Omnichannel

Mobile shopping from in-store is just beginning to achieve its promise. Most shoppers are not yet accustomed to turning on and logging in to a retailer’s mobile app when they enter one of its stores. Likewise, retailers are just starting to launch mobile commerce offerings, let alone offer capabilities targeted to in-store shoppers.

Dear Dr. pROfIt: My CEO recently asked me to run an analysis of our dollars per channel metric, one that measures how much our customer

Combining the forces of social media with email marketing has been under way for some time, with savvy marketers using the two channels to complement each other rather than compete. As companies gain experience in the area, their choice of tactics may change. A survey of small businesses by email marketing company AWeber found the most common tactics implemented last year were tweeting email newsletters and sending out blog entries to email lists. Fewer than four in 10 small businesses were engaging in those activities, and only about one-quarter had email sign-up forms on their social profiles or links within email messages to follow them on social sites.

Welcome to Online Retailing 2.0. Traditional brick-and-mortar retailers once outsourced their online sales to specialty "fulfillment" companies. Today they are running their own online operations — and increasingly challenging their executive brainpower to find more sophisticated ways to compete with online-only retailers such as Amazon.com.

The Direct Marketing Association today released the 2010 Response Rate Trend Report, which provides key cost and performance benchmarks to help marketers gauge the efficiency of their campaigns. The updated report shows effective paid search campaigns usually lead to a multistep sales process.

On day two of the Retail Marketing Conference in Orlando, Fla., last month, a panel of executives from Best Buy, Dell and 1-800-Flowers.com took part in a roundtable discussion on how their businesses have evolved their brand, e-commerce and marketing strategies to differentiate themselves from their competition through innovation.

In a session he led at the refocused Retail Marketing Conference in Orlando, Fla., Bill LaPierre, senior vice president of direct marketing and list firm Direct Media/Millard, discussed why traditional catalog marketers have encountered difficulty transitioning into online merchants. A recap of LaPierre's session follows, along with five pitfalls to avoid when shifting from a catalog-centric business to an online-driven operation.

In-store kiosks are a place where brick-and-mortar retailing meets the internet. It's a new initiative for Kohl's, aimed at boosting sales in whatever channel works for the customer: in the store or online.

Retailers encounter moments of truth that make or break their sales and marketing effectiveness multiple times each day. How they inter

We're not in Kansas anymore. Such could be the slogan for men's and women's apparel and accessories retailer Brooklyn Industries. Headquartered in its namesake New York City borough, the cross-channel merchant exudes a decidedly urban vibe. From the clothes it sells to the stores where those clothes are sold, Brooklyn Industries caters to the active lifestyles of its city-dweller, 25-year-old to 35-year-old demographic.