Retail Media Can Help Turn Persuadable Shoppers Into Loyalists

Back in October of last year, collaborative research by PYMNTS Intelligence and sticky.io found that a few relatively small subsets of consumers were driving the bulk of merchants’ revenues.

That’s especially true with subscription firms, where Loyalists, Persuadables and Short-Timers, the three segments we’d identified, all offered up some insights into how companies should fine tune their go-to-market strategies.

Get it right, and the payoff can be, and usually is, significant. After all, the data show that Loyalists are 30% of customers, and drive 80% of revenues. Drill down a bit and Persuadables are 22% of customers and drive 14% of sales.

Convincing the Persuadables, who by the implication of the name can be steered to make the leap into Loyalist territory and cement their allegiances, may be among the most lucrative strategies to get some top-line momentum.

Getting a Bit Granular

There’s enough data out there, particularly with transaction-level data, to give merchants the insight they need to help become a bit more, well, persuasive. More than half of consumers surveyed by PYMNTS Intelligence have said card-linked offers had been irrelevant to their needs. But 41% of consumers who make more than $100,000 a year prefer to earn rewards on overall spending at a specific store.

Connecting the dots reveals that eCommerce and browsing behaviors may help fashion a roadmap to targeted offers across channels.

In a separate study, PYMNTS Intelligence found 40% of persuadable and loyal consumers use online marketplaces for a significant slice of their everyday commerce activities. Credit cards were used by about 40% of Loyalists and Persuadables, which can give the platforms, and by extension their partners, the granular insight into browsing and buying habits — in other words, context — that help extend the lifetime value of customer relationships. Context is everything as advertising within app and on platforms become ever-more personal in nature.

As reported recently, DoorDash is introducing retail media solutions that it said enables brands to “convert high-intent customers at the point of purchase with sponsored products … [through] our Ads Manager UI and through our API partners, Flywheel and Pacvue.” Brands including Anheuser-Busch and Molson Coors are already seeing increased sales from this feature, the company said last week.

Separately, JPMorgan said in April that its own retail media platform would extend brands’ reach to the banking behemoth’s 80 million customers, as cash back and other offers would be shaped by those consumers’ spending habits. Walmart Connect has been broadening insights from its data monetization platform with its closed-loop, omnichannel retail media solutions. Recent efforts include working with Walmart Luminate insights (tied to first-party data) to target custom messages to create relevant shopping experiences for customers across physical and online channels.