Back-to-school & beyond: 3 reasons e-commerce retailers should embrace data sharing

Here are the top three reasons smart retailers are sharing data with brands:

1. Brands who can see marketing ROI are incentivized to send more traffic and recurring buyers their way. Brands have myriad options for where to send the traffic from their ad campaigns. And when it comes to prioritizing retailer websites, they’re going to give first nod to the ones that provide them with the most visibility into marketing performance. If a retailer chooses not to share conversion data with the brands that feed them, they might as well be sending their customers into a black hole and hoping for the best, which is not the best use of a brand’s marketing dollars. The fact is, brands need to optimize the customer journey to maximize sales. And to do that effectively, they need to be able to connect the dots from discovery to purchase. When a brand can see what assets and channels are sending high-conversion traffic to a retailer site, they’ll be far more likely to send recurring traffic your way.  From a back-to-school lens, retailers can then reap the benefits as brands prioritize sending them traffic from one — retargeting campaigns for school supplies that need to be replenished throughout the year, and two — future back-to-school campaigns. 
2. More knowledge means more power to unlock new audiences, drive conversions and optimize e-commerce operations on both sides. In a market that could be described as unstable — or unpredictable at best — retailers and brands need each other. But far too often, these relationships are strained or nearly nonexistent. Why? Retailers feel like brands are competing with them more than they’re cooperating, and brands feel like retailers aren’t giving them the individual attention they deserve. But sharing back-to-school data (and e-commerce data, in general) helps retailers and brands alike optimize their presence on the digital shelf. Whether it’s identifying technical problems (i.e. broken links), improving product pages or identifying customer trends and patterns, there’s something for both parties to gain by eliminating information asymmetry and combining insights to win more customers and optimize the path to purchase.
3. Detailed insights into the entire customer journey benefit everyone — including the customer. Sharing data with brands doesn’t require any extra work on a retailer’s part, but it does give them access to new insights they wouldn’t otherwise have. Retailers who embrace data sharing get reports that show how much traffic brands are sending them, where it’s coming from, how many transactions are occurring as a result and which SKUs are generating the traffic that converts.

From that data, retailers can figure out which brands are prioritizing their relationship and which products are bringing people to their sites. In turn, brands can make informed business decisions with insight into the complete buyer journey — including purchase intent and conversions — from first impression to final sale. Why’s that important? From this data sharing setup, brands and retailers now have the opportunity to optimize the shopping experience and their four Ps across the digital shelf — and that means more customers, more conversions and more profits for both.