Why Top Banks Around the World Use Cardlytics to Understand the Power of Analyzing Purchase Behavior

Everyone business wants to know when and why a customer might stop using their product or service, but few can figure out how. Enter Cardlytics, which uses data and predictive analytics to help its clients actually make an impact.

Data is king in today’s world, and in terms of kingdoms, Cardlytics is actually a pretty impressive one despite the fact that most everyday folks have never even heard of the company.

But if you’re in the banking industry and looking to up your eCommerce platform, Cardlytics is probably the first thing that pops into your head. You see, Cardlytics is a native ad platform for banks and it uses purchase data to deliver insights to customers who want to personalize and tailor their rewards or perks programs. The ability to analyze and take action based on all of that purchase data is what sets Cardlytics apart. And helping to lead the way is Nate Bucholz, the Vice President of eCommerce Partnerships at Cardlytics, who brought with him years of experience at some of the other biggest data companies in the world.

“I learned from Facebook and Google that when you’ve got an amazing first-party data set, then you can get a seat at the big kind of table,” Bucholz said.

In a recent interview with Up Next in Commerce, Nate walked through the work he and his team are doing at Cardlytics and the major takeaway was that when it comes to the digital platforms and serving customers, banks don’t want to just gather data for the sake of gathering data, they want to find the best way to interpret and use that data.

“[At Cardlytics] it’s not even about your interests online,” Bucholz said. “It’s just, where do you lay down the money, on what sort of categories, what have you done in the past, what’s the basket size and the frequency, and these sorts of things. I think that’s a natural evolution of marketing as you get better data, you’re able to cut out the waste more and more and get more efficient.”

The better your data, the more efficient you can be and the better the partnerships are that you can build with your customers. And those customer relationships are never more important than in times of strife or trouble, similar to what the world experienced due to the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 shifted the way most people in the world lived, and as a result, the way everyone shopped, where and why was different, too. Cardlitucs was able to track that entire shift in real-time and offer its customers insights into their own customers.

“We have a great analytics team and no more than a week into this stay at home lockdown that most of us are experiencing, they built this dashboard where we’re looking at quite granular categories and how the spend is changing year on year, updating every week, looking at all the different DMAs in the United States, and so we can see what happened.”

And what did they see? Some things you would expect, like an increase of online grocery shopping. But they also noticed some more interesting trends, like the rise of the home improvement and children’s toys categories. People are looking for ways to occupy their and their children’s time, and a company like Cardlytics is able to tell you exactly how they are doing that so that banks can respond in kind. Cardlytics can also narrow in on exactly where this spending activity is happening so that a bank working with them knows that even though this small town in Wisconsin never used to be interested in beauty products, it is now and we can update our platform to offer something to those customers.

Overall, these use cases prove the overall value of what Cardlytics offers, which are insights into how and why people are buying. And when those insights are used appropriately, the businesses that can optimize that data and insights are able to form better and longer-lasting relationships with customers.

To learn more, listen to Bucholz’s episode of Up Next in Commerce here.

—

Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce