More than perhaps any other industry, retail has faced an extensive shakeup with changing business models. Native online retailers have grown by leaps and bounds, while legacy brands with large physical footprints have experienced consistent falling sales. What has driven this change is the ability for online-only brands to personalize the customer experience based on past history and a number of other technological advancements.
This does not mean that traditional retailers are out of luck. Retailers that adopt an omnichannel approach to customer engagement find that they can more readily compete against the likes of Amazon and other native digital retailers. A focus on omnichannel retailing, where digital and physical channels are merged into a unified customer journey, can drive greater share-of-wallet and increased loyalty versus focusing on a single channel. Consider that engaged shoppers spend $373 per shopping trip versus only $289 per trip for actively disengaged shoppers.
To create an effective omnichannel experience, however, brands must be able to identify individual customers across channels and blend that data into a unified customer profile. Achieving this goal requires strong identity resolution capabilities, which leverage a combination of deterministic and probabilistic matching techniques to unify customer data across channels and devices. Three of the most important ways identity resolution supports omnichannel retailing are by:
Traditional retailers will need to leverage all the digital and physical assets at their disposal if they wish to compete against native online retailers like Amazon. Identity resolution capabilities are a key component of success in omnichannel retailing, empowering retail marketers with the ability to create unified customer profiles, interact with customers across channels, and ensure data consistency regardless of channel or function.
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