Five steps retailers can take to improve full-funnel advertising

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As a retailer, you likely have access to a plethora of 1st party data but maximizing the value of that data can be overwhelming. Between email and retargeting campaigns, ROI may look good, but you can't shake the feeling that you're not reaching all of your buyers, and prospecting new customers can be a shot in the dark. Never fear; Oracle has outlined the top 5 steps to improve full-funnel marketing effectiveness, from extending your 1st party audience reach to optimizing your ad campaigns towards initiatives that move the needle.

Maximize the reach of your customer data

As retailers, you own the direct relationship with shoppers, and many of those customers have opted-in for you to stay in touch, share personalized promotions, and advertise your latest new products and services that may be of interest. However, finding and reaching those customers in paid media channels using your 1st party data is sometimes easier said than done.

Advertisers and marketers utilize innumerable customer identifiers throughout today's digital world, often leading to poor match rates across paid media. For example, the home phone number you utilize for loyalty rewards may not match the cell number you have tied to Facebook, or the email account you recently used to buy new bar stools can't tie you to the old email in your New York Times subscription profile. The smaller the match rate, the smaller your audience, causing your advertising message to be disjointed across digital channels and leaving money on the table by not reaching your high-value customers or suppressing recent purchasers.

Speaking of digital channels, gone are the days when you could consistently reach all shoppers using one big social platform, a direct publisher buy, and a mass market vehicle like linear TV. Today's consumers have more choices on where, when, and how they consume media - ranging from a host of social networks, streaming music, podcasts, the open web, new subscription TV networks popping up every day, and more. They often use a dozen or more news and entertainment vehicles daily. To engage all your shoppers, you will likely need to deploy your 1st party data across many of these channels concurrently, frequently testing into new environments to determine what performs best for each tactic and consumer segment.

To solve both challenges, rather than trying to manually upload 1st party data directly into each media platform, advertisers can use an onboarding partner with an identity graph to improve match rates and expand audience reach. For example, when retailers upload their customer data into Oracle OnRamp or Oracle's new Data Collaboration Platform (DCP), our Identity Graph can often connect identifiers with a 90% or more match rate. With over 30 internal and external identity linkage partners and household extension options, Oracle Advertising can match retailers to their customers at higher rates across the digital ecosystem. Oracle's tech stack also encourages you to leverage your own data everywhere you choose, rather than penalizing you with hidden fees for each new advertising destination, pivotal for a marketer's budget and learning agenda.

Garner richer insight into your customer's behavior

Just reaching your customer isn't enough; advertisers need to make sure that their messages resonate with shopper segments and that the ads they deliver capture attention. While some retailers may have built tools to gain insight into shopper preferences inside their stores, that doesn't always paint the complete picture of their consumers – where else do they shop, what is the household composition, what are their interests and hobbies, etc. These gaps can be filled by leveraging external insights within Oracle Advertising's onboarding and collaboration tools. By utilizing external data to complement a retailer's 1st party data, advertisers can better understand nuanced differences between their shopper segments, improve ad creative, and even enrich their customer profiles for better one-to-one marketing.

Retailers can go beyond advertising use cases with Oracle's Data Enrichment product, which appends known attributes, characteristics, purchase behaviors and demographics at the individual level. This allows retailers to segment consumers granularly, prioritize investments by the individual, improve product and sales decisions, identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and personalize their singular experience cross-channel, reducing attrition by enhancing their overall customer experience.

Improve prospecting efforts by leveraging purchase data

For retailers, utilizing 1st party customer data is one of the most effective ways to reach and engage shoppers through media channels. However, more than that data is needed to help solve the critical objective of finding new customers and driving conversion. To help with upper funnel strategies, external audiences allow retailers to efficiently find individuals who are most likely to convert or have the potential for a high customer lifetime value.

With Audiences by Oracle, advertisers can tap into SKU-level purchase behaviors from hundreds of retailers to find top spenders, frequent shoppers, lapsed buyers, and more. Alternatively, marketers can leverage 1st party data to build custom-modeled audiences that closely resemble the retailers' shoppers. At Oracle, we pair our foundation in offline data with 1st party data to help brands find new customers who look, act, and spend like their best. By utilizing our holistic customer data points, such as demographics, lifestyle, and purchase habits, our technology can identify top shopper cohorts and then score this data against nearly the entire US population, delivering a customized prospecting audience with both precision and reach.

Another prospecting tactic that may not automatically come to mind when thinking of purchase data is contextual targeting. Standard context - segments that surround a particular content theme – is not what we're referring to. Oracle recently developed Content Affinity Targeting, which leverages data from known audiences to prospect consumers contextually. This new form of privacy-centric targeting pairs our history on offline and online data assets with our proprietary Contextual Intelligence algorithm to create a data-backed contextual segment based on what a given audience views online.

Engage in data collaboration

The idea of data collaboration between retailers, brands, and media partners is nothing new; however, online and offline use cases are expanding every day, and the ways we most efficiently and securely collaborate are evolving.

For example, one of the most impactful advertising vehicles for retailers is printing and shipping physical catalogs. To improve ROI on these direct-mail efforts, many retailers collaborate through third-party partnerships like Oracle's Retail Co-Op - a pioneer in the data collaboration for over 20 years. By allowing retailers to combine their data with hundreds of other retail contributors anonymously, brands are able to expand their reach, gain category insights, and optimize their mailing lists towards responsive households.

Similar concepts apply in the digital world, where various partners collaborate to improve ad targeting, customer insights, campaign measurement, and data monetization through technologies like clean rooms, identity graphs, and machine learning. Every retailer and their partners are likely engaging in some of these practices today, but with the demise of cookies and increased concern about consumer privacy, data collaboration will become a core part of daily operations.

Create a learning agenda, then optimize

As retailers set out to gain customers through advertising, they may also create learning agendas to help strategically optimize future campaigns. Optimization levers can be determined through campaign measurement and reporting, but where retailers get this data can be a point of contention.

While many platforms and publishers provide campaign feedback or reporting, choosing an agnostic measurement partner is essential to building trust and transparency with partners and giving advertisers an overarching look into performance across channels. Oracle Moat Measurement has over ten years of innovation with over 200 attention metrics to ensure advertisers are well-equipped to optimize their ad campaigns. Our platform-agnostic measurement reporting offers a picture of performance with varying levels of granularity and delivery methods to meet retail advertisers' needs and put them in the driver’s seat.

Additionally, with the rise of Retail Media Networks, many retailers are finding themselves in the role of ad sellers rather than just ad buyers. With a legacy of helping publishers optimize and monetize their inventory and providing the much-needed independent verification measurement that buyers have come to expect, Oracle Moat can help you take your RMN to the next level.

Where to go from here

As a retailer, you likely have access to a plethora of first-party data, but maximizing the value of that data can be overwhelming. In addition to leveraging the above five steps to improve full funnel effectiveness, partner with your dedicated Oracle Advertising team to learn more about your customers and leverage targeting and measurement optimizations.