Retailers are coming off a busy season. Adobe Analytics—used by 8 of the top 10 global Internet retailers to understand how customers shop—shows a final tally of $142.5 billion spent online from November to December, growing 13.1%. On Cyber Monday alone, nearly $10 Billion was spent online. While these figures are impressive, we also see significant growth off-screen. What was once considered a death knell for some, physical stores are becoming more of an asset. BOPIS for instance (“buy online, pick-up in store”) has grown 35% YoY. And in a survey of over 1,000 U.S. consumers, 82% of BOPIS users are likely shop for additional items at the store.
Shoppers value the speed and convenience of BOPIS services, along with the cost savings and preventing porch theft. It is one of a few major trends pushing retailers to better blend the shopping experience across digital and physical—and meet customers where they are most comfortable shopping. To support this, Adobe is showcasing Customer Journey Analytics for retailers. For the first time, brands can now bring together disjointed data via Adobe Experience Platform and get a more accurate view of the overall shopper journey from online to offline. A set of analytics tools will empower retailers to be more creative in how they piece together and understand this data, while AI/ML in Adobe Sensei can help automate heavy analysis and catch insights the human eye may miss.
Hidden insights
Consider a brick-and-click retailer: large network of physical stores, with a heavy investment in eCommerce. This brand has an incredible number of touch points with shoppers; interactions that happen in-store, on the website and via mobile are intertwined with customer support centers and emerging areas of shopping like voice. These data sets all sit in different systems, creating multiple and disjointed views of how customers engage. The net result is clunky shopping experiences that are remedied too late, along with duplicative marketing efforts and missed opportunities in areas like BOPIS.
With Customer Journey Analytics, retailers can finally begin to see where the various online and offline worlds intersect—and see where customers took the next step in their shopping journeys. Instead of the online team having one perspective and the in-store team having a completely different one, the brand can begin to see the series of actions that occur after shoppers have visited the website, for example. These kinds of insights are invaluable for many retailers to lead in customer experience management (CXM) and has long been a missing link in retail analytics.
