Online Marketing

In an effort to give you a sneak peek into the upcoming Retail Online Integration webinar, One Size Does NOT Fit All: Delivering Customized Shopping Experiences for Your Customers (you can register for free here!), I conducted an interview with Catherine Frye, marketing and customer services solutions manager, IBM Business Analytics. Frye will be co-presenting the webinar, and offered a few of her thoughts on the value of personalization in e-commerce. Here's a portion of that interview:

The Company Store hasn't sent many flash-sale emails. In fact, among the 133 emails captured by Who's Mailing What! this year, only one recent email used the flash-sale strategy. However, The Company Store clearly did its homework.

The holiday season is right around the corner, meaning most e-retailers are in the thick of finalizing promotional campaigns and optimizing websites in the hopes of increasing traffic and avoiding conversion roadblocks. However, before launching their email, social and traditional advertising campaigns, many online retailers would be well served to take the time to re-evaluate the overall digital experience they're delivering to visitors. 

As a 112-year-old brand steeped in a traditional brick-and-mortar history, Walgreens isn't what you would consider a digital pioneer. Yet the drug store chain has been forced to evolve its business to remain relevant for today's digital-savvy consumers. The transition has admittedly been a slow process, but it's taking shape. In a keynote presentation yesterday at the Shop.org Annual Summit in Chicago, Walgreens’ President and CEO Greg Wasson detailed how the company is embracing digital throughout its organization

Tuesday Morning Corp. has dropped the "e" from its commerce. The Dallas-based closeout retailer quietly shut down its online shopping site last month in order to better focus on business for its more than 800 physical stores. The company said the nature of its business, which involves a constantly rotating array of housewares, clothing luggage and more, is better suited for in-person shopping. While it seems like an unlikely move in an increasingly online-focused world, some industry experts say it may be for the best.

I had the opportunity to chat recently with Beth Guastella, the recently named president and chief operating officer of giggle, an omnichannel specialty retailer of upscale baby products and resources. In part one of this two-part blog post, we discuss what attracted Guastella to giggle; what specialty retail is; and how giggle’s catalog business works. 

It's likely you've used behavioral targeting to reach out to and convert shoppers on your website or through display ads. Now, however, with so much of your online marketing occurring on social media sites, wouldn't it also be valuable to reach consumers there with behavioral targeting? And what if you could actually improve your campaign effectiveness by retargeting those same people via social media?

Niraj Shah, CEO of Wayfair (formerly CSN Stores), the Boston-based online seller of home furnishings, with 1,250 employees, a global presence, 2012 revenue of $600 million and a 40 percent growth rate, offered his four drivers of long-term retail success during a session at the 2013 Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition in Chicago last week. They include the following:

In a session at IBM's Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Nashville yesterday, Michael Lahue, e-commerce project manager, and Lisa Langan, e-commerce marketing analyst, both of Carter's, discussed how the cross-channel retailer of baby and children's apparel is leveraging personalization solutions to drive sales across its organization.

The good news is that online retailers understand fraud is a growing problem and have taken steps to combat it. Their efforts are making an impact. Studies point to a decrease in the percentage of orders lost to fraud. Our own Annual Trends Survey revealed that for 75 percent of respondents, less than 1 percent of their online orders are fraudulent. While this is a step in the right direction, you shouldn't be satisfied till that figure is 0 percent. Here are tips to help you get there: