E-mail

From a marketing perspective, there are pros and cons around user experience, reporting and data. Email experts have been quick to spin as to why this is good for the industry. However ,it is important to consider why image-based emails is bad for your program. Specifically the long held practice of sending single image emails.

Hear several suggestions for using personalization, and about results marketers achieve when they treat customers as individuals.

A group known as the Syrian Electronic Army claimed over the weekend it hacked eBay and PayPal websites. Mashable broke the story on Saturday, and now Ars Technica is reporting on claims that the group intercepted sensitive email from eBay employees while they were investigating the incident. The EcommerceBytes Blog noted on Saturday that eBay users in the U.K. saw the group's logo on what appeared to be the eBay U.K. homepage on the day of the breach.

For ShopRoxx, an omnichannel fashion retailer for younger women, increasing customer loyalty and lifetime value with the brand is a key initiative for 2014. To help make this goal become reality, ShopRoxx is using email marketing. Specifically, the retailer is leveraging profile and behavioral data sets that enable it to send emails that feature highly relevant suggested products to its subscribers.

An everything guide on how to be a successful omnichannel retailer in 2014

With an ever-changing technology like mobile, it's important to stay up to date with the trends and take action on the already tried-and-true strategies. Let's take a look at some of these trends and must-do tactics.

Outdoor gear and apparel retailer Rock/Creek Outfitters used Twitter's Lead Generation Cards in a Promoted Tweet campaign last year to capture the email addresses of people who entered a drawing to win a free pair of Chaco sandals.

Some e-commerce marketers are having a challenging holiday season, and they blame Google for it. A change to Gmail that relegated retailers’ emails to a separate inbox for promotions has had a big effect during the busiest shopping period of the year, according to three services that manage mass emails. And another change to Gmail, involving the way it shows images in messages, made it harder for retailers to track who opens their emails. Google says it made the changes to improve the service for users, and that the changes could also be advantageous to marketers. 

Christmas 2013 shaped up as the biggest challenge ever for everyone working anywhere within the retail supply chain and logistics world. The number of gifts bought from retailers — both online and in brick-and-mortar stores — will probably hit an all-time record. Yet, because of a quirk in the calendar this year, the holiday shopping season in the U.S. is as short as it possibly can be — 26 days, down nearly a week from 32 days last year.

U.S. shoppers made Cyber Monday the biggest online shopping day in history with a 20.6 percent increase in online sales, according to the latest cloud-based analytics findings from IBM. Mobile sales led the way, exceeding 17 percent of total online sales, an increase of 55.4 percent year-over-year. Cyber Monday also capped the highest five-day online sales period on record — from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday — which grew 16.5 percent over the same period in 2012.