Featured Post: My Reading & Podcast List
Here are recent books I’ve read and podcasts I enjoy. If you’re looking for something interesting to listen to or read, these are a few that have stood out to me. Let me know if you have a recommendations.
7 Ways to Prepare Your Email Marketing for the Holidays
Believe it or not, the holiday season is right around the corner. This year’s holiday season is projected to rake in $123 billion in online sales, a 15.3% growth over last year. Here are several trends that are expected to continue for holiday 2018.
Are Your Competitive Differentiators Really Differentiating?
In today’s competitive retail environment, differentiation is more important than ever. Yet, very few retailers effectively communicate what makes them different from the next guy. Here is how brands can set themselves apart from the pack.
4 Ways to Produce More Authentic Brand Images
Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, email marketing, website images – we live in an image-rich online world. And now that everyone has a camera on hand 24/7, brands can no longer get by with boring, same-old-same-old photos. Thanks to a rise in social influencers and user-generated content (UGC), those old images are losing their effectiveness. Consumers expect more authenticity. Here are several ways you can offer customers more authenticity within your brand.
How Customer Service Can Increase Sales and Build Brand Loyalty
Have a question about a product? Need help with an order? Trying to find an item in your local store? Where do you turn? Customer service. Here are four tips that will help your customer service team enhance the brand loyalty.
When Is the Best Time to Send Your Brand Emails?
When is the best time to send emails?
This question has been around as long as email marketing itself. If you do a quick search, you’ll find tons of different studies pointing to a variety of answers, leaving retailers just as confused as before. The common result: Brands are flooding consumer inboxes with emails at seemingly random times throughout the day.
Is Marketing to Millennials Making Us Miss the Obvious?
My fellow Gen Xers and I are growing older with each passing day. And aging right along with us are two of the most talked-about cohorts – millennials and Generation Z. Here is how to market to both these demographics effectively.
Don’t You Know Me at All? The Importance of Relevant Recommendations
Imagine this scenario. You’re staying at a hotel, and you visit the concierge for a great dinner recommendation. You give him all sorts of information, including your craving for surf and turf. You tell him about the vintage red wine you like and your wife’s favorite chardonnay. You say you want a relaxed, romantic atmosphere – nothing too loud. After sharing all of those details, the concierge recommends the local sports bar. Wouldn’t you have expected more? Would you think less of the concierge and even the hotel chain as a whole? This same kind of interaction happens between retailers and consumers every day.
Are Loyalty Programs Still Doing Their Job?
It’s a pretty disloyal world out there, but can you really blame the consumer? Online shopping has never been easier, and stores have been stepping over each other to see who can offer the deepest discount. While discounting your way to a one-time purchase might work in the short term, at the end of the day, you need to aim for a higher prize: customer loyalty.
Many retailers attempt to accomplish this with an official loyalty program. There’s just one problem – they rarely work.
The Threat of Disappearing Brands in the Age of Voice Assistants
When you see a red and white can of soda or a Peter Pan silhouette on a jar, you see a brand. You know the product. But what happens when you don’t have those visual cues to draw you to certain items when you shop?
Brands used to rely on traditional advertising to embed their brand imagery in our minds and remain visible and relevant to their audience. But in today’s digital-first world, consumer attention is more fragmented. Television screen time is declining, while time spent on smartphones and other mediums is increasing. This has created challenges for brands trying to stay in front of consumers.
Millennials: From Punchline to Powerful Consumers
By now, you’ve heard the term “millennial” a million times over — and with good reason. They represent 25% of the US population and hold $1.3 trillion in spending power, which has turned them into quite a powerful consumer group.
Millennials have mostly been given the credit, for better or worse, for redefining consumer expectations. These expectations now go well beyond millennials, prompting retailers to change how they engage and market to consumers of all ages.
Holiday Predictions Recap: Did I Hit the Mark or Shoot My Eye Out?
The holiday season exploded, much like a shot fired from a Red Rider carbine action, 200-shot, range model air rifle, with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time. Back in October, I laid out my predictions for the 2017 holiday season. Now it’s time to take aim at my predictions and see whether I had Black Bart in the crosshairs or ended up shooting my eye out.
Confessions of a Holiday Shopper: Why I Didn’t Wait Until Black Friday
This holiday season was predicted to be the best yet for online retailers – and it was. Fifty-eight out of 61 days drove over $1 billion in online sales, including every single day in November. Gray November, the month-long period of deep discounts, is now commonplace. But do people buy more or simply buy earlier?
Top Retail Trends for 2018: Industry Experts Share Their Predictions
Many in the industry called 2017 a “retail apocalypse” and there were certainly strong elements of this. There were hundreds of store closings and several major bankruptcy filings as companies felt the ongoing pain of retail’s evolution. But the year ended on a high note with loads of anecdotal evidence of stronger-than-expected holiday sales; final figures will be in later this month.
Below, some industry experts provide their predictions on where retail, and B2C commerce in general, will be headed in 2018.
2017 Email Marketing Report Card: Did Your Program Make the Grade?
As 2017 finds itself in your rearview mirror, ask yourself a question. What changes did I make to my email program in 2017 that had a significant impact? It’s a simple question, but I bet many of you won’t have a good answer. Some of you are likely doing the same thing now at the end of the year that you were at the start of it, possibly due to the rush of day-to-day execution or limited internal resources.
Here’s a checklist to help you plan for 2018:
Why Amazon is trying to out‑Walmart Walmart
Cash is king. Well, actually, Amazon is king. And it certainly creates a lot of cash. Not only does Amazon continue to dominate e-commerce, but it also impacts almost every line of business—from supermarkets to web services. Now it’s even getting into pharmaceuticals.
The folks over at Amazon are not dumb. They test, and they try. Often times, they even fail. But while they push the limits of getting to market, they’ve also proven to be patient. More importantly, they’re very calculated.