How well do you actually know your customers? Do you have the right insights about their individual behaviors so as to impact their purchase patterns at the right moments? When it comes to using advanced analytics, fashion retailers are still lagging behind, but again, there are pioneers in the fashion industry too, who use BIG data to their advantage for making every day decisions based on real dependable trends and insights rather than gut-feel. How deep you dive will directly impact the relationship of your brand with your customers.
One area where BIG data can really help is hyper targeting. It gives retailers a great window to understand customer preferences and conduct focused and targeted marketing – to zero-in on prospects that are most likely to buy their merchandise.
But how do we optimize this process of knowing our customers better online as well as in-store? This requires tracking each and every customer as they move across various channels and identifying their browsing and buying patterns. The first goal must be to get a complete picture. It becomes imperative for fashion retailers to tie-in the data from various customer touch-points for omni-channel analytics, so that they can promote the right products to the right customers, at the right time.
Nicole Miller, an iconic American fashion brand, recently implemented an analytics tool and is now able to conduct some highly targeted campaigns. The director of ecommerce and retail Andrea Marron says that, “If we only look at ecommerce data, it’s probably an incomplete picture of what that customer is purchasing or is interested in — what their behavior is like. For instance, the brand sells a signature Sandy skirt. Some people come back and buy that same skirt in a different color. So if we’re only seeing an incomplete version of their purchase history we might not necessarily know that’s what they’re doing.” With an advanced analytics system in place, Nicole Miller can get a complete omni-channel picture, and when in the next season, the same skirt comes in different color; they can let the customer know through a targeted message. Nicole Miller is seeing fantastic results with these targeted efforts and has observed a click-through of 60% for highly personalized messages, as compared to 15% for mass email messages.
It’s all about understanding each customer as an individual and going that extra mile to make them feel special. Analyzing BIG data can help with uncovering such granular but useful insights about your customers.