Marketing

To capture and capitalize on mobile traffic growth, retailers are eagerly looking for ways to optimize their digital marketing campaigns across various devices. As a result, top investment priorities include a few tried-and-true favorites: email and paid search. According to the Shop.org/Forrester Research study, The State Of Retailing Online 2013: Marketing & Merchandising, nearly nine in 10 (87 percent) online retailers surveyed either already have implemented or are planning to implement mobile email optimization in in 2013, and seven in 10 will optimize paid search for smartphones and tablets (71 percent and 73 percent, respectively). 

Office Depot is directing its back-to-school marketing efforts at teachers by offering them an online tool to help them plan and prepare for the academic year. The retailer is

Competing with an e-commerce Goliath like Amazon.com can be a daunting task, but specialty merchants have some distinct advantages, including the capacity to forge strong ties with shoppers through a brand community. Amazon's online warehouse of products offers little to unite customers around a common lifestyle or passion. By focusing on a particular product category, value proposition or audience, you can provide meaningful interaction and a shopping experience to connect your customers with other like-minded consumers.

Making the most of peak selling seasons today requires technologies that not only simplify store shopping, but also tightly interweave it with omnichannel retailing's digital touchpoints. Major retailers including Sears, DSW, Cabela's and Pier 1 Imports have made significant IT investments that are designed to provide a big return on investment during the 2013 holiday season. 

Pinterest and online shopping — it's a match made in retail heaven. But Nordstrom is trying to bridge the gap between online shopping and the in-store experience by bringing Pinterest to life. According to GigaOM, Nordstrom has begun labeling its "Top Pinned Items" in stores with a Pinterest logo, alerting shoppers which items are the most popular online. The program, currently in place at 13 Nordstrom locations, is a good idea on the most basic level.

For many retailers, Christmas begins in July with preparations for major site traffic events like Cyber Monday. Will your company's site be ready? The time to find out is now, not when your web servers are overloaded, incoming orders have stopped, and frustrated visitors are abandoning their filled shopping carts and rushing to a competitor's site to buy their gifts.

Saks Fifth Avenue is debuting a new marketing campaign, which it hopes will sell shoppers on its reputation as a place for fashion discovery. Themed "Look," it starts this week with the release of its new "The Making of a Look" catalog, a spokesperson tells Marketing Daily. "Our ads, which will reflect 'Look,' won't run until August, and will be featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and local ads," she says. New shopping bags, direct mail, press initiatives, in-store events, digital marketing, social media and visual displays are also scheduled to begin in August. 

Webrooming is the practice of researching products online before going to a brick-and-mortar store for a final evaluation and purchase. For retailers, webrooming presents opportunities to provide shoppers with information they expect to receive online (e.g., product information, pricing, peer reviews, etc.), while maintaining control over the customer journey by showcasing the physical store experience as the consumer's final destination.

As other retailers struggle with slipping sales, branding problems and public relations controversies — or, in some cases, all three — an opportunity emerges for the once-venerable company. Brand strategist David Brier of DBD International shows how J.C. Penney can seize it.

There's nothing see-through about how lululemon will overcome its recent image nightmare. Just sell more of the pants once they are no longer so sheer that nothing is left to the imagination, a Wall Street expert told TODAY on Thursday. There's no reason that the clothing maker, forced to withdraw the line because they failed the bend-over test, cannot survive that public relations disaster and also the loss of its charismatic CEO and a resulting stock plunge, Dana Telsey said.