For many, the purchase journey goes like this: search for a product online then buy it in-store. Since customers don't usually identify themselves in-store, businesses often have the wrong perception of where their customers are in their buying journey. As a result, they frequently target shoppers with online advertisements for products they already purchased.
With 82% of all retail transactions occurring in physical stores, many omnichannel businesses make decisions with incomplete data. Despite their efforts to capture more in-store data, for instance by prompting customers to identify themselves through apps, many retailers still struggle to connect in-store behavior to customers’ online profiles. As a result, marketing teams allocate their budgets with limited visibility on actual customer behavior, only accurately capturing online transactions.
Data Connect for Marketing addresses this issue. It connects cross-channel transactions using unique payment identifiers and creates complete customer profiles, allowing businesses to easily access insights into their customers and recognize them across all channels. This helps them make informed decisions, allocate resources wisely, and deliver unified experiences in today's dynamic environment.
Complete customer profiles with unique payments data
Many retailers rely on loyalty programs or third-party data to generate better insights on their cross-channel transactions. But both options have their limitations.
When it comes to loyalty programs, customers often don’t identify themselves in-store as showing loyalty cards disrupts the checkout flow. What’s more, not all retailers offer loyalty programs and not all customers sign up for them.
Alternatively, businesses can buy third-party data to connect the dots. But these data sets provide generic insights for a broad demographic, failing to offer a detailed picture of a particular customer’s shopping behavior.
Data Connect unlocks a new opportunity for businesses to use first-party payments data to build 360-degree customer profiles and build their marketing strategies using accurate insights. Using payments data makes it possible to link previously unidentified transactions to customers, gain unique cross-channel insights, and drive more value, all while ensuring shopper privacy.
Adyen complies with data protection regulations, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards. So businesses can use first-party payments data and securely enhance customer experiences with Data Connect for Marketing.
Three ways to drive marketing optimization using Data Connect
Data Connect gives you a unified customer view, helping you identify customer lifetime value (CLV), target shoppers better, and build loyalty.
Identify real customer lifetime value
CLV is a crucial metric when deciding customer acquisition strategies. Acquisition budgets and profitability are calculated based on customers' purchase journeys. To find out how much you want to spend on acquiring a customer, you first need to know what they're worth. This can be difficult if you don't know what customers buy in-store.
CLV is used to identify high-value customers and develop strategies to retain them. Without the right data, there’s a risk of miscalculating CLV. This can lead to misallocated resources and lost revenue as businesses may invest less in acquiring or retaining valuable customers, resulting in higher churn and missed revenue opportunities. Alternatively, they may invest too much in less valuable customers.
This was the challenge faced by one of our global quick service restaurant customers. Only 15% of their in-store transactions were linked to registered customer profiles. With Data Connect for Marketing, they were able to link 2 million unidentified transactions to registered customer profiles, improving their customer recognition by 48% and helping them identify their real CLV.
Segment and target your customers better
Businesses need to know as much as possible about their customers to create relevant campaigns that build lasting relationships. In other words, they need to accurately segment their customers and understand who is who to target them better.
By using payments data to recognize customers across all channels, you can make sure your money goes to targeting the right people with the right ads.
One of our European fashion retail customers with stores in 10+ countries previously used third-party data for customer segmentation. They segmented their customers into VIPs (high-paying customers) and customers likely to churn. With Data Connect, they realized that the proportion of their customers who are likely to churn was 13.9% instead of 4% as they previously calculated. These customers were soon added to a retention campaign, resulting in many individuals resuming their activity as shoppers once more.
Data Connect also helped AWWG, the fashion group behind global brands like Pepe Jeans London, Hackett, and Façonnable, in creating unified customer profiles to add customers to the right targeting campaigns.
With a complete data set, you can optimize your advertising efforts and offer your customers personalized experiences. Customers who already bought a specific product in-store can be identified and excluded from online retargeting campaigns for that product. Instead, you can target them for other products. This way you increase email conversion as the emails you send will target customers with products they actually want.
Enhance your loyalty program
Customer loyalty becomes important during times of uncertainty. During 2022, 42% of retailers saw a decrease in loyalty due to rising inflation and not offering the products and services that customers actually want.
Maintaining strong loyalty programs is difficult, especially when businesses struggle to identify loyal customers in-store and must rely instead on incomplete data to offer personalized experiences.
Data Connect is a great addition to loyalty programs as it helps create complete customer profiles. Data Connect captures all payments data in one place. It makes it easy to track customer behavior and assign loyalty points, whether the purchase is online or in-store, and offers benefits such as:
Saving years in understanding customers: You can look back until March 1, 2020, and retroactively add transactions to customer profiles. This means a customer can sign up for a loyalty program today, and all their previous transactions will be added to their profile.
Deduplicate customers with multiple memberships and registered accounts: You can identify and eliminate duplicate entries or records related to the same customer. This gives you a more accurate and consolidated view of your customer base, avoiding redundancy and potential confusion.
AWWG used Data Connect to understand their customers better and create complete customer profiles:
Turn transactions into customer profiles
Data Connect for Marketing is the next step for businesses that want to unlock a new opportunity to build a 360-degree customer view and drive more value.
A 360-degree customer view is only valuable when you use it to provide superior customer experiences. Data Connect for Marketing integrates with your marketing stacks, such as your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Customer Data Platform (CDP), through a plug-and-play integration. This lets you take action on these insights easily and achieve your marketing ambitions faster.
This is how Fortnum and Mason see it:
Are you ready to make smarter marketing decisions with payments data? Learn more about Data Connect for Marketing.
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