First-party data has become every eCommerce brand strategy’s backbone, especially since the global pandemic accelerated online shopping worldwide. Updated on a weekly, or even daily basis, converting this data into information is key to an evolved sales strategy.
However, with so much first-party data available, brands can have a hard time converting that into actionable strategies for a more profitable future. To gain more insights about ICIP, and craft the perfect shopping experience, Pacvue’s President, Melissa Burdick recently hosted a value-packed webinar.
She’s joined by 3 speakers, Molly Johannes, Key Account Manager, eCommerce, Henkel, Todd Hassenfelt, eCommerce Director, Growth Strategy & Planning, Colgate-Palmolive and
Brian Gillis, Sr. Director of Brand Insights, Instacart. You can check out some of the major takeaways from the broadcast here.
What is the Instacart Customer Intelligence Platform (ICIP)
Instacart as a platform offers its sellers insights about consumer behavior and brand-specific performance metrics. By understanding ICIP, you can maximize your revenue and take data-driven action to increase profits this year.
Internally, everyone from eCommerce data analysts to innovation and branding teams can consume the wealth of data available on ICIP to know product performances, budget spread, and other key insights. Along with the standard performance “snapshots” brands get every month, partners also have personalized QBRs to address any efficiency issues at the root level.
In the webinar, Brian Gillis, the Insights Director at Instacart, also announced the 4 A’s ICIP will focus on in 2022- Access, Accuracy, Actionability, and Advanced Tools for effective opportunity identification segmentation. With that, Instacart aims to create democratic transparency with regular updates for brands across the US and Canada.
How to Leverage Brand-Specific Insights
To be able to take data and turn it into a robust strategy, your first and foremost goal should be to pinpoint the data that is most relevant to your brand. Whether it’s your click-through rates, SKUs, AD spends, or budget fluidity, ICIP data clearly shows what returning consumers want more and less of.
ICIP data displays what your brand’s overall category share is, so you can track your long-term growth. However, since this isn’t the most accurate for brands with a segmented approach on Instacart. So, ICIP displays your share of categories to see if you are outcompeting your competition where you are.
Another comparison metric to understand investment versus return is the importance of getting into an early cart. With both seasonal and festive changes, it’s possible to see the graph of customer retention against investment level. Here, both shopper-profiling and seasonal bundling become huge aspects you can latch on to as a way of converting your consumers’ behavior into direct sales.
By measuring statistics such as household penetration and basket penetration over time of millions of consumers on Instacart, brands can understand exactly what makes consumers click “buy”.
ICIP also allows you to export your brand’s weekly performance reports, so you can experiment with the data freely. For feature products and popular search items, you can also compare daily budgets with maximum impressions, and the difference it can make when you get early cart retention. During deep-dive QBRs, these eye-openers can prove quite useful.
Why Your Consumers Come Back (Or Don’t)
One of the latest additions to ICIP, basket-affinity data allows you to understand what percentage of your consumers are loyal, and if the rest moved to a competitor or exited the category altogether. Across multiple weeks, this data shows you where returning customers came from and what they purchased along with your products.
The content optimization on your Instacart store can create loyal consumers as well, so elements like a creative banner image and optimized long-tail keywords make a lot of difference. All these analytics prove highly valuable when you do market research, say, before an important launch or after a successful sale.
ICIP also displays statistics about out-of-stock rates for your brand along with any item-not-found search queries on the platform. You can then actively measure brand loyalty and address any supply chain issues to combat them immediately. Overall, these metrics help your brand take a step back to appreciate long-term growth.
To Wrap It Up
ICIP is a step in the direction of regaining control of your shoppers’ experiences. By identifying key performance drivers and turning that data into actionable information, ICIP helps brands gain more market share while dramatically increasing profits.
Brian also mentioned how in 2022, ICIP will have a direct feedback portal so partners can send in any queries they have in terms of data access, data integrity, and performance. This will help accelerate upgrades so new launches witness organic success. By combining an effective strategy with social media inbound leads, your brand’s growth can skyrocket in 2022.
Check out the free webinar recording now to learn more about ICIP data and craft a more relevant, efficient, and impactful strategy on Instacart.
