Retailers today face the challenge of building customer-centric marketing programs that achieve one or more of the following three basic goals:

• Bring more traffic to the store
• Convert more store visitors from "shoppers" into "buyers"
• Encourage buyers’ purchases to be as large as possible

The most successful retailers will take into account not only these top-line goals—-i.e., traffic, conversion, basket size—-but also bottom-line profitability. They will ensure that building profit margin occurs not only at the net level, but also at the gross level—-that is, making sure that sales don’t grow solely because of discounting and other price promotion that rob from the bottom line.

What makes some retailers better than others at getting there faster? Data. In fact, the proliferation of data sources—-external data (behavior, lifestyle, etc.), as well as their own customer and transaction data--means that most retailers have access to a mountain of data on their customers.

The challenge, however, lies in using the data in a systematic and powerful way to improve decisions—to generate offers that are optimally targeted to customers, and that drive value that can be measured and used to further improve value in the next marketing campaign.