During the session, Using Innovation to Drive Growth in Today’s Retail Market, the executive explained that years ago, RetailMeNot realized its customers wanted more mobility and saw great success after launching its mobile application. Since then, the platform has been focusing on providing consumers with exceptional content and capability based on data that reveals what boasts well with them.

“Great content is really, really important for our audience and translates to benefits for the great merchants that we do business with,” said John Theiss, senior vice president of retail and brand solutions at RetailMeNot. “Most recently, we moved from providing traditional retail benefits to their audience to launching a great new food and dining experience.

“So our opportunity to recognize that our audience wants diversity of content and providing that content is a great new shift for us,” he said. “I think it will benefit us in years to come to look at other forms to evolve content to provide more relevant content for our customers.

“The other thing for us down the road is the opportunity for us to maximize with our partners the amount of data that we see.”

Data insights
RetailMeNot has just launched a new food and dining marketplace within its mobile app, and is seeing positive results with consumer adoption. The new capability is another example of how important it is to create compelling sales content on digital and mobile.

With such an overcrowded market today, it is vital that retailers are consistently working to provide a better product and commerce experience than competitors to keep customers returning. RetailMeNot’s future lies with data to accomplish that, which is abundant considering its 50,000 merchant partners and millions of unique visitors.

An executive from 1-800-Flowers also noted the industry’s overcrowding, and is leveraging tactics such as event reminders to keep customers loyal. The gifting service entices users to save important dates such as anniversaries and birthdays on its platforms in an attempt to keep them returning for gift purchasing, and for the retailer to gain data where it lacks information insights on individuals.

Seamless customer journey
Mr. Theiss emphasized how important it is to make the customer journey as seamless as possible, especially for its service as RetailMeNot bridges the digital and physical retail worlds. Customers need to be able to get from the point of interest to the point of purchasing in as a little touch points as possible with as little time as possible.

“The opportunity to control the transaction and become more reliant on your own destiny, have direct traffic, to have a brand so recognized by consumers and to be able to capture that data to seamlessly have that transaction happen in a much quicker fashion than multiple clicks that is very exciting,” Mr. Theiss said. “I would also say that one of the interesting things that that allows companies like us to take advantage of, is a real and seamless experience for customers.

“Today as we move more towards mobile, there is more of an opportunity for that connection with the digital and physical world to have a customer experience that is easy seamless and quick, and allows that direct interface,” he said.