By Jake Bailey

RichRelevance®, a provider of dynamic e-commerce personalisation for the world’s largest retailers, has recently released a new whitepaper for CPG marketers entitled, “Owning the Moment That REALLY Matters in Online Retail.” The report, the third in the company’s Did You Know series, elaborates on Google’s Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT) concept and shows how marketers can meet – and influence – their customers at this critical point. This includes new strategies for partnering with retailers on free and paid merchandising opportunities, as well as best practices for using the ZMOT to capture real-time consumer insights.

“Forrester predicts that more than $1 trillion in retail sales will be influenced by the web this year,” said RichRelevance CMO, Diane Kegley. “Brands need to understand how to best optimise their campaigns to reach these consumers where the purchase occurs. Without this knowledge, brands risk continuing to misallocate marketing dollars and ignore these floods of free consumer insights.”

Key take-aways: owning the moment that REALLY matters in online retail

The new whitepaper delivers a dozen concrete best practices to help CPG marketers effectively capture the two-thirds of shoppers who begin their purchase path online – and covers real-world examples of how 3M and other successful CPG brands are building brand awareness at the point of highest purchase intent. Topics include:

• Free opportunities in partnering with retailers: The report offers CPG marketers concrete ways to support consumers in the ZMOT phase by leveraging free merchandising tactics offered by retailers. This includes news strategies to effectively merchandise their entire product lines online, as well as effectively use online video and strategically partner with retailers around SEO.

• Paid merchandising opportunities: CPG marketers must make the most of new opportunities to own brand awareness across the entire purchase funnel (not just at the top of the funnel on sites such as Facebook and Yahoo). Insights from the whitepaper include tactics for using ad servers, owning brand and product pages, and winning at the category level.

• Using the ZMOT to capture real-time consumer insights: The whitepaper also highlights the fact that the most advanced brands are leveraging the ability to pull real-time qualitative customer research through their paid merchandising campaigns via online retail sites. Real-time consumer data brings insights to brand managers immediately, allowing realistic and robust rationales for how best to allocate scarce merchandising and advertising resources.

“We continue to field many questions from marketers and advertisers about this profound shift in consumer behaviour and realised we needed to provide business intelligence to our colleagues as soon as possible,” continued Kegley. “We trust our partners in CPG marketing and advertising to leverage these concepts to take immediate advantage of the opportunity to generate brand awareness in the new ‘digital aisle.’”

Additional Resources

• The whitepaper is available to download from the RichRelevance homepage.

• Watch the related webinar with Forrester’s Joanna O’Connell and Sucharita Mulpuru here.

• Connect with RichRelevance on Facebook and Twitter for updates and news.

About the author and RichRelevance

Jake Bailey is Chief Evangelist at RichRelevance, a company which powers personalised shopping experiences for the world’s largest retail brands, including Walmart, Sears, Target and others. Founded and led by the e-commerce expert who helped pioneer personalisation at Amazon.com, RichRelevance helps retailers increase sales and customer engagement by recommending the most relevant products to consumers regardless of the channel they are shopping. RichRelevance has delivered more than $3 billion in attributable sales for its retail clients to date, and is accelerating these results with the introduction of a new form of digital advertising called shopping media which allows manufacturers to engage shoppers where it matters most – in the digital aisles on the largest retail sites in world. RichRelevance is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York, Seattle and London. For more information, please visit www.richrelevance.co.uk .