Ai Editorial: Email + ecommerce receipts = data driven retailing

First published on 3rd November, 2016

Ai Editorial: Travel marketers need to consider the prowess of emails featuring item-level ecommerce receipt data. Ai’s Ritesh Gupta explores how such data can help in understanding the traveller and optimize the travel booking funnel.

 

How can travel brands make the most of data captured from items purchased?

This isn’t a new opportunity as such, but surely is one that is getting sophisticated.

Email data featuring retail transactions is offering visibility into shopping activity, paving way for profound analysis into buying preferences and patterns.

Travel marketers are being enticed to look into such data as details relate to actual transactions made by consumers in “near” real-time.

So is the transactional data market being disrupted?

Yes, says Dwight Sholes, Senior Consultant, Travel and Hospitality, Return Path. The company maintains a panel of over 1.3 million consumers who are active buyers and are receiving email receipts into their inboxes on a regular basis. These consumers have given “permission to have confidential visibility into their email inboxes while strictly protecting their privacy and personal data”, says Sholes. “We capture data at the item level, including product titles, colours, sizes, individual order quantities, pricing information, and more. Analyze the macro and the micro,” he says.

Today, receipts for a very large percentage of consumers’ online and offline transactions are being transmitted via email.  When a consumer walks into a brick-and-mortar location and makes a purchase, or when a consumer transacts business online, he or she will receive a detailed receipt via email to her inbox.  Receipts are sent via email for all online transactions and, increasingly, for many offline transactions made at both large and small businesses.  These email receipts contain detailed information about the purchase, including the specific items purchased, the amount paid, the method of payment, the merchant making the transaction, and so forth.

Rich, detailed data

Armed with rich, detailed data, travel marketers will have the ability to understand where consumers are transacting, when they are buying, what they are buying, and how much they are paying. 

Source: Return Path

 

“And with overlays of demographic and other profiling data from third parties, travel marketers will be able to understand who these customers are in greater detail,” said Sholes.

When asked how such insight can play its part in the travel booking funnel, Sholes says the quality is superior. Credit card companies, for example, typically only provide data at the merchant level and do not provide data down to the individual item level. “We parse nearly 100 pieces of information into a database,” says Sholes. The team at Return Path is in the process of completing development of Consumer Insights for Travel, which will provide detailed receipt data about airline transactions followed, in later releases, with data about accommodations, car rental, cruises, transfers, and other travel products and services. “Initial beta applications of the data have been very promising, shedding light on how different demographic groups buy different types of ancillaries at different rates, and how different carriers have different take rates for ancillaries.  Going forward, additional applications include leveraging Consumer Insight data to gain a better understanding of the path to purchase not only for airline ancillaries but other travel products and services as well.”

“In particular, Consumer Insight provides airlines with valuable data about ancillary products and purchases.  With Consumer Insight, airlines will be able to develop deeper understanding about the profile of consumers who buy different types of ancillary products and services, both for their own passengers and for competitors’,” shared Sholes.

Gearing up for parsed data

The challenge for airlines (as well as many other businesses, particularly in travel) is creating human processes to make more effective use of data in their business planning.  Too often, businesses ignore data that is available to them and continue setting strategy as they always have.  In today’s data-driven business environment, it is important to break down silos, to take a customer-centric view, and to make smarter decisions by leveraging data that is available rather than the easier route of ignoring the data in favour of business as usual.

As for what sort of infrastructure or integrations are required to optimize parsed data in an airline, Sholes said this depends on the infrastructure and capabilities of each specific airline.  Such data is provided as a data feed to existing non-travel customers, and the amount of integration required is minimal. According to Sholes, any airline that is able to accept a data feed and utilize Consumer Insight data with its current analytics capabilities could start receiving the data relatively quickly.

Expect more in the time to come

Generally a retailer tends to have information about individual purchase histories for regular buyers. In addition to this, one can evaluate certain demographic and payment preference details.

But one can beyond this, too. For instance, what sort of activity or shopping the same set of buyers indulge in outside a brand’s touchpoints. Return Path has underlined that 3rd party consumer data can tell retailers more about how much their average shopper spends at competing stores, which brands they prefer for non-competitive, non-substitute products, and even provide a glimpse into customer psychodynamics. The company also added that the term consumer insights and the underlying art/ science that turns insights into action “are still shaping into something meaningful, but let this be the first step on a journey to understanding what consumer insights really are”.

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