Fire Sale: How Multi-Location Businesses Should Handle Downturns and Fails

Fire Sale: How Multi-Location Businesses Should Handle Downturns and Fails

Share this:

This year alone, more than 2,000 retail locations have closed. The major casualties include Party City, Jenny Craig, and Bed Bath & Beyond. Some multi-location restaurants are also slimming down, shuttering locations in markets that aren’t performing well. That doesn’t necessarily mean the beginning of the end for the brands. They may simply reduce expenses to […]

Love Languages: 5 Ways to Earn Brand Loyalty 

Share this:

Hard metrics define brand loyalty’s value, but brand loyalty is really a feeling we earn by inspiring love, trust, and connections. It’s time to embrace that.

Inform Your Multichannel Customer Experience Strategy

Consumers Widely Frustrated by Business Messaging

Share this:

Consumers are seeking easier ways to connect with businesses. For businesses, offering a phone number is no longer enough to maximize conversion opportunities when connecting with local customers searching for their products and services. But few businesses are prepared to meet consumers’ demands for quick, convenient communication.

Inform Your Multichannel Customer Experience Strategy

Business Messaging Best Practices: A Conversation with Meta

Share this:

Messaging is one of the core ways customers interact with local brick-and-mortar businesses. Yet this key part of the customer experience often leads to frustration, and automation, which is supposed to boost convenience, sometimes leaves customers feeling underserved.

Inform Your Multichannel Customer Experience Strategy

Report: Text Messages, Online Chat Essential Channels for Businesses

Share this:

More than 70% of US consumers polled in a survey commissioned by business messaging platform Quiq had engaged with businesses via text messaging or online chat two or more times in the previous month.

That should be a signal to businesses that email and phone are no longer sufficient; messaging will be key to survival for consumer-facing businesses of the future.

Direct-to-Consumer Brands Are Winning at Personalized Messaging. Here’s Why

Share this:

According to new research conducted by Braze, a company that specializes in growth marketing automation, direct-to-consumer brands beat non-direct-to-consumer brands with 58.6% higher messaging open rates across channels.

One reason for the higher open rates is because direct-to-consumer brands show greater willingness to use automation and iteration to personalize messages and speak to customers at a point in the journey when it makes sense for them.

Inform Your Multichannel Customer Experience Strategy

Facebook Marketing Partner Summit 2019: What’s All the Hype about Messaging?

Share this:

Facebook led the Summit with this very interesting statistic: “There are now more messaging users than social users globally.” While the semantics of “messaging” vs. “social app” draw a fine distinction, on raw user count alone, WhatsApp and Messenger account for 2.9 billion users, and Facebook alone sits at 2.4 billion.

With these numbers in mind, Facebook’s contention is that conversation should be a larger part of the consumer journey when it comes to advertising, even noting that consumers are increasingly expecting to be as well, creating a virtuous cycle of sorts.

Inform Your Multichannel Customer Experience Strategy

The Number-One Reason Consumers Will Delete Your App

Share this:

It’s easy to get your app deleted from consumers’ phones at a time when every businesses has its own mobile property and social notifications are wearing consumers down. If you want to get deleted, just message your customers all the time, a new study by messaging platform Leanplum found.

The most common reason consumers deleted mobile apps is too many irrelevant notifications, Leanplum’s survey of 1,000 US mobile users found. This held true for all generations, from Gen-Z to Baby Boomers. More than 75% of the crucial millennial generation said they delete apps due to excessive notifications.

Klos Founders See Opportunity in Social Messaging Market

Share this:

Like so many other startups, Klos is being marketed as a solution to a problem. In this case, the company’s founders see the problem as social media being inherently anti-social. Original broadcast sharing on legacy social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn is on the decline. Messaging services like WhatsApp and iMessage are incredibly popular, but they don’t help people expand their social networks. While there are existing services, like Tinder and Bumble, that combine messaging and network expansion, they almost all fall into the dating app category.

Airship Acquires Apptimize to Sharpen Mobile Marketing Experiences

Share this:

Airship rebranded to emphasize its shift from push notifications to a broader suite of messaging tools. Apptimize will help its clients iterate across channels and solutions as they attempt to find the best way to reach customers flooded with marketing and other kinds of media.

Heard on the Street, Episode 32: Is Messaging the Next Brand Channel?

Share this:

Conversational commerce, brands’ ability to interact with customers through messaging, continues to evolve. According to Quiq CEO Mike Myer, our latest guest on Heard on the Street, this is a function of the technology but also cultural factors that deter consumers from traditional channels like email and phone.

“Waiting for email to come back is like watching paint dry,” he told us. “So, if you’re in the purchase process, you’re going to go somewhere else to buy if you’re on a brand’s website and you have to interact with them on email. And making a phone call: There’s a whole generation of people who aren’t very fond of phone calls.”

Heard on the Street, Episode 31: CDPs and Israeli Innovation

Share this:

As data science continues to collide with digital marketing, customer behavior metrics are reaching new levels of actionable insight. But counteracting that advantage is the growing fragmentation of devices and platforms used in the path to purchase, making it harder to get a single view of the customer.

This is the world of customer data platforms (CDPs), and it is where Optimove hangs its hat. Founder & CEO Pini Yakuel explains to us on the latest episode of Heard on the Street how the company helps brands and multi-location retailers get the insights they need to better serve their customers.

12 Years After the iPhone, Marketers Need to Lean Into Digital Wellness

Share this:

Once upon a time, “getting a Starbucks coupon as you walk by a Starbucks” was the Holy Grail example of the potential power of mobile marketing. With the iPhone turning 12 years old this week, it’s a great time to observe how drastically more sophisticated digital relationships between consumers and brands have gotten thanks to the supercomputers in our pockets.

Mobile is now about building a customer journey and taking patrons to the next level rather than a single, location-based transaction. You hear it a lot: the customer journey reigns supreme, but there’s a good reason for “customer journey” becoming like the Greek chorus in marketing. Consumers are inundated with messages from brands, so marketers need to be judicious about how, when, where, and why they reach out to customers.

Heard on the Street, Episode 29: Push Notifications and Tech History, with Airship’s Mike Stone

Share this:

Airship has been innovating around push notifications for more than a decade, a lifetime in internet years. Airship SVP of Marketing Mike Stone, the latest guest on Street Fight’s Heard on the Street podcast, broke down the company’s approach to the mobile marketing business.

“There are two dimensions. One is the proliferation of devices and the channels that are attached to them, but there’s also that much more difficult thing of what consumers are willing to do,” said Stone. “The devices are one thing, but it’s also, once they’re there, where’s that line of creepy versus helpful.”

Inform Your Multichannel Customer Experience Strategy

Consumers Welcome Some Automated Business Messaging, But Humans Must Tag Along to Help

Share this:

More than half of consumers are frustrated by customer-service situations in which they can only interact with automated agents, and nearly one in five even reporting feeling angry in those situations. That’s per a new survey of U.S. consumers conducted by The Harris Poll and commissioned by call tracking and analytics firm Invoca.

Texting Allows Marketers to Reach Customers Where They Spend the Most Time

Share this:

Seventy-six percent of consumers are already receiving texts from businesses, and a majority of consumers across all age groups would prefer that more businesses take up texting as a mode of communication, a new report from business text messaging platform ZipWhip indicates.  

A whopping 83% of Gen-Z respondents and 82% of millennials said they “wish more businesses” would use texting. Even for older generations, that number made up a more than slight majority, including 76% of Gen-Xers and 64% of Baby Boomers.

Report: Upon Unlocking Phones, People Flock to Social, Messaging

Share this:

Anyone with a smartphone unimmune to our pervasive cultural addiction with digital communication will be unsurprised: It’s WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Facebook that currently capture most of the attention when we mindlessly unlock our mobile devices.

That’s according to media measurement company Verto Analytics, which released a report just this morning on the earliest part of the mobile journey: what happens right when we unlock our phones some 50 times per day.

Communicating on GMB Poses Some Challenges, but the Local Ecosystem Has Answers

Share this:

Google has been hard at work on local in 2018 and 2019, taking strides toward making its Google My Business app the one-stop-shop for local businesses hoping to connect with customers through digital means. Nevertheless, local is a tricky, 24-7 business, and when it comes to connecting brick-and-mortars with customers nearby, Alphabet’s core business has some room for improvement.

Inform Your Multichannel Customer Experience Strategy

Facebook to Integrate Technical Infrastructure of WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger

Share this:

While the move indeed indicates that Facebook’s chief executives are looking to centralize acquired properties that once operated with relative autonomy, the integration also marks a response to growing concerns over user privacy. Under this new technical configuration, all the messaging platforms will be endowed with end-to-end encryption, warding off the possibility that people other than those taking part in conversations will ever read messages sent on the platforms.

Inform Your Multichannel Customer Experience Strategy

Will 2019 Be Remembered as the Year of GMB Messaging?

Share this:

Mihm to Blumenthal: Absent a messaging competitor, even a handful of conversations with real customers make businesses *think* Facebook is where the party is. In reality, as you and plenty of others have found, 90% of actual leads are coming from Google. And a serious chunk of that 90% comes directly from Google My Business. Per my prediction, Google is *just* starting to push the “Message” CTA to consumers. And I think the floodgates are about to open.