what would make the ideal Christmas gift. Marketers seldom enjoy such first-hand and intimate knowledge of customers. But today’s ground-breaking technology makes it possible to garner actionable insights and understand customers from the data they generate in their interactions with your brand, over time and across channels.
In fact, 55% of consumers surveyed by IBM said they expect retailers to use purchasing and behavioural data to offer relevant promotions. Meanwhile, 40% of consumers say they purchase more from retailers that deliver a personalised, cross-channel shopping experience, according to a survey by the E-tailing Group.
Achieving deeper insights into customer interests and behaviour is job number one for marketers who want to increase customer engagement and drive revenue. A foundational layer of actionable understanding is key to delivering offers and content as unique as your customers and cultivating profitable brand relationships. To make this happen, empower your marketers with hands-on tools that improve productivity and reduce internal costs.

Optimise the mobile experience
Mobile can’t be treated as a standalone channel – it needs to blend with web, email, social and other channels to maintain a cohesive and consistent dialogue with your customers and seamlessly improve customer interactions with your brand.
Quantitative and qualitative mobile analytics are key foundational elements to make the most of opportunities for mobile site optimisation, mobile apps, SMS text messaging, mobile push notifications, and personalised emails and recommendations.
Leading organisations are seeing clear benefits from their mobile investments. Nearly two-thirds (62%) of leading marketers are using mobile channels to engage with customers, compared to 43% of all others, according to IBM’s annual State of Marketing study.
Those leaders are nearly twice as effective in location-based targeting and mobile messaging campaigns, the study found.

Focus on digital marketing
Today’s customers don’t think in terms of channels. But many marketers do, in part because they rely on siloed systems for email, mobile, social, on-site recommendations, search and display ads, and more.
Dissolving those analytic and marketing execution silos to deliver a relevant and consistent brand experience across all channels is a key to winning wallet share among empowered consumers awash in competitive and channel options.
Personalisation defines success in digital marketing. Leveraging a deep understanding of customer behaviour and interests, effective personalisation can be synchronised across all channels and adapt instantaneously based on consumer response.
Top marketing teams are far more effective through the use of such techniques as adjusting real-time offers based on context and using optimisation technology across channels. Along with cross-channel integration, these techniques dramatically improve the performance of personalised recommendations, email marketing and display ad targeting.

Measure your impression-based investments
Display ads and social media presence are valuable investments in building your brand and driving revenue. These vehicles contribute to direct load site visits, with a healthy conversion rate of 3.3% in March 2014. Direct load also accounts for a high percentage of site traffic, at 42.8%.
But their value goes beyond direct clickthroughs. As with other types of advertising, it is important to measure both direct response and brand awareness delivered by the ad. This is typically measured by the number of times the ad was viewed, commonly referred to as the number of impressions.
Understanding the impact of unclicked impressions, is important to making informed choices on your budget and marketing mix. IBM Digital Analytics Impression Attribution reveals the business impact of impression-based marketing to help guide your strategic decisions. With impression attribution, you can evolve beyond simplistic and frequently misleading first- and last-click attribution models for a comprehensive view of marketing performance across channels, including syndicated videos, blog posts, micro-sites and more.

Step up to omni-channel marketing
Consistent messaging across all channels is a hallmark of marketing success in our age of the connected and empowered customer. As IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark data shows, consumer attention is in decline; shoppers use multiple devices for different purposes and at different times, and expect a seamless experience regardless of touchpoint. Retailers can fall out of favour fast with inconsistent and contradictory communications.
Suppose, for instance, that a customer buys a £1,000 leather couch at a retail store. Several days later, she orders matching pillows from the same retailer’s website. In her order confirmation email, the customer finds an offer for a £200 discount on the same couch she bought in the store. Interactive omni-channel marketing means moving beyond siloed communications to unified, personalised engagement at every interaction, from websites to physical stores, call centres, mobile apps, social media and more.
The ideal approach intelligently orchestrates outbound and inbound communications based on past and real-time customer behaviour. Marketers need the ability to adapt on the fly to customer response, inviting conversion or making a predetermined next-best offer over channels of the customer’s preference. With a single customer portrait from a unified data foundation, you’re ready to put insight into action to deliver the right message at the right time through the right channel.

For a full copy of the report visit the IBM website >