In the face of rivalry with supermarkets and e-commerce, local retailers need to deploy digital strategies to stay in the consumer’s sights. Data management must be at the heart of your strategy, as it enables you to get to know your customers better and identify their needs. This will make it easier for you to optimize your customer relations, improve the customer experience in your physical or online store, and sell more effectively.
What is data management?
Data management consists in analyzing and processing customer data, and using it to support your communication and marketing strategy. The process involves several stages, including collecting, qualifying, structuring, securing and using customer data.
The aim of data management is to process customer information and turn it into a strategic asset for your business. Once the data has been processed, it is integrated into the information system, ensuring that it is reliable and accessible to all members of the operation. Use a single, customizable platform like DOOD to extract, process and use your customer data.
You then move from raw information to valuable information that will help you in your decision-making process.
What role does data management play for local retailers?
Like all companies entering the digitalization process, you can also exploit customer data to optimize your internal and external organization. Once you have a perfect understanding of your buyer persona, you can easily design offers that meet their needs.
Before embarking on this quest, you must first clearly identify the information you need about your customers. The aim is not to collect just any data you may never use.
It all depends on your marketing and customer relationship objectives. Want to improve the user experience in your store? Want to optimize customer satisfaction? Or do you want to rapidly increase your sales within the year? There are four categories of data you can exploit.
Identity data
This is the easiest data to collect when subscribing to your newsletter, downloading a white paper, placing an order or making a purchase. You obtain the customer’s surname, first name, age, title and contact details (telephone, email, social networks, etc.), which you can then use to get in touch with them.
Quantitative data
This data shows how the customer interacts with you, your brand, your services/products and your customer service. This includes, for example:
- Web behaviors: frequency of visits to your site, pages visited, a like on your Facebook page, etc.
- Online and offline transactions: purchases made, average basket, total purchase amount, basket abandonment, etc.
- Responsiveness to your marketing campaigns: channel used, opening rate, click-through rate, etc.
- Customer services: complaints, returns, frequency or number of calls, etc.
This data will enable you to identify the offers that are of greater or lesser interest to a given type of customer, the most effective channels, the main causes of abandonment and the decisive points in the purchase.
Descriptive data
This information enables you to get to know your customers better and easily assess their needs. In short, there’s their family situation, lifestyle, level of education or training and professional activity. You can obtain them from a questionnaire.
Qualitative data
Once you’ve worked out who your customers are and what they do, you need to go deeper to find out what they think of you, your brand, your products and your services. You can find out more from customer feedback, ratings and opinions.
What are the advantages of data management for local retailers?
Data management enables local retailers to ensure the quality of the data they collect, so that it can be put to good use in your marketing strategy. To do this, you need to establish a data governance model.
This determines how data is processed: collected, processed, captured, categorized and used for your decision-making process. It also defines data usage mechanisms: who has access to which data, and for what use?
To create a quality data stock, there are several points to consider:
Data accuracy and completeness
Is your prospect, customer or supplier information complete? Do the files still have blanks? Are they consistent wherever you store and use them?
Data validity
Data can be considered valid when it no longer contains any errors and is the same everywhere. We need to create standards, such as using a full address or an abbreviation. Example: Avenue and Av.
Data update
Regular updates and use of the latest information are essential to ensure its accuracy and effectiveness.
Data availability and traceability
Thanks to DOOD’s all-in-one platform, you can access every type of information and trace its source from a single interface. This will prevent you from ending up with useless data.
Why should retailers use data management?
Data management is a real growth driver for local retailers. This strategy offers many advantages:
- Sell more effectively thanks to precise targeting and a customized offer based on each customer’s usual behaviors and needs.
- Optimize customer relations by creating personalized exchanges for each profile, whether in your physical store, on your e-commerce site, on your marketplace or through social networks. You have the chance to build stronger ties with them.
- Improve the customer experience, because every individual has his or her own preferences and buying habits.
- Optimize your resources, since you save time by avoiding going down the wrong track with non-quality data.
- Anticipate risks in this ever-changing market.
Using qualified, verified, recent and detailed customer data enables you to improve your marketing strategies and naturally increase your ROI.