A unified commerce approach to growing your bottom line

Unified Commerce is a term that many brands are starting to adopt in concept, yet are largely unable to implement given the challenge to identify the right solution to centralize and synthesize disparate customer data. As the retail and payment verticals have evolved, countless brands have fallen victim to siloed systems, revenue streams and even departments.

Despite the challenge of controlling and mastering your brand’s customer data in order to deliver personalized and intelligent engagements, there is hope for brands using Demandware. Let’s review a handful of prebuilt cartridges from the Demandware LINK Marketplace that can help brands leverage unified customer data to increase KPIs across an array of channels, including instore, online, social, and mobile, all of which are necessary in meeting the goals of a brand dedicated to a unified commerce approach

IN-STORE / ONLINE

1. Demandware Cartridge: Clutch

Expertise: Gift and Loyalty processing, First party data synthesis, customer intelligence and analytics, automated marketing, segmentation and profiling

2. Demandware Cartridge: Listrak:

Expertise: Email service provider, cross-channel marketing, cart abandonment

Identifying cartridges to realize the value of in-store data may seem like a daunting task, particularly when trying to implement them through your ecommerce processor. However specialized Demandware cartridges can act as a bridge between your in-store operations and online platform.

Cross-channel loyalty is one way to complete this task.

Andy O’dell, Chief Strategy Officer at Clutch explains,

“What’s exciting about having a gift and loyalty cartridge

for Demandware is that brands are increasingly trying to

implement gift and loyalty programs that have universal,

cross-channel functionality. Clutch’s Demandware cartridge

and wide swath of POS integrations are solving a lot of

these challenges for brands by connecting the dots between

the in-store and online. “

Through integrations with POS, beacon and wifi technologies, Clutch can track customer engagement from in-store, allowing brands to leverage this in-store data to inform online communications and engagements. Now gift and loyalty currencies can be issued and redeemed across every buying channel with in-store data informing a more personalized interaction with the customer online.

Once this in-store data is aggregated it needs to be put to work. Having a sophisticated customer CRM or first party data platform is instrumental in segmenting this data to employ campaign triggers that deploy engagements at the right time with the right message to the right customer across the right channel. A complementary addition to the consumer management story is alignment with a robust email service provider (ESP), like Listrak, that can seamlessly deploy automated marketing tied into loyalty and rewards to engage the customer in context of their spend and non-spend behaviors. The goal is to enable KPIs like: converting in-store shoppers online, catalyzing an impulse buy and even simply earning trust with the consumer by sharing relevant information and personalized campaigns in place of generic messaging or one-size-fits-all communications.

MOBILE

3. Demandware Cartridge: GPShopper

Expertise: Mobile Commerce, beacon technology, push notifications, mobile app development, cross-channel marketing

Mobile presents another unique opportunity within a unified commerce approach. First and foremost unlike mobile at its inception, which was mainly a branding exercise, the crowning KPI for mobile is now revenue, so finding a LINK partner that focuses on mobile commerce is a must. Mobile has the potential to be the catch-all for relevancy. Not only can gift balance and loyalty progression be featured within the app, but push notifications based on customer progress can be programmed directly into the app as well. All in-store and online data can be used to trigger communication in real-time in order to pull a customer off the street and into your store. Data points like current shopping cart items, outstanding rewards, past purchases and flash sales based on customer loyalty can all be leveraged in real-time as customers approach your store front.

In-store technology including beacons and wifi can be used to generate longer in-store customer engagements, while arming sales associates with data that can make the consumer visit more personalized, engaging and ultimately more profitable for the brand.

However, there are a number of significant barriers that mobile providers face when trying to service their clients. Good apps are expensive – they just are. App marketing and maintenance are even more expensive. So, if you are going to commit to mobile and invest in a proprietary app then there has to be a way to stay relevant and drive revenue. Leveraging cross-channel data is the answer. Also working with a modular provider like GPShopper who is quick to market and has the flexibility to turn modules off and on based engagement can deliver tremendous value.

SOCIAL:

4. LINK Cartridge: Olapic

Expertise: UGC Aggregator, curation/moderation tools, analytics, mobile optimization

Many brands are still trying to determine how they can tie social activity to their bottom line. Using open graph data to learn more about who their customers are at scale is a solid first step, but as we’ve uncovered, anonymized data can only get us so far.

As social has evolved over the years an increasing number of customers focus on the quality and status their favorite brands supply and also the celebrity they bring when highlighted through social imagery. Surprisingly, few brands have found a bullet proof way to track and manage user-generated content. UGC is by and large the most valuable social engagement that consumers have to offer. The brand loyalists that have enough of an emotional connection to a brand to publicly evangelize are the users that you not only want to track, connect with and motivate, but also better understand so you are more likely to attract and create more of them through your acquisition strategies. Brands like Target, New Balance and Brooks Running have done this famously.

DATA QUALITY

5. LINK Cartridge: Experian

Expertise: Data quality (email, address and mobile data validation)

The last and final recommendation is an essential service that creates efficiencies sure to streamline the value of our data aggregation efforts. As we work to unify data, our first-party data platforms can extract data from an array of customer sources. However, there are a number of sources that are ripe for human error and can derail success for email, mobile and even direct mail campaigns. For example, when a customer is joining a newsletter, receiving targeted coupons via mail, enrolling in your loyalty program, or signing up for text message alerts what good is pulling in that data if it’s not accurate? Massive amounts of resources  can be wasted on pushing campaigns to bad emails, mail addresses and mobile numbers.  

Jen Varney, Strategic Alliances Partner Manager at Experian

Data Quality states, “We are proud to be the Best-of-Breed

address and email validation partner for Demandware, saving

brands time by making sure the consumer data they capture is

accurate and actionable.”

Experian Data Quality is a solution to qualify that ingested data and confirm and even in some case correct its validity. As we syphon data from POS, mobile, social and online through ecommerce or web properties, Experian has embeddable technology that can judge the accuracy of the data that’s being shared.  Accurate data…is the best kind of data.

Jenna Flateman Posner is Vice President of Strategic Partnerships for Clutch, a leading provider of advanced Consumer Management, intelligence and loyalty solutions for many of the world’s premier brands. Click here to learn more about how Clutch’s Gift & loyalty integration for Demandware merchants can help grow your business. You can follow Jenna on Twitter @JFlateman and Clutch @clutchsuccess.

Image sourced from Flickr