Thinking about learning more about offer catalogs and their importance for marketing and conversion, we interviewed Alejandra Betancourt, Director of Sales and Business Development/Retail/Digital at Ofertia.
Interview with Alejandra Betancourt, Director of Sales and Business Development/Retail/Digital at Ofertia
I have more than 10 years of experience in sales and commercial areas. I started at a sampling marketing agency , whose strategy was to get samples to hospitals. Then I was in a company called The Warranty Group, which is extended warranties, where I began to have contact with retailers, such as Liverpool and Sears , and I began to develop sales strategies so that the extended warranty service was sold within the point of purchase. physical sale.
Currently, I am at Ofertia , a digital Shopper platform as Director of Sales and Operations, already in the 100% digital world.
Ofertia started in Barcelona, Spain, in 2012 and arrived in Mexico in 2015. In Latin America we Telegram Number Data are present in Colombia and Chile, while in Europe we are in Romania, Bulgaria, France, Spain, Sweden. The fact of being linked to Europe, where the digital market is more developed, gives us that vision of where the market and trends are heading.
The company was born from the need to transfer handing out brochures on the street with brand offers to the digital world and help the consumer communicate all the benefits of a brand. Beyond that, we also help retailers, because we generate metrics, such as readings, pages, views, products that are being searched, in addition to helping them learn more about the consumer.
Ofertia is a Shopper platform, available both in app and on the web, specialized in categorizing, digitizing and geolocating catalogs and publications of different brands and retailers to find promotions, discounts or benefits of these brands for users.
As Mexicans we are compulsive buyers, but we love planning, so the idea is to help the user plan their purchases.
We use tagging algorithms and artificial intelligence to digitally label retailers' or brands' products. When a user makes a specific search, using these same algorithms and AI, we find and show the catalogs that have those products that the user is looking for.
Mexico is the fifth Latin American country with the highest adoption of Artificial Intelligence in the business sector
10:08 Can I buy inside the Ofertia store?
We are not a marketplace, we are dedicated to helping increase the traffic of retailers and brands, both in the physical store and on the website. Our platform uses Gspot, a technology with which we geolocate all stores, track traffic and place virtual billboards, with which we show promotions to users and which physical store they can go to buy it or through linkouts on which website they can buy it.
We publish the material on Ofertia and give two options for the customer to choose from: I place links so they can go to the website and I show them the store closest to their location where the customer can go to make their purchase.
We always do surveys within the platform to learn about consumer habits. In this case we did a survey to ask the user if they do a digital search first and end up in a physical store or vice versa.
The results were very interesting, because they revealed that 82% of users still prefer to buy in a physical store. Furthermore, although 75% perform online searches to compare prices and product details before going to the physical store, 63% do the product search while in a physical store.
This demonstrates the importance of showrooming , webrooming and omnichannel, because right now users are interested in the experience and knowing that they will find the same thing both in the physical store and online and they want to know about delivery, distribution, returns, delivery logistics.
There are two very important elements that differentiate us. First of all, we have the endorsement of Nielsen. As we are a geolocated platform that seeks to convert visits to a physical store, this endorsement gives confidence to our retailers to share this conversion with them.
On the other hand, something very important is our First Party Data. Thanks to the years we have in the market and our experience as shopper users, we can do audience segmentation and generate programmatic campaigns and generate retargeting strategies and lookalikes based on the information we have about users.
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We have several elements that make merchants choose us. First, we have offices in Mexico, which allows us to respond quickly to promotions and discounts that our clients want to make.
In addition, we have distinguished ourselves by offering our clients the necessary help in planning strategies, campaign designs and implementation. Thanks to our algorithms and AI, we can offer tracking analysis, conversion (whether in a physical or digital store), and metrics such as generated readings, page views, words that are being searched, what times they are going to the physical store, which days of the week have the highest recurrence, user conversion percentage once they saw the publication and went to the physical store.
ECommerce is enhanced with the use of AI in Mexico
On the other hand, we focus on looking for a quality audience, ensuring that the audience is well segmented and finding that qualified user who will convert to the purchase, both online and in a physical store.
In cases of retargeting we talk a lot with clients about the frequency cap, that is, the times the same banner is sent or appears to a client. In very thoughtful purchases, such as a car, the banner should appear more times, because it is a purchase with a high average ticket. But in purchases with a lower average ticket or more immediate purchases, such as fashion, this frequency cap should be minimal, so as not to stun the user and lower the impact of the campaign.
We work very hard with social media campaigns, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, where we show this benefit of finding offers, the variety of retailers and brands they can find, and the products. In addition, we do SEO and SEM strategies .
Currently, we have more than 3 thousand published catalogs, but the reach of our platform varies. If there is a brand that is not within the platform, I cannot show it in searches. With programming strategies we have greater reach and it is not necessary for them to be within the platform.
Before the pandemic, we had a great challenge, because although the whole world is digitalized and there was a great penetration of smartphones, the search and trust part was not so strong. At first there was some resistance, but we had a very good response because the user noticed that they could have more direct contact with the offers and they no longer had to visit several websites or visit several physical stores to obtain the same information about products and brands. what did he want.
After the pandemic, the topic changed a little, because it was no longer just webrooming, where users do digital searches to buy physically, but showrooming became relevant, where the customer sees a product in the physical store and buys online. digital.