News and Analysis

5 Cloud-Based Platforms for Optimizing Retail Returns

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Returns are soaring along with e-commerce transactions. Here are five return management and pick-up services designed for retail businesses.

What’s Old Is New Again: Marketers Adopt Marketing Mix Modeling

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As signal loss complicates granular measurement frameworks like multi-touch attribution, marketers are reconsidering more holistic techniques like marketing mix modeling, or MMM. 

customer experience retail

Report: BOPIS Use Soars While Demand for Curbside Pickup Declines

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More than half of retailers (54%) are now offering BOPIS (buy-online, pick-up in-store) services, but just 31% are showing store inventory availability online. One third of retail brands have a mobile app, and an impressive 76% are accepting contactless payments in-store. 

Commentary

Customer Engagement Critical for Local Business Survival During Re-Emergence

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It has been an especially hard few months for small businesses, many of which will never reopen or will take months – if not years – to recover financially from the shutdowns and reduced patron numbers. 

Despite the challenges, there are very real opportunities for sustained growth during this time. To survive and thrive during this next period, local businesses must deepen their customer relationships despite having fewer resources available. While it may sound like a conundrum, this actually presents a significant opportunity to deliver a personalized customer experience and drive loyalty. 

Hybrid Events: Preparing for a Digital Future

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Hybrid events are becoming more popular due to the world’s current state, the rise of remote working, and because of their appeal to global audiences. But what is this new event format and how can you prepare for it?

We break down this new event form and outline what companies can do to create hybrid events.

How Z-Axis is Set to Level Up Localized Marketing Post-Covid

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The margin for error is thin and every dollar counts. Accuracy and precision are top of mind, as advertisers continue to long for reliable data to make the most strategic decisions in their advertising spending, especially in the digital space.

Advertising technology and localized marketing platforms built their business on the use of GPS signals to provide real-world KPIs like foot traffic attribution, allowing businesses large and small to go beyond the click to reach and engage more precise audiences. And while this technology has certainly improved from its early days, it can only go so far without the introduction of another dimension: z-axis.

Latest Posts

LBMA Vidcast: Pokemon App Driving Traffic to Target, Google Integrates Food Ordering into Maps

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On this week’s Location-Based Marketing Association podcast: Swatch goes drive-through, iGeolise raises £3.2, Pokemon app driving traffic to Target, Neustar partners with JCDecaux, Google integrates food ordering into maps, MTA accepts Google Pay on subway/bus lines.

SMBs Warm Up to New Tech But Are Skeptical of Impersonal Interactions

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A freshly released report from SMB software firm Broadly uses data from a survey of 300 SMB leaders to paint a picture of the American SMB in 2019: gradually embracing mobile-first communication, skeptical of innovation that undercuts human connection, and ambivalent toward large digital marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy.

Why Marketers Still Struggle With One-to-One Personalization

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Personalization has long been touted as the future-proof way for businesses to connect with and retain customers. With Gartner predicting enterprises will win or lose due to customer experience in 2019 and beyond, offering customers meaningful, personalized experiences takes on even greater importance.

To uncover the truth about how personalization efforts are affecting the bottom line of the Global 2000 and just how much one-to-one personalization is taking place, we conducted a survey with Forbes that asked 200 marketing leaders just that.

Visual Search Moves Beyond Experimentation and Into Prime Time

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After years of experimentation and broad discussions about how visual search would someday take hold, it’s clear that the future has arrived. Visual search has moved into the mainstream, and companies like Pinterest, Instagram, and even Google are paving the way for consumers to engage more deeply with the products they find online.

As visual search moves into the mainstream, questions are intensifying over what impact the medium will have on SEO and traditional search metrics.

Good Data vs Bad: How to Decide What to Keep and What to Discard

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Unfortunately, there’s no “silver bullet” for separating good data from bad. Instead, organizations should think of data quality as a habit, with “good” data clearly defined and concrete processes in place to harvest what’s valuable and discard what isn’t.

With that in mind, here are three steps to taking unfiltered data and deciding what to keep — and what to throw out — to achieve optimal data accuracy.

Who’s Winning the Reviews Race? How Do We Define Winning?

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In their latest Street Fight conversation, Mike Blumenthal and David Mihm examine the state of the local reviews space and assess the reasons for Google’s dominance. “For me, the question of the future is whether Google’s behaviors will impact the remaining vertical sites over the next 10 years,” Mike writes.

To Understand the Tech Industry’s Responsibilities, We Must Think Differently About Humanity

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These questions would be preludes to less abstract ones that will seem more familiar to the creatures of Silicon Valley. Is Facebook responsible if people use WhatsApp and Messenger to spread false news and incite genocide? Is that just the fault of (heinous) people being (heinous) people or should the platforms be held accountable? As for privacy and data collection, what rights do people have to safeguard their information from the communications platforms they use? What does data scraped from Google search or Amazon’s facial recognition technology have to do with our identities? Can data be human?

Google Integrates Food Delivery into Search, Maps, Assistant

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More or less following the model of Reserve with Google, which has seamlessly integrated the process of reserving a table at a nearby restaurant into SERPs, Google is now integrating food delivery into search, Maps, and Assistant, keeping consumers on Google properties for the entire journey as they make transactions via third-party couriers.

LBMA Vidcast: Macy’s & Pinterest; PlaceIQ, PMG, and Old Navy

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On this week’s Location-Based Marketing Association podcast: Trial Run Media’s ABIE, Cheek-It’s scavenger hunt, JCDeacaux + Location Sciences, Macy’s launches OUT[FITS] with Pinterest, PlaceIQ partners with PMG on Old Navy, Admetrix + Locomizer.  Research: S4M & LBMA contrast GDPR vs. CCPA

How to Survive the Coming Data Privacy Tsunami

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Just as we have gotten used to the idea that the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a fact of life and have made modifications in our data collection procedures, the Brazil General Data Protection Law (LGDP), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and waves of proposed new data privacy laws are swirling in the calm preceding a privacy tsunami heading our way. All these privacy regulations share a number of commonalities, and by addressing them now, you will be on high ground as the waves begin to pound.