Omnichannel Personalization Sits at the Top of Retailers’ Holiday Wish Lists

• Retarget browser and cart abandoners. Retargeting offers a proven technique to recapture lost business. It also suggests to shoppers that you recognize their interests and value their business. For those shoppers with short attention spans, retargeting offers a clear call to action and streamlines the path to purchase.
• Accurately measure channel performance. Leading marketers are evolving beyond first- and last-click measures. Moving toward more sophisticated impression attribution enables marketers to better measure social media, optimize budgeting and marketing mix, understand display ad performance, and track brand sentiment.
• Assess your strengths and weaknesses against the competition. Use digital analytics that allow for comparison of performance against peers in the same sub-sector (e.g., footwear, beauty, sporting goods, etc.) and the retail industry as a whole. This type of assessment gives insights into where efforts might be best focused, adding to the already ongoing monitoring of various tactics and techniques.
• Progress towards interactive cross-channel marketing. Whatever the focus area and channel mix, it pays to think in terms of a progressive journey toward interactive cross-channel marketing maturity. With the massive amount of data generated by customer activity, technology is essential to leveraging information and automating campaigns that deliver communications as unique as your customers and evolve with the customer lifecycle.

While the holiday shopping season presents a lot of challenges for retailers, the opportunity to differentiate with personalization is enormous. By creating a strong omnichannel marketing strategy with a clear focus on personalization, retailers can adapt to the large-scale changes in consumer behavior to capitalize on the bountiful opportunities of the holiday season and beyond.