Page 20 - How Top Merchants Create the Best Customer Experience

SPONSORED ARTICLE

An executive conversation
with Tim Glomb,
vice president of global
content, CM Group
Personalization at scale helps retailers
better connect with customers

For several years, personalizing the shopping experience has How are retailers getting relationship
been a critical part of providing consumers with a great online marketing right?
customer experience. But many retailers today continue to
struggle to do it at scale — leaving some customers feeling One example is Discovery Communications. It has a platform
disconnected from brands. To discuss the importance of that’s collected more than 100 million declared opt-ins from
relationship marketing and how technology has evolved in the consumers. That data helps fuel personal offers and messaging
past few years to make personalization at scale more accessible to meet one-to-one individual needs.
to retailers, Digital Commerce 360 spoke with Tim Glomb, vice
president of global content at CM Group. Another is Starbucks, which put every action taken — every
credit card transaction, SKU, time of day, and location — into one
platform to activate personalization. And it’s all collected in a
What are some of the current trends around compliant manner. Starbucks is very transparent about what they
relationship marketing? will do with the data when you use that app. That’s an excellent

Personalization at scale has been a goal for years. But it needs to example of compliant data collection.
be more than just an email with the contact’s name in the subject
line. Next-gen personalization uses customer intentions and What strategies and or technologies are
interests to personalize the content, and technology now exists most effective for relationship marketing?
to make this happen.
Marketers used to worry about their collected data being siloed
— customer data, data marketing and supply chain data. But the
What are the biggest relationship marketing biggest problem was that the ability to bring in data, understand
challenges that retailers face? it, apply machine learning, and then activate it, was also siloed.
Data governance and getting explicit consumer consent at Now, it can be all in one place where that data is completely
an individual level is a big challenge. Most marketers are still uniform on one platform — no longer siloed. When you can get
collecting data in a way that either isn’t compliant for use in everything into a single platform, everything works.
their personalization engine or soon won’t be. Instead, they
need to adopt technology to collect individual data — both CM Group, for example, has mastered that single platform with
psychographic and demographic, first- and zero-party data — fewer silos, and with more action-oriented native capabilities.
in a compliant manner. The good news is that this is an easy To run it, you don’t need to be a data scientist or an IT guru. Any
fix with the right solution. modern marketer can.

How have tracking policies and privacy Retailers need to understand that if you don’t put human
restrictions impacted relationship connection into your marketing efforts, you will not win. A
marketing? large chunk of their activity is meeting the needs of everyone
rather than a segment. To drive real, sustainable results, today’s
Legislation and industry trends are forcing the issue. Technology
lets brand marketers just lay back and get the sale. But today, marketers need to meet every customer as if they’re meeting
you’ve got to be savvy, upfront, and genuine. Before, marketers them on the street representing their brand. And they need to
sat back and let cookies do their work, but now they must lean build relationships.
forward, get creative, get the right data, and use it to engage
people and offer them value.