By Brett Banner, Senior Vice President of Strategy at PriceSpider
After 2023 – a year in which customer loyalty declined by a whopping 14% – brands need to focus on keeping customers’ trust and interest if they want to succeed in 2024. Much of this work will be done via promotions, as discounts, deals, exclusive offers and loyalty programs will entice shoppers to return.
But there’s also lots to be done on the brand commerce side. Did you know, for instance, that 14% of shoppers consider a consistent brand image to be the most important factor for a brand to win their loyalty? Or that 31% of shoppers consider the immediate availability of a product to be the most important factor in gaining their repeated business?
With this in mind, here are five ways for brands to bolster a rich, informative and consistent experience at every touchpoint, improving the customer journey in a year where it matters more than ever:
1. Ensure and enforce price consistency across retailers
When it comes to building a better customer experience, brands need to start with trust—ensuring customers that the products they’re searching for are actually what they’ll receive. One of the best places to do that is on the product detail page (PDP), as 46% of global shoppers say accurate product descriptions are important to them.
Inconsistent pricing, grammatically incorrect product pages and low-quality product imagery weaken that trust by making it difficult to understand what they’re buying and whether the brand (and seller) they’re buying it from is trustworthy.
By crawling relevant product detail pages across thousands of ecommerce sites, digital shelf analytics solutions like PriceSpider’s Brand Monitor can help brands pinpoint inconsistent content across thousands of online sellers. Then they can take action on unauthorized sellers or brands that break their minimum advertised price policies by using MAP enforcement solutions, which can not only monitor for pricing violations—but also let brands send automated communications to the offending sellers.
2. Maintain consistent copy and images across product detail pages
When it comes to reducing friction points in the customer journey, brands need to eliminate inconsistencies, which can lead shoppers to doubt a brand’s reliability. By using data from digital shelf analytics, brands can make sure their product content is accurate and consistent across various selling platforms and marketplaces. Not only does this ensure customers that they’re purchasing an authentic product, but helps them feel like they’re getting the best deals possible, too. By building a consistent brand experience across all shopping platforms, brands can boost revenue by anywhere from 10-20%.
3. Aggregate ratings and reviews
Since retailer websites only show ratings and reviews from their own customers, they provide a limited view of shopper sentiment. That’s why it’s crucial for brands to make the most of their owned touchpoints wherever possible. By leveraging where to buy technologies like PriceSpider’s, brands can aggregate ratings and reviews of selected products from all of their retail partner sites—giving customers everything they need to make an informed decision.
4. Collect data at every customer touchpoint
Giving customers an on-brand experience at every touchpoint is just the beginning. Ideally, analytics solutions should provide reliable data on how a brand’s audience interacts and behaves, whether they’re shopping on an owned brand website or a retail website.
Tools like PriceSpider’s shoppable solutions allow you to make product campaigns shoppable, then give you access to a range of reporting dashboards that let you analyze those campaigns from high-level overviews of performance to granular sales data. It’s the perfect tool for top-of-funnel activities like converting special offers, nurturing repeat customers and promoting lower-priced items.
This data allows brands to find the holes in their online shopping experiences—meaning they can intelligently allocate resources to patch up their ecommerce ecosystems. This capability also enables brands to track how various channels perform over time, which means they can redirect ad spend to channels that show promise and reduce wasteful spend on underperforming channels.
5. Mine portfolio performance for new opportunities
One of the smartest ways brands can drive ecommerce growth is to reverse-engineer their own successful campaigns. Using data gathered from PriceSpider shoppable solutions, it’s easy for brands to pinpoint their most effective product campaigns (and the ones that don’t perform so well). With data from each promotional offer, channels used, campaign content types, timing and engagement rates, brands can glean insights to optimize current campaigns in real time and apply their learnings to future ones.
This doesn’t need to be restricted to a single example campaign. Remember, full-funnel campaigns can yield up to 45% higher ROI than campaigns that target a single phase of the customer journey. If brands have traditionally relied on single-target-phase campaigns, they can analyze each campaign that most effectively addressed their target stage.
This might look like isolating a few very successful awareness campaigns, a few successful promotional campaigns, and a few successful loyalty campaigns. By doing this, brands can amalgamate their learnings into a master “all-star” campaign blueprint, and apply this blueprint across relevant brands. Additionally, brands can take valuable lessons from failed campaigns and use them to improve their future efforts.
Manage and optimize your brand portfolio with PriceSpider
PriceSpider’s brand commerce platform helps brands enact all these takeaways and more. Our proprietary data acquisition technology gives brands real-time data on how their products are priced and presented across all retailer sites, and our analytics tools provide them with engagement and conversion data for every touchpoint along the customer journey. And our enterprise-grade platform can unite a brand’s ecommerce analytics across its entire portfolio.PriceSpider is trusted by the world’s largest consumer brands, including Procter & Gamble, the Kraft Heinz Company, Samsung and more. If you want to see how PriceSpider can help your CPG brand do better, smarter commerce, book a free consultation today!
