Shoptalk in Vegas: A “Welcome Back” Blowout

This March, ShopTalk was back in person after two long years. And this retail technology conference certainly came back in style – roughly 10,000 attendees and more than 250 speakers met in Las Vegas to chart the future of retail tech and exchange ideas on industry trends. Fittingly, even the wifi password was “welcomeback.”

Of course we couldn’t miss this occasion. Our very own Sam Elliott, Strategic Account Executive, presented at the Salesforce booth. His talk focused on the importance of organizing a retailer’s tech stack to best suit today’s customers and how CDP can help. Keep reading for a summary of the presentation:

The Goal: A 360 Degree Customer View

Most retailers today aim to achieve a comprehensive view of each unique customer. That granular insight, in turn, would allow them to create personalized customer journeys. This strategy offers some big benefits:

1. Deeper insights. Once a brand zeroes in on the most loyal customers, it can encourage them to become brand ambassadors.
2. Smarter targeting. It’s just as important to send messages at the right time (i.e. when a customer is contemplating a purchase) as it is to avoid sending them at the wrong time. For example, savvy retailers exclude individuals with open customer service tickets from promotional emails.
3. Personalization. Modern customers don’t want to feel like just a number. They expect conversations with brands to be tailored to their particular interests and purchase histories. So, a customer that recently browsed ski boots might welcome a special discount on ski jackets.
4. Automation. Marketing teams win when tedious manual processes are automated. An automated system can send product recommendations based on product affinity, no manual effort required.

The Challenge: Easier Said Than Done

Achieving a comprehensive understanding of each customer is easier said than done. More and more softwares and points of interaction must be taken into consideration and connected.

Maintaining continuity across conversations is tricky when communications happen across channels and devices; data needs to sync across multiple systems in multiple ways. The bottom line is that retailers need a single source of truth to make sense of all this information.

The Salesforce Solution: CDP to the Rescue

Salesforce helps by connecting disparate systems. Data is synced from the web, CRM, ERP and Marketing Automation platforms. Further, when specific customers contact the brand, Salesforce can automatically identify them. Complex calculations for targeted segmentation happen behind the scenes. Lastly, Salesforce manages data security. This protects the retailer from potential legal missteps and gives managers peace of mind.

Accelerize360 recently helped a prominent retailer reap such benefits with Salesforce CDP (or MC CDP). Here’s an overview:

1. Deeper insights. The retailer in question used CDP to create customer segments – for instance, loyal customers who have spent over a certain dollar amount or new customers who have recently shared their email.
2. Smarter targeting. With CDP, the brand could track behavior on their website, such as specific product categories viewed by customers.
3. Personalization. Our team leveraged Einstein Recommendations to pull in personalized product recommendations based on past user views and purchases.
4. Automation. Check out these time-saving automations:

1. Move information from the data warehouse into Automation Studio via FTP to send into Service Cloud
2. Pull transactional data from ERP to bring into CDP for future segmentation
3. Automatic assignment to a journey based on when a user is created
4. Automatic assignment to journeys based on data in CDP or Service Cloud (i.e. customer’s birthday is today)
5. Send daily triggered messages to find out how many users were sent coupon codes so the retailer knows when codes need to be replenished

Hope to See You Next Time

Our CEO, Vijay Proddhutur and Sam Elliott had a blast. They enjoyed rich conversations with the many VPs and CMOs in the audience. The live performances and awesome speakers broke the work-from-home humdrum. Retail is back – in a big way.

From a company perspective, we had the privilege to share our point of view as CDP experts. If you don’t want to wait until the next ShopTalk to update your retail operations, bring your architecture map to us for a free consultation!