Data-Driven Marketing: Using Data to Help Boost Holiday Retail Sales

Whether it’s purchasing holiday gifts, festive home décor or plane tickets, consumers begin opening their wallets liberally each fall in preparation for the holiday season. This year, retailers may experience an even bigger surge in consumer spending as restrictions around the COVID-19 pandemic wane and people plan long-awaited celebrations with friends and family.

While remaining cautiously optimistic, retailers that struggled to stay profitable during the pandemic are taking a fresh look at cost vs. return — especially when considering strategies for how to convert shoppers in both their online and brick-and-mortar stores.

Retailers need cost-effective ways to engage in precise, data-driven target marketing and advertising. This is where partnering with a big data provider can help.

To help boost your holiday retail sales this year, be sure to focus your data strategies on two main areas: currency and precision.

Currency: Quality Data is Key

These days, there’s no shortage of consumer data, but quality varies widely. When working with data companies or audience list providers, it’s important to learn how they collect and verify consumer data and how often their databases are updated. Why? People frequently change their physical and email addresses, which means consumer data from a source that isn’t regularly updated will deliver a high percentage of inaccurate results.

For any retailer engaging in targeted marketing, audience data that isn’t up-to-date equals wasted effort — and money. And during the holiday season, the stakes, budgets and margin for error is even higher. Partnering with a data provider that doesn’t prioritize quality data could cost you an entire season’s positive return on investment.

Many companies buy their data from reputable providers because they know exactly how often information is updated, how comprehensive their consumer and consumer-related data is (including property, homeowner and environmental data), and that all data is directly collected and cross-checked from multiple sources.

Bottom line: Don’t be shy about asking marketing partners where their data comes from and how often it’s updated to ensure you’re getting accurate, up-to-date information.

Targeting With Precision: Drilling Down Using Big Data Analytics

Data analytics allows you to find the precious needle in a haystack of big data. By processing millions of data points to find the exact audience information you need, data analysis can create your ideal audience list.

Combining, overlaying or matching property data to consumer data has multiple benefits. It can help fuel loyalty programs, memberships and identify new prospects for acquisition, as well as provide cross- and upsell opportunities for customer retention based on consumer behavior and analytical insights. For example, a home goods retailer can use property data in concert with the market value of a house and the available equity the borrower has to identify the right leads for a holiday sale.

The ideal data partner will combine accurate, quality data with superb analytics capabilities. Doing so enables them to translate raw data into actionable information you can use in your targeted holiday marketing campaigns.

Putting it All Together

This holiday season is shaping up to be a crucial one for retailers. And as we get closer to the holiday season, retailers should be preparing and doing research to ensure a successful partnership with a data provider — and a profitable season.

As a retailer, finding a data partner that can provide the information you need to reach your prospects is paramount. Ensure its data is accurate, current, precise and maintained. Remember, your business’ holiday season success is counting on a data partner that meets these criteria.

Pro tip: As a final step, consider planning a post-holiday getaway to celebrate your success. You deserve it.

Sherrie Clevenger is principal, product management, new markets at CoreLogic, the trusted source for property intelligence, with knowledge in economic, social, and environmental forces that promote healthy housing markets.