Personalization

Most email strategies are still built around campaigns, but performance is coming from somewhere else. Automated flows make up just 6 percent of sends, yet generate $513 per 1,000 emails compared to $62 for campaigns. That is an 8x difference. And this pattern shows up consistently across North American e-commerce brands. The math is clear:…

Retail media has quickly become one of the most important growth engines in commerce. Retailers are increasingly monetizing their digital properties, from search results and product pages to apps and email, by enabling brands to promote their products directly within the shopping journey. Yet despite its rapid growth, many retailers still hesitate to fully embrace…

Retailers are finally realizing that their customer data can pay for itself. For years, brands have treated first-party data as a cost of doing business, but now it's being redefined as a monetizable asset. Purchase history, browsing behavior, loyalty engagement, and customer preferences are becoming foundational inputs for personalization and performance measurement. Most organizations recognize…

The retail landscape has undergone more transformation in the last 24 months than in the previous decade. While the past few years were defined by the rise of enterprise artificial intelligence optimizing supply chains and back-office efficiencies, 2026 marks the year the "AI agent" officially takes the driver’s seat in the consumer journey. As we…

Personalization may be the promise, but the retail experience that customers get from their favorite brands often tells a different story. Despite claims of sophisticated, advanced and "personalized" engagement, many retailers still group customers by generic segments that look similar on paper, such as demographics or purchase history. This approach overlooks the fundamental requirement of…

If technology matures at a pace closer to dog years than human, then we’ve already witnessed a century of conversational intelligence since Siri first appeared on our iPhones 15 years ago. As ChatGPT and a constellation of other large language models (LLMs) continue to evolve at an exponential speed and scale, legacy interactive voice response…

The way people shop during the holidays has shifted so dramatically that the old idea of a single “peak” moment no longer fits. What used to be a frantic sprint around Black Friday and Cyber Monday has stretched into something slower, more deliberate and, frankly, more interesting. Consumers are buying earlier, using artificial intelligence to…

Most brands talk about personalization like they’ve mastered it. However, personalization is still mostly smoke and mirrors. If customers click your email and land on a website that acts like it has never met them, you’re not personalizing, you’re decorating. True personalization spans the entire customer journey. Great customer experience (CX) feels like one continuous…

In episode 499 of Total Retail Talks, Editor-in-Chief Joe Keenan interviews Mike Natenshon, founder and CEO of apparel brand Marine Layer. Beginning from his desire to re-create a favorite worn-out college T-shirt to founding a successful brand known for high-quality, custom fabrics, Natenshon breaks down Marine Layer's milestones. From opening its first retail store (2:00)…

Retailers are pushing hard to personalize every step of the shopping journey. As the tools get sharper, so does a real challenge: knowing when personalization feels helpful and knowing when it feels like someone is looking over your shoulder. That “creepy factor” shows up the moment shoppers feel observed instead of understood. The ability to…