3 Ways Retailers Can Leverage the Cloud To Provide Rich Brand Experiences

Cloud technology offers brands a wealth of platforms and services to support their marketing efforts. In this article, Kyle Hirsch, solution architect, Merkle, discusses how as marketing methods become more advanced, retailers can leverage the cloud to provide experiences that reinforce their story and exceed the expectations of their customers. 

Retailers have long sought to balance the use of traditional and modern marketing methods to tell their story, connect with their customers, and drive transactions. Cloud technology offers brands a wealth of platforms and services to support these efforts allowing them to launch initiatives quickly, scale for seasonality, and react to consumers in relevant time. 

Let’s explore a few ways retailers can leverage the cloud to provide rich experiences that reinforce their story and exceed the expectations of their customers:

1. Scale for Seasonality To Handle Spikes in Demand

Retailer marketers often need to support multi-channel marketing environments that generate millions of customer data points at any given time. The cloud allows marketers to achieve one-to-one experiences at scale, far beyond what traditional legacy systems can manage. 

Scalability is key for retailers as they need to analyze massive data sets to make decisions about the value of potential customers to best target and create predictive models for customer profitability. Data sets can include contact information, demographics, payment data, and site behavior and add new sources for analysis. This is especially the case during peak seasonal events, such as holidays and the back-to-school shopping season and allows retailers to better prepare when spikes in demand arise.

Traditional on-premises approaches can quickly become overwhelming, or they can be overbuilt and too expensive for the value they deliver. The cloud, on the other hand, enables companies to scale data capabilities up and down to meet their needs as they quickly and easily grow and change at different points in time. 

Learn More: Giving Up Cloud Data Control Puts Businesses at Risk

2. Use Cloud To Drive Good Content

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) libraries come standard with most cloud platforms. Retailers can harness the power of these tools to streamline user-generated content from customers (such as product reviews, customer-made social media videos on the products, social ideas and feedback, etc.) to drive sentiment and alter content that is displayed to the customer in real-time. With the use of the cloud’s AI and ML capabilities, retail brands can quickly understand and leverage appropriate content to share based on customers’ past actions. 

For example, if the customer has already left a negative product review of your signature sweater, it wouldn’t make sense to promote that line of sweaters to that person. But if the review mentioned a specific trait that was disliked, such as the scratchiness of the material, that information could be fed into the platform, and content could be altered to promote apparel made from a different material, with messaging to emphasize its comfort. 

Learn More: The Power of Data: How Organizations Can Improve Data Management in Cloud

3. Virtual Environments/Gamification

It’s no secret that COVID-19 has amplified the need for brands to think outside the box to create compelling virtual environments and gamification functionalities. Cloud has many quick starters for this from the backend, as you can build it to meet your organizational needs now and easily scale for future needs you may have down the road. Platforms can be built upon in a matter of minutes without worrying about scalability issues down the road. As a starting point, focus on the experiences that you want to create versus managing backend infrastructure. Using the cloud frees the team from these headaches without sacrificing security, flexibility, or control.  

When thinking about what digital experiences you should be creating, make sure you’re passing Rachel Shechtman’s “Cocktail party testOpens a new window .” This is an analysis of your brand’s character and personality, revealing whether others want to hang out with you. To pass this test, think of digital experiences that your customers and ideal prospects would get excited about and actually use, share, and tell others about. The experiences you stand up for also have to be relevant to your brand. Does it make sense to create the next complex augmented reality game, such as Pokémon GoOpens a new window , for your brand? In most cases, probably not. 

The world of retail is exciting and full of opportunity and origination. The brands leveraging cloud-based technology are at the forefront of innovation because of their ability to scale quickly, drive relevant content in real-time, and act as the base for wowing digital experiences.

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