Epsilon

An outraged consumer-advocacy group is calling it “the Fukushima of the email industry.” Comparing mere data theft to Japan’s nuclear nightmare is perhaps a bit over the top. But the theft of data from Epsilon, a marketing-services company, has nonetheless caused widespread concern.

Social media is all about growing your brand's outreach and engaging your audience, Sundeep Kapur, author and digital evangelist at NCR Corporation, explained at the Publishing Business Conference & Expo in New York City this week. While social media is a powerful marketing tool, there are more seeds that need to be sown. 

Best Buy, TiVo and Walgreens are the latest in a string of companies hacked over the weekend. Fraudsters gained access to customers’ files, including email addresses. Epsilon, the communications provider of the companies, issued a brief statement saying “a full investigation was under way” of the breach of some customer client data was discovered.

Welcome to Retail Online Integration's annual Resource Guide. This special section offers all the crucial details, company information, contact numbers and addresses of product and service providers to the cross-channel retail industry.

Six years after the launch of Facebook, North American consumers in the valued 18-34 year-old demographic prefer by a wide margin to learn about marketing offers via postal mail and newspapers rather than online sources such as social media platforms, according to national survey research from ICOM, a division of Epsilon Targeting.

The Trend Report looked at consumer behavior by channel and found that online purchasing continues to grown steadily while sales from the retail channel are decreasing year-over-year. From 2008 to 2009, sales taking place online grew by 4 percent.

Tasked with generating higher revenues on smaller budgets in more crowded marketplaces, today's marketers must take advantage of every tool at their disposal. One such resource is the power of word-of-mouth, an approach that uses the innate behavior of a unique group of consumers, known as influencers, to extend the reach of your efforts via “talkability.” A recent whitepaper from ICOM, a division of Epsilon Targeting, examines how to best tap into this rich resource.

Based on the latest findings from ICOM, previous profiles of influencers have to be adjusted. Consider the following:

• consumers are influencers strictly within product categories, not across them all;
• few commonalities exist within influencer demographics, as they cross gender, age, income levels and channels; and
• influencers do their talking in person — at the kitchen table, on the phone, etc. — but opportunities exist to take their messages to new realms, such as social media.

An Abacus/Epsilon webinar I took part in on Oct. 1 addressed the challenge all marketers face today: how to maintain or grow our active customer databases despite increased costs and declining sizes of lists that used to be available for prospecting. Where do we turn for help to meet this challenge? To our customer databases, our largest assets.

With company-record net income of $58.4 million and sales gains of 15.2 percent (including comparable store sales rising 8.9 percent) for its fiscal year that ended Jan. 31, JoS. A. Bank was a rare 2008 success story.

With the appeal of e-mail already well-established among multichannel marketers — in large part because of its relatively low cost — here's another reason to become a fan of the channel: It positively influences consumers’ offline purchasing decisions, enhances companies’ reputations and generates loyalty to their brands.