MarketLive news: The path to customer-driven commerce

If you’ve been reading our blog for a while, then you know that we view the shopper experience as the most crucial aspect of successful online selling. Consumers’ expectations are high for merchants to present relevant products and offers — which translates into significant revenue gains for brands that can deliver.  More than 40% of consumers say they buy more from brands that individualize offerings, while personalized messaging earns an average of 10 times more than “batch and blast”-style campaigns, according to MarketLive partner MyBuys.

Moreover, presenting consumers with the right products and offers for their specific situation is what can distinguish merchants in their race to and other mega-merchants that increasingly dominate online commerce. By honing shoppers’ experiences to take into account everything from their preferred mobile device to their in-store buying behaviors and past call center interaction, merchants demonstrate a keen understanding of individual consumers’ needs — and win sales and lasting loyalty.

With this philosophy as a guide, earlier this week we revealed a new vision and product strategy for MarketLive’s commerce platform, which we’re dubbing “Customer Driven Commerce.” This approach  provides merchants the technology, tools and strategy to build meaningful customer relationships by optimizing every individual client interaction regardless of touchpoint.

Core components powering customer driven commerce on the MarketLive platform include:

• Comprehensive data and analytics. The platform collects customer data across channels and touchpoints, while measurable outcomes are layered into the solution at every level, providing granular insight into shoppers’ behavior.

• Personalization and segmentation: Analytics data helps merchants predict the best promotional strategies and drive optimization through segmentation and personalized marketing strategies.

• Retail CRM: A retail focused version of the customer relationship management concept gives merchants a marketing database integrated with the commerce platform, allowing creation of targeted programs, targeted messaging and optimal campaign strategies for driving revenue and loyalty.

• Rich experiences across touchpoints. A comprehensive feature set — including award-winning content and product discovery tools —  ensures every customer touchpoint creates the best possible brand experience for that shopper, whether it be via responsive design on a mobile or tablet device, through clienteling at a portable POS or through well-targeted advertisements or emails.

With the MarketLive platform, data from across a range of channels, devices and consumer behavior is integrated into a powerful marketing database, providing a 360-degree view of the shopper. This information is made actionable with a suite of tools to develop effective campaigns, tailor merchandising, and individualize content to give shoppers the best possible retailing experience with every brand interaction.

This core technology, when combined with MarketLive’s call center and customer service solution, provides merchants unparalleled insight into shoppers’ cross-touchpoint behavior, while ensuring that consumers enjoy a seamless brand experience that takes into account their interaction history and smoothly enables their journey along the path to purchase. Furthermore, MarketLive’s offering is built using extensible architecture that allows for nimble implementation of new features and functionality in response to customers’ needs.

Read the full press release about our new approach, and continue to watch this blog for customer-driven strategies and best practices.