Data privacy and digital trust: A balancing act which hinges on the customer

Protecting data privacy and preserving brand integrity can bring about a whole host of unwelcome processes for businesses, with added layers of complexity evolving from the increasingly stringent regulations and heightened expectations that come with leveraging large data lakes of personal data. However, instead of steering data strategy to react to regulations, brands need to proactively pivot in the direction of their primary purpose: satisfying customer expectations. With an...

27 April 2021 | Commerce

Salesforce Digital 360 for Industries looks further to a cloud-controlled marketing approach

You may have heard of the concept of an 'industry cloud'; a solution which has been customised to fit operatory and regulatory requirements for a specific vertical. Salesforce has looked to this for software as a service (SaaS) and digital experiences with the release of Digital 360 for Industries.

The company's latest offering mixes industry apps, developer tools, websites, portals and best practices purpose-built for the financial services, grocery, healthcare and non-profit...

22 April 2021 | Commerce

Never underestimate AI: How retailers can predict the unpredictable

From hoarding toilet paper to shops shutting their doors, it’s fair to say 2020 was one of the most disruptive years for retailers. According to the ONS, online sales grew by 46% in 2020, compared to the previous year. With consumer behaviour changing rapidly in response to the pandemic, retailers have had to adapt and keep pace with demand. This has been the perfect use case for automation, which has proved invaluable as retailers navigate a path through disruption.

The...

16 April 2021 | Automation

Why direct-to-consumer depends on digital transformation: Key brand examples

Stay-at-home rules, imposed during the global Covid-19 pandemic, have put digitalisation into turbo drive. According to McKinsey and Company, the growth in the USA’s e-commerce in the first six months of 2020 equalled that of the previous decade.

The accelerated adoption of eCommerce has introduced existential threats for many traditional retailers, while creating fresh opportunities for brands that are comfortable with using digital channels to develop a personalised...

8 April 2021 | Branding

Two key marketing automation tools you may be missing for your eCommerce clients

More and more, eCommerce companies and online shops are tapping digital marketing agencies to help them advertise their products online - on not just one, but multiple marketplaces. Whether you are adding eCommerce clients to the agency portfolio for the first time or working with these clients - there is a need to break through the noise by advertising on marketplaces.

Successful ad campaigns for eCommerce call for high-quality PPC ads, banner ads, text ads (expanded and simple),...

26 March 2021 | Automation

Analysing the haves and have nots for sales enablement: How can you become better?

If you want to be part of the C-suite at a visionary company, then you need a strategic, cyclical approach to the customer lifecycle. But where should sales enablement fit in?

This is the keynote of a new report issued by Seismic (landing page, email required). Not overly surprisingly, 'sales enablement platform provider says sales enablement is key' is not going to get tongues wagging. Yet while, as one would expect, the report says companies are applying sales enablement to...

22 March 2021 | Advertising

Gartner: How is digital commerce changing the face of customer experience?

There was a time when digital commerce meant static storefronts. Back then, if you were to purchase from a business, you’d almost definitely have spoken to someone along the way – either face-to-face or over the phone. Perhaps it was the cashier at your local grocery or the account manager at your local bank. You might have even known their name. Even if you didn’t, you’d expect that staff would be trained in a variation of the phrase, ‘the customer is always right’ as a...

16 March 2021 | Best Practice

The need for ‘evolved phygital’: Ramping up the experience

Little did marketers - or anyone else for that matter - realise that it would take a pandemic to turn our well established retail infrastructure on its head. Almost overnight social commerce became our new form of retail architecture. What was already prevalent in China took hold in a matter of months and continues to gain momentum in the West.

Of course, even prior to 2020 the tech was available for marketers to mesh live-streaming, short-form video and social-networking to show...

15 March 2021 | Advertising

Forget headless: Why agile CMS delivers the goods for marketing teams

Brands are trying to keep pace with new technologies and trends and even the terms that are adopted to describe them. ‘Agile CMS’ has recently been coined by Forrester, and it sounds great, but what does it mean in practice?

Disparate content systems rife with duplications and impossible to search cause delays and difficulties in enterprises today. Headless CMS, which separates frontend experiences from the backend content repository and management, had potential, but failed...

9 March 2021 | Commerce

How Covid-19 is changing retail KPIs: From traffic to engagement

Traffic. It’s what almost all retailers swore by — that, and time spent in stores. The logic was simple: Get people through the doors and entice them to linger longer, and they’d buy your wares. All that came into question when Covid-19 hit. Even after the shutdowns were lifted, retailers found themselves facing a new reality: Traffic looked (and still looks) nothing like it did the year prior.

Almost overnight, consumers were utilising convenient services such as buy...

4 March 2021 | Branding