How To Augment Customer Experience With Omnichannel Personalization

Omnichannel personalized marketing is no longer just “nice to have” in today’s marketplace, especially with customer experience becoming a key brand differentiator.

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Consumers are now interacting with brands across multiple channels. Not only do they expect relevant content but they also want the ability to “pick up where they left off” when they switch from one channel to another.

Many retailers consider implementing omnichannel personalization as one of the key strategies to generate growth and increase revenue through providing a customer-centric brand experience. In fact, many retailers see an increase in revenue and new customer conversion rate when they start offering personalized customer experience.

A study by Invesp has shown that personalization has been proven to improve customer loyalty and increase conversion:

  • 53% of online shoppers consider customization valuable.
  • 45% of shoppers prefer to shop on sites offering personalized recommendations.
  • Personalized ads have a conversion rate 10 times higher than “one-size-fits-all” ads.

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However, there are many moving pieces to ensure the successful implementation of such strategy, including the collection, integration, and synthesis of a large amount of customer data and the ability to turn it into actionable insights.

Thankfully, there are many tools you can use to help gather customer data and apply them to improve customer experience. Here are a few helpful features to look for:

Customer Data Management (CDM)

Information on your customers’ behaviors and preferences will help you cultivate relationships and increase retention rate. Data collection is the first step to implementing a personalization strategy.

To see CDM in action, look no further than online retail giant Amazon.com. Customer information is collected and utilized for making recommendations that leads to increase in sales, as well as improving customer relationships with more personal services.

To get the most out of your customer data, you should:

  • Decide on the critical data to collect so you don’t end up having to parse through irrelevant information
  • Clean up your data to avoid duplication
  • Funnel all information into one centralized database to construct 360° customer profiles
  • Avoid siloed internal practice and encourage collaboration between departments
  • Make the information and customer profiles easily accessible to sales personnel in the field.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

After you have constructed 360° Customer Profiles that aggregate your customers’ unique preferences, brand interactions, and habits, it’s time to take that information to the next level.

You can leverage the analytics capabilities of your software to make data-backed business decisions based on the level of brand interaction and projected lifetime value of each of your individual customers.

To leverage the power of CRM, follow these best practices:

  • Create targeted content for specific customer segment to help your brand stay relevant and top of mind. For example, P&G developed the Being Girl microsite to share relevant content with a specific customer segment
  • Use geo-location to target customers who are in the vicinity of a physical store
  • Learn customer habits and preferences to create offers and deliver services that are timely, customized, and relevant
  • Implement Omnichannel marketing and customer care to deliver a seamless customer experience across all touch points

Automated Personalization

You can also leverage the information about your customers to create personalized campaigns and communications that help you deliver the most relevant information to specific customer segments in a timely manner.

This will not only allow you to nurture customer relationships and improve retention rate but also entice new customers to engage with your business by sending out highly relevant offers at the critical moments of their customer journey.

These are some of the ways you can leverage automated personalization to increase sales:

  • Segment and target high-quality leads that are likely to convert
  • Implement personalized lead nurturing campaigns to deliver the most relevant content and offers
  • Increase customer lifetime value by improving customer satisfaction and loyalty with relevant offers
  • Leverage your social media presence to deliver a seamless experience that moves customer along their purchasing path

The Best Marketing Speaks To What Makes Your Customers Tick

The effectiveness of one-size-fits-all marketing messages is plummeting as consumers are becoming increasingly savvy and expect for customized content and offers from brands.

As a marketer, you need to deliver a personalized customer experience across all channels and make sure your copy, content, and offer are highly relevant while appearing in front of your audience in the right place at the right time to get the highest ROI on your marketing budget.

4 Ways to Increase Seasonal Sales With Personalized Content on Social Media

How to use personalization technologies to drive more traffic and increase sales

Consumers are bombarded with marketing messages from retailers during holidays and seasonal occasions. They’re more selective about the brands they engage with and purchase from.

In fact, 63% of consumers are annoyed by repeated generic advertising messages. On the other hand, 79% of the companies that exceed their revenue goals use personalized marketing to reach their customers.

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Personalized marketing is the key to increasing conversion, and social media platforms offer a lot of opportunities for retailers to leverage the latest personalization technologies to boost revenue.

Here are 4 ways to use personalize content on social media:

 

1. Segment your audience

The foundation of any personalization strategy is to understand the preferences, behaviors, and habits of your target market. Social media marketing allows you to leverage customer data and segment your audience at a granular level so you can deliver timely and relevant messages.

In addition, your content should relate to the audiences’ customer lifecycle stages. During seasonal occasions, many consumers would actively research products and make purchasing decisions. Your posts should provide the relevant information to shoppers with a high purchase intent.

 

2. Focus on one-to-one interactions

Consumers want meaningful interactions with brands. Instead of constantly selling your products, focus on being helpful and relevant to build trust and relationships with your audience.

Monitor all your social media profiles to ensure that you’re answering inquiries or comments in a timely manner. In addition, engage your followers in meaningful conversations — for example, you can ask a question, take a poll, or tag your loyal customers for more personalized interactions.

 

3. Leverage the power of conversational selling with messaging apps

Messaging apps are popular among consumers, and brands are using these features (e.g., Facebook Messenger) to tap into the power of conversational marketing.

With the aid of AI technologies, it’s now possible to deliver highly personalized shopping experiences at scale via messaging apps. You can combine consumer data available on social media marketing platforms with your customer database to deliver meaningful interactions that’ll drive engagement and conversion.  

 

4. Use retargeting ads to reduce cart abandonment

Sales lost due to cart abandonment is a particularly acute challenge during the holiday season and merchants can recover some of these sales by using retargeting ads to re-engage shoppers on social media.    

For example, you can use Facebook dynamic ads to show the exact product a customer has viewed on your website. You can segment the target audience to deliver a highly personalized message or a special offer to increase your conversion rate.

 

Increase the effectiveness of personalized content with customer data

While social media platforms allow you to access a large amount of user data, you can augment the effectiveness of the content by layering on your own customer data to deliver the most relevant and timely information.

By using a robust customer data management platform that supports multi-channel campaigns, you can leverage your database to reach shoppers that are most likely to make a purchase.

Request a demo today to see how our unique personalization solution can help you increase seasonal sales on social media.

4 Healthcare Marketing Trends You Can’t Afford to Ignore

How to improve patient acquisition and retention for your medical practice or healthcare facility.

The healthcare industry has been going through a massive change. With the dramatic shift in health insurance policies and consumer behaviors, patients are stepping up to take better control of their healthcare choices.

In addition to this, as more patients are covering a larger portion of their healthcare bills, providers need to put more efforts into marketing directly to consumers.

Here are the latest healthcare marketing strategies to help you meet the fast-evolving patient expectations while improving patient acquisition and retention.

4 latest marketing trends in the healthcare industry

The key to attracting more patients to your medical practice or healthcare facility is to deliver an outstanding patient experience. Here’s what successful healthcare marketers are doing to succeed:

1. A patient-centric online portal

Consumers are now accustomed to managing their relationships with retailers and service providers via a robust online platform.

You need to offer a sophisticated, secure, and user-friendly patient portal that can handle most of the day-to-day patient interactions, such as paying bills, making appointments, checking test results, ordering prescription renewals, obtaining medical histories, and even conducting virtual consultations.


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2. A search-engine optimized website

Consumers are now more comfortable with using online searches to look for a medical facility or a healthcare provider.

Your website needs to be optimized for local SEO so it’ll show up in the “local pack” at the top of the search result pages when users search for “_________ near me.” You can also build backlinks and drive more traffic by getting online reviews on Google and third-party websites.


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As digital assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are gaining popularity, more than 50% of searches will be voice-based by 2020 — your website content needs to be optimized for voice search. You can do this by focusing on long-tail key terms, using patients’ language, and providing local information.

3. Real-time patient support and interaction

With the latest customer support technologies, consumers are used to getting their questions answered and problems resolved in real time.

Providing best-in-class support is the key to improving your patient acquisition and retention rate. Make sure patients can contact your team via multiple channels such as email, text, phone, social media, and live chat.

In addition to this, don’t just interact with your patients only when there’s a problem! You can use the same channels to increase their engagement with your brand by sharing valuable content and gathering feedback.

4. Marketing automation and personalization

Consumers expect relevant content, information, and offers from their service providers. You can use marketing automation and segmentation strategies to deliver a highly personalized experience that meets patient expectations, increases engagement, and improves retention.

A robust marketing personalization platform allows you to deliver an omnichannel patient experience through multiple touchpoints, such as email, social media, text messages, printed materials, and so on to provide the most relevant and helpful content so you stay top of mind.

Hyper-personalization will drive the future of healthcare marketing. Request a demo to see how you can use our robust customer data management system to unlock the power of this marketing strategy.

4 Ways To Use Personalization For Healthcare Marketing

Apply marketing personalization to augment patient experience and improve patient retention.

The healthcare industry is becoming increasingly competitive while patients expect interactions with a provider to resemble other consumer experiences.

In order to stand out from your competition, as well as to attract and retain more patients, your medical practice needs to deliver an excellent patient experience that makes receiving care from you convenient and seamless.

With the aid of advanced marketing technologies, many businesses are now delivering personalized user experiences that have helped them increase customer acquisition and retention.

These strategies can be applied to the healthcare industry as well and here’s how you can augment your patient experience:

1. Personalized website content

Sharing helpful and relevant content with your audience and patients can help build trust and relationships. In addition, users are more likely to return to and engage with your website if they can find what they need easily.

You can program your website to show customized information and make content recommendations to the visitors based on a variety of criteria. For example, the search terms they use, the links they click on, the pages they have visited, or in the case of registered users, their medical histories and preferences.

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2. Customized patient portal

More and more consumers prefer to manage their relationships with service providers online via a self-service portal. A customizable patient portal can help you deliver a seamless experience that’ll improve patient retention, reduce errors, and lower administrative cost.

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Deliver a fast and convenient experience by incorporating each user’s medical history, preferences, and other personal data into the patient portal experience. Posting reminders and offering the ability to schedule an appointment, pay invoices using saved payment information, and order prescription refills are a few examples of this.

3. Targeted email marketing

Marketing automation and email personalization have been proven to generate an ROI of as high as 400% when combined with proper segmentation and content targeting strategies.

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By sharing targeted content that’s most relevant to each recipient, you can stay top of mind and nurture relationships with your audience. Such content can include information on specific medical conditions, event announcements, and seasonal resources.

You can also improve patient retention or re-engage lapsed patients by sending out reminders for regular checkups or vaccination visits and make it easy for users to set up an appointment through your online portal.

4. Omnichannel patient support

Consumers want to interact with businesses through their preferred touchpoints and be able to “pick up where they left off” if they switch channels in a middle of an interaction.

They also expect such interactions to take their histories and preferences into account so they can receive personalized content, recommendations, and solutions.

By using a customer data management platform, you can set up a single customer view to facilitate patient communications and ensure that your team is accessing the latest information in real-time to provide the best support possible to improve patient satisfaction.

How To Design a Personalization Marketing Strategy For the Healthcare Industry

4 keys to increasing patient acquisition and retention with personalized content and offers.

Personalization has become one of the most effective marketing strategies for any business to improve customer acquisition and retention by increasing audience engagement and building relationships

It’s no different in the healthcare industry. In fact, with an overwhelming amount of health-related information available, it is now more important than ever to deliver content and services that are helpful and relevant to your patients.

Here are some essential steps to designing a personalization marketing strategy for your healthcare practice:

1. Create personas and map out the buyer’s journey

The first step to successful personalized marketing is understanding your audience by creating a series of buyer personas. 

These personas help you identify your patients’ priorities, the questions they have, the language they use, and their main concerns so you can design communications that speak to them. You can leverage this information for creating your content, designing your offers, and setting up your promotional strategies.

You also need to understand where your patients are in their decision-making process; for instance  they could be researching a medical condition, looking for a provider, or ready to schedule a visit. You can deliver the most relevant content and offer at the right time.

2.  Design targeted content and offers

When you have gained a clear understanding of your patients, identified where they get their information, and segmented your audience according to a variety of criteria, such as health conditions, you can then design targeted content and offers to deliver an individualized experience in the right place and at the right time.

Distribute the information and offers through multiple channels, such as personalized website content, emails, phone, printed materials, and social media, based on the patients’ preferences and past interactions with your content to maximize engagement and conversion.

3. Communicate the privacy policy

In a survey, 49% of consumers don’t mind businesses having a certain amount of their information so they can receive content and offers that are more relevant.

However, healthcare services involve more private and personal information than a typical retail business so there’s a fine line to tread when you use patient information to deliver personalized content.

To reinforce trust and patient relationships while distributing targeted content, you need to clearly communicate your privacy policy and how you utilize patient information before adding your patients’ information to your CRM system.

4. Analyze the data to understand user behaviors

There’s no one-size-fits-all personalization strategy and there’s only one way to find out what really works for your market and your practice, and that’s by analyzing the data to understand how your patients interact with your content and respond to your offers.

To effectively implement a marketing personalization strategy, collect patient information, and analyze the data to fine-tune your marketing communications, you need a robust customer data management system that provides you with a single customer view and offers content recommendations.

Request a demo to talk to our personalization expert and see how Nectarom can help you deliver a personalized patient experience.

How AI Is Changing Marketing Personalization

3 ways artificial intelligence is used to augment customer experience

Consumers are facing more choices every day and the sense of overwhelm is often paralyzing. Instead of making a decision, many simply defer making purchases.

In addition, when shoppers aren’t getting the products that are right for them, they’re more likely to return the items. This eventually increases cost and impacts profits.

Using AI-driven technologies, such as machine learning, predictive analytics, and natural language processing, marketers can now leverage customer data and use marketing personalization to offer customized recommendations that help consumers reduce overwhelm and find the most relevant products.

Here’s how AI is changing and improving marketing personalization:

Personalize interactions at the individual level

Accenture found that 41% of U.S. consumers have switched brands due to lack of personalization in their customer experience.

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In the past, most product recommendations were made based on broad-stroke segmentation, static demographic, or transactional data that may or may not be the best fit for each individual customer.

By using AI technologies, marketers can now identify and analyze consumer data from all touch points to offer the most relevant content, products, and services.

Besides basic information, AI can incorporate real-time data such as location, context, and behavior to deliver the most appropriate customer interactions.

For example, by combining location information with a customer’s preferences and past purchases, TGI Friday was able to increase conversion rate by 35%.

Increase the effectiveness of content marketing

Prospects and customers at different stages of their customer journey have unique questions and concerns. You need to deliver the right content to the right place at the right time to effectively move them along the funnel and shorten your sales cycle.

AI-driven technologies can analyze user interactions with your brand on multiple channels in real time and deliver the most relevant content or offer through the most appropriate platform to increase your marketing ROI.

For example, when a prospect has visited your website multiple times, shown interest in content on a particular topic, and reviewed the sales page of a certain product, you can deliver content designed for the consideration or purchase stage to help close the sale.

Improve pre and post-sales customer support

Chatbots often come to mind when we talk about AI and natural language processing. From live chat to messenger apps, chatbots can facilitate pre and post-sales support to increase conversion and improve customer satisfaction.

By programming a series of chatbots to answer specific questions or send complex queries to agents, you can reduce wait time, help shoppers make better purchasing decisions, and provide real-time support to existing customers.

For example, Winne is a chatbot that assists website owners to choose hosting providers. 72% of users who use this bot on Facebook Messenger click through to an affiliate hosting provider.

 

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Effective AI-driven personalization Starts With the Right Customer Data

In order to optimize the use of AI technologies, you need to ensure that your customer information is well-organized in a centralized database and can be updated in real time based on customers’ interactions with your brand.

A robust data management platform (DMP) is the foundation of any effective AI-driven marketing strategy, which allows you to capture meaningful data and extract actionable insights.

To see how our customer data management system and decision engine can help you take marketing personalization to the next level, schedule a demo today.

How To Use Personalization To Optimize Every Stage Of the Customer Lifecycle

Deliver the most impactful message to drive traffic, convert sales, and build customer loyalty

 

The most effective marketing strategies deliver the right message to the right audience in the right place at the right time to drive traffic, build relationships, convert sales, and build customer loyalty.

Understanding your customer lifecycle stages can help target content and deliver a personalized shopping experience to your prospects and customers.

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In this article, we’ll look at the different customer lifecycle stages and how you can optimize your shopping experience:

Define your customer lifecycle stages

The first step is to review your buyer’s journey and define the various lifecycle stages, which may vary slightly depending on your industry and business model. In general, all customers go through the following: the awareness stage, the consideration stage, the decision stage, and the retention stage.

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Apply personalization to customer lifecycle stages

Using a marketing personalization strategy, you can deliver the most relevant content and offers to each customer based on their lifecycle stages:

Awareness stage

Prospects at this stage are searching for a solution to their challenges and may not yet know about your brand.

Based on their browsing behaviors, such as clicking through to your website while performing a search on a particular keyword or reading a few articles on a particular topic on your website, you can recommend more relevant content to build trust and establish brand awareness.

You can also entice visitors to sign up for a lead magnet so that you can capture their information and build a 360-degree customer profile, which will allow you to further understand their preferences, behaviors, and needs for future personalized interactions.

Consideration stage

At the consideration stage, prospects are evaluating the different solution categories for their problems.

You can personalize the website experience to focus on content designed for this stage, such as by providing the pros and cons of each solution category.

They’re also likely to be on your email list, so you can send them personalized emails with links to such content or create a custom audience for your social media ads to promote these links.

Decision/purchase stage

Your prospects have decided on a solution category and they’re deciding who to purchase from.

They have probably visited your website a few times, viewed the sales pages, and researched about your products or services.

Send personalized emails or recommend website content designed for this stage. For instance, you could make use of demo videos, case studies, and testimonials.

You can send cart abandonment emails and include a special offer to entice them to take action.

Leverage pre-sale support, such as live chat, messenger app, or searchable knowledge base, to answer questions, address objections, and deliver a personalized customer experience that will help increase conversion.

Retention/advocacy stage

After your customers have made the purchase, continue to offer a personalized experience to build loyalty, entice them to make recurring purchases, and tell others about your products or services.

You can send personalized emails to share customer-exclusive content, perhaps an email on the different ways of using the products they have purchased, or recommendations and special offers on related and relevant products.

You can also personalize post-sale support by associating customers’ profiles to the products they have purchased so that you can direct them to the most appropriate resources when they log onto their accounts or get in touch with your customer service department.

Customer database: the foundation of effective personalization

A robust customer database is the foundation of an effective personalized experience appropriate for each stage of the customer’s journey.

Our data management platform (DMP) allows you to centralize your omnichannel customer data and organize the information in real-time so you can deliver the most relevant content to your prospects and customers based on their latest interactions with your brand without missing a beat.

GDPR For Marketers: How the New Law Affects Personalization

GDPR helps increase transparency and trust. Here’s what you need to know to stay compliant

For online marketers, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been creating quite a stir.

This new EU law, which will go into effect on May 25, 2018, is designed to give individuals more control over their personal data.

It affects how companies gather and utilize information from their website visitors, prospects, and customers.

In short, marketers aren’t allowed to collect, store, or use the personal data of any European Union (EU) citizen without an explicit consent.

The key areas covered by GDPR include breach notifications, right to access, right to be forgotten, data portability, privacy by design, and the appointment of a data protection officer.

GDPR In the age of personalization

What does GDPR mean for marketers who use a data-driven approach and personalization technologies in their marketing strategies?

Here are a few critical GDPR concepts you need to know when collecting information and obtaining consent:

Legitimate interest

You don’t need permission to obtain or use personal data when there’s legitimate interest behind the request for the information. For example:

  • When a visitor comes to your website and you need to present personalized offers so that you can market to them efficiently.
  • When a shopper is making a purchase and is expected to provide relevant information to complete the transaction.

Permission required for everything else

You can only collect data without explicit consent for the “main action” that visitors are expected to accomplish by providing their information. For anything else, you need permission.

For example, when a customer makes a purchase on your website, you don’t need consent to get the information required to complete the transaction. However, you do need permission if you want to add them to your email list or obtain additional information to personalize marketing messages in the future.

Individual rights

GDPR covers several individual rights, including the right to access, the right to object, and the right to erase.

Under the right to object, individuals can request a company to permanently stop all permission-based marketing and personalized communications. Under the right to erase, individuals can ask to have all their data deleted and be treated as a new user whenever they visit your site. This implies, that on their next visit, they will not see any personalized content.

Make GDPR work for you

GDPR helps increase transparency, which will ultimately help you cultivate more trust with consumers.

Most consumers appreciate personalized content and they’re willing to provide their information to the business that they trust.

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Becoming GDPR-compliant offers an opportunity to clean up your database and obtain the necessary re-permissions.

The process will help you better utilize the existing GDPR-compliant information to segment your audience, create highly targeted groups, and distribute personalized content.

Your liability increases as you collect more data. You should get clear on your personalization strategy and only ask for data that is necessary for effectively communicating with your customers and serving them better.

In addition, ensure that you’re storing the data in a secured centralized customer database so that you can manage the safety of your customer data while leveraging them effectively for your marketing initiatives.

Spring Clean Your Customer Data For Effective Personalization

How to increase the quality of your customer data for effective personalized marketing

Marketing personalization has become an indispensable strategy for retailers who aim to increase sales and improve customer loyalty through the use of targeted content and offers.

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While having the right technology is important, the foundation for implementing an effective personalization strategy is the quality of your customer data.

Without accurate information, you won’t be able to deliver targeted content in the right place at the right time to the right audience.

How to clean up your customer database for effective personalized marketing

It’s important that you regularly clean up your database and audit the sources from which you collect the information to ensure that the customer data is supporting your marketing personalization strategy:

Review web forms

If you’re generating leads by using web forms, ensure that you’re collecting relevant information that helps in targeting your audience effectively.

Consider whether you’re asking for the right kind of data at the right level of detail. Gathering too few details doesn’t allow you to effectively segment your audience while requesting too much information can cause form abandonment.

Audit data fields

Duplicate fields or repetitive information in your customer database can cause errors and confusion.

Ensure that the fields in your customer data management system are set up correctly so that data from web forms, lead generation mechanisms (from your website, social media, or messaging apps), and eCommerce platform is categorized and collated correctly to support your personalized marketing campaigns.

Refine segmentation

Audience segmentation isn’t “set it and forget it.”

Revisit the way you’re segmenting your audience periodically to ensure that it’s supporting your overall marketing strategy.

You can also enhance audience segmentation with the information you gather during the user-interaction sessions with your brand. This includes the products they’re interested in based on their browsing behavior and the questions they ask during a live chat session.

Set up single customer view

To effectively collect and utilize all the available customer data, you need to create a 360-degree customer profile so that the information can be stored in and accessed from a centralized location.

A single customer view allows you to gather relevant customer data and effectively leverage the information to deliver a customer-centric experience through personalization.

Review analytics

There are many different ways to deliver personalized content and offers. Are you leveraging the right customer data to form your strategy?

The best way to find out is to review your analytics and see if your personalization strategy has been effective in driving traffic and generating sales.

If the metrics aren’t meeting your expectations, you’ll have to adjust and test your personalization rules to ensure that you’re using your customer data in a way that helps deliver the most effective content and offers.

Build a solid foundation with a robust customer data management system

After you put in the work to clean up your customer data, ensure that it’s managed and utilized in a way that will help you implement personalization marketing effectively.

A robust customer data management system has become indispensable for marketers who want to use personalization to increase the effectiveness of their omnichannel marketing initiatives.

Request a demo to see how our customer data management system can help you derive customer intelligence and actionable insights so you can make data-driven business decisions and achieve your marketing goals.

 

Using Analytics to Choose Inventory for a New Season

Making purchasing decisions for a store or retail business is a complicated proposition. The decision-making becomes especially complex when you are trying to determine which products deserve permanent shelf space on your store floor; and which need to be discounted or sent back to the warehouse to make room for new inventory. It can also be difficult to know the answer to sourcing questions such as when to respond to trends, how much to purchase of a specific item and what price-points to sell at for maximum profitability. As a result, an increasing number of retailers are relying on predictive analytics to make more informed purchasing decisions. In fact, according to Martech Advisor, 57 percent of B2B marketers said predictive analytics was their “primary tool” for 2017.

Consider the following to learn more about how predictive analytics are helping companies to maximize sales and to make the most of their inventory budgets.

Determine Top-Performing Categories

Before a retailer can begin using predictive analytics to make better purchasing decisions, they have to determine the top-performing categories in their existing inventory. These can be found by collecting data on factors such including: sales numbers their POS system, consumer engagement with product images in specific categories and high-traffic areas on the company’s website. From here, a retailer can determine which categories are the most profitable, as well as what categories could be expanded to increase future sales.

Forecast Future Seasonal Inventory

Once a retailer knows where to expand their existing inventory, it is time to measure seasonal sales from past years against current industry trends to forecast seasonal sales. This helps determine how large of an order to place for a specific item, as well as where to take a well-calculated risk with a new trend or category. Targeted purchasing recommendations can be derived from this information, so retailers can order only what they need, when they need it – thus boosting seasonal sales and reducing the risk of end-of-the-season discounting.

 Adjust Strategy Where Necessary  

The capabilities of predictive analytics don’t stop once a retailer rolls out their new inventory. Analytics-based software monitors and reports on sales performance, so retailers can keep track of which seasonal inventory categories are the most successful and make modifications to their orders whenever necessary. This means that only the best-selling merchandise gets a place on the show floor. Since NectarOM uses the “Test and Learn” method, we are able to quickly respond to sales activity, so that clients can adapt their purchasing strategy in order to augment ROI.

Keeping Abreast of Trends 

It is essential for retailers to utilize predictive analytics when making seasonal purchasing decisions to remain competitive. In fact, Martech Advisor reports that 82 percent of B2B companies used predictive analytics in last year – and of the companies who did not, 67 percent intend to implement predictive analytics in 2018. It is not only important for retailers to have access to the consumer data, but also to have data-based forecasting software which enables them to quickly respond to industry trends and customer behavior. At NectarOM, we provide clients with software with real-time reporting capabilities that clearly outline actionable recommendations – so they can amplify seasonal sales and adjust to changing consumer preferences.