Product Updates: What’s Ahead for Bluecore Customers in 2024

The past decade has been an obstacle course for retailers trying to maximize reach and return. It’s getting harder and more expensive to reach audiences while engagement is on the decline. Reach, the ability to identify a shopper and tie them to an email address, is at risk of erosion, driven by the third-party cookie deprecation and the resulting higher cost of acquisition, as well as the ramifications of mass marketing, like lack of engagement and unsubscribes. However it’s also how retailers drive incremental conversion, and it’s critical to long term success. 

We’re here to help solve for the reach that’s being threatened not only to convert new customers, but to ensure that you’re engaging with known shoppers as effectively as possible.  

To drive incremental growth, retailers must shift from a channel-first mindset, to a customer-led approach. Retailers with customer-led growth strategies using Bluecore are achieving three year customer retention rates of 59%, compared with a retention rate of only 22% for retailers with channel-led strategies.

Historically, Bluecore’s technology has been categorized by channel, but under the hood, our core competencies have always been to identify and move shoppers by connecting people to the right product, content, and recommendation. Moving forward, you’ll be hearing about Bluecore advancements as an identification and customer movement technology. 

Bluecore’s 2024 Roadmap builds on our core principles 

This has shaped our product principles, which will govern everything we do and serve as the blueprint for our roadmap this year:

• Customer movement is essential to increase repeat purchase rates and loyalty 
• Data extensibility and flexibility is foundational to shift to a customer-centric approach and execute in any channel
• Identification recognition and transparency is critical to maximize reach and reduce wasted acquisition dollars
  

Bluecore’s 2024 Product Roadmap is designed to help retailers become more customer-centric by identifying more shoppers and engaging with them in any channel, within and outside of Bluecore.

• Identification: More transparent reporting with reporting dashboards showing ID rates, ID rate trends, ID sources impacting ID rates, lifts in ID rates and incremental revenue driven by the Bluecore Transparent ID Network.

• Extensibility: Expanding Bluecore’s audiences, predictive models, percentile ranking scores, input products and product recs into other systems on your stack like Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), Data Warehouses, Business Intelligence platforms, and Cloud systems. It’s the first time we are bringing the Bluecore models and scoring to other systems. 

• Customer Movement and Customer Analytics: 

• Customer Movement Assessment – An in-depth analysis revealing problem areas and growth opportunities within your customer file, benchmarked across your peers, coupled with specific campaign recommendations and execution strategy.

• • • Customer Analytics – A suite of reports that track customer behavioral and performance trends to improve engagement, purchase frequency and drive incremental growth. 
    • Experimentation Hub – A centralized hub to create and scale test and learn strategies 

• Platform Enhancements:

• Persistent Coupons – Between Site and Email and amongst email journeys, to ensure a smooth customer experience and minimize gamification of offers that erodes margins. 

• Observability & Monitoring

• Pre-send halt alerting

• User experience platform improvements 

Read on to learn more in detail about the investments and enhancements Bluecore has on the horizon this year. 

Transparent Identification to drive customer movement 

Bluecore is the leading solution to drive increased identification for retailers. The moment that Bluecore’s JavaScript is installed on the site, we’re able to capture every action that’s taken across multiple devices and tie it back to a single identifier. We are set up to prioritize and maximize identification from the get-go. We’re always ingesting feeds from different sources like loyalty and offline purchases, historical identifiers and more. 

We know that retailers want more, which is why we’ve created a Transparent Identification Network, an identification accelerator and it works almost instantly – boosting ID rates by an average of 42%.

It is the largest, most reliable and most compliant first party identification network on the market that enables retailers to:

• Continuously re-identify customers who are already known to you
• Maintain identification completeness over time
• Increase their identification rate in 24 hours

With more than 900 million IDs captured deterministically from 5,000+ brands and publishers, processing more than 10 billion shopper events daily, the Transparent ID Networks helps retailers extend and strengthen their reach and identification rates without requiring any data sharing back into the network, complying with even the strictest privacy policies.

We’ve seen incredible results from customers that have adopted our approach in a very short time:

• Oriental Trading saw a 100% increase in website visitor identification rate in six months
• Lulu and Georgia experienced a 1.3X increase in first-time buyers in nine months
• City Furniture saw a 33% increase in identified customers in one year

To make identification even more transparent, Bluecore will be launching three identification dashboards to help lift the black box off these critical data points:  

• Identification rate report that shows current identification rate, trends and rates by traffic source.
• Identification providers report that tracks ID rate lifts and revenue incrementality from the  Transparent Identification Network
• Identification source report that dives under the hood what is impacting your ID rates including the different feeds, networks, traffic, and integration sources

Our retail strategy and customer success teams are also equipped with a plethora of strategies and playbooks to help you optimize your identification programs. In the upcoming months, we will be undergoing identity assessments to provide insight into identification rates for each customer and what’s driving it and providing recommendations for optimizations. Additionally, we will be diving into ID benchmarks that reveal how different customers are doing compared to peers within the same vertical to better understand where the opportunities lie.

Extensibility across your marketing strategy

We’re moving to a world where the customer is at the center, not the channel. To be successful at that, retailers will need to activate on their signals where the shopper is, across any channel, within and outside the Bluecore walls. 

That’s why we’re focused heavily on making the Bluecore data and intelligence extensible this year. We want to bring real-time onsite signals that signify purchase intent to where our retailers need them most, and that’s often in the CDP. 

CDPs are prolific within the retail martech stack and are often the centralized location where retailers combine their customer profiles to activate against in different channels. However, CDPs are generally built against purchase data, meaning retailers will be overlooking the onsite signals on their site that show what their shoppers are engaging with that indicate demand signals.

That’s where Bluecore comes in. Combining the Bluecore audiences with customer profiles in the CDP is critical to bridging the gap between transactional data and onsite behavioral signals, and proven to drive major reach. In our tests, customers who combined Bluecore and Amperity affinity audiences, have increased audience sizes by 48%. The results from the campaigns to those audiences drove 150% lift in ROAS. 

And for the first time ever, Bluecore is also making our predictive percentile scores and rankings available to our customers to use in their CDPs and Business Intelligence systems.

This year, Bluecore will be investing in more resources to make our data available in:

• CDPs: Integrating with CDPs to push audiences, predictive percentile scores and affinity rankings, as well as input products and product recommendations with CDPs to help you connect the “what” and the “who” between what you’re selling and who you are targeting.
• Business intelligence and cloud systems: Integrating with business intelligence and analytic systems to make our data tables and raw event data available to partners like Snowflake to arm analytics and data science teams with the data to build their own insights. 

The relationship between customers and products is at the core of our extensible data. We can export different ranking scores that define how a shopper engages with your site, products and affinity programs. If you want to know your shoppers’ highest category or brand preference, you can use that data to optimize and personalize marketing for that shopper outside of Bluecore. You can send affinity scores for better segmentation and targeting. 

Retailers have unique needs, and we want to enable teams to have a full understanding of their shopper data and use it in the most efficient way possible. Extensibility unlocks shopper-level insights to inform things like merchandising and loyalty by leveraging unstructured data to drive insights beyond campaign performance

Customer insights that bring customer value and file performance to the forefront 

Customer movement is a comprehensive, in-depth approach to revealing the growth opportunities, benchmarked across peers, that you can execute to drive incremental growth.

We want to help achieve optimal lifetime value with our Customer Movement Assessment. It’s critical to understand your customer base deeply, develop outcomes-based metrics, and then create customer movement approaches directly tied to those metrics. By connecting experimentation, campaign execution and customer and campaign analytics, we create a positive optimization loop that continually improves your outcomes. 

We deliver a Customer Movement Assessment that has two phases that is specific for your business and directly connected to your data:

• Customer file analysis: We reveal high and low value cohorts and identify areas of opportunity for higher profit
• Use case recommendations: Here we identify actions that can be taken to activate more customers and create more opportunities for high-value purchase

The Customer Movement Assessment identifies the touchpoints that represent the highest opportunities for incremental growth. Observe and track growth for key business health metrics like repeat purchase rate, retention, 3-year survivorship to understand customer movement across lifecycle stages. With Cohort Analysis, you can also look at customers based on seasonality for example, and understand how your efforts are driving lift for cohorts that matter to you.

The Customer Movement Assessment works. In only 90 days, we’ve helped retailers generate 55% more in sales from new customers and 33% growth from existing customers.

Test and learn with Experimentation Hub 

Bluecore is also introducing an experimentation hub to help you test and learn across all of your efforts. With our new hub, you can bring all of your experiments into a single, cohesive view to get a clearer picture of what works at the macro level. Unified testing makes you learn faster, lean into winning strategies at scale and reduce duplicate tests in different parts of your business. 

You can test and scale at an audience, channel, campaign and journey level. Get access to experimentation templates and quickly see if your test has reached statistical significance so you can scale winning results and kill any tests that aren’t working quickly. 

We’ll test guardrail to improve the observability of testing outcomes and you’ll get feedback on what key metrics and parameters you need to optimize your experimentation on. All of the data is available in the platform and exportable for your analytics team so you can get an independent read on your experimentation.

Best in class platform performance 

We always want to make sure you get the best in reliability, transparency and trust within the Bluecore Platform. Here are just a few examples of the improvements we’re constantly generating to make your outcomes more seamless and effective:

• Persistent couponing: You’ll be able to target a known shopper with one coupon code across channels and touchpoints. 
• Faster and more focused alerting: Get faster, earlier and more focused alerting if or when an integration changes or breaks. This ensures freshness of data and proactive alerting for both our and your engineering teams to triage issues.
• Halts: Catch issues with audience and recommendation rules in your campaign that might cause halts in email delivery so that you can correct it before a campaign is launched

We’ve also made a number of UX investments to make it easier than ever to navigate the platform, including faster load time and rendering, enabling dark mode, SMS and email audience selection for experimentation, self-service mechanism for GDPR “Right to be Forgotten” implementation, and more stable journey workflows.

What’s next with Bluecore 

If you take one thing away from our updates, it is the importance of engaging with the Bluecore team. 

If you’re not yet working with Bluecore, the first step for driving incrementality for your business is by engaging in a Customer Movement Assessment, and it only gets better from there. We have a team of highly experienced retail executives at Bluecore that understand the ins and outs of retail marketing that are a great resource in your customer movement journey. 

Get your assessment and tap into growth opportunities in your business.