For most retailers, the holiday season is their busiest time of year. It’s when they have their largest number of transactions and their largest sales dollars. As consumers head to physical and online stores to purchase gifts, decorations, and more, a massive influx of data is generated. This surge in data across all areas of a retailer’s business – customer, marketing, inventory, fulfillment – poses both a challenge and an opportunity for retailers to optimize their marketing campaigns, enhance customer experiences, and drive profits. The role of a composable data platform is to help ingest, model, and activate this huge amount of data, and adding a composable data platform to your data tech stack ensures a seamless and successful holiday strategy.
Composable Data Platforms
Composable data platforms break down data into modules that can be easily integrated and adapted to meet specific business initiatives, which allows for flexibility, scalability, and agility in data storage, management, and analysis. Instead of relying on closed, proprietary data architectures, retailers who adopt composable data platforms can quickly adapt to changing business needs and maximize the value of all their data – especially their first-party data at this critical time of year.
The Holidays Create a Data Deluge
As the holiday season begins, retailers experience an exponential increase in data across all of their various channels and sources – in-store transitions, online sales, customer services, paid advertisements, social media, fulfillment, and more. Harnessing this deluge of holiday data is critical to understanding where opportunities exist to quickly and effectively personalize marketing for different customer segments, impact consumer behaviors, optimize inventory, and streamline fulfillment during the most important sales season of the year.
The Benefits of a Composable Data Platform for Retail Holiday Readiness
1. Flexibility and Scalability
Composable data platforms allow retailers to quickly adjust their data technology stack and analysis processes to address the spikes in data volume and complexity during the holidays. Whether it’s scaling up data storage, data modeling, or data analytics capabilities, the flexibility available with a composable data platform ensures that retailers can handle their surge in data without any disruption or risk to their business.
2. Immediate Insights
Composable data platforms empower retailers to extract immediate insights from their own first-party data. Retailers can analyze sales trends and customer behaviors, monitor inventory levels, and execute pricing strategies in real-time. Agile decision-making and quicker responses to changing retail market dynamics mean happier customers and higher sales.
3. Enhanced Customer Experience
Understanding customer behaviors through composable data platform technology helps retailers personalize marketing efforts, product recommendations, and holiday promotions, which all deliver a more custom and personalized shopping experience. Retailers have the ability to analyze customer behaviors, preferences, and purchase patterns in real-time. Retailers can deliver timely product offers, discounts, and content, directly impacting customer satisfaction and loyalty.
4. Adaptive Marketing Strategies
Composable data platforms help retailers quickly fine-tune their marketing strategies. By analyzing all of their marketing data as it’s being collected, retailers can identify the most effective marketing channels, campaigns, and messaging and ensure that their marketing accurately resonates with their most profitable customers to drive maximum impact on holiday revenue.
5. Increased AOV and CLV = Increased Holiday Profits
Composable data platforms empower retailers to get more insights out of their first-party customer data by helping them understand relationships to ad campaigns, marketing channels, and customer behaviors. The insights gleaned from unified data allow retailers to increase average order value (AOV) and drive customer lifetime value (CLV). A clear view into the unit economics of your customers, orders, products, and marketing campaigns will immediately drive increased holiday sales and profits.
Composable Data Platforms are the Future of Retail
As retailers continue to face countless challenges and industry evolutions, retailers are constantly being forced to adopt a future-ready approach to their data technology stack and their data analysis strategy. Quickly composable data technology is no longer a nice to have, but it’s now a necessity for any retail brand that is striving to remain competitive, especially during the holiday season. By leveraging the flexibility, agility, and power offered by a composable data platform, retailers of all sizes can elevate their holiday (and business) readiness, optimize marketing and operations, and deliver delightful customer experiences, which all lead to increased revenue and increased repeat customers.
SoundCommerce’s composable data platform is helping retailers like PacSun, Eddie Bauer, and Eberjey drive awesome customer experiences, increased customer lifetime value, and profitable growth, with their own massive amounts of data – from first click to doorstep delivery.