How are you unlocking the power of your transactional data?

What is Transactional Data?

Transactional data is the information recorded from exchanges – usually of money – between people and companies. Transactional data is a broad term that can include everything from purchases and payments to reservations made or interest paid. But here’s the key: we’re not just talking about the shopping behaviors and spending habits of your existing customers. We’re also talking about unlocking powerful insights about your potential customers – even if they’ve never purchased directly from you.

How can marketers learn more about their customers through purchase channels?

The ingestion of transactional data across channels is essential, as it shows the real value of a brand’s marketing initiatives by layering in data about recency/frequency of purchases, spend habits, and products a customer has been focusing on. This data is most powerful when a customer has identified themselves (through loyalty card, phone number, receipt scan, etc.), as their single-view profile continues to grow with purchase history, with a brand’s insights into the customer’s behaviors growing in tandem. As an added value, there are also key insights behind transactions that do not have an identified customer, enabling detailed reporting around key questions like the success of a brand’s new product or the time of day when certain categories become more popular.

The key to truly unlocking the potential of this data is enabling it in real time. This type of speed brings tremendous value in that brands can understand the success of new product launches, 1-to-1 marketing campaigns, and blanket promotions as soon as they happen. Even better, the sooner marketers are aware of the behavior (and associated details), the faster they can react.

Transactional Data in Action

Transactional data supercharges the process of finding and targeting highly relevant audiences within programmatic media, paid social and paid search. Even B2B tech and e-commerce companies can use transactional data – like when a small business buys another marketing technology or a new mother buys diapers – to prospect new audiences based on specific purchases they’ve made with credit cards and within rewards programs.

Here’s an example: Let’s say a customer visits their car dealership and spends money repairing their car. The dealer could then offer other repair services since it’s likely that the car will need further repairs in the future. However, with transactional data insights, they could also correlate outside purchases with the likelihood of a customer choosing to buy a new car and create a personalized offer that would entice that customer segment to purchase a new car from them.

Armed with data-driven insights pulled from patterns and trends in customer external expenditure data and purchase behaviors, the complex digital landscape becomes a virtual playground for marketing executives.

1. Identify valuable audiences: Blend purchase and intent data with predictive modeling to gain a deeper understanding of the customer segments that drive your business.
2. Reach new customers with powerful purchase signals: Reach people who are actively researching and intend to buy new products or services you offer – including those thinking of buying from your competition.
3. Improve multichannel marketing ROI: Glean insights from the data to craft highly personalized messaging that clicks and deliver engaging experiences that convert.

By unlocking the full potential of transactional data, you can orchestrate meaningful customer interactions at each digital touchpoint along the path to purchase. You can place personalized, targeted offers directly in the hands of your ideal customer at the exact moment when they are most likely to make a purchase.

Can I compete without transactional data?

Well, not really. Direct to consumer retailers around the world, from SME’s to multinationals, are all switching on to the commercial power of data-driven marketing. If you do not adopt techniques such as transactional analysis you may see your business decline.

Without transaction analysis, direct to consumer retailers would have no way of knowing who their most valuable customers are, or their least profitable/loss-making. There would be no way to determine the success or failure of direct mail campaigns either, except a simple revenue vs campaign cost measure, which isn’t sophisticated enough.

With transaction analysis, you can determine a campaign’s success and fine-tune it for further improvements. You can also identify your best and worst customers and all the other segments in between, enabling you to target your customers more effectively and at a lower cost.

Measuring and analyzing your own customer data provides a wealth of powerful insights to help you drive greater value for your organization. But…

What if you could see competitors data?

Well, you can! Analytical services do exist that allow direct to consumer retailers to access a ‘competitor universe’. OK, so you cannot dive into the database and grab all of your competitor’s customer records. But you can get a notification if your customer is buying a similar product from a competitor. You can see the customers who are still buying the products you offer, just not from you. You can see where they are going and what they are buying from your competitors. This provides you with a wonderful opportunity to win those customers back with incentivized promotions. You don’t need to convince them to start buying a particular product again, you just need to convince them to buy it from you.

Similarly, accessing universe databases can help you identify prospects who are buying your products, but not from you. Armed with this information you can create acquisition campaigns to bring those customers to your store and away from your competitors.

Finally, by taking your customer location map, you can cross-reference it against a competitive universe to find prospects who live near your outlets but purchase the products you offer from your competitors. With this information, you can devise appropriate communications messages to prise them away from the competition.

How are you unlocking the power of your transactional data?