Bluecore, the multi-channel marketing technology company that’s reimagining how the world’s fastest-growing retail brands transform casual shoppers into lifetime customers, today announced the release of its newest product, Bluecore Advertise™. The new product is the first of Bluecore’s three product lines to operate outside of retailers’ owned and ecommerce shopping channels. Specifically, Bluecore Advertise™ will activate retailers’ first-party shopper data on more than 20 digital ad channels, including Google, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and others, so that they can target their shoppers on the channels where they spend the most time. Bluecore has partnered with Criteo and two of the largest display advertising platforms, Google and Facebook, to achieve its new targeting capabilities.
Bluecore Advertise™ enables retailers to use their first-party shopper data on major digital ad channels, where they can now predict what their shoppers want to see next, orchestrate communications, and reach a specific individual with 1:1 recommendations. This is similar to how retailers currently communicate with shoppers on their owned email or ecommerce channels. Yet, it’s in stark contrast with retailers’ current retargeting efforts on digital ad channels, where limited applications of first-party data often result in shoppers being served ads for products they have already seen or purchased, or which are irrelevant.
Now, not only can retailers apply the knowledge they already have about their shoppers on major ad channels, they can also leverage Bluecore’s intelligence about individual shoppers’ interactions with specific products. This will, in turn, generate contextual insight into the different channels shoppers visit and what they engage with while there–allowing retailers to understand which products, recommendations and ads individuals will want to see on which channel and when.
Bluecore has set out to leverage a channel that’s traditionally used for customer acquisition to also support retention and long-term profitability. This comes at a time when retailers are acutely aware of the rising cost of ad spend and it’s diminishing returns, leaving brands activating, on average, only 20% of their known shopper bases. As the digital world increasingly moves away from third-party targeting, the importance of using living first-party shopper data to retain current customers by predicting what they will want to buy next is fast becoming just as important as acquisition efforts.
“The first step for us was cracking the code on how retailers could use paid channels like their owned channels, and put their mass amounts of shopper and product data to work for them,” said Fayez Mohamood, CEO of Bluecore. “Now we’re working toward an eventuality where we understand how individual shoppers buy on digital ad channels–and what they’re going to buy next–no matter where they are. As of right now, we can predict this on retailers’ owned channels and are now expanding into third-party channels.”
This year, Bluecore will leverage its artificial intelligence and machine learning foundation to combine this contextual insight with an understanding of where individual shoppers are in their buying cycles, allowing retailers to interact with shoppers according to known channel affinities and preferences. For instance, if a shopper has browsed 12 different pages on a brand’s site, Bluecore Advertise™ might determine that she should see a campaign aimed at driving conversion (rather than one aimed at basic prospecting). If a shopper is determined to be ready to buy shoes, then rather than show her a pair of shoes she’s already considered, Bluecore Advertise™ would show her an ad for shoes she hasn’t already seen but is predicted to like.
Bluecore has spent the last four years establishing itself as a multi-channel personalization platform built on a three-part retail data foundation, consisting of 1) first-party shopper data, 2) behavioral data and 3) the live product catalogue. The company’s verticalized approach means using artificial intelligence and machine learning to activate its intelligence through a growing suite of retail-specific applications including replenishment models, discount affinity models, and promotion and product preference.
In 2019, Bluecore launched Bluecore Communicate™ so that retailers could replace their traditional Email Service Providers (ESPs) and bring together their batch emails and triggered emails to introduce fully personalized emails. In 2020, the company launched Bluecore Site™ to personalize every step of the ecommerce shopping experience, from homepage to checkout. Now, it seeks to take this acute level of personalization into digital advertising channels to evolve shoppers’ experiences with retailers’, no matter where they are.
