SoundCommerce, the composable retail data platform has been selected by Hearst, a large global group of diversified information, services and media companies. The partnership will enable Hearst to measure and optimise eCommerce marketing and operations for its consumer media businesses.
According to Comscore, this will reach millions of unique users collectively each month. SoundCommerce will unify and model data for analytics and commerce activation across Hearst’s consumer publications. The company expects the partnership to drive profit and customer lifetime value-driven decisions.
SoundCommerce provides Hearst retail-ready analytical and behavioural data models populated by an intelligent data pipeline that promotes data visibility, transparency, and trust. The SoundCommerce platform connects both on-premise and SaaS applications like VTEX, SailThru, and AfterShip with modern cloud data warehouses. This includes warehouses like Google (GCP) BigQuery to enable faster and better business decision-making across commerce functions and departments. SoundCommerce is available as a native Google Cloud Platform Marketplace offering and as a fully integrated, turnkey Snowflake solution.
Supporting data-driven decision making
By selecting SoundCommerce, Hearst has reduced the time and complexity of building detailed retail analytics. Enabling their operational teams to focus on data-driven operation and marketing decisions that improve the eCommerce shopper experience.
Eric Best, SoundCommerce founder and CEO, stated, “Hearst has prioritised data-driven decision making as a strategic and competitive imperative for its growing portfolio of successful ecommerce brands. We are excited to bring SoundCommerce technology to this Hearst partnership. To drive adoption of the modern data stack and enable insights and action on the company’s most critical eCommerce data.”
SoundCommerce provides Hearst with business-ready omnichannel retail data models rendered and populated with data directly in Hearst’s Google BigQuery instance. Ready-to-go data models are available in BigQuery for immediate analysis. This allows the Hearst team to avoid time-consuming, resource-intensive data transformation tasks required when working with disparate data sources. SoundCommerce says this will result in faster time-to-value on the data.
Key insights include:
Granular profit and loss profiles for every order and shopper, modelled alongside order event and customer engagement data, are used by the company to better segment, target, engage, and serve e-commerce shoppers from the first click to doorstep delivery.
Visibility into fine-grain customer order details. This includes order items across the catalogue item master (product assortment), order cancellations and returns, and order fulfilment status
Consolidated order and customer data, including shoppers’ repeat purchase behaviours spanning years of order history, to calculate shopper lifetime profitability.
The ability to track and model customer loyalty, order history, demographic, repeat purchase propensity and marketing engagement data. The functionality uses SoundCommerce’s expanded customer profiles.
Robert Gash, Hearst’s Chief Technology Officer of eCommerce, expressed the company’s excitement for the SoundCommerce partnership: “SoundCommerce’s composable solution reduced our time-to-market for robust and in-depth retail analytics. While simultaneously enabling our internal data teams to focus on integrating our proprietary data to provide a more complete picture of our audience’s interests and commerce needs.”
Enterprise Times: What this means for businesses
The interpretation and analytics of data should be the heart of all important decision-making in enterprises, particularly in retail. Organisations, irrespective of size or sector have to understand the needs and requirements of customers and prospective customers.
SoundCommerce’s composable solutions can open up any company’s full API portfolio by making data useful and actionable. This should allow business units within Hearst to create and customise experiences necessary for their specific business model rather than having to tailor them to an out-of-the-box solution. SoundCommerce’s partnership aims to align marketing, merchandising, and operations with profit and customer lifetime value for Hearst.
