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Gas stations make most of their margin from convenience store items rather than fuel—but simply being there with snacks is no longer enough. Increasingly, C-store customers want more out of their gas station experience. Those that can deliver on those expectations are much better positioned to weather the continued storm of inflation and shifting consumer behaviors.

According to NielsenIQ, consumers have reported plans to cut back on discretionary spending in favor of meeting basic needs and paying for the essentials like utilities and groceries in response to pricing spikes. Part of the shift also includes cutting back on food deliveries and “other indulgences” (aka many of the items you might find at the convenience store). In fact, 34% of respondents indicated spending less on treats like dining out.

As household budgets shrink and spending habits change, differentiation is more important than ever. Here’s how you can amp up your C-store experience—and what it takes to get there.

Stock their favorite brands

According to Intouch Insight Ltd.’s 2022 Convenience Store Trends Report, 70% of shoppers prefer their favorite coffee brand over the more convenient cup of joe. Given the added hesitance shoppers feel toward purchasing “extras” at the moment, capitalizing on longstanding loyalties by stocking customer favorites can be a point of differentiation.

But in order to take advantage of this strategy, you first need to know what those brand favorites are—which means you need robust customer insights to fuel your decision making.

Keep the grab-and-go options flowing

The reviews are in, and customers love the grab-and-go options at their local c-store. Why? First, they’re already getting gas, so these prepped items save them another trip. Second, it’s faster than a drive-thru. According to Cardlytics data, the average wait time at a QSR is around 7 minutes, while C-store waits average 4 minutes. Plus, customers often stop for gas along their route to work, so they don’t have to go out of their way, saving even more time.

Gas stations that include made-to-order menu items show higher walk-in rates than those with more standard snack items. But the popularity of these items also opens a window for C-stores to continue gaining market share from grocery stores and restaurants. C-store share against the QSR category has increased 18.42% to 21.39% since 2019, and by refining and/or expanding grab-and-go options, convenience stores can continue the upward trend.

Do you have the tracking capabilities to identify which items are the most popular with which customer segments, or the items that customers would most want to see added?

Expand your operating model to include delivery

Preferred brands and grab-and-go items are pulling more customers into the store, but what could just as easily dissuade them? High prices and a lack of alternative shopping methods.

Many C-stores are already taking note: last year saw a 47% increase in “last-mile services” like curbside, delivery and mobile ordering. Mobile ordering in particular is a key strategy, with 1.1% of customers turning to their phones to order at convenience, QSR or FSR retailers, up from .5% in 1Q19.

Do you have insight into your customers’ price sensitivity and how they would most like to order and receive their purchases?

Lead with loyalty

Loyalty programs are also winning with c-store customers. According to the Convenience Store Trends Report, 94% of survey respondents were part of at least one, and 76% would choose a brand with a loyalty program over one without.

One challenge with these programs, however, is that employees aren’t promoting them sufficiently, causing c-store programs to lag behind grocery, restaurants and fast food in terms of popularity. Only 28% of cashiers mentioned their c-store’s loyalty program, while some locations lacked signable and promotional materials.

You can’t rely on your teams to make your loyalty program a success. Instead, you need a full-court digital strategy to get the message out beyond the four walls of your store. Do you have the ability to identify best-fit candidates for your program and deliver personalized messages and offers via digital channels to encourage signups?  

Get your data together & solve the “unknown” problem

Despite the strain of macroeconomic forces, C-stores still have plenty of opportunities to win and keep customers—but all of them require robust customer data. Before you can enact any of these strategies, you need a reliable set of customer insights to make the best product recommendations and personalized offers and messages possible.

But many brick-and-mortar retailers, like C-stores, have had a long-standing issue: they can’t identify who’s coming into their stores or what they’re buying. Instead, they’re left with unknown customers, unknown purchase behaviors—and no way to target these individuals.

However, nearly all the purchases at your C-store happen via debit or credit card. With the abbreviated card information stored with every transaction, we can help you build unified, privacy-safe customer profiles with SKU-level purchase history, as well as  hundreds of enriching demographics, socioeconomic and lifestyle attributes. We can also help you drive personalized offers based on actual purchases, preferred items, frequency, price sensitivity, promotional history, daypart and channel preferences via virtually any digital channel.

Ready to win over more c-store customers? Contact us today to learn more.

rsonalized messages and offers via digital channels to encourage signups?  

Get your data together & solve the “unknown” problem

Despite the strain of macroeconomic forces, C-stores still have plenty of opportunities to win and keep customers—but all of them require robust customer data. Before you can enact any of these strategies, you need a reliable set of customer insights to make the best product recommendations and personalized offers and messages possible.

But many brick-and-mortar retailers, like C-stores, have had a long-standing issue: they can’t identify who’s coming into their stores or what they’re buying. Instead, they’re left with unknown customers, unknown purchase behaviors—and no way to target these individuals.

However, nearly all the purchases at your C-store happen via debit or credit card. With the abbreviated card information stored with every transaction, we can help you build unified, privacy-safe customer profiles with SKU-level purchase history, as well as  hundreds of enriching demographics, socioeconomic and lifestyle attributes. We can also help you drive personalized offers based on actual purchases, preferred items, frequency, price sensitivity, promotional history, daypart and channel preferences via virtually any digital channel.

Ready to win over more c-store customers? Contact us today to learn more.

As the grocery industry goes digital, truckloads of data are pouring in for marketers to organize, contextualize, analyze and activate. Between media networks, ecommerce, digital offers, loyalty programs, frictionless checkout and other digital forms of doing business, there are more opportunities to and leverage collect customer insights than ever before. In a recent survey, 79% of respondents agreed that data sharing had become more important since the onset of the pandemic. 

But with new opportunities comes a big challenge: how to manage the heaps of raw information now available to marketers and turn it into the right insights?

New opportunities with data 

The pressure is on to personalize, but many top players are going a step further with shopping data to project into the future. Walmart U.S. President and CEO John Furner shared at GroceryShop 2022 that the retail behemoth is investing in predictive analytics to anticipate customer preferences and better respond to shifts in shopper behavior. (Source)

The more predictive insights you have, the more equipped you are to strengthen supplier relationships, gain influence and manage inventory levels. Forty-one percent of survey respondents identified out-of-stocks and low on shelf availability (OSA) as significant supply chain challenges. Moving forward, suppliers are willing to pay good money for customer data from retailers that would help get ahead of supply chain issues: 51% of suppliers indicated plans to make such a purchase in the next three years.

… and new challenges

But to capitalize on new opportunities like predictive analytics, you first have to gather raw data and turn it into insights. And for most grocers, the sheer quantity of data is overwhelming. You must be able to gather and unite information from multiple sources like loyalty programs, email, website, apps, POS transactions, online sales, demographics, and responses to promotions. Otherwise, you’re stuck in the “data dump” without actionable insights.

Beyond the quantity challenge, there are also sources of a more qualitative nature to consider. Data sources like social media interactions, online reviews or calls from a call center typically get ignored altogether because they are too unstructured and complex for relational systems to evaluate (since they don’t fit neatly into columns or rows). Finally, while customer profiles are a huge end goal of data collection and analysis, don’t forget about other information like insights into your local market or geospatial data that can help you determine product assortment, store location, layout and more.

Analytical shortcomings

Even if you have the necessary mechanisms to collect all the data you need and create truly comprehensive customer profiles, you may not have the analytical capabilities to leverage it. Many statistical models for predicting future purchases and responses to promotions rely on a limited set of demographic and transactional data. In other words, they don’t incorporate the depth of data now available to grocers and other retailers. 

There are other challenges to consider at the activation phase. For example, can you leverage real-time data or does your organization still rely on batch data? Timeliness is everything: delayed promotional offers create redemption rates less than 1% whereas real-time offers can yield upwards of 60-70% redemption.

Clear out the data dump with the right data platform (and partner)

The first step in overcoming the “data dump” challenge is a quality data platform. The right solution will help you unite data across silos and multiple customer touchpoints like POS data, email, SMS, mobile purchases, online ordering, loyalty and rewards membership, and more. From there, you can begin to form robust customer profiles and personas that you can segment to begin targeting, personalization and operational improvements. SKU-level purchase histories are also useful when determining inventory levels, improving store layout and other operational improvements.

Working with a solutions partner to handle some of the complexity of gathering, analyzing and leveraging the full range of data sources at your disposal is an increasingly popular choice for retailers looking to cash in on targeted marketing opportunities.  According to Coresight Research, solutions providers play a key role in helping retailers create a “single insightful data stream,” with the potential to generate .1% to 1.0% of total sales in data revenue.

Activate your potential with Bridg

We offer a data and audience platform that allows brick-and-mortar retailers to identify, understand and engage ALL customers from loyalty to non-loyalty and offline to online. We help our customers build unified, privacy-safe profiles of all customers with SKU-level purchase history and hundreds of demographics, socioeconomic and lifestyle attributes that power analytics, targeted marketing and closed-loop measurement. Plus, our intuitive UI makes it easy to create audiences based on the attributes of your choice, then distribute to your platform of choice for omni-channel activation.

Ready to turn mountains of data into measurable outcomes? Contact us today to learn more. 

Retail is going hybrid. In the wake of the pandemic, many customers are transitioning from their former all-online shopping habits to “hybrid shopping,” or rather, a mix of in-store visits and online shopping. And where the consumer leads, the investments follow. In a 2021 Deloitte survey of 1,000 global executes, 75% reported plans to increase investments in hybrid experiences over the next 12 months.

But the inherent value of omnichannel is nothing new to marketers. It seems like everywhere you look, there’s a study proving the incredible value of an omnichannel approach.

According to Harvard Business Review, 73% of consumers prefer shopping through multiple channels, with omnichannel customers spending 10% more online and 4% more in-store than single-channel customers. From a marketing perspective, omnichannel campaigns also drastically outperform single-channel marketing. In a study conducted by Omnisend, customer retention rates for omnichannel campaigns proved to be 90% higher.

How is the grocery industry pivoting to accommodate the growing preference for hybrid shopping? Let’s review emerging strategies—and the data you need to launch your own successful omnichannel approach.

Omnichannel in action 

Digital tools are taking the lead in helping major grocery players cater to the hybrid shopper. For example, grocery chain Albertsons recently announced over a dozen tech-based initiatives and tools to better connect the online and in-store shopping experience, including:

• Scan-and-pay mobile tool
• Online meal planning
• One-hour delivery scheduling
• Ready-made meal delivery
• Telehealth services
• Weekly budget helper online tool
• “Recipe discussion” in-app tool
  

And more 

Instacart, for their part, decided to launch a series of in-store tools, including electronic shelf tags, smart carts and digital list building after gathering insights from hybrid shoppers according to CEO Fidji Simo.

These tech-based omnichannel efforts all serve to boost ecommerce profitability. According to Raley’s Head of Ecommerce Zachary Wilson, the store’s omnichannel customers spend two to three times more and have larger online baskets. 

But only with the right data 

For grocers of any size, uniting the online and in-store shopping experiences promises a boost in online sales. An omnichannel approach also helps to meet shoppers where they are in terms of overall retail trends. But simply buying or developing a tool won’t deliver the results you’re after unless it caters to your customer base’s specific needs and preferences. And for that, you need data.

Albertsons, for example, reported relying heavily on technology investments and customer data to create and launch their suite of tools. The right breadth and depth of customer insights will help you not only choose the right tools and capabilities to add but also inform the product recommendations the tools themselves serve up to customers. 

Solve the “unknown” problem first

Before you can bring together in-store and online shopping experiences with data, you also need to make sure your insights are balanced on both sides. Many brick-and-mortar operations lack the sophisticated tracking abilities readily available to the ecommerce side of the business.

Consider the following before leveraging your existing data set:

• Do you know who shops in your store? 
• Can you identify the individual behind the in-store transaction in a privacy-safe way? 
• To what level of granularity can you track in-store seasonality, basket size, purchase history and other key SKU-level metrics?
  

While loyalty program data can provide some of these data points, unless a vast majority of customers enroll, you won’t have a complete view of your in-store customers. With these limitations, brick and mortar retailers often struggle to understand purchases across all customers. In turn, they cannot personalize communication to the vast majority of customers and lack insight into marketing’s actual impact on sales.

Before you can create a more seamless omnichannel shopping experience, you need to make sure you’re operating from a reliable data set when it comes to the in-store side of your business. 

Take the first step toward hybrid convenience with Bridg

We help brick and mortar retailers identify all customers that visit their physical locations, including loyalty and non-loyalty, and understand what items they’re purchasing. We can also help target these individuals via virtually any digital channel and transparently measure campaign impact utilizing POS data.

Using our insights, grocers like you can drive personalized offers based on actual purchases, preferred items, frequency, price sensitivity, promotional history, daypart and channel preferences via virtually any digital channel. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you improve your omnichannel marketing efforts.

You’ve heard of two-day shipping becoming standard across retail, but in the world of grocery, it’s more like 15 minutes. Why? During the height of the pandemic, delivery startups like Gorillas and Instacart upped the ante by promising lightning-fast 15-minute delivery windows for groceries. And while it’s hard to argue with the value that quick delivery times add to the customer experience, in the long term, the “blink and it’s there” strategy is not proving viable.

Grocers eager to reclaim Instacart business and the shopper data that comes with it cannot compete with a 15-minute delivery standard, but startups also can’t sustain it. According to Grocery Dive, Gorillas, for example, laid off 300 corporate employees in May, while Gopuff let go 3% of its global workforce at the end of March. At Groceryshop 2022, an Instacart representative acknowledged that the 15-minute model had become less viable due to inflation and the corresponding demand for lower prices. 

While quick delivery may not stand the test of time, its underlying motivator – convenience – is still king when it comes to perfecting the customer experience, nurturing loyalty and attracting new business. As high prices rage on, what other forms of convenience can grocers bring to the table to stay competitive? 

Serve up relevant products to shoppers

Personalization continues to reign supreme across the retail industry. Giant Food’s e-commerce program, Giant Flexible Rewards, for example, turned to personalized pricing, product recommendations and rewards to customers that tied directly to the in-store experience. By creating customer-specific offers based on order frequency, average basket size, purchase history, and more, you can get a running start on the competition, particularly as attitudes toward brand affinity continue to shift. 

You can also leverage personalization to get ahead of supply chain disruptions that inconvenience customers. Transactional data can help you pinpoint the biggest fans of individual products. Then, if you know a shortage is on the horizon, you can alert those shoppers ahead of time and divert them to alternatives, saving them the headache and hassle of a surprise stockout.

Meet shoppers on their terms

Thanks to the influence of streaming apps, ride-sharing apps and social media platforms, consumers now expect on-demand service, which in the grocery context translates to easy access to food. Mobile ordering, frictionless checkout, omnichannel offers and efficiently designed store layouts can all help grocers deliver on this expectation. 

Technology is also evolving how grocers engage customers within the store. A La Cross Hy-Vee location, for example, features all-digital shelf labels displaying product information and pricing. They also advertise products, services and promotions on over 100 TVs around the store. Customers can even use digital kiosks to place prepared food orders and access the company’s financial service offerings.

Meet more than one need

Convenience doesn’t just mean connecting customers to products faster. It can also mean providing services and products outside your immediate category. This saves customers an extra trip while helping you compete for market share against other types of competitors.

Sprouts Farmers Market, for instance, recently announced plans to open an in-store coffee bar in partnership with Phoenix-based, small-batch coffee roaster Press Coffee. This store will serve as a test run before opening up 30 new locations next year. The strategy formed in response to an insight on the popularity of grab-and-go items after a $4.99 deli sandwich ignited a viral video campaign that garnered over 10 million views. Sprouts now intends to offer more prepared foods and grab-and-go options that will help the chain compete with restaurant offerings. 

De-stressing & dressing up the grocery experience

Ease can take many forms. How can you make the shopping experience less stressful and more enjoyable for customers, especially given the tough economic realities many are facing? Can a trip to the grocery store become a personally and socially enriching event? 

Grocers like Hy-Vee, Whole Foods and Sendik’s are opening stores with a greater focus on transparency, education and community building. Hy-vee, for its part, has launched a food hall complete with fast-casual dining options, a sit-down bar with 32 taps, an outdoor patio and multiple restaurants. At Whole Foods, customers can look forward to educational, experiential elements like a meat-cutting room for observing butchers and certified cheese experts providing guided cheese pairings. 

Before convenience can happen, you need data

Whether you’re structuring an offer, planning partnerships or launching new programs, none of these forms of convenience will resonate unless they’re rooted in a solid foundation of comprehensive customer insights—and for that, you need enriched first-party (1P) data.

Are you positioned to gather data from all your customer touchpoints, including in-store purchases? Pay close attention to potential gaps in your pool of insights, particularly outside your digital channels. Do you have mechanisms in place to identify and understand in-store customers and their preferences? 

You need to make sure you have a clear picture of ALL your customers, from in-store to online and loyalty to non-loyalty. Otherwise, you’re basing your decisions on only a fraction of your new and existing customer pool.

Start today with Bridg 

Our data and audience platform was built to help brick-and-mortar grocers solve the anonymous or unknown in-store challenge. We can help you form unified, privacy-safe profiles of unknown, known, loyalty and non-loyalty customers with access to SKU-level purchase histories and hundreds of attributes for analysis. With a reliable source of customer intelligence and unique insights, you’re positioned to make the best decisions on how to deliver added convenience to the customer experience. 

Ready to start reimagining convenience? Contact us to learn more.

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Retail shopping behaviors are full of contradictions at the moment, and winning over the modern consumer is a complex task. Ecommerce, for example, continues to rise in popularity, but the majority (~53%) of consumers still shop in physical stores. Loyalty is in flux—yet the right offer from a preferred brand wins out over a lower price from a non-preferred one.

Understanding these nuances on a granular level and leveraging them on an omnichannel scale is paramount to retail success. That means brands need shopper data—and they need it fast. According to Trade Desk, the number of marketers who intend to use sales data very frequently is expected to nearly triple in the next year.

Retailers have a huge opportunity to help brands leverage that coveted shopper data through their retail media networks. These networks connect brands with the shopper insights and direct channels they need to find and retain customers. Seventy-four percent of brands have dedicated budgets for retail media networks, and according to McKinsey, retail media network growth could represent as much as $100 billion in ad spending by 2026. The operating margins for this form of advertising are also a thing of beauty, falling in the 50-70% range for successful networks, and this is mostly driven by onsite media.

But in order to deliver on the promise of the network – and reap the subsequent ROI – retailers need not only a heap of data but established mechanisms for turning that data into actionable insights.

Brands are paying for direct connections, not impressions

For brands, the goal of any retail media network is to harness rich data sets to better connect with consumers through relevant advertising. Sufficient data scale is critical to deliver on the ROAS that brands expect from their investments in these networks. Data in and of itself, however, doesn’t deliver the value brands are after.

Retailer first-party shopper data is appealing to brands because it promises a direct connection with the consumer – not a bunch of raw material they have to figure out what to do with. The increased expectations reflect a broader evolution within the world of media buys. Before, brands paid for impressions with the hope of a purchase. In the world of commerce media, brands expect to be able to close the transaction-level loop. For brands, success hinges on the right media buying strategy, measurement tools and real-time campaign optimization.

Gather data & create insights

So what does it take to create actionable insights of tangible value for brands? It’s all about distilling multiple touchpoints – like POS, website, customer service, billing, brick-and-mortar stores and more – to a singular view of a consumer. If you’re lacking in raw material, consider leveraging proprietary channels like email to capture more first-party data. This is also an excellent avenue for engaging audiences with specific interests, shopping habits or customer profiles, especially for smaller retailers.

Data platforms are a good starting point for synthesizing all the sources and creating unified customer profiles. It’s important to keep in mind, however, that not all customer data platforms are created equal. If your CDP isn’t helping you translate raw data into insights on your customers and their purchase behaviors at a regular cadence, you’re probably not getting the right ROI.

Finally, consider enhancing your first-party holdings with second and third-party data, as well as  identity resolution capabilities, to create the maximum number of attributes and ensure precise targeting.

The more insights, the more revenue-generating opportunities

When it comes to shopper insights, the more attributes you have at your disposal, the more personalized advertising strategies are available to you. Consider, for example:

• Cross-selling campaigns – Using SKU-level purchase histories, can you find opportunities to promote complementary products to select segments of your audience?
• Re-engagement campaigns – If you know the frequency or cadence of a certain purchase, you can identify lapsed customers and incentivize them to re-engage.
• Seasonal campaigns – Certain products have seasonal relevance to any consumer, but others are seasonal to specific segments – like baby items to new parents, for example.
• Other forms of personalization – Birthday offers. Membership anniversaries. It’s all about the special touches.

The more granular the insight, the more opportunities emerge to layer information and create relevant, timely offers to new and existing customers. We help our customers, for example, leverage over 300+ enriching demographic, socioeconomic and lifestyle attributes to drive personalized offers based on actual purchases, preferred items, frequency, price sensitivity, promotional history, daypart, and channel preferences via virtually any digital channel.

Start today with POS data

We can help you build unified, privacy-safe profiles of loyalty and non-loyalty customers with SKU-level purchase history and hundreds of enriching demographics, socioeconomic and lifestyle attributes that power analytics and targeted marketing. We do it by combining your Point of Sales (POS) data with bank transaction data, and our proprietary census of offline identity and behavior to identify the actual individual behind a credit/debit card transaction. Contact us today to find out more about how we can help you activate, expand and/or refine targeting and personalization for your retail media network.

Want to learn more about the current state of retail media networks, emerging challenges and how to bridge the gap on unknown shoppers? Check out our webinar with Progressive Grocer, “How Retailers and CPG Brands Can Win at Retail Media,” by clicking here.

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Restaurants are facing their fair share of challenges this year, from talent shortages to astronomical costs, supply chain disruptions and razor-thin margins. According to Restaurant Dive, over 66% of independent restaurants have seen a decrease in sales due to inflation. To combat the downturn, restaurants are testing a number of strategies, including more discounts and promotions, reduced operating hours, reduced staff and removal of lower-margin menu items.

Now more than ever, it’s critical for restaurant marketers to understand their audience, drive traffic and sales with personalized messages, and measure the efficacy of offers.‍

Loyalty programs serve as part of this strategy. McDonald’s, for example, announced they’ve acquired nearly 26M loyalty members this year, helping to drive more visits and incremental sales for the chain.

In the race to profitability, marketers must approach new solutions and strategies with added scrutiny—and make sure they have the data they need to connect with customers now and into the future.

New third-party solutions to the rescue?

Third-party vendors are looking to cash in on the challenging environment for restaurants. DoorDash, for instance, recently announced the revamped DoorDash Merchant Suite. Billed as a self-serve platform with solutions for small and medium-sized restaurant partners, it affords restaurants:

• The ability to offer promotions like 20% off your first order and free delivery (to attract new customers & increase order volume)
• Access to more of the population (DoorDash reaches 94% of the U.S. population)
• Easy access to capital without a loan application process and hidden charges using DoorDash Capital

The platform aims to help restaurants increase business and compete in the face of rising costs and supply chain shortages. From a marketing perspective, however, third-party partnerships can present a significant challenge: the fight over data. DoorDash, for example, sued the State of New York last year, contesting their new law requiring delivery apps to share customer information, like names, addresses and email handles, with retailers.

In the case of Merchant Suite, the platform promises customer insights like zip codes for delivery, popular items and sales analytics. But in terms of customer information, you will be limited to reviews, star ratings and whether a customer is new or returning.

The takeaway: Make sure you’re in a position to collect and leverage the customer insights you need to meet your marketing goals when considering outside partnerships.

Loyalty: the old standby hitting new markets

A more direct way to ensure you’re getting all the information you need is through a loyalty program. These are especially popular in the QSR space, with Starbucks Rewards serving as the gold standard. Now, less traditional players are joining in on the trend.

Wow Bao, a virtual brand, and Paytronix recently announced Bao Bucks, a loyalty program that allows customers to earn points on online orders. As many as 41% of independent restaurants are operating virtual brands. The idea of the virtual brand is to grow digital sales and diner reach without having to invest in a brick-and-mortar expansion. Within that strategy, the loyalty program creates access to customer data that can be used to tailor products and promotions.

The takeaway: When you launch a loyalty program, you may gain the type of information you need to improve personalization and targeting—but not necessarily at the right scale. Keep in mind that these programs only represent a portion of your overall audience. In fact, just a 15% penetration rate is considered successful.

What if you already have the data you need?

New third-party partnerships promise strategies for attracting and retaining customers, but may not be an unlimited source of customer insight. And even if you get the insights you need, you’ve only covered the portion of customers who choose third-party ordering or delivery to begin with. Loyalty programs present a similar limitation in that they can only provide a partial view of customers and their purchasing behavior.

The solution may be simpler than you think. What if restaurants already have the data they need to better understand their customers, even those without an e-commerce component?

It may seem unlikely, given that many restaurants have only outdated POS systems and siloed data at their disposal (with added restrictions for franchisees in many cases). Technologically speaking, the industry lags behind retail, but despite these limitations, nearly all restaurants have a key capability: they can process card transactions. And with that capability comes data that, when leveraged properly, can unlock a wealth of insights on all customers.

By enhancing POS data with bank transaction data and proprietary census of offline identity and behavior, you can begin to identify individuals behind card transactions–as well as actual purchases, seasonality, daypart, channel preferences, and more. This information delivers both the scale and specificity you need to understand what’s working and what’s not.

We recently helped a client identify which daily special promotions were most effective by tracking YoY spend and frequency, as well as highest repeat rates for new customers. As a result, the client knew which days of the week and times of day to place daily offers for maximum results.

Position POS data for privacy-safe targeting

We help our clients build unified, privacy-safe profiles of loyalty and non-loyalty customers with SKU-level purchase history and hundreds of enriching demographics, socioeconomic and lifestyle attributes that power analytics, targeted marketing and closed-loop measurement.

To learn more about the first data and audience platform that enables the identification, understanding and engagement of all customers (loyalty and non-loyalty, offline and online), contact us today.

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Identity resolution is becoming an even more important tool in your marketing arsenal as privacy concerns increase and targeting mechanisms disappear. While customer data platforms (CDPs) promise to unite the data you need to better understand your customers, they are not always a reliable reference point. Let’s discuss how you can correct for the common shortcomings of both identity resolution and CDPs to create a single source of truth—and get the full story of all your customers.

But first, what exactly is identity resolution?

Identity resolution describes the process by which a business creates a single, unified customer profile by attributing all customer behavior and interactions with the business, across all touchpoints, platforms or channels. In a nutshell, it helps you recover value from all the data points generated from anonymous or unknown visitors, which can account for upwards of 98% of all web visitors.

Third-party cookies will be phased out eventually…

As technology providers like Google and Meta continue to phase out the third-party cookie, identity resolution – and the CDPs that help orchestrate it – are of heightened interest. Companies are becoming even more dependent on their first-party data to derive insights, segment audiences and activate targeted, personalized offerings.

Additionally, new privacy regulations like the CCPA allow consumers to request access to all data an organization has about them, making match accuracy in identity resolution even more critical. Brands will similarly have to strike a balance between delivering personalization and not alienating consumers through invasive targeting methods as they build out marketing strategies for new platforms like the metaverse.

… but technical challenges still persist

While the concept may sound simple, identity resolution increasingly presents an enormously complex technical challenge. Why? Because the number of potential touchpoints from which you have to gather data is exploding.

According to Park Associates, internet households now own an average of 16 connected devices in 2022. In 2021, the number was 13. But the complexity doesn’t end there. According to Google, 90% of web users move between devices to complete a task. You might start considering a purchase on your phone, then check it out further on your desktop. You might even then make the purchase in-store, creating three separate touchpoints for one purchase.

What about unknown customers?

While CDPs help simplify the challenge of collecting so much disparate data, you may not be gaining as clear a picture of your customer base as you think. While many CDPs leverage omnichannel data and help match individual identifiers to associate customers with their interactions across touchpoints, a significant shortcoming plagues these platforms. Oftentimes the CDP can only match identifiers for known targets, or rather, those customers who have provided some level of PII.

Unfortunately, many brick-and-mortar retailers lack mechanisms to identify their customers. As a result, they don’t know who’s visiting their stores, don’t have insight into their purchasing behavior and can’t target these individuals. So none of this information makes its way into the CDP, in turn making the resulting customer profiles unreliable.

Loyalty data offers one workaround in this scenario. Many retailers create loyalty programs for the express purpose of gathering valuable customer data, since customers volunteer information to join. The retailer can also track their purchases if they use their loyalty ID at checkout.

The problem is, loyalty data can be deceiving. Retailers will likely see an uptick in signups when they launch promotional offers and count that surge as evidence of traction. In reality, however, most of these customers stop identifying themselves once they’ve received the offer. On the whole, these programs generally reach 5-15% penetration, so the vast majority of customers remain unknown, not understood and unreachable.

Solve the unknown problem with a single source of truth

Offline identity resolution helps solve the unknown customer problem for brick-and-mortar retailers and create a single source of truth for customer information. Multiple sources of data – including POS, mobile, email, SMS and more – should come together with market-leading offline identity resolution, card data and consumer attributes to create one unified, privacy-safe profile of your customers.

While it’s easy enough to identify the myriad of digital touchpoints that should contribute to customer profiles, even retailers with strong ecommerce capabilities should not discount the importance of offline touchpoints. Consider our example from above: you start researching a product on your phone, then on your desktop, but make the actual purchase in-store. Without offline identity resolution, a crucial data point – your actual purchasing behavior – is missing. Additionally, postal addresses are an important identification tool to link identities in your database, which improves the quality of your data, in turn bolstering the reliability of the insights you draw from your CDP.

Offline Identity Resolution that incorporates point of sale (POS) data combined with bank transaction data, and proprietary, self-built census of offline identity and behavior enables identification of individuals behind in-store transactions. This creates a more complete customer profile than using digital touchpoints alone.

Start today with Bridg

Bridg is the first data and audience solution for brick-and-mortar businesses that enables the identification, understanding and engagement of all customers (loyalty, non-loyalty). We can help you identify offline customers and build rich privacy-safe profiles that are targetable across virtually any digital channel with transparent closed loop measurement.

We enable brick-and-mortar businesses to go beyond the constraints of the known customer universe (e.g; loyalty, online ordering) and utilize purchase intelligence and behavioral insight across ALL customers to drive strategic and tactical actions in support of customer engagement and top line growth.

To learn more about how we fuel the “art of the possible,” check out our white paper here and our case studies here.

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Changes are afoot in the marketing and advertising world as a key lifeforce fades into extinction: the third-party cookie. Faced with the dilemma of how to continue delivering personalized customer engagements without it, 41% of marketers believe their biggest challenge will be their inability to track the right data (Hubspot).

But what if you already had the key insights you needed to understand your customers and drive revenue from your marketing spend? Let’s explore how enhanced first-party data can help you shed third-party dependency—and what steps you can take to future-proof your MarTech stack and prove incrementality today.

#1: Embrace the cookieless future

Cookies have been a best friend to businesses large and small for years, allowing brands to track web traffic, improve UX and collect data for targeted advertising. But now, thanks to shifting policies and growing concerns for consumer privacy, that’s all changing.

What’s happening, exactly? First, Google plans to phase out the third-party cookie from Chrome browsers and replace it with Topics API. Topics API assigns users a set of topics that represent their weekly interests based on browser history. Sites and advertisers receive three topics that represent their visitors’ interests. Apple, for its part, also now requires apps running on its devices to get consumer permission before tracking their activity. And new consumer data privacy laws continue to take shape across the country with data privacy proposals under review in Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

What does it mean for brick-and-mortar retail and restaurant marketers? The shift away from third-party cookies represents a major shakeup to targeting strategies, since Chrome comprises nearly 60% of the web browser market, and more than half of all global web traffic (Statista). As new changes take hold, marketers need to prepare their tech stack and corresponding targeting strategies for a privacy-first future.

In a nutshell, consumers will choose whether or not to give you information, and you need to be prepared to capture and enhance that information to create a basis for targeting.

#2: Use first-party data to understand your customers

The easiest way to future-proof your marketing strategy in the face of changing privacy policies is to focus on shoring up first-party data, or information collected directly from your customers. The cookieless future is full of first-party data, but where do you actually get it? There are a number of sources within a retailer’s reach, including, but not limited to:

• Behaviors or actions taken across your website, app, and/or product (via the first-party cookie)
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system
• Social media profiles
• Subscription-based emails
• Surveys
• Customer feedback

Keep in mind that not everyone will opt-in, making these measures inconclusive when it comes to creating a full picture of your customer base. However, don’t forget about point-of-sale (POS) data. Since most consumers pay with cards (credit/debit), you automatically capture abbreviated card data from anyone who makes a purchase in your store. By layering this information with anonymized offline identity and behavioral insights, you can create a privacy-safe, 360-degree view of all your in-store customers.

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The right data platform can help you leverage this data in a privacy-safe way to gain insight into unknown consumers with access to item-level purchase history, demographics, socioeconomic, special interests, and predictive attributes in support of strategic and tactical decision making. But keep in mind: your insights need unifying: pull it all together to create a single, longitudinal consumer profile.

#3: Leverage your data & audiences—and reach out at the right time

Once you’ve enhanced your first-party data to create a deeper understanding of customers, it’s time to activate those insights and start engaging. Now that you know the “who,” you need to perfect the “where” and “when.”

Targeting your audience takes the right combination of data management platform (DMP) and demand side platform (DSP) capabilities. First, you need to clearly track and understand the user’s cross-device journey, particularly given the prevalence of omni-channel convenience. Next, you can buy advertising based on that information and reach your targets at the right time.

#4: Align your marketing goals & spend

The campaign is live. Is this the finish line—or the start of the race? It’s a trick question! Make sure you have the right measurement tools in place to “close the loop” on performance and incremental sales lift. Armed with the right analytics, you can make sure your marketing goals align to your spend to drive towards your business goals.

Here’s where the beauty of enhanced first-party data comes in: you’re already working from directly-measured, comprehensive insights to gain a deeper knowledge of customers, positioning you to make better-informed decisions across the funnel that drive economic outcomes.

Bridge the gap with Bridg

We work with brick-and-mortar retailers to help them solve the “anonymous consumer” challenge, identify the real person behind the in-store transaction and gain insight into SKU-level purchase history, demographics and more, all while protecting consumer privacy. These unique insights can help you drive targeted and personalized marketing communications across 200+ integrated advertising platforms for enhanced media efficiency and top line growth.

Ready to tackle the unknown by enhancing your first-party data? Let’s connect today.

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Here’s the understatement of the year: retail media networks are getting big—and fast. As U.S. digital retail climbs to a projected $50B by 2023, both retailers and CPG brands are clamoring to cash in on the booming trend (eMarketer). But can retailers deliver on the data scale and nuanced analytics they need to pull it off? Let’s explore what’s at stake on both sides—and how retailers can future-proof their tech stack to deliver on ROAS and keep the network expanding.

‍Benefits galore

In many ways, retail media networks represent the ultimate win-win for both parties. 

Retailers who build or partner to create these channels open a new revenue stream while tapping into new brand budgets previously unavailable to them like media, search and social spend.

By advertising products on these networks, retailers also expose consumers to more “shelf” items that often go unseen in the e-commerce experience. And when brands succeed, so do retailers–with increased trips, loyalty, basket size and overall category spending. 

Brands, for their part, get direct access to verified shoppers when they are ready to buy, driving stronger awareness and sales for their brand.

In addition to increased ROAS and omni-channel sales, they can also achieve greater SKU visibility, strengthen their retailer relationships and gain a better understanding of the shopper at the retailer. 

‍First-party data wins the day 

At the top of the list for CPG brands interested in retail media networks is the opportunity to gain access to a retailer’s first-party data.  Changing privacy laws and the sunsetting of third-party cookies have magnified the value of first-party data for brands as they look for ways to future-proof their digital advertising strategy.

Most have used cookies to create, track and reach consumers with personalized marketing across sites. Personalized marketing has driven huge efficiency gains for advertisers, and retailer first-party shopper data offers CPGs a route back to a direct, measurable connection with the consumer in the impending post-cookie era.

‍Retailers are watching the challenges stack

Despite all the opportunity, many retailers face serious challenges in establishing the network and delivering the needed insights to prove ROAS for brand partners. Top obstacles include:

• Expense and complexity of building the tech stack
• Capacity to sell, plan and measure programs 
• Metrics and methodologies that differ from those of the brand partner or across retailers 
• Low onsite traffic
• Differentiation from other retail media network competition or other digital publishers 

Retailers are taking steps to address these challenges, namely through third-party partnerships and expanded in-house teams who can handle the tech stack and capacity challenges of building and maintaining the network. 

One challenge that has gone largely unaddressed, however, is that most retailers lack the scale, tools and data to compete with established advertising networks like Google and Facebook. In fact, many do not even realize they have a data scale problem until they’re live and running campaigns. That’s a big problem, since scale is often the biggest driver of ROAS—and CPG brands are already paying a premium at that point to advertise on the retailer’s media network. As retailers look to grow their retail media networks, a lack of data scale only stands to further impede their success.

‍The scale problem

In this sense, the biggest draw of the retail media network for CPGs is also the biggest challenge for many retail media networks. Many retailers simply don’t know who their customers are and rely on insufficient loyalty data to enhance their first-party data. As a result, those retailers are struggling to deliver the needed scale of first-party data to attract brand partners and make full use of their budgets.  And when first-party data isn’t sufficient, media spend shifts to third-party data, which means that to deliver adequate ROAS, impressions are over-delivered to a generic audience or spread over a longer period. 

In many cases, this means retailers are leaving money on the table. A large brand with $8M in planned annual investment, for example, may only be able to spend $5M of that commitment for a positive ROAS, as they cannot get as precise as needed with audience targeting. In addition, a limited 1P audience could make campaign measurement unfeasible for smaller brands with lower household penetration (HHP) or longer purchase cycles.

‍Identity resolution is the way forward

In order to remain competitive, it’s critical for retailers to optimize and expand their first-party audience. At the foundation of any retail media network, retailers need to be able to identify, understand and engage unknown store customers and provide a full 360 view including both online and offline sales at the individual level. 

Identity resolution greatly increases the scale and value of first-party data, unlocking greater spend from CPGs. For example, we worked with a Fortune 100 CPG retailer to identify unknown customers and better understand the shopping behaviors of a greater percentage of in-store customers. Now, they can reach 90% of their active customers through paid media.They’ve also been able to grow their media network by 17.5% and increase net sales during Q1 2022.

It’s important to note that most identity resolution solutions that are being leveraged by retailers today are not created equal.

Most of them are based on simple name and zip code/address matching or trade area appends, which happen to have very poor match-rates with numerous opportunities for error––and an inability to resolve identities to a single person.

You need to go beyond these simplistic approaches to ensure that only a single individual is tied to a transaction record and have a data platform in your tech stack that will allow you to do so with precision and accuracy, not extrapolation and guessing, and at scale. 

‍Identify unknown store customers with Bridg

As interest in retail media networks skyrockets, both the opportunity and the pressure intensify for retailers who need more first-party data. Those who can expand their first-party audience will be positioned to attract brand partners and keep growing the network.

We help retailers identify millions of unknown in-store customers, provide enhanced customer behavior insights along with SKU-level purchase history––all in a 100% privacy-compliant way. As a result, you can enjoy the same rich insight into consumer behavior, targeting capabilities and closed loop measurement that online-only retailers possess – which means you have the foundation you need to position your retail media network for the greatest competitive advantage.

Ready to expand your first-party audience and watch your media network thrive? Let’s connect today.

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