Data management platforms, or DMPs, are used by marketers in every industry to help make sense of the mountains of data they have in different places. For retailers, this can include online purchase data, offline purchase data, loyalty shopper data, social and search data, or anonymous online data gathered from your website visitors. DMPs are used to collect all this data into one platform, and turn it into audience insights to help drive your marketing plan and reach your target customers more efficiently and effectively.
Sounds pretty good, right? Want to learn how it’s really done? Here are 8 of the top use cases for how a retailer can put their DMP to work from day 1.
One of the most powerful ways a DMP can help retailers is offering the ability to slice and dice your customers into niche segments. Knowing information such as the age, gender, spending history, interests, income, wants and needs of your customers helps you in countless ways, and one is accurate segmentation. By separating out the high spenders from the trendy hipsters, you have the ability to target your messaging, creative, and product offering that each group sees when they visit your digital properties. Here are just a few of the segments a retailer might consider targeting:
Even with established retail buyer segments, you won’t be able to reap the benefits of your information until you fully grasp the value of each segment. At Lotame, we’ll be able to provide data in a comprehensive, understandable form so that you know the number of customers in each segment, revenue from your segment, number of product orders, customer value, average order value, latency and more.
Once you know segment value, you just need to organize the data to make it useful. We help you accurately assess consumer information so you have advanced customer segmentation that works for you. This helps you come up with the most actionable results to grow marketing success. Some of the primary benefits any company can gain from tapping into their retail buyer segments once they understand the full value of their segments are:
Segmentation can also be helpful for repressing certain audiences from a campaign, meaning you exclude this particular group from seeing your ad. For a large company such as Macy’s with thousands of employees around the world, excluding your own employees from your campaign improves the efficiency of your ad spend by only targeting prospective buyers.
Because a DMP is used to collect & organize data from any source into one platform, retailers have the ability to combine offline data, POS, CRM, loyalty or rewards programs, newsletter signups, mobile, social, search and any other source of data. By merging disparate data sources, retailers can have access to big-picture insights across all channels, platforms and campaigns. Want to learn more about your customers? Layer in additional 3rd-party data points to enrich what you know about your customers.
Here are some helpful data points you will want to combine in your DMP for a complete understanding of your customers:
AMP Agency wanted to support a major Pet Care Brand with advanced audience targeting in order to find a niche group of pet owners most likely to respond and engage with their marketing and recruitment efforts.
AMP had valuable insights into consumers’ pet ownership and preferences (Dog/Golden Retriever, Cat/Persian), the pet owner’s choice and location of grooming and veterinarian care, frequency of pet care, even the approximate location and times pet owners walk and exercise with their pets. AMP was able to enhance their existing data with additional demographic, interest, and purchase behaviors from Lotame’s Data Exchange to create a robust profile of the pet owner and ensure marketing messages were delivered when and where pet owners are most receptive to messaging and offers.
Consumer engagement, as measured by click-through rate, increased by 250%, showcasing the advanced relevancy in regards to targeting. Thousands of new pet owners were identified that weren’t included in standard third party audience segments and the advanced device graph opened up an opportunity to message consumers across devices, in the moments when they’re most likely to engage. In addition, AMP Agency was able to generate data costs savings of 83% for this Pet Care brand.
Once you have your data aggregated inside the DMP and segmented into groups, a quick way to get started is with retargeting, which means reaching those consumers who may have already been on your website or mobile app but left before they completed a purchase. Retargeting customer groups based on past behavior or activities is infinitely easier with a DMP – especially if it is integrated with a DSP. A DMP that is seamlessly connected to multiple DSPs means that you can send your audiences to any platform for immediate targeting.
So, you’ve already identified your most loyal, high value customers. Now you’re wondering how to grow that group and increase the number of loyal shoppers you have. Lookalike audiences are a way to use machine learning to take the guesswork out of finding more of those shoppers. Use lookalike models to identify new, additional customers likely to purchase products and increase the scale of your audiences.
Rise Interactive, a Chicago-based digital marketing agency, wanted to increase conversions and product revenue for their client, a well-known, global designer and manufacturer of high-quality, contemporary jewelry, via a targeted display campaign at a low CPA.
In order to drive sales, Rise Interactive leveraged Lotame Audience Optimizer to identify new prospective customers most likely to make a purchase. Audience Optimizer located lookalike audiences who were most likely to engage with the campaign to grow the prospective audience base.
As a result, Rise Interactive was able to decrease their cost per acquisition (CPA) by 44%, while increasing conversions by 80%.
Offering a personalized experience to your customer on and offline is a key to success. The same audiences you built in your DMP for targeted advertising Offer customized content to specific audiences on your website to increase engagement. Customize site messaging, creative and even functionality to specific user groups, increasing conversions even more. This applies to websites and apps as well.
This is obviously the point of marketing, right? Find those customers who are either very loyal to your brand, or spend a lot at once, or can influence their network to become your newest fans. Whoever your “best customers” are, DMPs offer analytics and insights about your audience. As a marketer, you can use your DMP’s insights to determine which segments are worth targeting and which are not, focusing their resources on the most high-value, high-ROI audiences possible. Instead of “spray & pray” marketing tactics where you just send the ad to everyone and hope you’re hitting your target audience, DMPs help you narrow your focus so you are only spending money where it matters.
Greenlight Digital was looking to maximize sales over Black Friday weekend for their fashion retailer client, the brand’s busiest time of year. The retailer wanted to focus advertising efforts on re-engaging consumers from a previous campaign which centered around their collection of jackets for a range of target audiences.
Having tagged previous activity with impressions and click trackers, Greenlight imported the campaign data into Lotame’s data management platform (DMP) to build an audience of users who had been exposed to the first successful video campaign. The goal was to retarget this audience who had seen the video ads with display ads featuring the same jackets to drive consumers farther down the funnel during the Black Friday weekend.
Because Greenlight used Lotame’s DMP to target a highly relevant and potentially engaged audience, they were able to increase their overall click-through-rate from their 0.08% benchmark to 0.21%, a 162% increase! More than that, the campaign also recognized a 52% conversion rate. Overall, the brand saw a 270% ROI from Greenlight’s work with Lotame to effectively target their campaign.
Digital advertising is not simple, because consumers are always connected and using many different devices to shop, browse, or search. You need to be able to connect with and target your customers wherever and whenever they are. Whether your customers are on a laptop, a mobile, a tablet, or whether they’re more active on emails, or social media, you need to know, and you need to be there. DMPs provide retailers valuable information about what devices an audience uses, as well as what they are doing. And if you are using cross-device technology from a DMP, you can sync your offline, online, and mobile messaging for one cohesive experience for your customers.
If you’re ready to take it a step further, retailers can consider adding in location-based targeting to actively target people who live or work near a particular store. DMPs can connect to other location data providers such as Beemray, who offer geo-targeting abilities beyond DMA or zip code. Want to hit business commuters who might be heading past your store on their way to the train station? Geo-targeting is the answer.
In a competitive shopping space, it’s important to know who your target audience is and how to reach them. You can either sit around and wait for them to come to you, or you can go out and get them back to your store.
DMPs are used by retailers around the world to reach the right audience at the right time. Want to learn more? Contact Lotame to set up a demo of our DMP to learn how we can help you turn your mountains of data into a goldmine.