Epsilon

As a retailer, you’re most likely in the throes of planning and embracing for what one can only expect to be another ultra-competitive holiday shopping season. Epsilon recently conducted its annual Holiday Shoppers Voice® survey of retail customers to find out what’s on their minds for the 2017 holiday shopping season. The survey asks customers about different aspects of their holiday shopping process and experience from planning and budgeting, marketing influences on shopping decisions, loyalty programs and promotions, social media, and their shopping location. Several questions include comparable results to previous year’s surveys to identify change in shopping behaviors.

The millennial generation, those born between 1982 and 1998, is the nation’s largest. Millennials are all 18-34 years old, but age is about the only common denominator for the individuals in this demographic. Jean-Yves Sabot, vice president of retail business development for Epsilon , breaks down millennials into six different groups, or what he refers…

Epsilon's new shopper behavior study may be the latest indication that millennial consumers are no longer spring chickens. In fact, they're using — hold on to your ironic fedoras, folks — email more than people of other ages to find products and services. Yes, trusty email, so often overshadowed by social media, appears to be making…

The focus of this year's Direct Marketing Association Annual Conference & Exhibition was reflected in its title, The Global Event for Data-Driven Marketers. That focus on data-driven marketing was evident throughout the show. The seminars were packed and a majority of the talks had a focus on and link to how direct marketers manage and use vast streams of multichannel data. Keynote speaker Nate Silver, who rose to fame with his incredibly precise predictions of the 2012 presidential election, reflected on the reliance that marketers have on data and the value of knowing how to use and interpret data correctly.

Modern marketers face many challenges, and one of the biggest right now is finding a way to best target high-value prospects at the right time. Cross-channel integration between traditional and digital marketing is a must to optimize spend and maximize communications with current and future customers alike. It's finding the best prospects from all channels and speaking to them with relevant marketing communications when they're ready to purchase that really impacts revenue.

Today’s consumers want and expect information in real time. Many retailers are saddled with outdated technology that hinders their ability to interact with consumers in a timely manner. The following five steps can help retailers overcome this obstacle, incorporate real-time communications and improve their overall marketing strategy: 

Direct mail is an integral part of any holiday marketing campaign. As a channel, print delivers a uniquely engaging and tangible experience. It's a quietly insistent communication that integrates well into any campaign and even affords some holiday fun. What follows are four direct mail concepts retailers can leverage to drive relevant offers, increase store traffic and build customer loyalty during the holidays:

According to Epsilon Targeting, B-to-B and B-to-C sales are on the rise as households and businesses break from the restrained spending of 2009. Epsilon Targeting's Annual Multichannel Trend Report, which is based on aggregated 2010 merchandise purchase data from the Abacus Cooperative database, indicates an increase in nearly all key metrics including transactions, sales per household or contact, average order size and transactions per household. Consumer sales and business offers are also showing growth in early Q1 2011 data.

I often check the clickthough rates of our daily e-newsletter of aggregated and orignal content, ROI Report, to gauge what our audience of cross-channel retailers are interested in and concerned about. Lately, the clickthrough rates for articles about hackers and scammers targeting retailers and shoppers are through the roof

Less than a month after the major security breach at Epsilon, Best Buy learned on April 22 that some of its customer email addresses were hacked from an unnamed third-party vendor.