At a recent Google event, I joined a panel with Cédric Chéreau, CEO and Co-Founder of Untie Nots and Sameer Dhingra, Director of Retail and Consumer at Google Cloud APAC, to share how digital technology can transform retailers’ approach to customer engagement. In this ‘future of retail martech series, unpack everything from one-to-one marketing capabilities, marketing in the moment and how AI and real-time technology are helping modern retailers get in on next-gen loyalty.

In a competitive landscape where soaring inflation and sky-high mortgage rates are making consumers tighten their purse strings, the pressure is on for retailers to get personalisation right. Research commissioned by Google Cloud found that 75 per cent of shoppers prefer brands that personalise interactions and outreach to them, and 86 per cent want a brand that understands their interests and preferences.

Understanding the shifts in shopper behaviour

The shopper journey has dramatically changed. By the time the customer goes through discovery, awareness, consideration, purchase, the decision to buy from which outlet in which platform and which channel is purely a matter of convenience and choice, Dhingra explains.

Knowing this, the question then becomes: how do you get shoppers into your store? And if they are in your store, how can you then increase engagement conversions, basket value, basket size, etc in an efficient manner while balancing cost, risk and growth aspirations?

“Last year, we looked at the shopper journey and the retailers’ focus was largely on retention towards the end of the cycle. It was a bit reactive. Now, it’s shifted to real-time personalisation at the point of engagement – a more proactive way of engaging customers,” says Dhingra.

The ‘buzz’ on personalisation

More than a buzzword, personalisation is now a critical component of a retailer’s long-term success. Personalised offers have the potential to transform the way retailers engage with customers. In fact, McKinsey research shows that 71 per cent of consumers expect companies to deliver personalised interactions – and 76 per cent get frustrated when this doesn’t happen.

When it comes to building a loyal customer base, personalisation plays a crucial role in creating a meaningful and lasting connection with individual customers. It tailors the shopping experience to each customer’s unique preferences, interests and past behaviours. By offering personalised product recommendations, relevant offers and content that aligns with their preferences, customers feel valued and understood.

This heightened level of customer experience fosters a sense of loyalty – happy customers are more likely to return to a retailer that understands and caters to their unique needs. Satisfied, loyal customers are also more likely to become brand advocates and recommend the retailer to family and friends. Positive word-of-mouth advocacy leads to new customer acquisition and reinforces loyalty among existing customers.

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Taking personalisation to the next level with AI

Technology has transformed retailers’ ability to engage with their customers, with artificial intelligence (AI)-powered recommendations now set to drive even more rapid change. And in retail, there’s nothing that generates as much data about customers as a loyalty program.

Currently, the majority of retailers are following a weekly cycle when it comes to issuing personalised offers to customers, but this can and will start to shift to a real-time model. Now imagine customers walking near a Starbucks. Utilising real-time data, their favourite drink preference and the current weather conditions, the store can instantly create an offer tailored to the customers’ preferences to drive them into store.

This ability to execute real-time personalisation when a customer is most primed to make a purchasing decision is going to be a game-changer for retail, and is something we call “marketing in the moment”. Marketing in the moment takes historical customer understanding and blends that with real-time contextual data to determine the right content/message to send a customer at that exact moment in time. This, we believe, is the future of retail marketing.

Eagle Eye and Google Cloud

There is tremendous opportunity in the next few years to start using AI on the data generated by loyalty programs. For example, Eagle Eye together with Google Cloud, gives retailers the ability to connect their customer data to a real-time platform in the cloud. This goes back to the DIAL methodology – enabling retailers to execute data-based insights in real-time to drive customer loyalty.

To help retailers create more fluid and intuitive online shopping experiences, Google Cloud introduced an AI-driven personalisation capability that customises the results a customer gets when they search and browse a retailer’s website.

The AI underpinning the new personalisation capability is a product-pattern recogniser that uses a customer’s behaviour on an ecommerce site, such as their clicks, cart, purchases and other information, to determine shopper taste and preferences. The AI then moves products that match those preferences up in search and browse rankings for a personalised result.

Shoppers’ personalised search and browse results are based solely on their interactions on that specific retailer’s ecommerce site and are not linked to their Google account activity. Shoppers are identified either through an account they have created with the retailer’s site or by a first-party cookie on the website. And as with all Google Cloud solutions, customers own and control their data – information on customer preferences stays with the retailer.

“Personalised offers have been challenging to scale for retailers and CPGs. Traditionally, there have been two ways of doing personalised promotions. The first is the old targeting way. Say a brand is launching a product, it would target its competitor’s customers, incentivising them to choose its product. However, that breaks golden rule number one; you’re asking customers to do what they’re not willing to do – change their brand to something else. That’s why this method has a very small return rate,” Chéreau explains.

“And that’s why promotional funds are still quite limited because suppliers are not really happy to participate in that kind of approach unless we can guarantee incrementality, ensuring that every offer we put on the market is incremental by design. Now we have the tools and the tech to do this. We have all the data science and the IT infrastructure to make sure that we can run personalised promotions at scale.”

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About Eagle Eye

Eagle Eye is a leading SaaS technology company enabling retail, travel and hospitality brands to earn the loyalty of their end customers by powering their real-time, omnichannel and personalised consumer marketing activities.

Eagle Eye AIR is a cloud-based platform, which provides the most flexible and scalable loyalty and promotions capability in the world. More than 750 million personalised offers are executed via the platform every week, and it currently hosts over 100 million individual loyalty members for businesses all over the world. We are trusted to deliver a secure service at hundreds of thousands of physical POS destinations worldwide, enabling the real-time issuance and redemption of promotional coupons, loyalty offers, gift cards, subscription benefits and more.

The Eagle Eye AIR platform is currently powering loyalty and customer engagement solutions for enterprise businesses all over the world, including Asda, Tesco, Morrisons, Waitrose and John Lewis & Partners, JD Sports, Pret a Manger, Loblaws, Southeastern Grocers, Giant Eagle and the Woolworths Group.

In January 2023, the Group acquired France-based Untie Nots, an AI-powered personalised promotions business, adding Carrefour, E. Leclerc, Auchan and other leading brands to its European customer base.

About Google Cloud

Google Cloud accelerates every organisation’s ability to digitally transform its business. We deliver enterprise-grade solutions that leverage Google’s cutting-edge technology – all on the cleanest cloud in the industry. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted partner to enable growth and solve their most critical business problems.