The ongoing competition between retailers for a share of the consumer’s wallet is rapidly evolving. While sharp pricing and high in-stock positions remain important to the decision making process, today’s consumer demands a retailer who rewards her with personalized marketing for choosing to spend her hard earned money in their stores.
At the same time as consumer demands of a retailer are dramatically changing. Retail, in general, finds itself in an ongoing cycle of cost control measures to ensure a healthy balance sheet for shareholders or ownership.
Each year sales targets are increased, margin expectations raised, while operational spend is reduced. Traditional go-to-market strategies used by marketing and merchandising are quickly becoming untenable in this environment.
Print marketing, that includes hundreds of offers at deep discounts and is broadcast to all households in a local trading area, is becoming unaffordable to both Marketing departments and Merchandising units.
SAP Campaign Management
The SAP Campaign Management software suite, a Customer Activity Repository (CAR) based solution, codeveloped with Rizing, provides a platform to develop and execute marketing and promotional campaigns across any sales channel.
These campaigns along with customer response and sales performance are then stored against each individual customer record. Advanced analytics are then able to model and predict customer responses prior to campaign execution in order to easily model multiple what-if scenarios and select ones most consistent with the company goals.
The Customer: The Value of Differentiation
The SAP Campaign Management suite of tools is an important method of differentiation between yourselves and your competitors. This toolkit allows you to discretely identify particular customers of your choosing, (with the added fiscal benefit of potentially limiting Marketing spend or Merchandising Margin bleed at the register).
This is accomplished with reference to either consumer purchase patterns or from augmented customer master data available from Third Party service providers. By way of example, it is typically understood that ‘New Mothers’ is an important demographic and psycho-graphic segment of customers. No longer will a Retailer need to broadcast to an entire local trading area that they have excellent assortment and pricing relevant to the New Mother demographic – You can simply tell her yourself.
You don’t even have to communicate baby products. Perhaps an offer that only she could use – spa products for example – to reinforce that you understand her needs and life experience. Or, discretely campaign to different ethnic groups – Moon Festival, Diwali, Ramadan, Cinco Dey Mayo, Passover, for example – with reference the same purchase patterns and customer master data. The opportunities are truly extensive.
The Campaign: Do More with More
Omnichannel is no longer simply an industry buzzword – many retailers have fully integrated channel management offerings as fierce competition has moved to arenas outside of ‘brick and mortar’.
Web offerings, mobile offerings, loyalty offerings and other types of personalized rewards and communications are being distributed to the tune of billions of consumer touches annually across North America.
Again, the SAP Campaign Management suite of tools provides the flexibility to manage your customer communications in a single, easy to use application. Control your Marketing expenses by choosing the appropriate combination of consumer touchpoints. For example, one can dial down printing and distribution costs by featuring more electronic communications.
Merchandising can also selectively choose products for these campaigns to ensure an appropriate level of investment to achieve their budgetary goals. For example, perhaps the best offers are only targeted to the best customers – effectively eliminating the ‘cherry-pickers’.
Results Oriented: Everyone Wins
The SAP Campaign Management suite of tools provides a scientific modeling ‘engine’ and user-friendly application layers to achieve these goals and more.
The modeling engine learns from past marketing and promotional effectiveness and fine tunes predictions based on this input.
Now both Marketing and Merchandising can finally truly understand the effectiveness of campaigns and offers and use this information to make better, fiscally responsible, decisions that reward your consumer for choosing to spend her hard earned money in your stores.
At the same time, your organization will have the tools to better manage operational costs and budgetary goals.