The Personalization Opportunity In Retail: Insights From Industry Experts

Previously published on our LinkedIn newsletter

According to Forrester, 86% of retailers say their customers demand more personalized experiences than ever before. Yet, 54% of retailers struggle to provide consistently relevant advertising to consumers. 

Relevance in retail is a win/ win for both the consumers and the brands. For consumers, the right message served at the right time creates a better experience and that bodes well for retailers and brands alike. 

How can brands and retailers ace the personalization game?  

In a recent webinar we hosted with AdAge, guests from Leap Media, Giant Eagle’s retail media arm shared their success story with personalization. Here are some of their top takeaways:

#1 Make Personalization Operationally Efficient

Creating many ads personalized to individual consumers using traditional, manual methods is time-consuming and difficult to scale. Multiple rounds of approvals and edits further slow down campaign activation. With DCO, much of the manual work involved in creative generation and asset delivery can be automated, freeing up precious time for creative teams for larger branded campaigns or value-creating tasks such as optimization. 

Giant Eagle, for instance, was able to activate retail media campaigns for over 15 supplier brands within the initial launch period, reducing the turnaround time by 67%. 

#2 Tap Into Data For Success

Retailers must have a multifaceted approach to personalization that begins with understanding customer journeys across the website and tying that data to product feeds and cart history. Marrying such first-party data with contextually relevant information such as weather can further drive relevance for consumers.

Giant Eagle started by first understanding their customers’ behavior across the website and combining such first-party data with geolocation and contextual triggers such as weather conditions.

#3 Personalization Is A Journey That Evolves Over Time

Brands often think implementing personalization with DCO requires a lot of heavy lifting. But that need not be true.

Start with the data you already have and build out campaigns that can evolve with time to include more complex strategies. Often, category-level data from the website is the easiest starting point to build a campaign. Viewing personalization as a journey rather than a complicated one-time campaign makes it less intimidating and more feasible in the long run.