Loyalty-based marketing in the retail sector is undergoing significant change given the rise of modern data science, AI and cloud computing. Traditionally, loyalty programs were often based on simple reward schemes and discount offers largely targeted generalised segments of customers.

Today’s consumers expect more personalised experiences. Retailers that can capture a customer’s favourite brands, products, shopping habits and budgets are more likely to earn their trust and loyalty.

Modern hyperpersonalisation is a highly data driven AI-enabled approach to one-to-one marketing. Innovative retailers are now able to collect, classify and analyse large volumes of data to produce highly individualised insights, recommendations and offers.

However, none of this would be possible without the modern cloud and composable commerce platforms.

While a deep dive into the cloud and composable commerce platform aspects of one-to-one marketing isn’t feasible, it’s worth covering the basics.

Unpacking the basics for retailers

As discussed in our latest ebook, modern cloud and composable commerce platforms are helping the retail sector innovate by providing powerful tools for data management, customer understanding, and business transformation.

These platforms can be game-changing for retailers seeking to scale with ease, adopt new data practices, and deploy AI solutions for improved marketing, forecasting and customer insights.

Some of the major benefits advanced cloud platforms can provide retailers include:

  • Analysing large volumes of customer data
  • On-demand computing power that can run marketing forecasting models and AI-driven experiences for shoppers and staff in real-time
  • A scalable platform allowing for growth and development Improved product and services intelligence
  • Cost reductions
  • Optimised operations

Your very own customisable retail toolkit

A composable commerce platform is like a ‘customisable toolkit’ for building an e-commerce store, which comes in handy for any retailer or brand needing to generate vast amounts of hyperpersonalised offers and challenges.

During a recent conference presentation, Paul Williams, APAC Director of Solutions Engineering for cloud-based commerce platform commercetools, illustrated what a difference a composable commerce platform could make with reference to the British department store John Lewis.

Until recently, John Lewis’ platform could only support 10 releases per year and launching new products took a product team the whole day.

Peak sales periods like Black Friday required a 270-step manual process and staff had to spend months preparing for it. Fast forward to them transitioning to a composable approach, and John Lewis can now achieve thousands of releases a year across completely independent product teams.

In fact, a single team member can launch new products in under an hour and the platform is able to handle 1000s of orders per second.

One-to-one marketing isn’t the future, it’s increasingly the present

Not so long ago, the notion that a major retailer or brand could create millions of individually tailored offers for the millions of customers signed up to their loyalty program would have seemed like science fiction.

Yet the technology now exists to do this. Some of the world’s more innovative retailers, such as Tesco, have already embraced it, with promising results.

As more retailers and brands embrace hyper personalisation, there will undoubtedly be even more evidence that combining customer and product data with AI/ML drives loyalty and sales.

This article is an adapted excerpt of Eagle Eye’s recently published eBook: Real-time Hyperpersonalisation: Retail’s Next Big Thing? click here to read the eBook now.

Jonathan Reeve is vice president of APAC at Eagle Eye.