500+
retail brands
25+
retail categories
24 months
of historical data
Privacy-first marketing solutions with consumer purchase data
Experian’s purchased-based data is available in our suite of privacy-by-design marketing solutions.
Understand current and prospective customer's shopping behaviors to better connect with your target audience. Purchase-based data helps you identify and reach audiences who:
- Buy from your competitors
- Shop for the upcoming season
- Purchase from your category
- Visit brick-and mortar stores
With this information you can reach the right consumers, with the right messages, and identify new audiences to target. Using purchase data can help you improve customer acquisition and retention, boost sales, and enhance overall business growth.
With this information, you’ll gain valuable insights into customer behaviors and can make data-driven decisions around marketing strategies like how to segment your customers, or other strategies for product development, pricing, and inventory management. As many people continue to turn to online shopping, customer purcahse data is more readily available and detailed than ever before.
This is because online and e-commerce retailers have more access to in-depth information, including:
- Browsing history
- Search queries
- Click-through rates
- Conversion rates
When you use this information, you can create a more personalized and overall better customer experience.
Examples of consumer purchase data
Several types of consumer purchase data are available for you to gain further insights into your customer base.
- Transaction details: like date, time, location of purchase, payment method and total spent.
- Product details: the specific product or service a customer has purchased and includes details like the name, brand, model, size, color, and quantity.
- Price details: how much the product or service costs, including discounts or promotions, for the total price of the purchase.
- Purchase history: information gained each time a customer makes a purchase and builds up over time, giving you more understanding of the customer’s specific buying patterns and preferences.
- Shopping preferences: general observations about what a customer likes to shop for, including preferred brands, types of products purchased, how often items are bought, and how the customer usually pays.
- Online browsing behaviors: how consumers are browsing and shopping online, like which websites were visited, the products viewed, what was added to the online cart, and how long the customer shopped.
How do marketers use consumer purchase data?
Marketers use consumer purchase data to better understand, connect, and serve their customers by creating data-driven strategies for:
- Audience segmentation: group customers based on past purchases, similar spending patterns, and product preferences.
- Personalization: customize marketing messages with the most relevant products that current and prospective customers are likely to buy.
- Product development: insights from purchase data allows you to better understand your target audience’s needs and preferences to inform development of new products and services that are likely to interest your customers.
Identify data requirements
What are the specific types of data your business needs? Consumer purchase data includes many types of data points to choose from such as online or instore transactions, product category spending like retail or food, and groups like high or frequent spenders. You may not need all of it so it is important to consider which type of data will benefit your business.
Research data providers
Where you get your consumer purchase data is just as important as the data you get. Ensure you find reputable providers with proven reliability and quality and are known for properly following privacy regulations.
Assess data quality and relevance
Different data providers may have varying data points and insights for your company. This means you’ll need to decide how accurate, complete, and relevant the data is and whether it is detailed enough for your needs.
Evaluate data privacy and compliance
Make sure the data you buy has been obtained correctly, with appropriate consent, and follows all privacy regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
Secure data transfers
Once you’ve decided on the data you want and from which provider, you’ll need to arrange to get the data securely transferred to you. Data providers like Experian can help you safely access data through encryption, file transfer, and other secure processes.
How to determine what type of data to buy
There are several types of consumer purchase data you can buy, but you’ll need to ensure it will benefit your business before you decide what to get. To help you determine if the data will benefit your company, here are a few steps you could follow. define and identify the specific insights you need from consumer purchase data to achieve your marketing goals
- Define company goal: identify the specific insights you need from consumer purchase data to achieve your marketing goals
- Identify target audience: who is your target audience, what are their characteristics and demographics? Consider age, gender, location, interests, and purchasing behaviors to help you decide which data type you need.
- Conduct market research: get a better understanding of your target audience by analyzing existing data, surveys, industry reports, or other details to determine what you have and what data you need to fill in the gaps.
- Consult with experts: if you still aren’t sure which type of consumer purchase data you’ll need to buy, consider working with a data analyst, marketing professional, or industry expert who can give you more insight into what data would be most beneficial for your company to buy.
Transactional data is the information recorded for a specific transaction.
With a growing number of traceable online purchases, transaction-level data plays a huge role in digital commerce and marketing. The level of detail recorded in purchase datasets depends on the organization recording the information. It’s also important to note that everyday transactions are often recorded by multiple parties.
Businesses collect first-party transaction data that will help improve their marketing campaigns by answering questions like:
- What products were sold?
- Who purchased those products?
- When was the transaction?
- Where was the transaction?
- How much money changed hands?
Examples of transactional data
Brands collect first-party transactional for many marketing use cases. This data can be totaled to find the amount a consumer spends at their stores each year and which products are frequently purchased to cater marketing messages to loyalty status and product preferences.
Financial institutions such as banks and credit card companies also record transactional data. However, they often record information differently. Financial institutions often record a much larger volume of transactions than any singular brand. So, to manage their data effectively, banks or credit card companies may record less granular, merchant-level information for each of their customers.
Merchant-level transaction data includes the date, location and the total transaction amount a consumer spends at a brand.
How is transactional data used?
Marketers can use first-party data to personalize advertising campaigns, inform marketing strategies, improve targeting, and personalize communication based on customers’ previous purchases. You can even use it to build semi-annual sales based on when and how much your customers are likely to spend.
First-party transaction data allows marketers to look only at the customer base they’ve already sold to in the past. To reach prospective buyers in-market, we can help you leverage merchant-level transaction data to learn about and reach consumers who are likely to buy from your brand. With this data, you can:
- Learn more about customers shopping with your brand versus your competitors
- Get a robust view of consumers with deterministic credit and debit purchase-based data
- Build custom audiences based on consumer purchase behavior
How Experian can help
We can help you create marketing strategies catered to shopping preferences and behaviors of your current and prospective customers. We specialize in helping brands discover data-driven insights to make an everlasting impact on consumers.
Our data and identity products and services can help you learn more about customers and target audiences, leverage data resources, improve targeted marketing, create personalized campaigns, and optimize marketing strategies.
With us, you’ll understand your consumers better, make more effective data-informed decisions, and increase your customer base for bigger revenue.
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