There has never been a better time to be a social seller.
The pandemic-induced shift in consumer buying behaviour has accelerated the growth of social commerce, which accounted for approximately 20 per cent of total online spending in Southeast Asia since the pandemic.
A study iKala conducted last year found that not only did this spending span across all categories (clothes, health, furniture, appliances, groceries) but that the revenue per order rose by 88 per cent. This means consumers weren’t just buying more on social media, and they were also spending more.
To help sellers keep up with this fast-paced growth, we saw the emergence of new solutions that could turn social media into a viable sales channel. But while many of these are opening new avenues for selling, they often miss a crucial piece of the puzzle: customer data platforms (CDPs).
Data without consolidation affects your bottom line
Having worked with several brands and influencers through the pandemic, I observe that many enabling solutions for social commerce do not focus enough on data consolidation, which is crucial for automated marketing efforts.
Take, for example, a brand operating e-commerce, social commerce and physical store channels. The brand comes up with audience profiles for each platform (those who added to cart, recently purchased, are loyal, etc.) and then tries to utilise its email, push notifications, and messaging platforms (separate or one-stop) to send out appropriate lifecycle content.
But due to incompatible datasets, this is difficult to do. Still, it also takes much longer because the entire process is semi-automatic at best or manual at worst.
Why does this happen? Imagine a user today going into your app or website but suddenly changing their mind and deciding to go to your physical store or purchase via your chatbot on social media.
Without a CDP cohesively storing and tracking this data, the user may still be getting “hey, you left something on your cart” reminders from the app or website for the next few days.
Also Read: A look back at 2021: The year after 2020’s e-commerce boom
These inefficiencies result in a lot of money wasted on push messages that could’ve been used instead to recommend complementary products or strengthen the customer relationship through tips and tricks on product usage. Losing these opportunities also comes at a cost.
What are CDPs, and what are they capable of?
CDPs bridge the data gap by capturing, consolidating, and analysing your data sources to create a comprehensive single customer view. A view that considers all interactions across all platforms, allowing for a consistent customer experience across channels.
These advantages can be distilled into three main areas:
- Data collection and unification: A CDP can help you collect and sort data across your business units, platforms and channels. It also helps consolidate in-house and third-party data in a unified platform for effective data alignment and management.
- Single customer view: A CDP can track all customer behaviours and interactions with real-time events and provide a holistic view that helps you visualise customer profiles. This helps you know and understand your customers better without the need for high-level technical skill sets.
- Marketing automation: CDPs offer machine learning-enabled business analytics that can empower your marketing efforts by helping to deliver personalised messages through multi-channel campaigns. Not only are you able to engage with your customers better, but your efforts are more targeted, efficient and automated.
The insights offered by CDPs offer a variety of use cases and applications. They can complement retail AI applications like planograms, for example.
By marrying insights from customer behaviour analytics and merchandising efforts to key target segments, a CDP can help prioritise planograms that deliver the most impact.
From an O2O (Online To Offline) perspective, a CDP can also help retail businesses understand where their customers are located.
For example, suppose a brand knows that 80 per cent of its high-value customers do not live in the area. In that case, it can better allocate resources towards planning logistics and improving the digital customer experience.
The opportunities are virtually endless and, more importantly, constantly evolving. As social commerce continues to take off around the world, having a CDP foundation in place can support your expansion to new platforms and channels, bringing together all your data sources to create actionable insights that can transform your business.
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