Here’s how retailers can understand the customer lifecycle journey

• In partnership with eTail Asia, Tech Wire Asia had the pleasure to interview Joshua Wilson, Commercial Director at JAPAC for Crimtan on how retailers can leverage their data to understand the customer lifecycle.

In today’s saturated advertising landscape, both online and offline, marketers within the retail industry face the daunting challenge of standing out. As a response to macroeconomic headwinds, brands have started to reevaluate their marketing budgets, seeking to optimize their resources by developing more targeted campaigns based on a deep understanding of their customers’ preferences and desires.

A critical aspect of achieving this objective lies in comprehending customer behavior. By leveraging customer data brands can aim to craft messages that resonate with their target audience, positively influencing their purchasing decisions. Brands must also look at the entire customer lifecycle and foster meaningful engagement rather than simply focus on metrics that don’t give the full picture (CTR being one of them!).

The contemporary customer lifecycle is complicated and ever evolving. While many brands invest heavily in technology to gain a better understanding of their customers, there still exist inefficiencies in the tools employed, resulting in data that can often be limited in value.

To meet these challenges, businesses must employ data intelligently and judiciously. They require a versatile platform that seamlessly integrates with their operations, empowering them with additional value to comprehensively understand their customers. Armed with this knowledge, businesses can strategize and execute campaigns, products, and services to achieve real impact.

The customer lifecycle journey

For Joshua Wilson, Commercial Director, JAPAC for Crimtan, it is all about being relevant to customers today. With the overwhelming content across all devices, businesses will want to cut through the noise to effectively engage with their customers. For this to happen, firstly their ads need to be relevant.

Currently, Wilson highlighted that most businesses, especially retailers, do not know how to understand, collate, store and segment data in a privacy-first way. Retailers are also not sure how to leverage this data outside of their own ecosystem and are not sure how to use it to their own advantage.

“You need access to quality, consented data. You need to know what someone’s interests are, and then what may influence them (for example, location, financial status, or day of week). Then you need to be able to deliver ads with creative and messaging that reflects this.” said Wilson.

Retailers need to understand the customer lifecycle. And this is where Crimtan focuses on helping brands maximize efficiencies across their customer lifecycle through programmatic advertising.

“Because of our single tech stack and ActiveID, Crimtan’s Cookie-less technology, we’re able to interact with customers outside of limited 30-day (even shorter on Safari) cookie window and help brands drive purchases at all stages of their purchasing journey,” explained Wilson.

The Crimtan way

As programmatic experts, Crimtan recognized the need to address inefficiencies arising from silos within the adtech industry. Its comprehensive platform seamlessly combines multi-channel capabilities, data integration, and dynamic creatives, enabling brands to run programmatic advertising campaigns with a single trusted partner instead of multiple vendors.

As a UK-founded company, Crimtan navigated and prioritized GDPR compliance and addressed the imminent challenges of a cookie-less world, they developed ActiveID, an innovative solution designed to ensure clients are future-proofed.

The foundation of Crimtan’s solution revolves around safeguarding user privacy. As a consumer-first product, the primary focus is to deliver consented and relevant advertising. ActiveID is agnostic, allowing integration with other ID solutions. It can seamlessly plug into clients’ websites and interface with a Consent Management Platform (CMP) of their choice if required. This empowers consumers to determine whether they wish to allow Crimtan to utilize their data for advertising purposes, placing control firmly in their hands.

Crimtan’s platform serves as a key enabler for brands in uncovering their full potential by understanding their customer lifecycle journey. The journey is segmented into three stages: new, convert, and grow. At each stage, Crimtan employs data-driven targeting, creative strategies, and investment techniques to ensure the delivery of the right message, at the right time, and in the right place, to the intended audience. Leveraging their integrated omnichannel technology stack, Crimtan empowers brands to execute these strategies seamlessly and efficiently.

Recognizing the growing importance of artificial intelligence (AI) in the industry, Crimtan has long embraced machine learning (ML) and algorithmic approaches. These elements play a crucial role in algorithmic bidding, optimization processes, decision-making, and feed recommendation engines. While newer technologies such as generative AI are still being explored, Crimtan adopts a hybrid approach, utilizing the best of ML, algorithms, and AI. However, it is the indispensable role of human expertise in their trading and optimization practices that still remain vital to the success of campaign execution.

Drawing the line between customer lifecycle and privacy

While understanding the customer lifecycle gives businesses an advantage, concerns regarding privacy, especially when dealing with customer data always arise. As much as retailers want to understand their customers, they need to be able to know where to draw the line as well, especially with personalization.

For Wilson, there are three reasons why privacy is a hot topic today. The first is legislation. ‘Assumed consent’ is a thing of the past; now there is legislation and policies in place that require ‘explicit consent’ to collect consumer data. The second is the demand from consumers. Consumers are starting to become more savvy about what’s happening on the web. And thirdly, tech companies are finally trying to identify how to work with legislation to accommodate these trends and changes.

Wilson mentioned that because of these reasons, brands and advertisers can no longer take a back seat in this. In fact, in a cookie-less world, it’s even more important for brands to start putting in place marketing strategies that focus on consented advertising, and start testing different, future-proof marketing solutions that best fit the business needs.

“Being a British-founded company, Crimtan has had to navigate through arguably the strictest privacy legislation we have seen – GDPR. We welcomed and championed this change and developed a Consent Management Platform (CMP) and a consent first Cookie-less data tech solution (ActiveID) that helped make sure that our clients were still able to run relevant and personalized campaigns in a compliant way,” he explained.

On that note, Wilson is hoping to hear how brands are continuing to stay relevant and profitable at this point in time at the eTail Asia 2023 summit. With consumer behavior changing dramatically over the past two years, Wilson believes that some of these changes have become permanent.

“eTail Asia is the retail event to attend, and Singapore is finally fully open to the world, so I’m most excited about meeting old industry friends and seeing new faces. Attendees can also look forward to hearing from leading brands and peers on the path they took to remain profitable despite the gloomy economic outlook and tightened marketing budget,” concluded Wilson.

eTail Asia is a premier e-commerce and digital marketing event that offers valuable insights, knowledge sharing, and networking opportunities to industry professionals. eTail Asia brings together some of the brightest minds in the e-commerce industry, including leading retailers, tech innovators, and digital marketers. eTail Asia also offers a platform for industry professionals to connect and build relationships with like-minded individuals.

Attendees have the opportunity to learn from experts through keynote speeches, panel discussions, and workshops as well as connect and build relationships with like-minded individuals.

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