Creating a single view of the customer is the goal for many retailers, but having their data in multiple places is preventing many of them from making this a reality.
“[Retailers] are looking for a solution that has a 360-degree view of the customer, and they want this view on a real-time basis,” said Omer Artun, CEO of predictive marketing platform company Agilone, in an interview at eTail East 2014.
Artun said retailers today want to know in real time who was on their website, which customers went into a store and bought a product and who browsed their products on a mobile device.
The way to make this happen, he said, is to maintain proper data management and data hygiene, including tracking the volume, variety and currency of the data.
“The currency and volume has become much more important in the last eight years,” said Artun. “It’s important to do something with the data you have in a matter of days, not months.”
Artun said retailers need to have their data clean and build intelligence in order to have conversations with and react to customers, instead sending out batch-and-blast emails to broad segments.
Retailers should build email templates and create rules to automate the conversation, he said. “Rather than send 100 emails, you may send 10 and customers may click on nine of them,” said Artun.