Customer Data

For online retailers, there will be some subtle changes to their marketing programs this holiday season — driven by changing consumer behaviors — but by next year, the wave of change is expected to be so dramatic that it could sink companies that don’t react in time. The Otto Group won’t be one of them.…

As consumers lead increasingly connected lives, more of their personal information is being transmitted through online channels than ever before. In an increasingly competitive ecosystem, brands are collecting consumer data dubiously to better inform marketing efforts and personalize campaigns. Unfortunately, this behavior often puts both brands and consumers at risk. Retail, specifically, is at such…

Loyal customers are what every brand is after. Considering the cost to acquire new customers — as well as the challenge of identifying which of the multiple touchpoints drove them to purchase — many retailers are recognizing the value in spending to retain the customers they already have. From technology upgrades to improve the shopping…

In a typical marketing department, demographic information is relied on as a key tool for developing targeted outreach strategies. A retailer’s marketing team, for example, can use these breakdowns in gender, age and geography, among other areas, to determine outreach and offer strategy. This approach relies on the basic premise that people who share these…

Getting a prescription filled at Walgreens has been taking a lot longer than usual this week due to an ongoing outage of the drugstore chain's pharmacy computer database. Pharmacists have been filling prescriptions manually since the system went down Tuesday morning, causing delays for customers at all 8,200 Walgreens drugstores across the U.S.  

As retailers and banks prepare for the Oct. 1 EMV liability shift — which moves fraud liability from issuing banks to merchants — many consumers haven't yet received their new chip-enabled cards, or are simply in the dark about what EMV means, according to a new survey from ACI Worldwide. The new EMV Readiness Survey of…

What assumptions are you making about your customer data and marketing technology that's limiting the effectiveness of your marketing efforts without you even knowing it? The ability to manage customer data is the lifeblood of retail customer journey marketing; however, many retailers are making assumptions about customer data that may impede their marketing efforts. What…

Over the past few years, the media has painted millennials as a generation of high-maintenance, lazy and entitled people. Considering that there are more than 75 million millennials in the U.S. alone, it’s a bit faulty to lump them all together. These consumers vary drastically from one another. They’re the most ethnically diverse generation of…

On a recent afternoon about three dozen members of the upper management team from Lowe's, the big-box home improvement chain, flew from their company headquarters in the suburbs of Charlotte, N.C. to Los Angeles. They climbed aboard a pleasantly air-conditioned charter bus. They weren’t in L.A. for the typical tour-bus stops; no movie-star mansions or…

As consumers increasingly reveal their shopping habits online, retailers can access social media, purchase history, consumer demand and market trends to better understand their customers, maximize spending and encourage repeat purchases. Retailers are considered early adopters of big data technology, integrating it into every imaginable business process to achieve a deeper understanding of consumers and…