Retailers are facing a new wave of economic pressure as sweeping new tariffs drive up costs across categories from apparel to electronics. These policies are squeezing margins, disrupting supply chains, and pushing consumers to reevaluate their spending habits.
In an environment where brands must do more with less, the most resilient are turning to a resource they already own—and can control: first-party customer data.
Tariffs are raising the stakes for retailers
The retail landscape is always competitive, but tariffs have added fresh urgency to protecting profitability and deepening customer loyalty.
Margins, already slim across the industry, are now being severely compressed. For example, a brand with a 6% profit margin could lose over 60% of its profits if hit with a 15% tariff on imported goods. These increases often get passed to consumers, changing their behavior in ways that impact every part of the business:
Stockpiling and shifting demand: Shoppers are rushing to buy before price hikes, creating unpredictable spikes and drops in store traffic—and skewed, abnormal inventory needs that make forecasting and fulfillment harder.
Trade-down behavior: More customers are opting for lower-cost or private-label alternatives, eroding brand loyalty.
Rise of resale: As new apparel costs rise (projected to increase by 65% due to tariffs), consumers are turning to secondhand platforms like ThredUp and Poshmark.
Caught between higher costs and increasingly value-conscious customers, every customer interaction now carries higher stakes for retailers.
First-party data: the advantage brands can actually control
While no brand can control global trade policy, they can control how they use their data.
First-party customer data—behavioral signals, purchase history, engagement patterns—is key to unlocking new efficiencies, strengthening loyalty, and driving growth.
Here’s how leading brands are putting their customer data to work:
1. Grow value from existing customers
Acquiring new customers is costly—especially when margins are under pressure. Retaining and expanding relationships with existing customers offers the fastest path to profitable growth.
First-party data empowers brands to:
Identify high-value customers based on behaviors and lifetime potential.
Personalize experiences with targeted promotions, loyalty rewards, and exclusive offers.
Extend Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) through better engagement strategies.
Amperity makes these insights actionable, helping brands grow their most valuable customer relationships with confidence.
2. Optimize marketing efficiency
Every marketing dollar must now deliver measurable results. Broad, inefficient targeting strategies are no longer sustainable.
First-party data empowers brands to:
Build highly specific, behavior-based audience segments.
Optimize acquisition and engagement campaigns for better ROI.
Suppress low-probability or low-value targets to minimize wasted spend.
Amperity’s real-time segmentation and activation ensure brands continuously improve performance based on actual outcomes—not assumptions.
3. Strengthen demand forecasting and inventory planning
Traditional forecasting models can’t keep up with today’s volatility. Customer-driven insights offer a smarter foundation for inventory and supply planning.
First-party data enables brands to:
Analyze purchasing patterns, affinities, and lifecycle behaviors.
Forecast demand signals with greater accuracy.
Align inventory, promotions, and production with true market needs.
Amperity connects customer insights to ERP and operational systems, enabling faster, smarter supply chain decisions.
4. Streamline operations
A modern approach to customer data management creates significant operational efficiencies:
Marketing teams are able to design and execute campaigns much more rapidly.
Customer Care teams, armed with improved customer context, are able to reduce call handle time and resolve issues on the first customer inquiry.
Data Management teams avoid complex and time-consuming activities integrating customer information across various brands, segments, and channels.
Amperity brings customer information together across every source of data, allowing for more streamlined and rapid execution of customer strategies.
5. Own your customer data future
With third-party cookies in rapid decline and privacy regulations tightening, first-party data strategies are becoming mission-critical for resilience and growth.
First-party data strategies allow brands to:
Own rich, reliable customer profiles built from direct interactions.
Comply with global privacy regulations without sacrificing marketing effectiveness. Future-proof customer engagement strategies against data ecosystem volatility.
Amperity specializes in maximizing first-party data value, giving brands full control over customer intelligence.
6. Build an agile customer strategy
Markets shift fast—and your customer strategy needs to shift even faster. Real-time insights are the difference between reacting late and leading change.
First-party data empowers brands to:
Pivot campaigns, offers, and messaging based on live trends.
Respond quickly to trade-down behavior, price sensitivity, or shifting loyalty signals.
Launch promotions and experiences in days instead of weeks.
Amperity enables rapid action through real-time processing and activation, helping brands stay a step ahead.
How Amperity helps brands activate their data for impact
This is where Amperity makes the difference. Our Customer Data Cloud empowers retail brands to unify, understand, and activate their customer data at scale—fueling resilience and profitable growth even in turbulent times.
With Amperity, brands can:
Unify fragmented customer data: Bring together messy, siloed, and incomplete datasets—even when identifiers are inconsistent or missing—to build stable, accurate customer profiles.
Unlock real-time insights: Understand customer behavior, preferences, and lifetime value with continuously updated intelligence—not outdated batch reports.
Power omnichannel personalization: Activate unified customer profiles across email, SMS, web, media, and more, delivering consistent experiences with full confidence in the underlying data.
Accelerate decision-making: Reduce data latency so teams can react faster to market changes, emerging customer needs, and new competitive pressures.
Streamline operations: Improved customer understanding improves productivity across every business function.
Integrate customer intelligence across the business: Connect insights to broader operations—from marketing to supply chain planning—for enterprise-wide impact.
Amperity turns customer data into a true competitive advantage—helping brands take faster action, personalize at scale, and maximize every customer interaction.
Resilience starts with your customer data
Tariffs are putting new pressure on margins, supply chains, and pricing models. But brands that deeply understand their customers—and act on that understanding—can rise above the challenge.
With a strong first-party data foundation, it’s possible to retain customers, optimize spend, and drive profitable growth even in tough times.
Ready to see how your customer data can do more? Request a demo today.