Personalization

In episode 326 of Total Retail Talks, Editor-in-Chief Joe Keenan interviews Sachin Shroff, vice president of CRM, loyalty and marketing technology at Michaels, the largest arts and crafts retail chain in North America. Shroff discusses the technology investments the retailer made to support its personalization efforts, how Michaels is using personalization to optimize the performance…

It’s an interesting time for the relationship between brand and consumer. The travails of 2020 changed the mindset of the shopper immensely and consumer expectations about the shopping experience are permanently altered. The world was forced to adapt to a digital-first customer journey, which not only accelerated the opportunity for retailers to engage and interact…

As retailers continually adjust to the global pandemic, they’re tasked with building upon what’s already been a rapid pace of digital transformation. The sudden shift in customer behavior — from in-store to digital — had businesses of all kinds adjusting their products and services to keep things going. Now, retail’s new normal endures through a…

The global impact of COVID-19 will be studied for decades to come; an immediate impact however has been the massive growth of e-commerce due to store closures early in the pandemic. Consumers simply went to their smartphones and laptops to buy everything from pet food to electronics to everyday essentials. Even today, when most retail…

When it comes to online shopping, Alexa is one of the widely used machine learning-based conversational interfaces. While many of us love to ask such tech interfaces to better understand our needs, most merely cannot handle conversation beyond one or two questions. In other words, we're beginning to see the indicators of where the machine…

To say that the retail world is changing is an understatement. The constant pressure from discounters, along with the increasing power wielded by consumers, has pushed retailers to seek new effective differentiation approaches to remain competitive in the market. With retail sales rising rapidly since the pandemic — jumping to a whopping $791.70 billion in…

Retail marketers may be unclenching their teeth knowing the digital industry has two more years to prepare for Google’s clampdown on third-party cookies. However, let’s not get complacent. Industry stakeholders need to make serious moves on solving identity — and for retailers, that means getting serious about their first-party data. If you don’t, you’ll end up…

The future of retail, and the CPG brands that fill its shelves, has already arrived. If you're not yet omnichannel, your chances of survival are slim. If you're not working with data in real time, your decision making will be restrained and ill-informed. If you're not adopting a platform-centric orchestration mindset, your growth will be…

Every retailer wants to be the go-to place that consumers rave about. And in today’s overcrowded business world, one surefire way to win customer loyalty is to provide personalized retail experiences through marketing campaigns. When you offer personalized digital experiences for your customers, they’re more likely to feel understood and important. This leaves them less…

Responsible marketing delivers hard commercial returns by building trust with customers who are more worried than ever about their data and privacy. It's well established that winning and retaining customer loyalty comprises multiple elements, possibly the most important of which is trust. The 2020 Trust Barometer from Edelman says trust is the make-or-break difference for…