How Can Retailers Capture Consumer Data to Produce Personalized Marketing?

Most retailers face what marketing organization Wunderkind calls a “black hole” in their personalization efforts, Retail Focus reports. This “black hole” is a retailer’s inability to recognize return visitors to a website, thereby hampering their personalization efforts. Even more difficult is recognizing a return visitor who is returning via another device (i.e. they first visited on their phone and then on their laptop).

This is important to retailers because as customers seek to save money, they tend to visit more than one website when shopping, bouncing between different sites as they make a decision. With an inability to identify returning visitors, these visitors can be subjected to redundant first-time-visitor lightboxes.

These “black holes” also lead to less-personalized email communications. Half of shoppers report receiving impersonal communications from retailers, and half report that these impersonal communications make them less likely to buy.

As a result, retailers are left scrambling to come up with creative ways to track customers while keeping their privacy in mind.