Marketing

The holiday shopping rush is right around the corner, and retailers are cementing their digital strategies to win over new customers, maintain loyal shoppers, and compete in an autonomous market. From interactive virtual shopping assistants to personalized recommendation engines, retailers are making major investments in artificial intelligence to connect with shoppers and drive growth. However,…

Walmart on Tuesday announced a new joint membership combining its namesake chain and its subsidiary Sam’s Club, as the retailer leans further into convenience and value to win over cash-strapped consumers. The membership, which combines Walmart+ and Sam’s Club Plus, will cost $120 per year, according to the company. That price is nearly $100 less…

Retailers tend to judge loyalty success by penetration, which measures the share of transactions tied to a member account. It’s an easy number to report and an easy one to feel good about. However, penetration mostly counts people who were already coming in. It doesn’t show whether the program created a new visit, held off…

Every year, small business owners spend September and October telling themselves they have plenty of time before the holidays, yet wake up in mid-November and wonder where the time went. When the signage is finally ordered, they find the printer backed up, the good display space at the front of the store spoken for, and…

Chinese online retailer Temu has agreed to settle data privacy claims raised by Texas and will ​restrict how it handles personal data from shoppers in the state, according ‌to documents made public last week. Temu faces several lawsuits from U.S. states concerned that the company unlawfully harvests U.S. customer data that could be accessed by…

The holidays are often treated as an exceptional period in the marketing calendar. In reality, they tend to amplify the trends already underway. The season puts the year’s marketing practices under stress. Customer journeys become denser. Media spending rises. More consumers enter the market at once, and the consequences of weak measurement or disconnected customer…

Retail marketing experts will cover which shopper behaviors signal buying intent and how AI turns those signals into decisions.

Marketers often suppress email-engaged or repeat customers from direct mail campaigns, reasoning that if customers are opening your emails or actively purchasing, do they really need direct mail? We thought the same thing. However, after several years of testing, we’ve found that engagement in one channel doesn’t necessarily diminish the value of another. In fact,…

In the modern retail era, loyalty is still a tool that works to reward the most frequent buyers and retain them as customers. But many retailers now take loyalty further, turning it into something much bigger: the customer data that powers the rest of the business. Steph Hoppe, vice pres­ident of omnichannel marketing at Casey's…

In episode 518 of Total Retail Talks, Editor-In-Chief Joe Keenan Interviews Bear Mayer, founder and CEO of BRUCE BOLT, a family-owned sports equipment brand based in Austin, Texas. Mayer looks back on his entrepreneurial beginnings, touching on the valuable business lessons his father imparted on him (00:55). He discusses the rapid growth of BRUCE BOLT…