Personalization

School is back in session — and it isn’t just students who should be ready to learn. For retailers, the back-to-school shopping season has become increasingly important each year as both a growing revenue opportunity and often as an indicator of peak holiday performance. What lessons can they take away from this year in order…

Retail marketers have spent the last decade looking to personalization as the primary strategy for bringing shoppers back through their doors, both physical and virtual. With more than 3,000 stores already shutting down this year, it’s never been a bigger priority to understand the customer and what's going to get them to make a purchase.…

With Cambridge Analytica, British Airways, and several other high-profile data breaches making headlines, retailers are (unsurprisingly) starting to reconsider their own customer data policies. But rather than making the mistake of seeing these events as an obstacle, they should see them for what they are: an opportunity. In the last few years, customer experience has…

For customer-centric companies, the death of retail has been greatly exaggerated. While many retail brands are underperforming and facing consistent declines in sales, others are doing well enough to drive an overall increase in store openings. Winners and Losers In reality, we're continuing to see a bifurcation within the retail industry between the haves and…

More than ever, businesses need to deliver personalized experiences that provide customers with real value. In a recent survey of corporate leaders, analyst firm Gartner reported that 81 percent of respondents believe their companies will compete mostly or entirely on customer experience. However, acknowledging that customers today expect personalized experiences and delivering on that expectation…

In episode 163 of Total Retail Talks, recorded at the Customer Relationship Management Conference (CRMC) in Chicago, Kent Zimmerman, vice president of digital at Shoe Carnival, discusses how the family footwear retailer is using customer data to personalize marketing communications, particularly email, helping to drive conversions and, ultimately, loyalty.

We’re saying it: personalization is queen among today’s consumers. Just look at Spotify, which algorithmically delivers a unique 30-song playlist to each of its tens of millions of users every week. Meanwhile, Google Home's Assistant and Amazon.com's Alexa use voice recognition technology to tailor their responses to each member of a household. Nowhere is this truer…

Today’s shopper is overwhelmed with choice, making it increasingly challenging for retailers to instill loyalty into their customers. With one-click immediacy making it possible to transport a product from your online shopping cart to your front door in one hour, shoppers have high expectations for the retailers they choose to frequent. The tiniest inconvenience can…

If you can compare customer relationships to romantic ones, you could say that B-to-C customer relationships are like a first date, whereas B-to-B is more of a long-term committed courtship. When you're trying to appeal to a B-to-C consumer, the point is to make your brand and product as attractive as possible, capture their interest,…

In episode 159 of Total Retail Talks, recorded at the Customer Relationship Management Conference (CRMC) in Chicago, Danielle Fewtrell, director of CRM, and Rachel Waldstein, senior manager of CRM strategy, both of Wolverine Worldwide, parent company of footwear brands such as Keds, Stride Rite, Saucony, and more, detail how data (customer, product, competitor) is used…