The 50 Best Tips of 2015

41. Offering free shipping to your stores is a great strategy. Having multiple orders consolidated and shipped to a single location is significantly cheaper than shipping individual, lightweight packages to multiple residences.
Rob Martinez, Shipware, “Delivering a Profit,” Spring, Total Retail

Social Media Marketing/Commerce
42. Find your influencers. You can tell your followers to buy a product all you want, but the message will resonate more strongly if it comes from a third-party influencer that your audience trusts. Do the research to determine which Twitter users have the strongest pull with your various target audiences, then reach out to those influencers to engage them with your product and encourage (or pay) them to share with their followers.
John Donnelly III, Crimson Hexagon, “4 Tips for Driving Sales on Twitter,” Jan. 15, Total Retail Report

43. You need to have really high-quality catalog data. The titles, descriptions and structured attributes that are in your catalog are going to determine when and how your product content is served on a platform like Facebook.
Eric Best, CommerceHub, “How Facebook Product Ads Will Impact Retailers,” Feb. 27, Total Retail Report

44. Follow high-value hashtags in your industry. Tweet items that fit the hashtag’s target market. The other day someone who came to hear one of my lectures found me from one of those hashtags. We reconnected and are looking into ways to work together.
Jim Gilbert, Gilbert Direct Marketing, “The Immutable Law of REALationships: How to Build an Engaged Following on Twitter,” April 3, Return on Intelligence blog

45. Encourage authenticity. You want employees to positively represent your brand, but you don’t want robots. A social strategy only works if you let your employees authentically express themselves. Brief your team members on the dos and don’ts of interacting with customers online, then let them post, share and comment in ways that are comfortable and natural.
Russ Fradin, Dynamic Signal, “How to Localize Your Global Store Through Social Media,” April 28, Total Retail Report

46. Every time you get a like or share or retweet, it’s an opportunity for a contact of a more personal nature — e.g., a simple “thanks for sharing” message. Don’t automate it, however. Add a personal statement like, “Thanks Barry for sharing my 9 Immutable Laws presentation. How is your social program working?” Remember, you have the opportunity to seek out your followers and make them feel special.
Jim Gilbert, Gilbert Direct Marketing, “Social Spotlight: The Law of ‘REALationships’,” Winter, Total Retail

Startups
47. Don’t get paralyzed by not having data. Let data guide you, but go with your instincts.
Meredith Mahoney, Birch Lane, “An Online Retailer’s Journey Into Catalogs,” March 16, Total Retail Report

48. Don’t forget yourself. When launching a business, so much of your time and energy is poured into the day-to-day operations of the business that it’s easy to lose sight of yourself outside of your work — and ultimately you’ll burn out. Remind yourself to take a second away from the emails and task lists and prioritize you.
Rachel Shechtman, Story, “Game Changers,” Summer, Total Retail

Technology
49. Look externally to help increase the pace of change at your brand. We’re applying innovation to accelerate the pace of change in retail and accelerate the pace of change at our brand, with the purpose of driving growth and value for our customers.
Charlie Larkin, GameStop Technology Institute, “GameStop Leverages Technology to Transform the In-Store Experience,” Jan. 14, Total Retail Report

Video Marketing
50. Address the differences between tablets and smartphones. You can use a HTML5 player with full functionality in a tablet experience, while in a smartphone environment consumers almost always use the native player. When mobile video uses a mobile device’s native player, the functionality is often stripped out, leaving only your content. Knowing this, make sure your content is engaging to your customer and can stand on its own.
Ben Kopetti, Liveclicker, “4 Best Practices for Mobile Video Success,” March 6, Total Retail Report