January Point of View: 2011 Key Takeaways for Specialty Retailers

By Rod Ford, President and CEO

Over the past few weeks our Specialty Retail team has spent an appropriate amount of time reflecting and projecting into our strategy model. Through the lens of servicing over 120 specialty retailers, as well as managing the customer intelligence and campaign execution platform for over 40, I thought you might enjoy learning about the marketer sentiments to which we are exposed and the conclusions we derive that formulate our strategies to serve the industry this coming year.

What we saw in 2011:

#1. The continued growth in digital channel marketing spend.
Social 4.1%
Search 3.9%
Mobile 3.8%
Display 3.6%

#2. Marketers continued to recognize the effectiveness of connected media as direct mail spend, increasing by 2% in 2011. Subsequently, standard-class mail continued to rebound, growing volumetrically by 1.8%.

#3. Used primarily for non-marketing purposes, first class mail continued to succumb to pressures from alternative channels and dropped slightly over 5% in volume from the previous year.

Concerns, Challenges, & Opportunities in 2012:

#1. Evolving Channels: The inevitable reality of accessing new audiences through social media is finally upon on us. There exists a line of sight today of how social media can be used for pragmatic purposes for the first time since we began the social discussion. Of course this realization is introducing new challenges such as access to new audiences and results in (1) further fragmentation of customer audiences—requiring more sophisticated ways of viewing audience segments—and (2) a plethora of new data streams that must be managed and rationalized.

#2. Display: New capabilities in the data management platforms that power the targeting of display are quickly evolving to convert unknown browsers to a known audience, thus increasing the audience and further pinpointing the offer through deeper levels of personalization. The integration of digital assets and new data management approaches are resulting in a level of targeting sophistication previously unachievable.

#3. Technology Convergence: The proliferation of all the data exhaust in the emerging channels has resulted in an arms race to develop the convergent data management hub and become the “data management platform of record” for the marketer. Marketers are very confused in the capability differences between Customer Intelligence databases, Lead Generation platforms, Analytic Marts, and Marketing Automation tools. They are not the same thing and it pains us to see marketers making poor decisions because of vendors’ overzealous aspirations to stretch their capabilities beyond their core competencies.