Why It’s Imperative Retailers Move From Next Best Offer To Next Best Experience

Historically, retail marketers have chased the next offer. Most analysis is focused on what will drive the next sale and not necessarily the customer’s big picture. With advances in marketing technology, marketers are now able to tap into sophisticated data sets of their customers offering insight into contextual awareness, lifetime value, customer satisfaction drivers and loyalty.

It's time for marketers to pivot from the marketer focused “next best offer” approach” to the customer-behavior driven “next best experience” approach to build short and long-term customer value in the modern retail landscape.

Expectations Run High

Customers expect that they have a 1-1 relationship with a company and they want to be treated as an individual, not an anonymous member of a similar group. The operative word of course is expect. This is not an option anymore. This is a requirement for success.

Customers also expect that their experience will remain consistent across different channels – whether it is online, in store, through a sales rep, etc. To achieve this marketers must build customer profiles that integrate data from all points of customer interaction, and treat customers as individuals.

Most marketers rate Customer Experience as a top priority for their organization year after year, but very few companies are actually able to deliver on their vision. How often do we hear stories of customers with open service tickets receiving an email promotion targeted towards “happy customers”?

Or display ads shown promoting a product to a customer who just recently purchased that very same item? When investigating where these customer experience initiatives fall flat – or even fail to get off the ground – we often see data issues at the root of the problem.

New Challenges

Although many have adopted new technologies to address new channels and challenges, the rapid pace of technological change has created new challenges including:

Data Silos
E-mail marketing overload
Channel coordination and conflict

These challenges, coupled with the rising cost of acquiring and managing customer data, are compounded by increasing scrutiny on marketing budgets and an expectation of being able to prove the value of every campaign in terms of increased revenues.

The cold, hard truth is retailers are increasingly challenged to grow revenues and engage customers while managing costs.

Download this guide from Nucleus Research to learn more about the challenges and how moving to Oracle Marketing Cloud increased marketer productivity by an average of 50 percent while increasing customer engagement.