“The painful reality is that establishing a personal bond with individual customers is hard for omnichannel retailers,” an article for Fourth Source recently opined. “While it’s true that digital retail generates a lot of data relating to individual customers, which can be extracted and utilised both online and in the store, few businesses have successfully struck the balance between helpful and...

As customers’ paths to purchase become increasingly complex, marketers are under mounting pressure to evidence their contribution to ROI within the multichannel mix.

But with more tech platforms to integrate than ever before, is there room for call intelligence within the growing martech stack?

Despite the significant evolution of the call tracking and intelligence market, the technology, to date, is utilised by less than 5% of businesses that could benefit from it. In part...

Brands that craft excellent loyalty programmes know that they are all about the customer – not the business.

The benefits of long-term customer loyalty are self-evident. But, without providing the rewards and relationships that people want, that loyalty just isn’t going to happen.

Effective loyalty programmes focus on the wants and needs of individual programme members, and then align them to the sales goals of the business (rather than the other way around).

Businesses that want to provide a...

Personalised marketing is hardly anything new. It’s been around for decades and marketers have long reaped the benefits.

However, the sheer number of digital channels that consumers are engaging with has increased dramatically over recent years.

As consumers incorporate technology into more aspects of their daily lives, they meander across channels and devices as needed. They seek answers, solutions, products, and entertainment. They express interests, intent, and preferences leaving a digital trail or...

Many recent technological advancements, which may have seemed outlandish even five years ago, have started to enter the mainstream.

Take fingerprint recognition on smartphones – an advancement which has come so far that now 64% of us would consider using it to access our bank accounts.

Yet for all the innovations that become part of our everyday lives, there are others – such as Google Glass and 3D TVs – which fail to make the same impact.

for all the innovations that become part of our everyday...

The entertainment award season is now in full swing; brands are embracing real-time marketing and gearing up for social war rooms. Marketers are increasingly realising the value of engaging with customers ‘in the moment’ as events unfold so they can be part of the conversation and ride relevant trends.

Timing is absolutely key and the availability of marketing tech tools and data has enabled marketers to make intelligent decisions around when it is best to activate content and reach audiences in...

Hyperlocalisation – theoretically taking personalised marketing one step further – is more than a trend: it’s the culmination of technological advances combined with innovative marketing tactics, and it has created new opportunities for brands to communicate value to customers. Couple this with the power of data, and you open up a whole host of possibilities for reaching specific sets of customers.

Here are just a few reasons the marriage of hyperlocalisation and data is a match made in...

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By now, it’s a familiar narrative: The advent of artificial intelligence, along with contextual computing, will transform entire industries and leave nearly everyone — including marketers — jobless. 

Well, maybe not.

The fact is that AI and CC simply provide new ways of doing what marketers have always done: Track, measure, assess, and...

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Huge quantities of data pass through the marketing department. While collaborating with colleagues, ad agencies, agency partners and marketing tech providers, marketers are often required to share confidential information, from strategic presentations to brand images. As flexible working explodes and marketers handle major campaigns from both the office and home, we need to consider how this information is being shared and controlled over time.

Consumer grade platforms such as...

If anyone doubted that the internet is becoming a progressively more visual medium, two deals announced last month should have enlightened them.

Instagram revealed plans to create a live video function on its Instagram Stories platform, taking it up against Snapchat and Facebook Live. Unlike Facebook Live though, the short videos recorded by Instagram's users will disappear as soon as they are recorded – friends will only be able to watch them live.

Meanwhile, Facebook is...