As we head into the busiest retail season of the year, marketers face an uphill battle. Across Asia-Pacific, retailers are grappling with a price crunch problem from both ends of the spectrum. 

According to a recent APAC survey, 53% of regional retail businesses are currently struggling in the consideration stage of the customer journey to demonstrate value beyond price. This aligns with a survey of Australian retailers which showed their top concerns include responding to price sensitivity (34%) and the cost of operating customer experience (CX) (22%). 

Not only are business costs sky high, but their customers are under immense financial strain, making efforts to engage through alternate value propositions extremely tricky. So what can retailer marketers do to help them stand out among peers and survive the price crunch this holiday season?

Twilio’s latest State of Customer Engagement Report provides some clues as to what consumers are looking for.

Connect data dots 

Interestingly, Australian businesses have the widest customer experience gap of all APAC organisations; 86% of businesses surveyed believe they provide ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ customer engagement, but only 54% of consumers agree. 

The main reason local brands are struggling to understand their customers’ perceptions is due to poorly connected data, with half (51%) of Aussie brands saying that connecting customer data across channels, sources and platforms is their biggest challenge, and close to half (46%) indicating they struggle with turning data into customer insights.

Brands are pouring resources into creating customer experiences across all of the appropriate channels, but by not collecting and unifying the data they need to execute each properly, it’s all just guesswork.

Brands need to invest in more foundational work around their use of data, which includes having a unified place to collect, analyse and act upon all customer data in real-time. This data collection must include dark data, the information that’s stored in your company’s systems but not necessarily utilised.

If left untouched, dark data can develop disparate and incompatible understandings of your customers, their journeys, and how your business should interact with them, which means you could be putting significant money into systems that are actually giving you the wrong information. Having a trusted partner to help sort, make sense of your data, and recommend strategies that will move the needle, is essential.

Effective AI-driven personalisation

If you’re a brand that has unified data but is still struggling to activate it in the right ways, AI tools can make all the difference. Even with data usage challenges, when AI-powered personalisation is deployed effectively, global consumers reward them by spending an average of 54% more with them compared to brands that do not.

Additionally, 55% of respondents globally are willing to spend more money for a customised experience, while 48% say they’ve made a repeat purchase from a company based on the level of personalisation they received.

The beauty of AI is that it can help your team generate ideas, copy, and ultimately campaigns in a fraction of the time it takes a human. This is very handy in the lead up to sales periods and Christmas when you’re trying to do as much as possible in a small amount of time.

You can create more precise, predictive audiences out of the box, trigger timely journeys, and personalise experiences based on a customer’s predictive lifetime value. This means your precious internal resources are being directed to the areas that will make a difference.

Real-time responsiveness for younger generations

Nowhere is personalisation more important than across interactions with younger generations. Almost seven in 10 Gen Zers and Millennials would stop using a brand that doesn’t deliver personalised experiences on their preferred channels. Additionally, more than one-third of them will abandon a brand that doesn’t engage with them directly in real-time. 

Taking your data and building “unified customer profiles” can allow your business to understand every user’s complete journey, so you can send them targeted offers, messaging, content, and more. This is the only way to truly understand your customers’ behaviour, giving you the ability to use those insights to develop ways to make them feel seen.

Converting money-conscious consumers in today’s tough economy is no easy task. But the facts are clear when it comes to customer data utilisation and personalisation. Retail marketers who make this a top priority in the lead up to the holidays rush will be pleasantly surprised.

Liz Adenji is regional vice president of sales for Asia Pacific & Japan at Twilio Segment.