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Grant Miller is vice president, global strategic product management, at Pitney Bowes where he manages four distinct product families in the company’s global production mail business for enterprise-level clients. Grant holds a Bachelor’s of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University and an MBA from Butler University. For more information, please visit www.pitneybowes.com

Five years ago mobile commerce was something that only venture capital firms were talking about. Big brands and big platforms hadn't made their move. Similarly, Facebook targeting didn't even creep onto the marketing agenda until three years to four years ago. Now Facebook is one of the most sophisticated channels for brands, with Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Tinder (swipe right for new shoes?) stepping up their own advertising offerings. At the same time, e-commerce has seen tremendous growth over the past four years, with the share of U.S. retail sales occurring online growing by 50 percent (from 4 percent to 6 percent). That growth rate is likely to accelerate as mobile device usage grows and consumers across the world gain comfort with e-commerce. Given this rapid expansion, predicting specifics of how people will shop in the 2020s is difficult. What channels will rise and flourish? Will retailers move to more of a subscription model? Will the world run on magic?

Were you prepared for the recent arctic blast? For West Coasters, what about those above-average temps? I'm not talking about whether you were ready to shovel your driveway or if you had a fully stocked beach bag waiting by the door, I'm talking about your ability to leverage these newsworthy weather events in the inbox.

Sen. Bill Nelson on Wednesday called for a federal investigation of Lumber Liquidators amid allegations that it sold an imported laminate that could pose health risks. The Florida Democrat sent a letter to federal agencies asking them to independently test the company's flooring products. He also sought to discover whether the company made potentially false marketing claims about its product's compliance with safety standards.

Simply put, disruptors change the formula for winning business models. For retailer marketers, digital disruption is becoming a constant. Retail marketers must now be highly flexible and adaptable, anticipating and reacting to the next round of digital disruptors. As we progress in 2015, here are five potential disruptors that all digital marketers will need to be actively engaging on to ensure they continue to have a winning formula for success:

Retailers took spending on product listing ads (PLAs) to another level at the end of 2014. According to data from Adobe Digital Index, Google Shopping ad spending in the retail sector grew 47 percent year-over-year and 53 percent quarter-over-quarter in last year's fourth quarter. Meanwhile, spending on Google text ads was down 6 percent year-over-year. PLAs accounted for one-fifth of U.S. retail search ad clicks in the fourth quarter of 2014. Despite their decline in spend, Google text ads led in share of search engine marketing clicks, grabbing two-thirds of the total. 

Email gives you an ideal opportunity to engage with customers and prospects, and evidence suggests that it's still highly effective. According to a Marketo report, 77 percent of consumers said they prefer to receive permission-based marketing communications through email, compared to just 5 percent for text messages and 4 percent for social media (Facebook). Email generated nearly twice the return on investment compared to other channels, yielding $40.56 for every dollar spent. The channel with the next highest ROI, search engine marketing, yielded $22.44.

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