Chris is among the speakers presenting at the Figaro Digital Retail Conference in London on 14 May 2015.
Chris Clapham is Managing Consultant EMEA at Silverpop, an IBM company. Ahead of our Digital Retail Conference, we caught up with him to hear about the opportunities and challenges facing retail marketers right now
One of the biggest challenges is often obtaining a truly unified single customer view, where you can treat customers as individuals and communicate with them across multiple channels, based on their actual behaviours.
A single customer view brings with it the opportunity to intelligently target key segments and engage with customers on a one-to-one basis. However, with customers interacting with your brand across multiple touch-points, it can be hard to achieve a perfect view. But don’t let perfect get in the way of good.
This brings me onto one of the biggest opportunities for digital retailers which, with the aid of the right technology, is the ability to better engage your customers with the right message at the right time and via the right channel.
Omnichannel customers are becoming more receptive to receiving automated and behavioural-driven messages from the brands they love, provided they are relevant, timely and adding value. This could mean sending a targeted mobile app push notification to a customer as they enter a physical shopping location, prompting them to view a product they previously browsed online.
Of course, careful planning is required to get your technology mix and customer communications strategy right, but if you can pull it off, the rewards can be huge.
silverpop.com
This article also appears in Issue 24 of Figaro Digital magazine.