Holiday Retail: A Perfect Setting for Analytics Use

At the end of every year, retailers all over the world in virtually every single segment of the industry gear up for the accelerated pace of the holiday shopping season.

At the end of every year, retailers all over the world in virtually every single segment of the industry gear up for the accelerated pace of the holiday shopping season. The combination of the holidays themselves – all of which center around gift-giving in some fashion – and sale-heavy retail occasions like Black Friday and Cyber Monday makes for an amazing opportunity to bring in record sales figures from new and loyal customers alike. 

In preparation for the inevitable rush that just about every retail business is about to experience, it will behoove company leaders to do everything they can to not only attract consumer attention during this season, but also to lay the foundations for bringing in new customers who will become loyal buyers. Big data and analytics can be ideal tools for accomplishing this goal. Retailers who might be skeptical about analytics use – or are simply unfamiliar with such platforms – would do well to examine concrete examples of how businesses have successfully leveraged business intelligence software and related methods.

Targeting through personalization
Holiday retail requires businesses to walk a delicate line, in terms of how they market themselves. These sales occasions require considerable scale – attractive discounts, new and expanded product selections, rewards programs and the like – but nevertheless necessitate that retailers consider the personal element of such commerce. If vendors fail to reach consumers on a personal level and treat them as transaction opportunities rather than individual people, it can be detrimental in the long run. 

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According to SmartDataCollective, aggregating and examining big data that is derived from multiple business channels – brick-and-mortar, online and mobile – afford retailers the best opportunity to develop stores of full and nuanced customer information. This can then be used to craft advertisements that speak to what consumers want out of their holiday shopping experience and on an overall level.

Offering rewards
Additionally, circling back to the idea of rewards programs, the source states that analytics can serve as a foundation for those initiatives, noting that Sears recently found success with such a venture. The wide availability of BI software tools ensures that retailers of any size can collect and look at purchase histories and other relevant customer data to decide which perks to emphasize to which customers during holiday sales and determine what deals will be most enticing to the widest audience.