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With a new year underway, brands are looking to enhance their digital marketing agility, with data use at the core of their strategies.

So here, Toby Stupples, Client Delivery Director at field marketing specialist, Gekko Group, takes us through some of the essential elements that brands need to bake into their digital plans to maximise customer experience online in 2025…

Retailers and brands invest millions on advertising and marketing support every year to encourage consumers to purchase products or services in a fiercely competitive landscape.

However, the efforts of marketing teams and the crucial spend can be negated in an instant if the customer has a negative experience when they go online. According to research, 78% of online shoppers abandon their carts due to a poor customer service experience.

According to recent reports from the BRC, two thirds of leading retailers in the UK claim that they will be forced to hike prices to cope with the increase to National Insurance costs brought in by the New Labour government this year.

Having worked hard to shield customers from higher costs, with slow market growth and margins already stretched thin, it’s inevitable that consumers will bear some of the burden, so effective sales that lead to ROI are more crucial than ever.

With that, it’s time for brands and retailers to take a more holistic overview to the omnichannel customer journey, particularly when it comes to considered purchase items.

As a new year starts, e-commerce plans for 2025 are seeing many brands seeking to enhance operational agility online to remain competitive to appeal to their desired audiences.

Laying a strong data foundation

With consumers bombarded with deals hourly across multiple platforms, presenting a functional, transactional website is not enough when it comes to the savvy consumer.

Underpinning it all, there needs to be a well-considered data stack as the solid foundation, providing customers with the experience they have come to expect, and to help identify their needs at every touchpoint.

Helping to shape the marketing activity accordingly, brands continue to harness the power of consented first party data, and work closely with third-party sites and stores to gain an in-depth understanding of their customers.

The current reality is that there is low metric transparency from third-party websites to the brands, as they, in turn, seek to monetise their proposition.

When it comes to digital merchandising performance, it’s critical to think beyond consistency, stock levels and presentation, and assess the success of the whole shelf, and how specific products compare to those of competitors.

As many brands find themselves working with more third-party retailers, data and insight models become a crucial part of the marketing mix in order to better serve their customers in a trustworthy way.

Digging deeper into shelf analysis

Everyone wants to get the best deal, but trying to compare products becomes more challenging when descriptions, specifications and images are inconsistent, leading to potential loss of sales to competitors that are better aligned on the finer details.

This is why consistent presentation in digital merchandising is critical for avoiding confusion.

For brands working with multiple retailers, reviewing and tracking how products are presented manually can be a monumental, and an arguably impossible undertaking.

Digital shelf analysis tracks both a brand’s own, and the competitors’ product lines, which can help to create an effective real-time competitor strategy, combining data from web-scraping with retail expertise to respond to activity from the competition with vigour at the optimum time and across the right platforms.

Rather than relying on shared data, an end-to-end web scraping solution could help to marry e-commerce intelligence with insights from bricks and mortar retail to provide visual and actionable trends.

This type of service provides a dashboard that consolidates insights from different websites, allowing brands to track other measurables, like share of voice, availability, pricing, promotion and reviews, and use the data to build more informed strategies.

Unlocking Retail Media Potential

Retail media is a colossal advertising medium, with global revenue from retailer e-commerce sites expected to exceed television revenue by 2028.

For brands, the potential of reaching target consumers while they are already browsing or shopping in the category cannot be ignored.

Combining this type of digital advertising with physical shopping environments ensures that brands are showing up in the right places and at the times across relevant channels.

When this is done well, relying on insights from data and human expertise, this ensures continuity within the purchase journey alongside consistent brand messaging, which will ultimately bring the consumer closer to making a purchase.

However, brands should be careful that they do not de-prioritise data and insight in their rush to play in the retail media space.

As retail media supply increases brands will have to manage campaigns across multiple networks, and it will be those with campaign control and strong insight reporting that will unlock the potential of the data to truly drive innovation in the space.

Getting ahead of the competitor curve

Personalisation drives performance and better customer outcomes, which requires a strong data foundation. Although, brands still need to think about what their insights mean for the digital shelf.

Browsing the digital shelf is the equivalent of exploring products in-store, but they need to be discoverable quickly on listing pages and under relevant search terms.

Benchmarking against competitors for pricing, promotions and presence is critical and this data, along with on-site performance metrics, are incredibly valuable to brands.

This can be a complex and time-consuming process, but with an automated solution like web scraping, brands gain the same knowledge that can be used to form campaigns, and free up time for sales and marketing teams to focus on other priorities.

What’s to come in 2025 for brands and retail?

With the continued evolution of how we track and manage consumer data, brands should be prepared to optimise their own tracking data and work closer with third party retailers.

As retail media grows in years to come, keeping track of metrics across the board becomes vital for maintaining consistency, managing campaigns and influencing presence, and also performance on partner sites.

2025 provides opportunities for brands and retailers to equip their teams with the best actionable information that will influence change in the relevant e-commerce channels.

The unpredictability of pricing trends underscores the value of retail monitoring tools, helping provide smarter insights to understand shifting consumer demand, and adapting strategies to remain competitive in an increasingly fragmented and challenging environment.

To read the published article by Toby Stupples, Client Delivery Director please visit Mediashotz

Photo by Mediashotz