For retailers, the COVID-19-induced economic toll on the landscape has been less of a ripple effect and more of a tidal wave of change.
“What was true at the beginning of the week might not be true at the end of the week,” Matt Limeri, an account executive at Bluecore, said when describing industry volatility.
According to Limeri and Madison Hilali, a key account director, the effects of COVID-19 on retail are many, including constricted consumer spending, volatility in category demand and pinched supply chains.
On top of those stressors, companies might also be contending with reduced headcounts or restricted resources.
“There’s this notion of ‘consolidate or be consolidated,’” Hilali said. “Retailers are focused on reducing their overall marketing spend and reducing redundancies within their marketing stack.”
For marketers, that means heightened pressure to demonstrate value and ROI under higher-scrutinized strategic investments.
“When thinking about how our capabilities ‘fit’ into a customer’s technology stack, SaaS companies typically evaluate that maybe twice a year,” Limeri said. “Now we’re reevaluating those things much more frequently.”
From a sales-focused lens, Hilali and Limeri champion self-aware client communications that temper empathy with advancing strategic aims. The outcome? Being able to adjust to a retail environment that’s changing weekly.
In the Cart
How would you describe COVID-19’s impact on the retail landscape?
Limeri: It’s really accelerated digital transformation in companies that were only going to transform kicking and screaming. All of the sudden, for traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, the only revenue is e-commerce if stores are closed.
Even for online-only retailers, there’s lots of strain on supply chains. I think that, in the future, rather than talking about e-commerce as something to invest in — the majority of revenue will come from that versus in-store — we’re going to see folks leverage e-commerce in conjunction with the store.
Hilali: I think it’s also going to play out on supporting technology that marketers use. With the shift online and the constraints that COVID-19 has posed to things like budgets, we’re going to see fluidity in how retailers are investing in different technologies, potentially changing their partners for e-commerce and digital retail initiatives.
Retailers are focused on reducing their overall marketing spend and reducing redundancies within their marketing stack.”
How do those industry effects trickle down to your day to day?
Hilali: Marketing dollars and the results that they’re yielding are under such a laser scope. There’s this notion of “consolidate or be consolidated.” Retailers are focused on reducing their overall marketing spend and reducing redundancies within their marketing stack. Now that we’re not just a point solution, but more of a retail marketing cloud, it’s been really impactful for us.
Limeri: In the past three months, I’ve talked to more CFOs than I have in the past three years, due to where technology buying decisions are happening. Even though it’s a marketing purchase, it’s not just the CMO and the CTO making decisions; many times, it’s the CFO ensuring that there’s ROI attached to a project.
We’ve had conversations around doing more with less and being more agile for customers, who are dealing with stores opening, then closing; rules and guidelines changing; and retailers needing to pivot based on inventory. For example, summer inventory and back-to-school inventory is usually purchased earlier in the year. All that’s been interrupted. We’ve needed to get really good about having conversations with the finance team, and positioning how we help them become more agile and drive increased performance over time.
How is Bluecore equipped to help retailers ‘do more with less’?
Limeri: That’s always been a core differentiator of ours. The two main things we help with are personalization — leveraging data about customers for more tailored marketing communications, and automation — assembling that data to be automatically attached to a marketing campaign. We give companies the ability to consolidate from potentially seven marketing technologies to just us.
If a company’s running with a leaner marketing team, it’s attractive to buy technologies that allow you to do more with less. Coming out of COVID-19, or next year and beyond, perhaps teams don’t need to be as heavy as they were. Or, if the headcount is the same, the types of activities folks are going to be doing is more strategic in nature than manual work that we eliminate inherently with our tech.
Hilali: Automation and personalization are the key drivers to helping retailers do more with less. For example, we have what we call Smart Content: In a pre-Blucore world, if a retailer wanted to target customers, like showing men’s content to men, women’s content to women, kids content and home goods, they’d have to create four different campaigns with four different sets of creative with a number of audiences. With smart content, a marketer can create one campaign; then, our AI and ML is able to determine who within their audience should receive which kind of content.
We’re going to see fluidity in how retailers are investing in different technologies.”
From a sales perspective, how do you make sure outreach strikes the right tone?
Limeri: Doing our research before any sort of cold outreach has been especially important in the last couple of months. If someone has furloughed 70 percent of their company, you can be seen as pretty tone-deaf if you’re not acknowledging what’s going on in the organization. There definitely was a period where we made a decision, on the new business sales side, to not reach out to customers, as we felt it was too inappropriate. Now, we’ve ramped things up again as we know with our performance-driven platform we can provide meaningful progress towards recovery.
Hilali: Checking in went a long way, while setting the sales and the pitch aside — we focused less on how we could pitch our customers to buy more and do more. Instead, my team worked collaboratively with our customer success team on a COVID-19 playbook of ideas for campaigns, recommendations and optimizations that can help double down and start driving recovery for their business.
How have industry changes impacted any of your processes or workflows?
Hilali: There are many more players needed to make a decision on a martech investment. There’s a lot more at stake and the potential ROI. We’re seeing a lot of success in laying a framework for proof of concepts and pilots of certain functionality or product lines with us. Not only does that achieve immediate results for our customers, but also sets us up for a longer-term engagement once they have the initial results from that pilot.
Limeri: Rather than a weekly cadence or biweekly cadence figuring out industry trends, it’s like an hourly pulse check-in of like: Who’s doing well? What are new brands emerging? What strategies are folks deploying? Keeping up with what’s going on has probably been the biggest day-to-day shift. What was true at the beginning of the week might not be true at the end of the week.
