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Valentine’s Day in February, Christmas in December – what happens in between?
Most brands in beauty and retail are driven by promotional campaigns that form a retail calendar of events to promote relevant products and ranges across the year, for example, Valentine’s Day, Christmas, Hanukkah, Mother’s Day and Black Friday. However, there are numerous other opportunities to create impactful promotions and product launches throughout the year.
By harnessing the power of AI-driven merchandising experience platforms, brands can bridge the gap between these calendar events, and develop relevant moments that matter for their customers. By utilizing this solution, your team can effectively build a visual and personalized “trading opportunity calendar,” also known as a retail calendar, catered to your business. This calendar allows you to maximize inventory management to delight customers with unforgettable experiences through relevant assortment planning, product launch (NPD), retail promotion and competitive intelligence solutions.
The purpose of a promotional retail calendar is to maximize sales, capitalize on seasonal trends and stay ahead of your competitors. With access to enterprise and market data through AI-driven platforms such as EDITED, you can create these trading opportunity calendars to help you effectively plan and strategize throughout the year. Along with the key holidays and dates, this calendar would include other factors that could influence consumer behavior and purchase decisions.
To effectively create relevant moments, your team will need access to internal and external data in order to understand both your customer and the competitive market. This data provides a comprehensive view of what your customer is buying outside of key promotional dates and what competitors in your space focus on during these times. Retail intelligence platforms allow companies like yours to understand their customers, optimize their inventory and product offerings and, ultimately, create moments that matter all year round. As the world of retail and beauty becomes increasingly competitive, retailers that invest in retail intelligence partners will be better equipped to stand out and create lasting relationships with their customers.
Within an AI merchandising platform, you will find a few key tools that allow your team to access the data and insights needed to be successful. These insights come from, but are not limited to:
Implementing a trusted and proven visual merchandising tool enables brands to create and execute product launches and promotions with precision. Retailers can identify trends and optimize their marketing efforts by tracking and analyzing historical and current promotional strategies across the market and key competitors. Instead of manually conducting competitor analysis, you can now access a holistic view of brand and competitor promotional campaigns, empowering teams to make data-driven decisions. This tool allows you to create relevant moments with timely and personalized promotions and product launches.
For example, National Lipstick Day or National Handbag Day might be strong promotional opportunities for beauty or retail brands. Retailers can use visual merchandising to search for keywords or phrases like “national” to see what their competitors are participating in to promote certain products and ensure they are not missing out on a relevant moment from a marketing perspective.
Spending time manually gathering insights on new product development, best-performing products, discount promotions from competitors and industry trends can be more of a hindrance than a benefit when trying to understand what relevant moments might look like. Investing in timely, on-demand reports tailored to you with a competitive intelligence solution means access to concise and digestible reports for insights, buying, merchandising, account management, strategy and new product development teams. You can:
By investing in tools that automatically provide KPIs, you can understand the impact of your bestsellers, rising stars, low-cover items, unprofitable products and more. Metrics-based ecommerce tools also typically provide recommended actions, such as which products you need to make price adjustments on or boost. You can also measure the impact of campaigns and promotions (such as “gift with purchase” or “3 for the price of 2”) enabling you to evaluate impact or optimize your promotions as necessary. With recommended actions, moments that matter to your customer become clear much more quickly.
Understanding customer shopping behavior is crucial to success in defining relevant moments for your consumers. With tools such as EDITED’s Basket Analysis solution, you can easily and simply conduct in-depth correlation and behavioral analysis based on what your customer purchases, making it easy for your team to boost strategy and performance in assortment planning and promotional activity. This advanced analysis allows you to look at product combinations based on a wide range of variables including region, profitability, promotions, product types and more.
In the fast-paced world of retail and beauty, creating relevant moments for consumers is a strategic imperative. By leveraging AI-driven merchandising experience platforms to implement a visual trading opportunity calendar, brands can optimize inventory management to deliver delightful customer experiences throughout the year. From perfect promotions to on-demand reports, accessible metrics and deep customer insights, this toolkit equips brands with the insights they need to excel in the competitive beauty and retail markets. By investing in technologies that empower data-driven decisions and customer-centric strategies, retailers and beauty brands can ensure that every interaction with their customers leaves a lasting impression.
Contact us for a demo to start building your very own trading opportunity calendar with access to these key insights and tools through EDITED today.
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