News and Analysis

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. 

Demand for Ad Buying Diversification Juices OOH Market

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With fewer consumers spending time at home, traditional website banner advertising is becoming less relevant. Meanwhile, particularly in large cities, like Los Angeles, New York, and Dallas, investments in OOH campaigns are on the rise.

How AI Can Help Retailers with Supply Chain Disruption

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The pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and climate change are fueling supply chain disruption. This has cost retailers billions as they struggle to get products to customers and optimize product distribution for demand. Better forecasting can help.

Commentary

How Restaurants Can Capture More Customer Demand With Email

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Email is often the primary channel for restaurants to stay in touch with customers and let them know about changes. When email is done right, there are many small ways restaurants can use it to personalize messaging, drive more engagement, and make their lives easier with scalable best practices.

6 Ways To Use Hyperlocal Data To Rebuild in the Covid-19 Economy

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Location is a prime indicator of our interests, purchase habits, and daily behaviors. Where we go defines who we are, and in the Covid-19 world, location continues to tell that story, even if the story has changed for many of us as we practice social distancing.

Marketers continue to command vast data sets for campaign targeting. Here are six data sets, powered by location behaviors, that marketers can use to build awareness, generate leads, and drive sales.

4 Ways Retailers Can Navigate A Post-Covid-19 World

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Brands are also facing unprecedented demand for online orders. For example, retailers within Radial’s network witnessed a 70% increase in orders in April 2020 compared to their order volumes in April 2019. As shopping habits continue evolving in the wake of Covid-19, omnichannel options will be imperative for business continuity.

Retailers are finding that developing an omnichannel experience for shoppers is no longer a modern, unique competitive strategy. It’s now a requirement for any retailer looking to power through what the unforeseeable future has in store. Here are four essential Covid-19-era strategies.

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Consumer Dollars Are Up for Grabs—If Retailers Can Master the Basics

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To maintain the business of today’s consumers, consistency is key. Just under 70% of respondents said they’re less likely to return to a store after just one subpar experience. As for what earns a shopper’s approval, only 19% of consumers said they seek out food or entertainment from stores. More important are fundamental technical capabilities like mobile app integration and access to WiFi. Two thirds of shoppers even said retailers are too focused on experimental tech and should pay more attention to the building blocks of good retail strategy.

Consumers Hungry for New Content Discovery Channels on Mobile

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The content consumers are craving is personalized and brief. Over 40% said they would like content experiences between 15 and 30 seconds, and another 26% favored engagement somewhere between 30 and 90 seconds. Despite amplified privacy concerns of late, 68% indicated a willingness to trade some personal information in exchange for content tailored to their interests.

Brands still trigger-happy on mobile push notifications may want to reconsider. Twenty-five percent of respondents ranked them as their least liked content delivery method among current and future modes of discovery.

Does Influencer Marketing Have a Transparency Problem?

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Although the average share of budgets spent on influencer marketing is just 10%, that figure is growing as visual platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest see explosive growth.

The problem? Brands are often focusing on misleading vanity metrics in an attempt to justify those investments. For example, many marketers track follower counts as a primary indicator for determining brand and influencer partnerships. Growing evidence shows that follower counts do not equate to true impressions or reach data, giving brands a false sense of how their campaigns are performing.

As AI Adoption Accelerates, Brands Search for Competitive Edge

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In Gartner’s 2019 CIO Survey, which included more than 3,000 CIOs from 89 countries, AI technology was ranked as the technology most likely to be disruptive. Despite their enthusiasm for AI, CIOs showed a lack of certainty over the best way to implement the technology and get their newest marketing strategies off the ground.

That uncertainty has the potential to negatively impact brands’ bottom lines, and it’s an issue that industry insiders like Cerebri AI co-founder Jean Belanger are working to combat.

At I/O, Google Offers a New Vision for Local Search

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The notion of “helping you get things done,” emphasized by Sundar Pichai in his I/O keynote, provides a through-line for many of the event’s announcements. It struck me watching the presentations how thoroughly Google has become a consumer electronics company, a marketer of devices where search is more a central feature than a standalone product. Google, in other words, has become thoroughly dedicated to marketing its famous search capabilities in the context of devices that help you perform daily tasks. In the process, it is transforming local search and how we relate to the world with electronic devices.

LBMA Vidcast: Factual, Walgreens, Burger King

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On this week’s Location-Based Marketing Association podcast: Factual partners with Airship & Braze, Class action against all 4 U.S. mobile operators, Decathalon opens first U.S. store, Burger King delivers in Mexico City traffic jams, Para’Kito goes AR with Georgia Pacific, Walgreens teams with Narvar.

Twitter Time: Responsible Writing in Today’s Media Landscape

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If criticism of Twitter and the news media is ubiquitous, it is largely because content on those platforms so often fails to rise to the challenge of responsibility. It aims to produce outrage and push partisan narratives without interrogating its assumptions and all the facts in play. It lacks thought at a time when the endless and rapid reproduction of content in digital space demands we be more thoughtful than ever because we never know where and in how many places our words will reappear.

Zenreach Attract Connects Online Ads to In-Store Results

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Online metrics, like click-through rates and return-on-ad-spend, can quickly show ecommerce retailers how well their digital advertising campaigns are working. But what happens in the real world? The KPIs used in ecommerce mean almost nothing to brick-and-mortar merchants. In fact, digital approximations can actually cause merchants with physical locations to overspend on certain audience segments, while undervaluing others.

That’s something Zenreach is trying to change.

Chrome Cookie Changes to Affect All—Not Just the Top Line

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Google’s latest Chrome changes may sound abstract to those of us who are on the ground doing digital ad work, but they will soon come to dominate our industry. If you work in display advertising at a brand and read the announcement, I’m sure you know at some point the dynamics of the ecosystem will change. But this is going to be big — your entire set of knowledge will soon be different. You’ll need to learn how first-party data looks, is captured, and how to connect first-party data that represents intent to first-party stable identifiers like email.

Visual Search and Local: A Match Made in Mountain View

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Though visual search challengers such as Snapchat and Pinterest could shine in niche use cases such as fashion items, Google will rule as the best all-around utility for visual search. It has the deepest tech stack, and the substance (knowledge graph) to be useful beyond just a flashy novelty for identifying things visually.

The name of the game now is to get users to adopt it. Google Lens won’t be a silver bullet and will shine in a few areas where Google is directing users, such as pets and flowers. But it will really shine in product search, which happens to be where monetization will eventually come into the picture.