Activate trusted customer data to offer personalized retail buying experiences

This is a guest blog post from our friends at Looker.

Modern consumers want, if not expect, personalized retail shopping experiences. Today's shoppers are used to navigating tailormade digital stores that offer highly relevant, creative messaging and product recommendations. These seamless, connected shopping experiences have the ability to drive customer engagement, conversion, and, ultimately, retention.

68% of shoppers are unlikely to return to a website or store that doesn't provide a satisfactory customer experience. - Forrester

Perfecting this equation many times across millions of customers may seem daunting as a data endeavor, but in reality, organizations may be closer to doing so than they may think by just using the business intelligence (BI) tool their organization already has, Google Cloud’s Looker, and Hightouch. With the data models already defined in Looker's semantic layer and Google Cloud’s commitment to open ecosystems, teams can leverage Hightouch to activate customer data and create personalized buying experiences and messages in minutes.

Building Customer and Business Definitions in One Place

With Looker's semantic layer, created with LookML, data teams collaboratively build the data foundation used by the rest of the business as a single source of truth. Using LookML, companies can define any metrics once in Looker and seamlessly reuse them across dashboards, Looker explorers, or, in this case, with Hightouch to power any SaaS application.

When data definitions and metrics are centralized with Looker, data teams ensure metrics stay consistent and fresh regardless of where they are being used. This means definitions of what constitutes "active" or "customer" at the organizational level are easily extended to the digital store level without needing to rebuild or repopulate the definitions in a separate system, which quickly becomes challenging to manage.

With Looker's semantic data model, all these customer and business metrics are maintained in one central place, ensuring easy access to trustworthy data and simplified business logic. When business logic and definitions change, they are automatically and globally updated to ensure the most current definitions are always used.

Insights on All Platforms

After defining customer metrics and insights in Looker's semantic layer, teams can use Hightouch to activate and leverage their data model beyond Looker’s UI. This creates truly self-serve data access for any team. With Hightouch and Looker, teams no longer have to worry about whether the CSV exported to Facebook's ad platform contains out-of-date customer segments or product inventory. Instead, Hightouch ensures automated syncing between Looker and the platforms retailers rely on to serve personalized shopping and advertising experiences to customers.

For example, retailers can define "high lifetime value visitors in the last week" in Looker and use Hightouch to trigger reminder emails to that segment or show relevant Instagram ads based on shopping cart abandonment. This can all be done without ever exporting and importing a CSV, ensuring timely action and reducing ad spending waste.

With Looker and Hightouch, businesses can easily manage various customer segments, maintain a growing product catalog, define robust suppression lists, and ensure these are automatically updated and acted upon across any platforms customers appear in.

Check out this playbook from Hightouch on how retailers can power Facebook Dynamic Ads with an up-to-date product catalog.

Secure Access and Trusted Platform Governance

Customer trust and data security are at the center of everything Hightouch and Looker do. Hightouch and Looker's granular access controls, robust permissions, and audit logs help ensure that the right stakeholders can access the right customer metrics and data securely. Using Hightouch to sync Looker data directly into tools retail and e-commerce teams rely on ensures there is always a centralized place to toggle access controls to that data, supporting compliance obligations.

Both Hightouch and Looker continually invest in enterprise-level governance capabilities to help keep data secure so companies can activate their data with increased peace of mind.

Take Action on Your Data Today

As a retailer, staying competitive in today's market means not only having a deep understanding of customers and their purchasing propensity but also acting on that information. By leveraging Hightouch and Looker together, retailers and e-commerce companies can easily and automatically respond to customers with a personalized touch.

Check out how to add Looker semantic models to Hightouch in minutes or book a demo with Hightouch’s team of experts today!