Author: Santiago Bazarra

A key moment for all retail companies is market expansion, whether that means opening new brick and mortar shops or launching marketing campaigns in new areas. This is the moment when the company must decide between multiple opportunities for expansion and it is often difficult to know what data should serve as the basis of these decisions.

At FLYDE we understand the importance of not making these decisions based on intuition or convenience, but using your own business data to guide them.

UNIFY YOUR DATA

To make the most of your data, you need to be able to collect it, structure it, and make it actionable, all in one place. That’s exactly what a Customer Data Platform does.

With FLYDE, you can unify data from all your sources (social media, ecommerce platform, POS, email, CRM) into a single, structured view of each customer. You can then enrich that data with external socio-demographic information, such as average income levels by neighbourhood or predominant housing types, giving you a much broader and more accurate picture of who your customers are and where your best opportunities lie.

OBTAIN A 360 VIEW OF YOUR CUSTOMER

With all your data unified in one platform, you can build detailed customer profiles and segment them based on real behaviour and characteristics, not assumptions.

For example, if you run a fast food chain, FLYDE can show you the shared characteristics of your most loyal customers: their income level, neighbourhood type, preferred shopping hours, and purchase patterns. Once you identify those commonalities, you can build an audience based on that profile and use it to target campaigns towards new customers who share the same characteristics, whether you’re launching in a new area or trying to grow an existing one.

GEOMARKETING

Beyond unified customer profiles, FLYDE also gives you the tools to act on that data strategically, including predictive models that help you identify where your next growth opportunities are.

One of these is Geomarketing, which lets you visualise your customer data geographically and understand the relationship between your customers and their locations. All your customer and market data is mapped so you can identify patterns by area, compare markets, and spot where demand is strongest.

Going back to the fast food chain example: when the time comes to open a new location, FLYDE can compare the profile of your current customers with the characteristics of potential customers in other areas. Rather than relying on gut instinct, you get a data-backed recommendation on where your next expansion is most likely to succeed.

WHY FLYDE?

Market expansion is one of the most significant decisions a company can make. With FLYDE, you have all of the information at your fingertips in order to make a data-informed decision. 

From unifying your customer data across all sources, to building detailed profiles, to mapping expansion opportunities with Geomarketing, FLYDE gives your team the tools to make smarter, faster decisions based on your own data. And with Brain, FLYDE’s conversational AI, you can ask questions about your data and get answers in seconds, without needing a data science team.

If you’d like to see how FLYDE can support your expansion strategy, request a demo and we’ll show you the platform with your own data.

Today’s retail has nothing to do with what it was 20 years ago, nor with what it was 5 years ago. Due to the advances and changes that have taken place in this sector, companies have had to adapt to this new situation and many are still in the process of doing so. Therefore, one of the most recurrent questions is still: How can my company adapt to these changes in the most efficient way?

Putting the customer at the centre is essential. ROPO, Showrooming… each customer has specific needs and expectations of your company that you must meet. Failure to do so would certainly result in your customer going to your competitor. Therefore, it is no longer enough to have a powerful product, you also need to meet the specific demands of each of your customers if you want to retain them.

How does the rise of omnichannel affect the way I sell?

Retail companies are living in a world of constant change, to which they must adapt. The rise of Omnichannel as a new key trend in this sector is leaving behind many companies unable to practice omnichannel in a real way.

The fact that a company sells products in a physical shop and on its website is not enough to consider your company an omnichannel company, as this requires a comprehensive strategy in which you can control all of your channels as if they were only one.

If John buys in your physical shop on a recurring basis, why, when he accesses your website, you don’t consider him the same John who buys every month in the physical store?

By concentrating all your customer’s data on a single platform, you will be able to compare them and unify that customer as John, and not as three different customers. This will allow your company to be truly Customer Centric, as your customers will no longer be a number, or even several different ones, but a person who likes your brand and wants to continue buying your products.

Hyper-segmentation

The unification of your customer data in a single platform is a great advance for your company, but today’s technology allows us to do even more. Following on from the previous point, having that customer who navigates through your different channels unified and with knowledge of all their contacts with your company, will allow you to segment those customers in a way you had never imagined.

Segmenting by age, gender, and income is useful, but insufficient in 2022. The use of an Intelligent CDP, apart from unifying customer data, will also allow you to hyper-segment these customers. This accumulation and unification of data on one platform will allow you to analyse and drill down into your customers’ trends, in terms of attitude and behaviour towards your brand and their buying preferences.

If you know how each of your customers tends to shop, you will be able to make customer journeys based on real-time data, and see how campaigns, promotions, or new collections affect this customer journey. This understanding of your customers’ behaviour will allow you to hyper-segment in a much more effective and realistic way.

Personalization

The hyper-segmentation plus the 360-degree view of the customer achievable with the use of an Intelligent CDP, will allow your company to offer one of the most valuebale needs of today’s customers. The real personalization of the experience and the products that your company offers.

If you know that an specific customer wants T-shirts because that’s what they always buy, why would you send them a promotional code for a shirt? With a 360-degree view of your customer and a marketing team guided by this data, you can offer your customers personalization in real time, varying according to their latest preferences.

If John has been looking for trousers on your website, but he tends to buy them in the physical shop, you can expect him to go to the physical shop he usually goes to (due to proximity), and have those trousers in stock there, as it is highly likely that he will go there in a short period of time.

WHY FLYDE?

Do you want your company to move on to the next level? A CDP is the key tool that will allow you to maximise the potential of your data and grow your business. Working like the big multinationals in the market, which already have this type of software, and having control over all your data is now very simple.

Moreover, if you do not have IT or Data Scientist teams, this tool will allow you to outsource this function. And if you have them but want to reduce their workload and give more autonomy to your marketing and business teams when it comes to working with data, implementing an easy-to-use CDP would be the best option for your company. It will allow any single member of your company to use it, as this softwares are prepared for them.

Retail has always been accompanied by the difficulty for companies to manage stock efficiently. In order to do this, optimal sales control and forecasting is necessary, but… How can we rely on the latest advances in technology to do this?

How do I solve my stock management problem?

Stock management has become a complicated task for companies. The rise of omni-channel distribution and sales has meant that a greater involvement is required to keep all these channels up to date and coordinated in real time. For this reason, many companies are opting to apply new technological solutions that improve these processes, reduce costs and ensure an optimal management.

One of the most recurrent solutions to tackle these problems is to implement Warehouse Management Software (WMS). The problem with this type of tool is that, despite its efficiency in the warehouse, it is not a total solution to the problem as it helps to know your stock in real time but does not go beyond that. Not knowing how your stock can evolve or not coordinating this valuable information with other teams such as marketing, sales or finance, are some of the handicaps they present.

If what we are looking for is a more efficient management, which allows us to plan in time to avoid problems such as stock breakages, the solution is to coordinate different tools that give us a broader view of our environment, unify the data from all departments of our company and can provide added value. And one of them, without a doubt, should be the inclusion of an Intelligent CDP.

What solutions can I apply with an Intelligent CDP?

An Intelligent CDP, or Intelligent Customer Data Platform, is a software that will allow your company to unify all the available data of your company, so that all your departments can work in coordination. However, the fundamental value of an Intelligent CDP, as its name suggests, is the application of Artificial Intelligence, to process these data in the most efficient way possible, finding details imperceptible to the human eye, and saving huge amounts of time for employees.

• Unify data: a Smart CDP will allow you to unify data from your WMS, sales, marketing campaigns, and any data you can imagine, and to which your company has access; to later be able to access this platform and get answers about your customers or any movement done by your company.
• Control in real time: access to all the information in a single platform will allow you to see in real time how each movement that the company carries out affects your stock. Thus, for example, the marketing department will be able to observe not only an increase in sales, but in real time they will be able to see the effect of each campaign or action carried out on the warehouse, and vice versa, thus being able to anticipate problems with the lack or excess of stock.
• Predict sales: as we have seen above, the Intelligent CDP is not only a CDP, but applies Artificial Intelligence to take your business to the next level. In this way, an Intelligent CDP allows you to predict sales in real time, and therefore, you will be able to anticipate any stock management problem, with an accuracy that could reach heights of over 95%, depending on the amount of data provided. And not only that, you will also be able to: establish relationships about peak and off-peak sales periods, and of which products. Which specific customers are buying each product, in what quantity and when or at what times the company is most likely to run out of stock, etc. All this is now possible with FLYDE.

WHY FLYDE?

Do you want your company to move on to the next level? A CDP is the key tool that will allow you to maximise the potential of your data and grow your business. Working like the big multinationals in the market, which already have this type of software, and having control over all your data is now very simple.

Moreover, if you do not have IT or Data Scientist teams, this tool will allow you to outsource this function. And if you have them but want to reduce their workload and give more autonomy to your marketing and business teams when it comes to working with data, implementing an easy-to-use CDP would be the best option for your company. It will allow any single member of your company to use it, as this softwares are prepared for them.

Mother’s day is a crucial day in any B2C company’s calendar, as it is one of those important days in the year for your customers. A date in which you as a company could create strong engagement with them, as well as boosting your sales. In the US in the last 3 years sales in this day have grown over $5 billion.

Many companies are not yet using their full potential to create proper bondings with their clients, although it is a MUST in our world. In this article we will explain the possibilities that the current technology available could give to your company to boost your sales, through a complete customer 360 view, on a special date.

Segmentation is no longer enough

In order to generate sales on the first Sunday of May, every company send emails, announce in their webpages, offer discounts or run online advertising campaigns, among other things, depending on the basic and traditional segmentation. Do you want to stand out? Your segmentation could go a huge step further with the use of the right tools. An Intelligent CDP, will help your company segment your customers in a different way.

Usually companies segment their customers according to their age, gender, or maybe even by their affinity with the company. This way of segmenting had been enough for companies until today. With the last advances in technology this way of segmentation is just not enough. Taking into account that today’s companies have omnichannel retail and marketing strategies, there are huge data sources from where to learn from your customers.

What is Hyper-Segmentation?

All of this data available in the different channels used by your company can give you an extremely detailed definition of every single client. Imagine unifying the information you have from social media, your website, your offline selling and promotions, your call center’s data, etc. 

The possibilities your company would start having in customers relationships with this data unification are huge. But an intelligent CDP does not do stay here. As well as storing, unifying, and securing this Big Data, with FLYDE your company would also be able to analyze this information with a series of easy to use applications, thus making the customer’s vision accessible to all departments of the company, technical or not.

Possibilities driven by hyper-segmentation

Going back to Mother’s day, you can start to hyper segment your customers on these special dates.

Not just in email marketing or in call centers, where having a hypersegmented view on your customer would help you targeting, choosing who to call/email, and the type of message you will send to each customer this day. Also, with this level of detail of your customer, you could even detect the role played by each customer in the whole sales proccess of a product.

For example, you could know to a huge precision if your customer is a daughter or a mother, and trace a customer journey where you could see if she is a late buyer, or someone who likes to buy gifts with time, knowing when to approach each client and maybe offering a discount for an early buyer a day before the day where she tends to buy the gift.

AI combined with hyper-segmentation

FLYDE’s possibilities with customer segmentation are not yet done. There is a fundamental part left which makes this CDP an Intelligent CDP which is the application of Artificial Intelligence through the whole process, giving the ability to the FLYDE Brain, our Intelligent Assistant, to help your company view the deepest insights of your customers.

Continuing with the examples, if your company sells flowers and FLYDE Brain detects that in a neighborhood where, for example, single-family homes predominate and you generate a large amount of sales, our assistant, after comparing with the rest of the areas, will recommend other neighborhoods with similar characteristics and a large number of potential customers so that you can improve your sales this day.

Why FLYDE?

Do you want your company to move on to the next level? A CDP is the key tool that will allow you to maximise the potential of your data and grow your business. Working like the big multinationals in the market, which already have this type of software, and having control over all your data is now very simple.

Moreover, if you do not have IT or Data Scientist teams, this tool will allow you to outsource this function. And if you have them but want to reduce their workload and give more autonomy to your marketing and business teams when it comes to working with data, implementing an easy-to-use CDP would be the best option for your company. It will allow any single member of your company to use it, as this softwares are prepared for them.