Marketing Automation

Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are becoming more accessible to retail businesses of all sizes, allowing even the leanest teams to reap the benefits. Instead of spending hours managing tedious manual processes, retailers that use automation can free up hours in the day to devote to customer service, product and inventory, and business growth. While…

The retail industry is on a never-ending quest to get the right products to consumers when, where and how they want. E-commerce used to be the end-all, be-all in this regard, but it’s no longer a differentiator — it’s the norm. From 2019 to 2021, ActiveCampaign users saw a 15 percent year-over-year increase in total…

A pullback on consumer spending, high inflation, and an uncertain holiday season. Toss in paid social’s cost and targeting effectiveness being in a state of perpetual fluctuation and retailers find themselves faced with a myriad of challenges in trying to increase sales and maximize return on investment. To maximize sales and profits, brands need to…

The COVID-fueled e-commerce party couldn’t last forever. Businesses knew that it was only a matter of time before consumers reverted to their pre-pandemic shopping habits of mixing online and in-person shopping. That time appears to be upon us. A recently released Mastercard SpendingPulse report showed a year-over-year (YoY) retail sales increase of 7.2 percent in…

What's a better marketing strategy: Walking into a room full of people, announcing who you are and what products you offer, and then hoping someone will come talk to you, or walking into a room and going up to each person, shaking their hand, and asking them what problems they need solving? Marketers are looking…

Retailers are constantly looking to improve the customer shopping experience. For e-commerce brands, it may mean implementing live chat, improving site speed, using 3D product images, and offering free returns. However, the shopping journey isn’t isolated to technical website details and store policies; it also applies to marketing. With email marketing, brands tend to look…

The 2021 holiday season brought with it several trends and surprising changes to consumer habits that were unexpected across the retail industry. After nearly two years of sporadic lockdowns and social distancing, it’s unsurprising to many that, for the first time in history, brands experienced a year-over-year decline in online sales during Black Friday and…

Last year’s unprecedented holiday shopping season brought e-commerce’s rapid expansion to the forefront. The pandemic forced brands and consumers to adapt to online shopping and virtual experiences, completely altering the way that consumers discover, shop and make purchase decisions. A recent MarTech study found that 81 percent of Americans did more than half of their…

In this episode of Total Retail Tech Insights, Editor-in-Chief Joe Keenan interviews Jennifer Lee-Harrison, vice president of demand generation at Carter's, and Youna Kim, senior director of integrated performance media at Merkle. Lee-Harrison and Kim discuss their backgrounds and current roles, their takes on the state of the retail industry heading into another COVID-impacted holiday season, and…

People are overwhelmed. The pandemic has changed the world. Supply chain disruptions are turning short trips to the store into mini-adventures and starting to cause worry about gifts for the holiday season. So the last thing shoppers need is to be bombarded with endless and oftentimes generic brand messages and ads in their social feeds…