SoundCommerce Customer360 is a retail cloud solution that helps brands align marketing, merchandising and operations data to build accurate views of customer profitability and lifetime value. | Image courtesy of SoundCommerce
TECHNOLOGY
SoundCommerce Launches New Solution to Optimize Profitability for Brands
Retail-data platform provider SoundCommerce has launched a new cloud solution that aims to help retailers better serve customers by using data to create shopper profiles that allow retailers to provide better offers and promotions based on shopping preferences.
SoundCommercehas launched Customer360, which collects customer profile and event data in real time and uses the data across marketing, merchandising, customer experience and finance, allowing for better retail decisions, improved shopper experiences and increased customer lifetime value. The idea behind Customer360 is that every decision a retail brand makes should be informed by the behavior of the customer being served.
The platform helps consumers and brands create and enrich shopper profiles with identity and demographic attributes that track shopper behavior. The shopper profiles can then be used to optimize marketing campaigns to drive customer engagement and increase customer lifetime profits.
“The first step is to understand who the most valuable customers are and who is most likely to engage as a shopper next,” said SoundCommerce founder and CEO Eric Best. “From there, based on everything we’re collecting for the individual consumer profiles, the brand can be very prescriptive in terms of the products and offers being promoted, which in turn leads to those merchandising and marketing campaigns performing better when the content and timing of the promotion aligns with the customer’s needs and behaviors. What’s at stake here is the ability to increase the value of a shopper relationship tenfold by aligning marketing to a particular type of shopper.”
SoundCommerce was founded in 2018 by Best, who said the inspiration for the technology came from the team’s work at companies including Amazon and other consumer brands and retailers. Best previously co-led the apparel brand Richer-Poorer as CEO in 2017, and much of the technology developed by SoundCommerce comes from Best’s firsthand experience in dealing with the complexities of the apparel industry.
PacSun has adopted Customer360 to bring marketing and event data together to balance customer experiences with profits. With the platform, PacSun will also optimize assortment, promotions and fulfillment for engagement and customer lifetime value. PacSun will gain insight into a customer’s average order and whether that customer frequently returns online orders, which allows the brand to see which customer should receive exclusive discounts or offers.
“SoundCommerce helps PacSun manage complex omni-channel data to drive great customer experiences and higher customer lifetime value,” said Mike Relich, co-CEO at PacSun, in a statement. “With SoundCommerce, we’re making smarter decisions to build stronger relationships with our community even as we grow our profitable retail operations.”
As online and other digital shopping ventures continue to rise, brands are looking for new ways to be able to engage directly with the consumer, which has given rise to applications that provide benefits in exchange for shoppers opting in to sharing their shopping data. SoundCommerce supports and integrates shopping-cart plug-ins that help bring more data into Customer360.
Customer360 joins SoundCommerce’s fleet of other platforms, including Campaign360 and Profit360. Campaign360 offers insights on marketing campaigns and tracks the orders, profits and customer lifetime value that were the results of marketing campaigns, and Profit360 provides order tracking and shopper-accurate profitability tracking. Jewelry brand Mejuri implemented Proft360 in October 2020 to optimize profits across direct-to-consumer commerce and its retail stores. Both platforms are designed to provide actionable data and insight at the intersection of retail marketing, finance and operations.
SoundCommerce announced in September 2021 that Rainbow Shops, an apparel chain comprising several brands that target teens and young women,hadadopted SoundCommerce to unify and activate all data across its legacy Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Shopify e-commerce storefronts, aiming to ensure continuity of customer experience. SoundCommerce helped Rainbow Shops unify more than eight years of order history and engagement data to unlock insights and develop new marketing and operations processes.
In addition to Rainbow Shops and PacSun, SoundCommerce works with other brands including Eddie Bauer and ProFlowers as well as Constellation Brands, a marketer of beer, wine and spirits that includes the brands Corona, Robert Mondavi and Svedka in its portfolio.
SoundCommerce plans to continue developing and building upon its existing platforms as well as developing new services that can help brands and retailers navigate the challenges of embracing a more direct-to-consumer model.
“The next step for us is digging into the back-office operations of apparel merchants by offering support for more-complex operations such as buy online and pick up in-store, buy online and ship from store, buy online and return in-store,” Best said. “We plan to dig deeper into those operational concerns that help apparel manufacturers that may have traditionally sold through the retail channel become more adept at the direct-to-consumer model.”
