Hewlett-Packard

Are you ever at a loss for what to include in an upcoming email campaign? Calendars can be a very useful tool to keep your emails fresh, lively and timely. Let's examine what should be in your calendar and how detailed it should be for the short and long term.

Rounding up the year's best tips to help you optimize your business.

Retailers should use a hybrid layout with both responsive and scalable design to ensure consumers can interact with their email content. Responsive design adapts emails to the device subscribers are using, creating screen-proportional layouts that are visually appealing. Scalable design ensures that emails are still readable when reduced to half their size on a mobile device. Retailers can use both tactics to improve their email strategy with these tips:

The warehouse is the last step in preparing a package before it lands in the hands of a customer. It's responsible for the last impression of the customer's overall buying experience. While this means it should be a key place to differentiate your brand's messaging, not many retailers recognize that order fulfillment represents an opportunity to capitalize on brand awareness. The fulfillment opportunity is responsible for the last impression of the customer's overall buying experience.

With demand for "PC plus" products (e.g., smartphones and tablets) growing by the day, Lenovo realized it had a tremendous opportunity at hand to capture market share. The problem was the brand suffered from a lack of awareness within the PC industry, with companies like Dell and HP top of mind for most consumers. To address this problem, Lenovo invested time and resources into improving its SEO. 

Despite all the buzz around social media over the past several years, the concept of "real" social commerce — when consumers can actually buy merchandise directly from whichever social network they're visiting and wherever they happen to be — has eluded the industry.

We picked 23 of Internet Retailer's top 25 companies (from the IR 500) and looked at 50 brands that these companies own to find the best overall inbox delivery and open rates over the last 90 days. Piperlime.com, with 99 percent inbox delivery, and Banana Republic and iTunes at 98 percent, were at the absolute top of the inbox delivery range. Kmart, HP, Gap, Netflix, Old Navy, Best Buy and Bath & Body Works all follow closely behind with delivery in the 97th percentile.

Apple's main manufacturing partner in China, Foxconn, is paying workers up to an extra 25 percent following widespread criticism of its labor practices.

Retailers have countless opportunities to creatively reach consumers through mobile devices — and it's not just limited to smartphone users. One-hundred percent of all mobile phones receive text messages, which means retailers can effectively reach customers and prospects to engage them on a personal basis. Consumers expect instant gratification in their multichannel interactions with retailers. There are many more social ADD consumers that would rather text than talk; they're very comfortable using mobile devices to buy things online.

Retailers are all about putting customers first nowadays, and with the holiday gift-giving season upon us, Walmart is doing just that. In an effort to make gift unwrapping as joyful as possible, the retailer is joining Amazon to promote "rage-free" packaging for a number of its non-food products, according to Business Week. Both companies are putting pressure on suppliers to eliminate excessive and cumbersome packaging materials, such as hard plastic casings enclosing electronics and wire ties used to secure toys to cardboard backings. In addition to being more environmentally friendly, the push can improve supply chain efficiency and customer