Retailers have had a tough few years, and it doesn’t look to be getting easier any time soon. Even as the destruction wrought by the pandemic recedes, retailers are faced with renewed economic challenges, including high interest rates, the cost of living crisis, continued supply chain disruptions, high street store closures… and the list goes on.
Challenges for retail marketing
These challenges also extend to retail marketing: competition from rival brands, changing consumer behaviours, evolving customer expectations, and maintaining brand loyalty. It’s a tough time to be seen and heard as a retailer.
For decades, brands have searched for the perfect formula to boost the golden trio of engagement, loyalty, and sales. And it comes down to one thing: data. Data not only enables personalised communications, but also enables the acquisition of new customers.
In a world where the vast majority of companies are focused on improving personalisation, those that don’t prioritise creating a tailored experience run the risk of getting left behind. Yet while everyone is talking about personalisation, even the savviest of brands still struggle to operationalise it at scale.
But personalisation doesn’t need to be all or nothing and a little can go a long way. Retailers don’t need to hyper-personalise or have millions of iterations for every customer to build meaningful relationships.
There are two main ways in which to go about creating more personalised communications with customers. The first is to retain existing customers and ensure that, as a retailer, customer data is accurate and up to date. The second is to prospect customer profiles which can bring the most profits to the business. Let’s take a look at both.
Building an accurate and enriched database
Driving maximum effectiveness and efficiencies from a customer database can only be achieved by having the RIGHT data to inform the marketing strategy and comms. A lot of brands only hold a name, address and email on their customer, leading to campaigns based on their purchasing behaviour, rather than who they actually are.
Creating personalised campaigns just isn’t possible without quality data. Retailers need to ensure the data they hold is accurate, complete, consistent and valuable. In the long run, cleansing data regularly is a good strategy: it maximises data quality and performance and addresses the end-to-end customer lifecycle, enabling retailers to hold a competitive advantage, gain a larger market share, and reap a return on personalisation investment.
Secondly, retailers can make the data they hold on customers more meaningful, purposeful, and targeted with data enrichment: gaining valuable insights about individual customers enhances marketing activities, drives stronger relationships, and maximises return.
Sagacity’s Enhance solution offers retailers the most accurate, in depth, and insightful view of existing customers, backed by the most comprehensive consumer population database in the UK. With unrivalled insights, Enhance enriches existing customer data with relevant information, helping retailers understand who their customers are, and how to connect with them.
This enables the creation of tailored, personalised marketing campaigns, and Enhance ensures data is clean, accurate, and complete, so that time and resources can be directed towards the right customers.

Identifying new opportunities
Enhance not only enriches existing customer data, but also uncovers new opportunities for the business. By analysing and enriching their data, a retailer can gain valuable insights to identify untapped markets, emerging trends and potential growth areas, covering everything from: who consumers live with; what they earn; what they spend; how they transact; and their interests and hobbies.
By enhancing customer data to include demographic, lifestyle or financial variables, retailers can create content that is relevant, personal, and therefore most likely to return results.
Prospecting customer profiles
If a retailer is looking to acquire new customers, then using data to prospect customer profiles can bring the most profits to the business. Prospect is Sagacity’s B2C database solutions for prospect data, providing retailers with the right data to acquire, engage and retain prospective customers, leveraging detailed profiling filters to precisely target ideal customers, and providing valuable insights on how to communicate with different prospect segments throughout marketing activities.
The Prospect database holds the most comprehensive, clean, accurate and responsive consumer prospect data available in the UK, sourced from lifestyle, digital and transactional data as well as open source information available at postcode level. The prospect database can be tailored to a truly detailed level, giving retailers the confidence to communicate with relevant prospect segments in the right way; build quality customer relationships; make better, more informed business decisions; and increase marketing ROI.
Data is key
With the right data built into their customer marketing database, retailers will benefit from the following:
- Accuracy: Up-to-date and accurate data ensures marketing lands correctly every time
- Insights: The ability to unlock the hidden potential within customer data to understand behaviour and trends
- Timeliness: Using data to prospect new customers and deepen engagement with existing ones, optimising ROI
Retail-focused data-driven solutions improve customer journeys and engagement, helping retailers achieve their objectives and deliver increased profits. No one channel works in isolation, and it is vital when campaign planning to measure the impact of each channel against another.
With a holistic, insight-driven approach, retailers can implement planning strategies they can feel confident in, and carry out personalised marketing campaigns that will not only make existing customers feel valued but also acquire new ones: the lifeblood of any retail business.