As data experts, we’re passionate about helping people improve their data literacy and get the most from their data which is why we’re sharing our expertise on how to get smarter with marketing metrics in this 6-part bi-weekly blog series.
In this first part, we look at the changing retail landscape, why data literacy matters, and what every retail marketer should know about data, insights, and metrics.
We’ll explore our top 5 metrics and insights for boosting customer acquisition, retention, and engagement based on our extensive experience working with many retailers (pureplay and multi-channel) in the rest of the series.
A digital world is shaping retail today
Retailing can be tough, even without the tsunami of complex market conditions currently facing retailers in a post-Brexit, post-lockdown world – inflationary pressures, economic slowdowns, global supply chain issues, skills shortages, changing consumer behaviours. The ongoing digital acceleration and shift to data privacy first also add complexity to the customer journey, data insights, and measurement.
As retail evolves there are always leaders and laggards. So, what is setting the leaders apart in the current landscape? Ask any market-leading retailer what helps them to stay ahead - being data-driven will be at, or very near, the top.
It’s no coincidence data-driven businesses perform better or several of the fastest-growing brands identify themselves as data businesses first and foremost - take Gousto and Gymshark as an example.
Making the shift to digital a sustained success requires good, intelligent data – data that is connected, centralised, and provides actionable insights. Without this, data has little value.
It also requires data literacy (the ability to derive meaningful information from data), underpinned by a data-driven culture where there’s a shared commitment to using the data, with a unified view of performance, customer behaviour, and experience.
Gartner defines data literacy as:
the ability to read, write and communicate data in context, including an understanding of data sources and constructs, analytical methods and techniques applied, and the ability to describe the use case, application and resulting value.
Why data literacy matters and what every marketer should know about data, insights, and metrics
For retail marketers, top-notch digital and data skills are now a prerequisite. After all, which C-suite doesn’t want their people to make decisions based on data?
With ever-increasing marketing tools to accommodate all things omnichannel and more personalised experiences, every marketer has a treasure trove of data. But not all can unlock its true value, or translate it into a compelling story. This is where the magic happens and leads to competitive advantage!
Success requires a much deeper understanding of the data, and how it shapes and drives performance, customer experience, and brand reputation across multiple platforms and channels.
In turn, this requires measurement to know what’s working and what’s not, how much it’s costing, and the return on investment to deliver the right marketing strategies to drive acquisition, sales, loyalty, and profitable growth.
There’s a multitude of metrics commonly used in retail - new customer acquisition, average order values (AOV), conversion rates, cost of acquisition (CAC), customer lifetime value (CLV), retention, return rates, best sellers, return on advertising spend (ROAS)…. but the real experts are those who:
i) determine the right performance metrics for their business (based on their business strategy, goals, drivers and growth stage)
ii) measure the right things in the right way
iii) drill further to explore and uncover actionable insights.
A single view of customers, sales and stock across all channels provides the right foundation to:
measure how you’re doing
identify and respond to trends and behaviours
improve planning cycles and purchasing decisions
engage with customers with greater relevance and personalisation.
And having the right technology is a prerequisite, particularly for the more sophisticated analytics and metrics needed. Thankfully data platforms are easier and intuitive to use, enabling marketers and retail teams to do their job better. A platform that integrates sales, stock, and customer data from all sources into a data warehouse, coupled with data visualisation tools to translate complex information into simple visuals quickly and easily, is likely to provide the broadest functionality and accommodate the most diverse use cases.
What are the top 5 metrics and insights retail marketers should be looking at to boost customer acquisition, retention, and engagement?
These are our top 5 recommendations based on our extensive experience working with many retailers (pureplay and multi-channel) over the years.
We explore each of these in this series. If you’d like to be alerted when new blog posts are published follow us on LinkedIn.
About Datitude
We do data! Datitude is a fast, robust, customer and retail data platform that helps businesses make sense of their data. Combining data warehouse and data lake, systems integration, and business intelligence, Datitude's platform integrates, processes and unifies your key data from multiple systems and channels, both on and offline, to unleash the most powerful customer and trading insights. Whatever the data source, we can process it.
Business intelligence, reports, and analytics are built-in and automated as standard, including visualisations and sophisticated interactive dashboards. Get a single customer view, lifetime value, segmentation analysis, product and customer loyalty analytics, device insights, and more.
If you need to turn your data into valuable intelligence, insight, and action, we'd love to talk.