Retail is an ever-changing industry, but the past few years have been particularly disruptive. The COVID-19 pandemic led to dramatic changes in consumer behavior that left many retailers scrambling to keep up. These factors, combined with the growing influence of Amazon, increased consumer privacy regulations and the abandonment of third-party cookies, only exacerbate the need for a transformation in retail that emphasizes in customer relations.
Companies that have been most successful in adapting to these challenges share a critical commonality: they prioritize the collection and use of privacy-compliant first-party customer data as a competitive asset. The Comoto family of brands is one such retailer.
In a recent MarTech sessionComoto’s Dana Green joined BlueConic’s Jackie Rousseau-Anderson to discuss how they are using a customer data platform to unify customer data across multiple brands and systems and activate it across channels to deliver interactions with the most attractive customers.
Put data at the center of customer engagement
As America’s largest motorsports retailer, Comoto is home to Cycle Gear, J&P Cycles and RevZilla.com. With more than 150 stores nationwide and e-commerce sites for all three brands, the company manages a complex ecosystem of customer data hosted in a multitude of systems.
“Data has always been central to our strategies,” Green said, “but it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the amount of information you have.”
This realization led Comoto on an introspective journey to transform the way they access and use customer data to unlock the potential of their marketing channels. BlueConic’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) has been a core component in its transformation.
Choose the right optimization strategy
When it comes to optimizing their e-commerce sites, Green and his team have traditionally relied on Comoto’s UX and Research teams to deliver a testing plan based on qualitative customer research. Using BlueConic’s optimization and A/B testing capabilities, the company can combine qualitative and quantitative methods for a deeper understanding of its customers.
“When we make big updates to our website, we usually have a theory that we want to improve. With BlueConic, we can run A/B tests on our site to validate the research we’ve done with our customers and back it up with hard data.” Green said.
He noted that even simple A/B testing could produce big wins. “Our customers have a real enthusiast culture when it comes to riding, but what they buy often depends on their riding style. So we decided to trial a shop by category module on our homepage which resulted in a very positive incremental increase. Just having the ability to provide someone with a personalized experience based on the categories they’re most interested in is an easy win for us that has a surprisingly big impact.”
Since then, Green and his team have used BlueConic to augment their A/B testing efforts. “We have a number of things we want to test at the moment. For the most part, whenever we finish a test, it usually raises another question. But it also warns others to start small, as the tests can get complicated. To improve success tests, recommends:
Try something that will get enough traffic to get a good read on what you are trying to answer. Make sure you are clear about your hypothesis and what you are trying to solve. Definition of clear success metrics.
Move from touchpoints to journeys
Green and his team have also been able to use the learnings from A/B testing as building blocks for the larger, end-to-end customer experience. “The real power we’ve been working on is the transition to create lifecycles. So we’re not just optimizing our site, we’re making sure we connect that experience to our other channels,” Green said.
BlueConic’s customer lifecycle orchestration capabilities allow Green and his team to move beyond channel-specific campaign workflows and instead orchestrate cross-channel lifecycle marketing programs that respond to the each customer’s unique journey based on unified real-time customer profile data.
“When we send an email, how are we thinking about the experience they’re landing on? Or when a paid ad hits the website, what can we do to personalize that experience?”
He also noted that sometimes seemingly simple components, like tuning in to where someone lives or their areas of primary interest, can be a really compelling way to develop a connection with customers.
“We have a blog called Common Thread that features incredible content. The data available at BlueConic not only allows us to understand how and when consumers engage with us on Common Thread, but also allows us to tailor our communications based on their individual interests . If they’re an adventure rider and we just published an article about an adventure bike, for example, we can promote the article and bring them into the Common Thread experience.”
Operation of a CDP
Green noted that it’s not enough to simply add a CDP to your business infrastructure and expect to reap the benefits immediately. Like any marketing technology, success (or failure) with a CDP often comes down to the ability to effectively manage change within the organization. For Green, education and communication have been key.
“We achieve some of this just by inviting more people from across the business to our quarterly reviews of what we’re working on,” Green said. “We set up our email and onsite teams to meet separately with BlueConic,” he continued. “Now, we’re coming together to be able to work on our combined strategies across both channels. So making sure the communication between the teams is connected has been a really easy and simple win.”
Since the addition of a CDP also fundamentally changes the way businesses can and must operate, Green stresses the importance of alignment on goals, use cases (immediate priorities and long-term roadmap ), the timeline and expected results for a CDP implementation at all levels. of the organization
“Our technical team is very busy with a lot of big priorities, which I’m sure a lot of people can relate to,” he explained. Being able to access unified, actionable data from BlueConic and use it to create compelling on-site experiences without touching the technical team has been a huge help for us. That way, we can keep moving and trying new things without being held back when our technology partners focus on other priorities.”
For others embarking on their own customer engagement transformation journey, Green offers some advice: “Just make sure you choose a partner who listens to your business problems and what you’re trying to achieve as company. Only then can you truly unlock the full potential of your investment.”
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About the author
BlueConic, the leading pure-play customer data platform, frees companies’ proprietary data from disparate systems and makes it accessible wherever and whenever it’s needed to transform customer relationships and drive business growth. More than 350 companies worldwide, including Forbes, Heineken, Mattel, Michelin, Telia Company and VF Corp, use BlueConic to unify data into persistent individual-level profiles, then activate them across touchpoints and systems of customers to support a wide range of growth-focused initiatives, including customer lifecycle orchestration, modeling and analytics, digital products and experiences, audience-based monetization, and more. BlueConic is a global company with offices in the US and Europe.
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