In the fast-moving world of retail marketing, business and brands, personalisation and bespoke messaging play an important role in helping retailers retain customers, build trust with their audiences and stay relevant.
When businesses use the plethora of data they invariably have at their fingertips to show they understand what people are looking for, customers feel valued and appreciated – essentially; they feel ‘seen’.
Used in the right way, this builds connections with consumers and customises their experience, leading to higher engagement rates, increased loyalty and repeat business. After all, we all like to feel special from time to time – and customers are no different.
With so much at stake, it’s fair to say that personalisation is key to many brand marketing strategies, as Boots’ UK omni-media director Ollie Shayer is quick to attest.
Talking at London’s MAD//Fest earlier this month, Shayer said that staying ahead in marketing requires a deep understanding of innovation and personalisation – both of which can drastically improve a marketing campaign’s chances of success.
Data-driven insights are key, he explained, to shaping personalised experiences that will actually resonate with a brand’s intended target audience. After all, if a brand doesn’t take the time to get to know its customers and understand their wants and needs, can it truly deliver targeted, personalised campaigns that will genuinely connect with people?
“All too often the customer experience is disconnected and represents an organisational structure rather than helping a customer make progress along their journey,” Shayer said, clearly laying out why personalisation is so vital to a successful campaign.
“In the end, the customer only sees one experience, and only together do they represent the overall customer experience.”
Data, loyalty and retail media
With retail media forecast to become a £100 billion industry by 2025, the way multinational retail brands like Boots operate is a shining example of how a modern marketing machine can harness the latest developments in data technology, delving right into the heart of what makes its customers tick.
This is of course in no small part down to the roughly 15 million active users of its flagship loyalty programme the Advantage Card, arguably one the most iconic and widespread programmes of its kind in the UK, rivalling Tesco’s Clubcard and Sainsbury’s Nectar card.
One example of the innovative ways Boots has used personalisation to help advertisers hone their content is by merging its Advantage Card customer data with Channel 4’s VOD platform. The new offering allows the retailer to target customers more accurately using the channel’s on-demand streaming platform – a move which Shayer described as a “significant milestone” in the Boots UK retail media journey.
Subscribe to Marketing Beat for free
Sign up here to get the latest agency-related news sent straight to your inbox each morning
Using software firm Infosum’s ‘data clean room’ technology, 24 million users of Channel 4’s VOD service have been successfully matched to their respective Boots Advantage Card accounts, a move which Shayer said “demonstrated commitment to innovation and a shared belief that data-driven marketing is the future of advertising”.
He added that the brands and advertisers were now “confident that this new offering would be a game-changer, and that they were excited to see the results as they roll it out”.
Boots agency service
Boots Media Group (BMG) is a full-service advertising offer which is available for all of the retailer’s supplier brands, allowing them to capitalise on Boots’ unrivalled data capability.
Rooted in insights and first-party data, BMG allows brands to deliver connected marketing campaigns to Boots UK customers. It tackles the retail media space head-on, making the most of Boots’ store estate and customer insight to offer brands the chance to create personalised and engaging advertising experiences across the physical and digital space simultaneously.
Fuelled by Boots’ Advantage Card data, the sophisticated marketing campaigns are also tailored to and measured against brands’ key objectives, meaning brands are able precisely target exactly the audience they are speaking to, ultimately maximising any return on their advertising investment.
Shayer sees the BMG as a “true agency service” in which suppliers are treated as clients, and everyone is working collaboratively to harness the “scale, reach, data, connectivity and brand equity of Boots in order to achieve high-performing campaigns that resonate with Boots customers”.
The science of personalisation
Over the last decade, personalisation has become increasingly important to winning over customers, but a number of factors have also led to retailers like Boots accelerating their personalisation journeys. The deprecation of third-party cookies and the implementation of GDPR have, Shayer said, entirely redrawn how marketers can gather data.
However, rapid advances in technology have also led to better activation of first-party data, more accurate measurement of a campaign’s impact and the sheer rise in the volume of addressable channels – all of which have given marketers myriad new opportunities to reach customers.
When deciding precisely how to target its customer, Shayer explains that three main criteria come into play for Boots: life stage, lifestyle and shopping behaviour.
These go on to ultimately inform the four principal aspects of the retailer’s personalisation strategy; being guided by insight into customer behaviour, defining a precise target audience, selecting the right channels and accurate, integrated measurement solutions to help tailor future campaigns.
These data-driven insights and customer segmentation all help shape super-personalised experiences that will resonate with target audiences and, ultimately, help drive the most impactful marketing strategy possible.
In conclusion, Shayer highlighted that, used correctly, personalisation can be a key driver for growth, but it should be customer-focused and not tech-obsessed, and that it will continue to evolve under AI in the coming decades.
Crucially, he also said that innovation should be a cultural mindset which permeates the business – and that ultimately – if a brand is truly seeking to understand its customer – failure to innovate and react to constant change cannot be an option.
