How data can provide a 360-degree view of today’s online shopper [CEO Interview]

This interview originally appeared in Internet Retailer’s report “Marketing Strategies of the Top 1000.”

In today’s eCommerce environment, a great product isn’t enough to keep customers loyal. Catering to today’s consumer requires an understanding of their unique wants, needs, objectives, and circumstances. To learn how retailers can impact customers’ experiences through digital marketing and gain more profits, Internet Retailer sat down with Steve Warren, CEO at Mapp.

What have been some recent changes in digital marketing?

Recent changes in privacy laws and political regulations have diminished the quality of third-party data, making it more difficult to collect and leverage shopper data. Online data is also underused and isolated from in-store purchase history, loyalty cards and an offline CRM. Each of these on their own only provides a glimpse of the whole story. Combining all data sources to create a single user profile allows retailers the ability to provide an exceptional experience across all touchpoints.

What challenges are retailers facing as a result of these trends?

Shoppers are savvier than ever before—always hunting for the best deal and the best buying experience. Marketers find it difficult to navigate the route to true loyalty because today’s consumers have raised their standards. Shoppers move quickly from device to device, to bricks-and-mortar stores, and back again. Living up to these standards is difficult without the right technology that can converge customer data from all sources, analyze and provide actionable insights.

How can they overcome these challenges?

Retailers need to have a strategy that unifies all data into one single platform, in order to gain a real-time, single customer view. This includes making their own data—first-party data— actionable, for a seamless shopping experience. Leverage real-time customer intelligence to understand customer actions, motivations, and values.

Armed with these insights, retailers can personalize the buying journey, and increase positive interactions customers have with their brand. Use AI to score, profile and visualize customer data to predict their likelihood of churning or converting. Artificial intelligence-powered technology can also help retailers predict what they should be communicating to their customers, when, where and how. If your marketing platform can understand individual preferences, you are then freed up to personalize offerings as customers shop, optimizing their journey with your brand and better predicting what they want next.

What strategies can they implement?

Our retail partners at Mapp Digital are able to access and analyze big data—collected through consumer engagements across multiple channels—bridging the gap between analytics and marketing to form predictions about future behaviors. These insights can be the difference between a healthy bottom line and a floundering business.

With Mapp, all customer data is in one place so retailers can create a comprehensive, unified customer profile. This type of convergence holds the potential for an unrivaled level of customer-centricity. From the customer’s perspective, this means more meaningful, relevant, and timely touchpoints throughout the customer journey.

How does this specifically help marketers?

Mapp gives retailers the customer intelligence their marketers need to accurately predict what the customer will do next. Mapp will help retailers acquire more customers, reduce customer churn, decrease cart abandonment rates and increase revenue among existing customers. With Mapp’s platform, retailers will be able to enhance the traditional purchasing path by adding value at every stage with personalized, relevant and automated engagement.