Marketing

J.C. Penney appears to be relenting a bit on the strict nonpromotional strategy launched by CEO Ron Johnson. In a report on CNBC.com, Deutsche Bank Analyst Charles Grom said the chain has added five "Best Price Friday" events to its calendar. The first took place the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, and another is scheduled for Black Friday in November. Others may occur at peak sales times, according to Grom.

Earlier this month, the anti-gay group One Million Moms (which has substantially less than 1 million members) called for a boycott of J.C. Penney after it featured a lesbian couple in its catalog. The retailer didn't apologize and isn't backing down. In fact, it's almost trolling the anti-gay groups with jubilant, uncorporate-like defiance in a Father's Day ad featuring not one but two dads. The two men pictured are real-life dads Todd Koch and Cooper Smith, seen with their kids, Claire and Mason.

It’s been months since Zappos.com experienced a massive data breach and the retail industry received a lesson in the speed of information. Within minutes of the breach notification to 24 million customers, the industry was scrutinizing Zappos’ response to the incident. Within days, a class-action lawsuit was filed. The "lesson learned" for retailers couldn't have been articulated more clearly: You may be next. Have a plan. Data breaches will happen, and major retailers have a target on their backs. However, a level of desensitization is occurring in IT as it relates to information and network security.

Sears is encouraging customer feedback for the products it sells by offering shoppers the chance to vote for their favorite participating charity every time they post a product review. Through its "Love/Hate: Share Your Thoughts, Send Some Love" project, Sears is offering customers the chance to share their opinion — good or bad — on products and in return vote for one of four charities to receive a grand prize of $100,000. The participating charities competing for the grand prize include the American Cancer Society, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, World Vision and World Wildlife Fund.

Giving potential customers the information they actually want is one of the most effective ways to grab their attention in today's fragmented media landscape. With the right tools in place, once you have a visitor's interest, it becomes easier to guide individual website experiences, with conversion as the ultimate goal.

What you will learn:

- The importance of making a great first impression through relevant website content
- How PODS employed a relevancy strategy to double its percentage of business that is booked online
- How to use customer segmentation strategies to drive more relevant content
- How triggered marketing campaigns can help improve the online retail experience

Marketers have developed quite a bag of promotion and coupon tricks to get consumers to spend more at the checkout counter or when mailing in the order form. The good news for online retailers is that modern e-commerce software lets them easily adapt these proven promotional techniques to an online environment to lift average order sizes, revenues and profits.

You Will Learn About:

- Free Shipping
- Premiums
- Discounts
- Coupons
- and more!

Earlier this week we profiled digital marketing execs from General Mills and GE on how they're running their organizations like publishers. For our third and final installment in this series on content marketing, we sat down with Julia Fitzgerald, chief digital officer, fitness, sporting goods and toys at Sears Holdings.

Digital Content is everywhere - your website, blogs, social media outposts, and every mobile device imaginable. And with customers and prospects radically adjusting to this wealth of information, companies are investing in developing digital content like never before. Despite their efforts, however, these same companies often miss valuable opportunities because they lack a well-rounded content marketing strategy.

This new whitepaper from Bridgeline Digital identifies the top 10 steps to building a content marketing strategy that you can execute within your company in an effective and timely manner.

What you will learn:

- What is content marketing management
- Why you should treat content like a critical business asset
- How to understand the content needs of your audience
- Why maintaining an editorial calendar is so important
- Why you need to give your content a "voice"
- Why content management and web analytics tools can best help you deliver relevant content

You'll be hard-pressed to find an uglier quarterly report out of the retail sector than what J.C. Penney (JCP) delivered on Tuesday night. Investors figured that new CEO Ron Johnson's "Fair and Square" pricing strategy wouldn't be a hit right away, but no one assumed that the recently remodeled department store chain would be this earnings season's biggest disaster.

A new digital marketing landscape is beckoning; how can you be sure you're prepared? With the simultaneous explosions of mobile, social networking, Wi-Fi and constant connectivity, we're creating a world that constantly offers more, with more selection, more options and more more than ever before.

More than 3.5 billion pieces of content are shared weekly on Facebook alone — certainly the fastest growing of the social platforms, but definitely not the only one. It's simply not enough to call this digital landscape "modern marketing" anymore.

Key points you'll take away from this free whitepaper include the following:

• how to build the best team, insource vs. outsource;
• what are the right tools for your marketing strategy — content management, e-marketing, web analytics and e-commerce;
• how to choose the most effective technology for your company goals — SaaS vs. perpetual, integrated vs. multiplatform; and
• how to tie all three together to increase traffic, visitor engagement and conversions.