According to new report from O Alliance, 70 percent of retailers are trying to run campaigns aimed at driving engagement in a different channel from the one in which the campaign takes place. Examples include e-mail campaigns offering a discount only redeemable in-store or a display ad that prompts a customer to download a mobile app.
Yet nearly half (48 percent) of all retailers still lack the ability to measure the success of these campaigns.
The findings in the consultancy's report, "Retail Transformation Underway: Achieving Customer-Centric Commerce," developed in partnership with Revmetrix, were based on a survey of 150 senior executives at more than 100 retailers in North America and Europe.
With multi-touch customers proving to be more loyal and more profitable, retailers want to stimulate cross-channel behavior, according to the report. Yet with the myriad of ways to reach customers, a lack of cross-channel attribution is leading to inefficient marketing spend with many using the "last-touch" model, according to the report.
As an example, the report pointed to how one leading retail executive who participated in the survey conducted a deep analysis and found that many marketing technology solutions were claiming credit for certain transactions they did not really deserve.
In one case, a customer made 11 visits across two different devices. The first eight began with click-throughs from e-mail campaigns, and on the eighth visit the customer added the item to her cart and then left the website. An automatic retargeted ad led the customer to click back to the company's website. The retargeted ad wound up gaining credit for the purchase even though the last e-mail campaign was the more meaningful influencer.
O Alliance argued that a more integrated measurement approach that ties in attribution and marketing mix together is required to optimize spending along the customer purchase path and leads to more relevant offers.