A few short years ago, the term “retail media” brought to mind an experience that was entirely e-commerce based. Today, retail media means so much more – not just because there are over 100 retail media networks (RMNs) in the space globally, but because offerings have expanded dramatically. From in-store touchpoints to out-of-home ad buys, RMNs and their brand partners are engaging with customers across their entire shopping journey.

This creates great opportunities for brands and retailers to forge stronger connections with their shoppers. It also, however, introduces more complexity and potential for experiences to feel disjointed. Today’s shoppers have high expectations, and for RMNs to deliver, there must be cohesion across in-store, offline, and digital media channels. 

Here are four tips for creating more connected shopper experiences, informed by data from our just-released 2023 Retail Media Research Report.
 

1. Use first-party data and strengthen customer profiles by co-mingling.

One of the most powerful tools for a connected shopper experience is first-party data. It provides a fuller picture of their interactions with you and offers critical insight into their purchasing behavior and relevant life moments – all of which help you meet them with the messaging they need at each stage of their journey.

For this data to be valuable, it should be deployed for omni-channel targeting. As mentioned before, the shopper journey happens across a variety of in-store, online, and offline touchpoints, and if you’re only using it in one place, you won’t get the results you want.

You can also strengthen your customer data assets by co-mingling with brand or partner data in a clean room. Brands have shown interest in this capability – 72% of brands who’ve invested in their first-party data have used a clean room in this way. The more relevant information you have about your customers, the more opportunity you have to personalize their experience.
 

2. Break down organizational silos.

Twenty-two percent of RMNs state conflict with internal merchant or trade teams as a top challenge for scaling their business. Retail media has historically been a fairly siloed endeavor, with most retail media investments coming from shopper and trade dollars. Now, brand media budgets are the largest funding source for RMN investments, followed by ecommerce media budgets and shopper/trade dollars.

With budgets coming from more areas and shopper touchpoints spanning more formats, it’s imperative that your internal teams work more closely together. RMNs can no longer march toward department-level goals; you must create shared plans and approaches around business-level objectives. Internal disconnects will show themselves in your customer experience if, for example, one group is focused on increasing average order size while another is tasked with new customer acquisition.

To align internally, bring stakeholders together regularly to plan around your shared vision and make connected analytics and reporting available to all relevant stakeholders to see progress and make optimizations.
 

3. Unify and personalize content with creative.

Creative capabilities should be an area of focus for RMNs at launch, as brands are increasingly demanding it and it plays a key role in customer experience.

Dynamic creative optimization (DCO) is particularly powerful for bringing large-scale creative to market quickly in a way that’s personalized. With it, you can use many data triggers (like weather, time of day, shopping history, and more) to strategically personalize content. DCO also expedites testing because it can deliver several versions to multiple audiences simultaneously – and if a version is underperforming, it can automatically remove it from rotation to more quickly boost ROI for advertisers.

Our survey shows that only 25% of RMNs currently offer DCO to brands. By adding this capability to your solutions, you can stand out within the crowded landscape and provide better experiences for your shoppers.
 

4. Connect merchant and loyalty strategies.

Brands reporting “a connection between merchant, loyalty, and RMN teams” as a key feature they look for in RMN partners increased 8x year over year. Loyalty data is an important source for understanding a shopper’s motivations and preferences, as those programs often collect zero-party data that’s volunteered by the user in exchange for some benefit.  Loyalty programs can be a foundational component to scaling RMN strategies and have a further connection to merchant teams through a strategic approach to data. Being able to connect this data (and the resulting strategies) to planning and decisioning can help you provide more valuable insights to brand partners and create more engaging touchpoints across the journey for shoppers.

Note that only 63% of RMNs in our survey see retail media, shopper, and loyalty strategies working together frequently, so there’s definitely room to improve in this area.
 

Conclusion

In today’s landscape, you have more opportunities than ever to engage with your shoppers across their entire journey, whether they’re online, offline, or in-store. Capitalize by using first-party data, creative, and unified strategies effectively – the result will be better experiences for your shoppers and positive engagements and increased investments with your brand partners.