News and Analysis

Retailers Are Using AI for Onboarding, Associate Retention

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The retail landscape is going through an evolution, with mom-and-pop stores on Main Street being replaced by e-commerce outlets that rely on sophisticated algorithms to manage virtually every aspect of business operations.

While most headlines about the transformation of retail focus on the consumer-side of the equation, there’s even more change going on behind the scenes. Competition between e-commerce and brick-and-mortar is forcing innovation in the way retailers approach the challenges that come with onboarding and retaining in-store associates.

Retailers Leverage Prime Day to Boost Offline Sales

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Unlike other shopping “holidays,” like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Amazon Prime Day is specific to a single retailer. But as the event grows, other retailers—both online and offline—are finding ways to leverage the anticipation that consumers are feeling.

Last year, 63% of Prime Day shoppers said they visited competing websites to compare prices. This is a major opportunity for online retailers to capitalize on the spike in traffic and provide consumers with personalized and targeted offerings and exclusive deals.

This Company is Forging a New Path for Digital Advertising with a Focus on Consumer Consent

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Brave is an example of how privacy-forward digital advertising business models that foreground consumer content can work for all parties. Users are not tracked all over the Web and choose how many ads they would like to see; they will also soon get rewards. In return, advertisers can be sure that the people seeing their advertisements are actually interested in looking at ads, and they can also boost loyalty or reach new customers by offering rewards for ad viewing.

Perhaps most importantly, with GDPR in place for more than a year and CCPA and other state privacy laws in the works, advertisers and platforms are less likely to get sued.

Commentary

The Usability Gap: Designing the Right Products for SMBs

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Surely small business owners belong to the class of ordinary users. Expecting them to invest the time and energy to become power users is a good way to guarantee that your user base will remain small. This realization could lead to a very different and more fruitful approach to product design for SMBs.

Could Chipotle Have Saved Millions of Dollars By Taking Online Reviews More Seriously?

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If done right, online reputation management can act as an early warning system for multi-location businesses, and can ultimately prevent long-term brand damage and reduce the risk of decreasing profits.

A Look at Google’s ‘Quality Rater Guidelines’ Over Time: How to Put Information Into Action

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Google is vague on a lot of things, but every now and then we get a glimpse into what the search giant values and deems important — as we do in the recently updated Quality Rater Guidelines.

Latest Posts

Street Fight Daily: Brick-and-Mortars Crushed by Online Costs, Instagram Tests Profiles for Businesses

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Online Operating Costs Are Crushing Brick-and-Mortar Retailers… Instagram is Testing a Facebook-Like Profile for Businesses: Here’s What it Looks Like… AT&T Unwinds Web Alliance With Yahoo (Wall Street Journal)…

Street Culture: Collective Employee Mindset = Shuffleboard at Nextdoor

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“One hundred and eighteen people is not a lot, but corralling those opinions is a more difficult task,” said Margie Mader-Clark, the company’s VP of human resources. “It’s about a stewardship of culture, taking care of it, making sure the negative aspects go away as early as possible.”

Belly’s LaHive: Beacon Tech ‘A Little Bit Overhyped’

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The company’s CEO says that he considers beacons “an additional channel of communication so that businesses can identify when customers are inside a store and target them with special offers,” but he doesn’t see location-based tech and loyalty programs going hand-in-hand.

Street Fight Daily: Uber Gets Merchants to Pay for Rides, Shopify Teams Up with Postmates

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Uber Offers Gets Merchants to Pay for Rides… More Than 21,000 Businesses Can Now Add Same-Day Delivery Through Postmates… Vacation Rental Startups Attract $100 Million in Funding So Far This Year…

Will Phone Calls Survive the Chatbot Apocalypse?

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The trillion dollar question is if this emerging chatbot technology will annihilate the phone call. Though I’m bullish on messaging and chatbots, the answer to that question is likely no.

6 Customer Analytics Solutions for Restaurants

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The restaurant industry may be better positioned to take advantage of big data than almost any other vertical. Here are six examples of data platforms that restaurants can use for both sales and service optimization.

Sponsored Post: 9 Mobile Apps That Are Transforming Local Commerce

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There is no shortage of business tools and apps available to entrepreneurs today. Technology, now more than ever before, is discovering new ways of solving old problems and enabling retailers and service providers as well as the mighty consumer to reach, share, save, buy, bid, deal, message, post and even make a phone call, anytime and from almost anywhere. …

Street Fight Daily: Co-op Marketing Battles Facebook/Google/Amazon, Lead Generation’s Future

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Facing Facebook, Google, and Amazon, Brands Pool Their Data (Marketing Land)… The Future of Digital Lead Generation (TechCrunch)… Publishers ‘Feeding On Scraps from Facebook’, Says Bloomberg Media Boss (The Guardian)…

Understanding the Local Search Marketing Funnel

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According to the funnel metaphor, customers travel in stages from awareness to purchase, the funnel getting narrower at each stage as some customers drop off and do not move to the next stage.

LiveIntent President: Local Publishers Need to Leverage ‘Gold Mine’ of Email Newsletters

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Advertising network LiveIntent has 1,300 publisher clients, including Hearst, New York Times, Washington Post and ESPN. Through these relationships, it can target 130 million unique visitors. We caught up with the company’s president, Jason Kelly, to talk about how local publishers can compete with social-media platforms for ad revenue.