For years, marketers have had two goals. They wanted to truly be able to engage with customers uniquely, based on both their interests and their value to the retail brand. They have also wanted to manage that conversation across every digital marketing channel, unifying email, web/mobile sites, display ad, and social efforts. While widely viewed as two separate goals, they were innately connected – how can you have cross-channel marketing without knowing who, specifically, you are communicating with? 2015 is the year when the promise of cross-channel marketing nirvana is fulfilled, finally.
Steadily improving economic fundamentals should moderately boost holiday sales in the stores and online this year, according to Deloitte's annual holiday sales forecast.
In order to keep up with major players UPS and FedEx in a hyper-competitive delivery market, the U.S. Postal Service is seeing a parcel-based future, including expansion of its grocery delivery business.
In a first in the athletic footwear and apparel space, Foot Locker has started a trial of same-day/next-day delivery at five stores in California, with plans to roll it out at its 1,300 locations across the U.S. and Canada should it prove a success. This includes all the company's brands: Foot Locker, Lady Foot Locker, Kids Foot Locker, Foot Action and Champs.
While pop-up retail is not new - dating back to California-based Vacant in 1999 - the concept of pop-up distribution centers is a fairly new one. Following the same idea, it involves setting up a temporary distribution center in a specific location for a set period of time to meet a temporary need, then shutting it down.
As retailers look ahead to the holiday selling season, e-commerce platform provider Volusion predicts that online sales during the holiday season will grow 9 percent compared to last year for small- to medium-sized businesses.
For growing ecommerce companies, timeliness is next to godliness. According to the 2014 UPS Pulse of the Online Shopper survey, half of consumers have abandoned carts due to a lengthy delivery time or no delivery date provided on a retailer's website.
Digital interactions influence 36 cents of every dollar spent in the retail store, or approximately $1.1tr, according to the latest study from Deloitte Digital. By the end of 2014, that number will climb to 50 percent, or $1.5tr of total store sales.