“Can Velocidi help me sell excess inventory?”
One of the challenging things about running a fashion business is that fashion is constantly changing. What’s trendy today might suddenly become outdated tomorrow. When that happens, you don’t want to get stuck with large amounts of unsellable inventory.
Trying to predict when fashions will change, or how much of a product to stock, is generally thought of as a supply chain problem. However, keeping your inventory moving out the door so you can keep your styles fresh—that’s where marketing can be the hero. And that’s also where Velocidi can help.
Velocidi’s CDP lets you collect detailed data on each customer’s browsing and purchasing behavior on your website. This includes information on the specific products they’ve viewed and purchased. Starting in August 2020, the CDP will be able to leverage this information to create audiences of users who relate to specific brands, product categories, and sizes.
So whenever you have a little extra product, you can use an audience segment of customers who have purchased or viewed similar products to get your inventory in front of the people most likely to be interested.
Example 1: Shoes
Let’s say the specific product you need to sell is a Men’s Nike shoe in size 11. To find people likely to buy it, you can build an audience segment of customers who have purchased products of the same brand or size in the past.
For example, select customers who have bought an athletic sneaker in Men’s size 11 before. Then you can narrow the segment to target just the customers who have purchased Nikes using the brand filter.
You can widen the reach of the segment by including people who have viewed the products or added to cart, instead of just those who have purchased. And you can limit the time frame of the targeted behavior. Customers who have bought or viewed athletic sneakers about a year ago might be more likely to be in-market for sneakers today.
Example 2: Children’s clothing
Children’s clothing is an excellent example of a situation where the timing of the target audience’s past behavior matters a lot more. Children grow like weeds, so parents buying children’s clothes will either need to see sizes that are the same as their very recent purchases, or they need to sizes that are larger.
So, in this case, if you are trying to move excess toddler clothes in size T4, target customers who have bought clothes in size T2 or T3 a year ago, and customers who bought size T4 within the last month.
Some additional help with timing
Some of our clients already have pretty deep intelligence on what the appropriate time frame is for each type of product. But if you don’t, (but also even if you do), you don’t have to leave it up to guesswork.
Instead of choosing an arbitrary time frame to capture “in-market” customers, use one of Velocidi’s built-in machine learning models.
- Add “Likely Buyers” to your segment parameters to capture customers who are currently in a buying journey. These are the customers who have browsed your website recently, and whose behavior is so far consistent with customers who are on their way to making a purchase.
OR
- Add a “Timely Re-engagement” parameter to capture customers who haven’t visited your site in a while, but are due for their next purchase in the immediate time frame, based on their behavior patterns.
Bonus: Product Affinity Segments as an Alternative to Discounting
Flash sales and discounts will likely always be part of your business strategy. But executing them successfully and without hurting margins takes careful consideration, and if you can move products without discounts, you’ll be better off financially.
So the next time you have a batch of product that isn’t selling as well as you hoped, try tuning your targeting first. If you find the right customers for your excess products, they’ll be happy, and you’ll be a hero.
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