Brands, finding themselves at risk of tone deafness in marketing, are turning to influencer partnerships to talk to customers. Since the coronavirus outbreak changed daily life, events have been cancelled, ad spending is down and, in the worst cases, some businesses have already closed. Even with this disruption, brands are still clamouring for consumer attention, but it’s difficult to know how to…
Industry Insights Blog
If you’re a small business owner looking to find better ways to connect with customers during the disruption caused by COVID-19 and social distancing, you may want to take a look at your data and customer service policies. “Businesses are worried about keeping their employees and their customers safe, while also keeping their business running. Not to mention that many…
In a short period of time, COVID-19 has overwhelmed lives and livelihoods around the globe. For vulnerable individuals and the customer teams that serve them, it has also forced a rethinking of what customer care means. Suddenly, examinations of customer journeys and satisfaction metrics to inform what customers want have given way to an acute urgency to address what they need.
Particularly…
Don’t push to hard with messaging, make it personal. It’s a classic ecommerce own goal: retailers and brands attempting to reach out to their customers with web push messaging that is generic and irrelevant. Rather than showing how well they know their prospect, this scattergun approach means the retailer instead reveals their ignorance, clogging up channels of communication and frustrating and…
Influencers are charging fans for a more intimate social media experience, calling the future of brand partnerships into question. Caroline Calloway, a 28-year-old internet personality known for her lengthy Instagram captions, and, more recently, the controversy surrounding her workshops and her relationship with Natalie Beach, started offering her 717,000 Instagram followers the option to sign up for paid access to her “Close…
Pinterest announced new features to help consumers find and buy goods via search, Pinterest boards, Pinterest pins and curated style guides. Consumers can use a new ‘shop’ tab to look for in-stock items via Pinterest’s search function or through a similar tab on users’ boards, which will offer up products from or inspired by the pins on their board, per the company’s…
As brands continue to shift their strategies in response to COVID-19, several important trends have emerged among what exactly eCommerce marketing teams are currently doing or planning to do. These trends cover everything from pausing campaigns to launching new ones to shifting in-store traffic online to helping resource-strapped teams become more agile. And with the situation changing so rapidly, it’s…
Marketers often get wrapped up in expert opinions rather than what their customers think, feel, and believe. But in the time of a pandemic, how brands are considering the customer is more important than ever.
The past few weeks have been tumultuous the world over. As such, it’s important to understand how different brands build relationships and engagement with their audiences outside…
Watch out, YouTubers. The first of the TikTok influencer beauty brands has arrived. A tried-and-true business strategy for an earlier generation of beauty bloggers including Jeffree Starr, Huda Kattan and Jaclyn Hill, the launch of a beauty line is now being embraced by the TikTok generation.
The first brand out of the gate is the newly launched beauty line Gloss Twins…
For decades, a handful of brands dominated consumer retail in the United States. Whether Kodak in cameras or Gillette in razors, the top brands in more than 10 categories were unchanged from 1923 to 1983. Then the internet democratized the tools required to start and scale a business. Over the next two decades, a new class of startups emerged. From…
Retailers beware: although the US economy began a record expansion in 2009, there were already signs of moderating growth and consumer spending when the coronavirus hit. No one can say if the economy will tip into recession (nor how long it will last, it if does). Still, retailers can be sure that when there is a slump, it will pose…
Fenty Beauty, the cosmetic brand by Rihanna, is using TikTok to promote the next generation of makeup influencers. To reach its Gen Z target audience, the brand created the Fenty Beauty House. The house is a real mansion in Los Angeles rented out by Rihanna and set up for five “creators” to live in and continuously post content from. The house…
While there is no denying that email marketing has incredible potential for ecommerce brands, many struggle to generate the sales results they’d like to see. Research from Adestra reveals that 73 percent of millennials list email as their preferred method of getting contacted by a business. A study from Campaign Monitor found that more than 50 percent of American adults…
Online shopping is more popular than ever, surpassing brick-and-mortar general merchandise sales for the first time last year. In 2020, however, the customer journey — that is, the entire series of interactions leading to the purchase of a product or service — will continue to be a winding one, often including several devices and various behaviors before the checkout process.
That…
As companies look to provide customers with better customer experience (CX), an increasing number are turning to voice solutions to provide quicker and better service in their contact centers.
The popularity of voice response has grown thanks in large part to the commercialization of Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and similar technologies as well as customers’ desire to contact companies while driving…
It’s no secret that the retail experience has seen a massive upheaval as a whole, but how are some retailers managing to thrive in this new world, while others are struggling? To discover what’s driving the retail divide, Salesforce surveyed over 10,000 consumers from around the globe to find out: How retailers, brands and online marketplaces can make their voices heard…
Amazon’s supply chain begins with the customer and works backward, but they are not alone, other companies are paying attention to the customer experience. Back in the March 2018 issue of Supply Chain Management Review, Michigan State’s Steven A. Melnyk co-authored an article titled Serving Up An Experience. Melnyk and his co-authors, Clay Voorhees and Nick Little argued that “the next generation of…
Personalization is ready for its closeup moment. Technology and customer expectations are converging to propel personalization—the process of using data to customize the timing, content, and design of every experience in real time—from a promise to a reality. Personalization at scale can drive between 5 and 15 percent revenue growth for companies in the retail, travel, entertainment, telecom, and financial-services sectors. One…
In SEO research, it’s crucial to develop a firm understanding of keywords that apply to your brand and their search volumes. This will allow you to better evaluate competitors and get more granular with your search strategy, looking at the differences between searches based on seasonality and location.
Here are three ways to take your keyword research to the next level…
When Sephora and Ulta officially closed all stores last week to follow U.S. government mandates around controlling coronavirus, beauty brand holdouts began to seriously reconsider distribution elsewhere — namely Amazon. For luxury, prestige and the indie beauty brands, the platform’s proposition in a Covid-19 climate is more than tempting.
Beauty and personal-care products interestingly clear Amazon’s new shipping restrictions announced last…