Marketing Automation
Last year’s unprecedented holiday shopping season brought e-commerce’s rapid expansion to the forefront. The pandemic forced brands and consumers to adapt to online shopping and virtual experiences, completely altering the way that consumers discover, shop and make purchase decisions. A recent MarTech study found that 81 percent of Americans did more than half of their…
In this episode of Total Retail Tech Insights, Editor-in-Chief Joe Keenan interviews Jennifer Lee-Harrison, vice president of demand generation at Carter's, and Youna Kim, senior director of integrated performance media at Merkle. Lee-Harrison and Kim discuss their backgrounds and current roles, their takes on the state of the retail industry heading into another COVID-impacted holiday season, and…
People are overwhelmed. The pandemic has changed the world. Supply chain disruptions are turning short trips to the store into mini-adventures and starting to cause worry about gifts for the holiday season. So the last thing shoppers need is to be bombarded with endless and oftentimes generic brand messages and ads in their social feeds…
After the onset of COVID-19, the world was abuzz with how the retail industry would fare. There were early signs that online shopping was surging, but nobody expected e-commerce penetration to grow by 27 percent in only eight weeks. Looking back at an unprecedented year for online retail sales, there are other trends that we…
The holidays are here and e-commerce marketers are mapping out how to cope with the increased demand and competition this year will bring. To compound the seasonal rush, e-commerce continues to accelerate, and businesses are trying to plan ahead to jump-start their 2021 e-commerce sales. As they do, retailers are looking toward omnichannel strategies for…
The questions that keep multilocation retail marketing executives up at night have evolved alongside the number of new technologies and marketing channels used to reach consumers. One of the biggest struggles is how to best execute highly targeted marketing campaigns to customers across hundreds or thousands of very unique communities where the brand’s retail locations…
In episode 238 of Total Retail Talks, Editor-in-Chief Joe Keenan interviews Gail Buffington, vice president of marketing and analytics at Soft Surroundings, a women's apparel, shoes and accessories retailer. Listen in as Buffington discusses Soft Surrounding's brand history as a cataloger, its expansion into brick-and-mortar retail, and her career at the company. She shares how Soft…
I'm no stranger to writing about disaster preparedness and crisis management. I live in an area where we get hit with a hurricane every few years. And while we're in uncharted waters here with the COVID-19 Coronavirus, there are some things that marketers forget about doing in times of crisis. I will leave up to…
Marketing automation isn’t a thing of the future — it’s very much a part of the here and now for small and midsize businesses (SMBs) across the world. However, there are a variety of marketing automation tools that many are unaware of that have the ability to help SMBs reach customers in a timely and…
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a hot topic and many marketers have high expectations for the technology. There are lofty predictions for AI in the future, however, there are already a lot of applications for the technology within marketing automation that retailers have yet to take advantage of. What does it look like in practice?