Competitors are an essential part of doing business.
As a retailer, competitors encourage you to keep innovating, growing and improving your products and customer experience. Having competitors means you can also learn from their mistakes, or even collaborate on propositions together.
And what about attracting your competitors’ customers? Now, thanks to regulations such as Open Banking and data sharing technology, attracting competitors’ customers is now possible. In fact, as we’ll see below, your competitors’ customers are some of the highest quality leads you could get.
Benefits of targeting your competitors’ customers
Lower cost of acquisition
Your competitors’ customers are much warmer leads than organic customers. That’s because your competitor has done the hard work of nurturing and educating potential customers about their product - now, all you need to do is convert them. This means that cost of acquisition is a lot lower: instead of nurturing and converting, you just need to convert.
In addition to nurturing potential customers, your competitor has also made the product or service appealing. If you offer similar products to your competitors, then their customers will already be interested and will have the budget. Not only does this make the conversions easier, but the marketing is a lot more targeted: your strategy and tactics will be a lot more focused and more likely to convert.
Increased market share
By targeting your competitors’ customers, you are essentially killing two birds with one stone: increased market share and increased customer base. Not only are you acquiring new customers, but you are also reducing your competitors’ number of customers. Although re-targeting old customers is an effective way to increase sales, you aren’t increasing your customer base and therefore market share. By targeting soon-to-be customers you are partaking in a double win situation.
Better targeting
Targeting your competitor’s customers is a good example of precision targeting. Your customer segment is incredibly specific, which means you can employ highly targeted marketing tactics that cater directly to them. For example, a competitors’ customer is much more likely to respond to an ad that offers a 10% discount specifically on your products (since they are already interested in the product).
Think about it: your competitors have already educated your customer and provided most of the relevant information. For example, imagine two competitors are both selling the same camping gear. Instead of educating the consumer in both shops, the second retailer can target the customers that have already visited the first shop. That customer has already been educated on the best camping gear, and now only needs an incentive to purchase at the second shop. This involves a much more targeted type of marketing that is less costly and converts more.
Your competitors’ customers understand your product or service a lot better than the average customer and are therefore much lower on the sales funnel. Targeted marketing means you are much more likely to stand out from others, and therefore attract more customers.
How Recash targets your competitors’ customers
Recash is a tool that can help you target your competitors’ customers and convert them into existing customers.
This is done through the use of Open Banking; a regulation that was introduced in 2018 and has changed the way the financial industry collaborates. With Open Banking, banks and financial institutions are obliged to make their customers’ financial data accessible to both consumers and third-party companies with the use of APIs.
Recash is an AISP registered entity in the UK, which means we can securely integrate a bank’s API with our own and gather the relevant financial data. Once the customer consents, we can share this anonymous financial data with our retail partners and they can see which competitors their customers are shopping at.
Through our cashback program, merchants can offer financial incentives to customers and encourage them to buy their own products rather than their competitors’. All these analytics are then gathered on a dashboard for you to visualise, which you can then segment into old and new customers, as well as various demographics.
How Recash works for customers
As a customer, the only thing they need to do is download the app and give consent to Recash to get anonymous account information. They will immediately start earning cashback when they go shopping, and receive their money back in 6 hours. Customers won’t need to do anything: whenever they pay by card, they will be earning cashback on every one of Recash’s partners.
Here is a real-life example:
Jenny regularly goes shopping for sports clothes. In order to receive cashback, she downloads the Recash app, registers her debit card and goes about her shopping. On your retail dashboard, you notice that Jenny is shopping at one of your competitors. Every time Jenny purchases a product from your competitor, you can send her a notification with an offer: 10% cashback if she purchases her sports clothes from your shop instead. She heads to your store to buy her clothes and receives her cashback 6 hours later.
By offering your customers cashback you are incentivising customer to shop at your store without discounting the value of your products. It’s also a great marketing tool to build customer relationships; in our example, Jenny feels identified and appreciates the offer. Putting money back in her pockets gives her more control, and she much prefers receiving a targeted offer than calculating points or clipping coupons.
With the Recash dashboard and the use of Open Banking, your company can learn more about its customers, its competitors and its competitors’ customers. As a retailer, you’ll be able to offer cashback to reward regular customers and also target your competitors’ customers. With Recash, you get to turn your competitors into a highly profitable asset.