The Retail Marketer’s Quick Guide to Decisioning Platforms
Got questions about decisioning platforms? Fortunately for you, we have answers. We’ve distilled what you need to know into our retail marketer’s quick guide. Just think of what follows as your Cliff’s Notes for understanding exactly what a decisioning platform is, who it benefits and how it works.
benefits from using a decisioning platform?
There are three types of retail marketers that can benefit from using a decisioning platform:
Those who lead customer communication on a specific channel, such as email, social or display advertising (or any other channels that are in play)
Those who manage customer systems of record, like a CRM or CDP, to better understand customers and determine their interests and preferences
Those involved in data analytics and insights who try to predict things like customer behavior and lifetime value and understand how those factors affect business outcomes
does a decisioning platform do?
A decisioning platform allows you to connect data that currently resides in channel-specific silos in order to make decisions based on customer needs and desired business outcomes and then sync those decisions to any customer interaction channel to take action.
does a decisioning platform fit into the marketing stack?
Introducing a decisioning platform does not require any retooling of the marketing stack. A decisioning platform interacts with existing systems of input (any systems that house analytics, like CRM) and systems of interaction (any systems used to communicate with customers on different channels, like ESPs and social media management tools).
does a decisioning platform come into play?
Retailers now have a significant amount of data and marketers are struggling to wrap their heads around all of it to figure out what to do next. Originally, this data helped optimize channel-specific goals like personalizing emails, but determining how to maximize outcomes in a cross-channel world requires a different approach. Retail marketers now need to think about how to transcend channels to achieve goals like increasing the lifetime value of customers, and there’s simply too much data and too many options available for humans to make those types of decisions. A decisioning platform connects and orchestrates all of this complex data to answer the question of what to do next.
do retail marketers need a decisioning platform?
To improve metrics like repeat purchase rate, top line revenue and churn reduction, retailers need to use the vast amount of data they’ve collected to make fast decisions on customer engagement. Additionally, success in retail is not just about acquiring customers, but retaining them and growing their value over time, and achieving those goals requires understanding customer behaviors and preferences in order to personalize brand engagement. All of this is more important now than ever because of the high bar that leaders like Amazon, Google and Facebook have set for customer expectations.
does a decisioning platform give retailers a competitive edge?
A decisioning platform gives retailers a competitive edge by taking decision-making out of the hands of a select few data scientists and empowering a large portion of the retail workforce to make decisions and react to customer behaviors quickly. But in order for this empowerment to mean anything, a decisioning platform needs to evaluate and present data in the right context to make retail-specific decisions and make those decisions actionable.
What To Do Next
Now that you’ve got the basics down, it’s time to take the next step. Witness the power of a decisioning platform firsthand: Set up a discovery call with Bluecore to see how we can help you make answering the question of what to do next easier than ever.
