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

The Fight Against Facial Recognition Tech

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Microsoft and Amazon suspended their sales of facial recognition technology to police departments in recent weeks amid nationwide protests against police brutality. IBM went even further, ceasing its research on the subject altogether.

It might be clever and intuitive, but facial recognition technology is highly invasive. Little wonder, then, that across the world, people are joining the fight against its implementation.

Data Enrichment, Your Business, and Your Career

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Creating great customer experiences is ultimately what matters most, and this requires a single customer view and data enrichment techniques for a deep understanding of your customer. Organizations that rely on only first-party data are at a disadvantage. They risk missing out on valuable new information as time passes. For example, did your customer just move to a new state or buy a new home? 

How Connected TV Ads Help SMBs Recover from Crisis

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One medium that will be especially helpful in the recovery is connected TV (CTV). About three-quarters of households own connected TVs, so SMBs can easily reach the public through this ad-supported medium as life returns to normal.

There are many opportunities to excel both in the current and post-pandemic marketing landscape, but businesses will only be able to take advantage of them if they intelligently create demand. Because of this, SMBs should use audience and measurement data to inform their CTV advertising strategies as markets reopen.

Latest Posts

Letter From the Editor: Retail Transformation Rules

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As we continue to evolve the definition of “local,” one key component of its market opportunity is offline brick-and-mortar shopping. After all, about 90% of all U.S. retail spending, to the tune of about $3.7 trillion, is completed offline in physical stores. And that’s usually in proximity to one’s home (thus, local).

This makes retail transformation a key focal point for Street Fight. And there’s a lot happening.

May Focus: Visualizing Local

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Street Fight is rolling into May with the theme, Visualizing Local: a look at how marketers are using visual content to boost visibility, presence, and conversions. This includes everything from images in search results and local listings to utilizing increasingly popular social media like Instagram Stories.

Foursquare’s Location-Based Loyalty Metrics Point to Best Practices for Casual Restaurants

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Brushing aside customer surveys and other imprecise measures of customer loyalty, location intelligence firm Foursquare released a location-based report this morning that evaluates best practices and practitioners in loyalty among casual restaurant chains. 

Most importantly for future considerations, the report suggests that brands can improve loyalty in all four of the areas that contributed to its index.

Voice Marketing Starts with Smart SEO

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How can enterprises better leverage voice search for brand marketing? To start, winning in voice search demands many of the same strategies as search engine optimization (SEO), as the goal in both cases is to get your content to rank position zero on search engine results pages (SERPs) by focusing on authority.

Report: Consumer Expectations for Brands Higher than Ever in Age of Convenience

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With the omnichannel age upon us, the impact of bad customer experiences is unprecedented. The main fear for businesses should no longer be a standoff between the worker behind the customer service desk and the angry customer who failed to get his discount; it should be the rant that hits social and is shared or liked a slew of times, dragging digital reputations through the mud.

Brand Building Beyond Reviews: Is the Local Marketing Ecosystem Ready?

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“I think it makes more sense for a small business to buy ‘brand building’ that includes some community events and link building than for that same business to buy SEO,” Mike Blumenthal tells David Mihm. Find out what tech tools can build a local brand and why David disagrees partly with Mike’s suggestion.

The Power of Micro-Location Technology

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The location market has matured beyond push. The value of micro-location technology is now built on hyper-accurate analytics on where users go in the physical world, allowing advertisers to re-target them with a variety of omnichannel marketing efforts. Here are a few exciting use cases that highlight the power of hyper-accurate location-based marketing technology.

Walmart Tests Out the “Future of Retail” in Long Island Store

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There’s no time for the future of retail like the present. That is the motto at Walmart’s Intelligent Retail Lab, a live experiment in AI-driven shopping experiences that is now open to the public at a Walmart Neighborhood Market in Levittown, NY. 

Facebook Expects Record-Setting FTC Fine for Privacy Violations

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Five billion would be a record for FTC punishment of a tech company and would signal harsher scrutiny to come for an industry that has accrued unparalleled wealth and power with little regulatory oversight. Facebook’s fine comes after a saga of instances in which it failed to protect user data. Most damningly, the company vowed to shore up its data protection practices in 2011 and can now be accused of failing to uphold that promise.

How Emerging Technologies Allow Businesses to Merge Their Digital and Traditional Marketing

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New technologies (and new spins on old ones) are the modern company’s ally in merging digital and traditional marketing. The brands that find a sensible balance between the two are the brands that will outperform the competition. Let’s take a look at four major examples of innovation in this arena.