Customer expectations for Black Friday are evolving and brands are beginning to change their approach to what was historically one of the busiest in-store shopping days of the year. Continue reading
November 11, 2015
Category Archives: Retail
October 28, 2015
How Retailers Can Reach Their Audience by Targeting Consumer Interests
Email marketing has been the workhorse of marketing for a long time. Despite the hype around social media and mobile marketing, email is still one of the most valuable tool for businesses. Continue reading
September 23, 2015
Retailers: Amazon is Beating You to the Inbox
If you’re a retailer — big or small — you’re most likely competing with Amazon for customers. And that’s probably not news to you. But what may be surprising is how many of your email Continue reading
September 2, 2015
[Webinar] How Amazon Does Black Friday and Cyber Monday
Even though we’re barely into September, for the past two weeks, everyone’s been buzzing about Holiday 2015. We have too: last week we released this infographic as the first part in our holiday content series. Continue reading
August 25, 2015
[Infographic] Get Ready for Black Friday & Cyber Monday 2015
The holiday season always manages to sneak up without warning. Halloween is fast approaching in just two months and Thanksgiving and Christmas follow right behind it.
Marketers: don’t let this time of year stress you out! We’ll be releasing a five part holiday content series aimed at making marketers’ lives much easier. Continue reading
June 25, 2015
How Online Fashion Retailers Are Using Customer Data in Email Marketing Programs
This is a guest post by Netta Kivilis, Head of Marketing at Custora.
We recently analyzed data from some of the fastest-growing online fashion, accessories, and lifestyle retailers in North America — brands such as Bonobos, Crocs, Trunk Club, The Tie Bar, Live Out There, and Choxi. Our goal was to understand what makes these high-performance retailers different from everyone else, and how these differences led to a growth rate that is almost double that of the overall average e-commerce industry.
We supplemented the quantitative findings with insights and advice shared by some of the retailers included in the study. You can learn more and download the full research report here.
June 10, 2015
65% of Consumers Still Want The Traditional Retail Experience
If you listen to anyone in the tech industry today, there’s a consensus that shopping in an actual, physical store is passé. Over. Done. Cooked. In a few short years, we’ll all be seamlessly ordering everything from mattresses and groceries to clothes and books directly from our phones.
Or… not. A new report from TimeTrade found that 65% of consumers would still prefer to purchase an item in a nearby store as opposed to online. The majority of them said they wanted to “touch and feel” the products before making a final purchase.
More importantly, 42% of consumers have never actually purchased something from their mobile devices. And when they’re looking to buy something, only 13% will decide to buy it from mobile.
So where does this leave brick-and-mortar retail? Somewhere in-between. Clearly, physical purchases are still extremely important. But digital can help drive foot traffic to the store and get customers interested in what the store has to offer.
Here’s how.
March 30, 2015
3 Geo-Targeted Emails: Clothes, Rewards Programs, Shoes
If email marketers have learned anything over the past few years, it’s that every customer is now a moving target. They’re checking emails on their phones and tablets, which means they’re doing a lot of different activities at the same time.
Responsive email design strategies play a critical role in this new world. Customers are always on the go and your emails need to offer real-time content that reflects their needs in the moment.
One simple way to do this is to start creating geo-targeted emails. Ordinarily, a customer checking their personal email on a lunch break isn’t too likely to redeem a discount offer. But if they see a personalized map that shows that a store is right around the block, that can change.
Geo-targeting can help brands create contextual marketing campaigns. Here are three companies that have used maps in emails effectively:
March 3, 2015
The Terrible Truth About Mobile Shoppers
For the past few years, we’ve heard that it’s “the year of mobile.” Companies are frantically building mobile-first strategies and websites because so much traffic is coming from mobile devices. Our own research has previously found that more than two-thirds of email opens occur on mobile devices.
There’s no doubt that people are browsing websites from tablets and smartphones. Last year, comScore found that mobile visits (mostly from apps) account for 60% of total web traffic. Organic mobile traffic is lower, at about 30% of total web traffic as of last year.
But does that mean that desktops are getting replaced by mobile? In the world of eCommerce, it looks like mobile devices are shopping companions, but desktops remain the shopping destination. Black Friday 2014 is a great example – while IBM found that mobile traffic accounted for about 50% of online traffic on Black Friday, mobile sales accounted for only 27.9% of total online sales.
So, really, more than two-thirds of online sales occurred on desktops during Black Friday last year. That shouldn’t be a surprise – at the beginning of 2014, research showed that desktops were converting at about a 50% higher rate than mobile devices.
The reality is that the “year of mobile” is always going to mean the “year of multiple devices.” And that has big implications for email marketers.
January 15, 2015
[CASE STUDY] How One Retail Store Used Contextual Email Marketing to Increase Click-through Rates by 300%
Once an email marketing campaign is sent out, subscribers are going to get the content from that time of send – whether they open emails that day or a year from now.
Most campaigns don’t take into account things like time of open, location, or what’s happened since the email was originally sent. But with so many people using mobile devices to check their emails, companies are slowly changing that, working to ensure that emails are contextually relevant whenever and wherever customers open them.
Finish Line, an athletic apparel store with both brick-and-mortar locations and a growing eCommerce presence, is doing just that… and it’s paying off. Over the past year, the company has doubled open rates and grown click-through rates by 300%.
This didn’t happen overnight. As Finish Line experiments with the capabilities of contextual email marketing technology, the business has been rethinking and redesigning email campaigns to make them more targeted and more personalized.
Our latest eBook covers four different campaigns Finish Line used to do it – raising email revenue by 50%. Check it out!
