November/December Issue 2013
1-800-Flowers.com Revamps Loyalty Program to Maximize LCV
In a move to improve its ability to deliver a more dynamic and engaging loyalty experience with its brand across all customer touchpoints, 1-800-Flowers.com launched a new loyalty marketing platform in September. The floral and gifts omnichannel retailer is using 500friends’ LoyaltyPlus platform to power its Fresh Rewards customer loyalty program.
3 Omnichannel Retail Trends to Watch in 2014
As the year comes to a close, it's time for my annual roundup of omnichannel retail predictions for the year ahead. I'm focusing on a few interesting trends I saw come to light in 2013 that I believe will become even more widespread next year. Enjoy!
50 Best Tips of 2013
Rounding up the year's best tips to help you optimize your business.
8 Surefire Tactics for Increasing Your Mobile Revenues Without Breaking the Bank
With consumer usage of smartphones continuing to skyrocket, it's past time for your brand to have a mobile presence, be it a mobile-optimized site, app or both. To help your efforts in generating sales from mobile devices, consider the following eight tips:
Best Practices for Growing Your Email List
Finding the right marketing mix to meet your acquisition goals can be a test-and-learn endeavor. The first thing you need to know is your audience. Where online do they spend time? It's likely your strategy will contain a mix of display advertising, social media and search engine optimization to drive direct signups on your website. Knowing where your customers spend time online will inform how much you should invest in each channel.
Growing the Corner Store
Optimizing Google+ Local pages can pay big dividends for retailers that want to increase visibility on search engine results pages, according to a new aggregate case study from my firm SIM Partners. Furthermore, the ubiquity of Google for local searches is growing according to a report from MDG Advertising. Consider the following:
Hungry for Content
Instagram, Facebook's insanely popular photo-sharing app, introduced video capability in June to compete with the rise of Vine's bite-sized videos. Within 24 hours, Instagram's 130 million users uploaded over 5 million videos.
Sears Uses Crowdsourcing for Tech Innovation
Plenty of retailers have leveraged user-generated content (e.g., customer photos and videos) from contests and promotions in branded marketing campaigns before, but not quite like Sears just did. The company's Startup + Developer Challenge, held this past summer, was a "code-a-thon" designed to find the best and brightest minds in the tech community of Silicon Valley — and then use those minds to Sears' benefit.
VILLA Leverages Mobile Hiring Solution to Improve its Recruitment Process
With the employee turnover rate typically high in the retail industry, particularly within brick-and-mortar stores, managing the process of finding and hiring qualified individuals is a challenge for many brands. It often proves time consuming and can be expensive. Such was the dilemma facing VILLA.
