Ray Wright

Earlier this year, I attended the Sirius Decisions 2018 Summit. For those firms seeking a framework to help them plan their digital transformation, the summit didn’t disappoint. With well over two hundred sessions, delegates could choose form a wide range of topics grouped into four main streams: account-based marketing, channel marketing, portfolio (product) management, and sales strategy and operations. The sessions included presentations from Sirius Decisions (SD) staff covering most of their 14 different frameworks, SD framework and partner technology case studies presented by their customers, and several motivational keynotes from SD management and outside speakers.

Data is now at the heart of the digital transformations occurring across the economy and building an advanced data analytics team is one of the keys to competitive advantage. Whether you plan to simply disrupt your own industry or expand into an adjacent segment, data is the key to unlocking opportunity. Data has become a critical corporate asset, and business leaders want to capitalize on the information they hold. But its value is tied to how it’s analysed and by whom. One dataset may be of little value, while another may contain the key to launching a new product line or cracking a challenging marketing question. One might affect only a small percentage of a company’s revenue, while another could reveal an opportunity for significant future growth. How do firms find out? Analytics.

Government agencies at every level—city, state, and federal—collect large amounts of data; that’s a fact. The challenge for many lies in the ways information is collected and processed. Much of it is locked up in departmental silos, on somewhat dated computer systems, and it’s hard to access for additional analysis or to share publicly. Much of it may have been collected on paper forms or input by busy staff with lots of other things to do. Yet in any commercial organization, your data might be considered like gold dust! Locked within those siloed systems are many nuggets of valuable information that can help improve the efficiency of your entire organization, help deliver better services, and help improve the lives of your constituents.

The Financial Brand Forum conference in Las Vegas was packed with sage advice and excellent ideas for bank and credit union marketers to ponder and act upon. Several sessions, such as the insightful opening keynote from Ray Davis of Umpqua Bank and the equally compelling keynote from Eric Ryan of Method, focused on the importance of organizational culture. Employee engagement and empowerment are key to success when the primary source of differentiation is how well you understand your customers and how far you are prepared to go to meet their needs.

Reading the statistics on cart abandonment rates can be quite sobering. Sixty-seven percent of online carts are abandoned before a purchase is made and, apparently, about 97 percent of mobile carts are abandoned. The reasons oft quoted are myriad but one of the bigger issues is simply the time it takes to check out; the longer it takes, the more likely that your customer will become distracted. Plus, when the shopping process requires any significant amount of typing on a mobile, forget it! Although you have to find a way to enable accurate address capture and to collect other important information, requiring customers to input too much is surely one reason that the mobile abandonment rate is so high.

Now that the busy holiday season is winding down and we’ve turned the calendar, retailers are refocusing their attention to driving sales in 2017. Retailers are always keen to hear what their peers and competitors were doing to improve customer experiences and drive sales. Here are five things those in the retail industry should keep top of mind in 2017. 

It sounds counter-intuitive, but a very impactful approach to customer satisfaction is to minimize the number of customer interactions. Let me explain. Each interaction requires retailers to invest considerable effort to meet and exceed customers’ expectations. The more interactions or steps there are to the customer journey, the harder it becomes to deliver a great overall customer experience.

Whether we are talking about store associates wielding mobile POS devices or consumers sporting their mobile phones, mobile digital transactions are on the rise and gaining in importance.

The latest studies* show that online purchasing has now become the preference, just beating out other forms of purchasing (e.g. store, catalog) by 51 percent to 49 percent. And 77 percent of mobile phone users have used their devices during the shopping process, with over 40 percent having completed a mobile purchase. This number rises to over 60 percent for Millennials. Clearly online and in particular, mobile online shopping, is redefining the shopping experience for a large portion of the population.

Email marketing remains one of the most successful and cost-effective marketing channels. Some say it’s second only to search, and we agree. The cost of sending an email is measured in tiny fractions of a penny while the average return is between $0.06 and $0.07*. The common wisdom is that every $1 spent on email returns $40 in revenue. That’s a 4000% ROI!

Yet there’s a lot that can be done to improve results. Clearly open and click through rates depend a lot on subject lines and offers, but maximizing your return also means maximizing deliverability. Here are 10 tried-and-true steps for optimizing your retail email marketing efforts and achieving the greatest return.