Use Oracle Retail Data Platform to Know Your Customer

Retailers can use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure data and analytics capabilities to better know their customer and take meaningful actions.

About Customer Loyalty Program

Customer loyalty programs are the flagship programs of many retail businesses. Customer loyalty strategies are defined and designed to boost business growth by selecting the right marketing approach that can help promote brand identity and give rewards to customers who purchase or engage on a recurring basis.

To optimize the loyalty programs, retailers need to:

• Identify, recruit, and retain the right kinds of customers.
• Tweak the layers / parameters of the programs.
• Target and message the programs correctly.

The result of well-optimized loyalty programs includes increased top-line sales, increased profits, more satisfied and engaged customers, and true customer loyalty (i.e. not switching retailers at every whim). Oracle Retail Research shows that 72% of customers choose a brand based on earning loyalty points .

To achieve the three aforementioned ways of optimizations, retailers need a lot of data and analytics. In the past, most programs were created based on intuition or modelling after competitive programs. But the modern retailer is awash in data—data that can be used to make their loyalty program much more targeted and effective than intuition alone.

In addition to the loyalty program data, transaction data, and similar internal data sources, smart retailers combine this with externally available deep profiling data, demographics, information from social networks, and use it all to build smarter combined actions on micro segmentation level. This also includes what-if analyses on the impacts of proposed changes to the program parameters.

About This Scenario

This playbook describes how a fictional retailer with several loyalty programs aimed at different customer subsegments uses Oracle Retail Data Platform to better understand customer behavior toward those loyalty programs.

Based on the examples presented, you will see that the programs were performing well in the near past, but recently their effectiveness has started to wane. You will then see how loyalty program data is analyzed, combining it with data about the customers and enrich it with Oracle Advertising cloud-based data on customer profiles, and then use all of this data to understand what is motivating and demotivating different subsegments of customers.