Brands are revisiting their CRM infrastructure

With Ecommerce gaining ever-more importance for brands and high street retailers, the value of their data (both earned and purchased) has not been lost to this sector of the industry. With the myriad of retailers, resellers and affiliates announcing closures/mergers in the first half of this year, brands have been working frantically to protect their baseline revenues – and are frequently looking to Ecommerce to pickup the slack from the high street.  

Electric Persona has been advising numerous (small and well established) brands on-and-off the Isles around the impact of GDPR on their CRM data, PLUS, on how to recover what they have lost as a consequence of the May deadline. That said some big names in the industry have used this time to revisit their agency relationships and take a hard look at their existing CRM, lead-generation and ecommerce infrastructure.

There are numerous and variable challenges based on each companies objectives, though they all share similar barriers to overcome in the immediate-near future…

1. How to enhance their CRM data-segments, to play a more deterministic role in customer engagement.
2. How to grow their own DMP’s, and better leverage the data they earn as a consequence of their paid-for media.
3. Identify those nuances between partners offering Sample vs. (truly) ‘Big data’ analysis, subsequently looking more frequently at various sets of DaaS API’s partnerships.

Ultimately, this has caused some businesses to either pull their branding budgets ‘in-house’ OR shore-up their existing Ecommerce infrastructure – whether these be SaaS-based supply platforms or simply reviewing their ESP partnerships to find more ‘open source’ platforms, which, work more flexibly with those data partners they need in order to grow their bottom-line conversions. 

Stopping to address the role of the high street in all of this…

Retailers and brands alike, have identified that the high street is still very much a valuable asset for conversions, but have moved to pair these bricks-and-mortar assets with deterministic datasets to help validate their existence as effective advertisings hubs for their brands ( branding) and merchandise – albeit and consequently delivering sales through online channels… Never has the adage ‘window shopping’ been a more accurate description to that of the high street than today.

Where there has been a slight shift however in their (high street) positioning is in the use of these ‘deterministic’ datasets for investing in the ‘right’ location (pop-up/permanent), which will position their brands to the right demographic – with a view to capture their audiences ON-SITE.

Permit us to divulge an example of point number three (3), which we made earlier…. 

A prominent international cosmetics company and owner of several brands which speak to almost every demographic on the planet, was seeking to apply Location-based-data Ecommerce-based -data analysis to determine where on planet earth to setup shop – and for which brand.

The problem they faced on the location front was much tougher than that of the latter, when little-to-no location data was available to them at-scale for in-depth analysis. To credit Kenneth Cukier & Mayer-Schonberger (in their book: Big Data), they were trying to use data to solve for the ‘WHY’ (i.e. why invest here), and sample data only enabled them to ask ‘WHAT’. Electric Persona was able to advise them on partnering with multiple data providers, which gave them impartial analysis on footfall of all demographics in their focused territories – whilst feeding and enhancing their CRM segments for later customer engagement and analysis.

Together with ecommerce analytics from affiliates and third party stakeholders, this company was able to justifiably invest in certain locations in many EU cities – and in some cases – know which side of the street would trade better than others, enabling satellite locations which didn’t shift merchandise to focus solely on consumer engagement, OR, window shopping – for latter ecommerce successes. 

Brands as content producers

One other way brands are growing and enhancing their customer segments, whilst engaging them (the dream!), is creating content.  

Whilst hosting said content where consumers are currently connected (FAGMA), brands have realized that this is no long-term strategy – nor does this strategy apply itself well with brands broader on-and-offline branded marketing and content strategies.  

With that said, there are serious obstacles to overcome when attempting to move away from the industries current dependency on well established platforms – and whilst this is nothing new, this is the subject for next weeks blog post, which we will cover in detail…

With CRM enhancements and infrastructure (plus ESP) investments continuing to develop well into H2 of this calendar year, we shall share more with you as these projects continue – please feel free to share your thoughts, suggestions and opinions on the realignment of the high street.

- Diarist of a consul, Electric Persona