Have you seen The Marketing Operations Playbook?

Learn the insider's tricks and techniques to super-charge your company's marketing operations, build up your market share, make more sales through repeat business and customer loyalty, and prove your marketing's true worth through analysis and reporting.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)

Most retailers plan to find out who's in-store

Unified commerce is the evolution of both multi-channel and omni-channel retailing that provides a seamless experience in the store, on the Web or anywhere customers choose to shop. The report found that the key Unified Commerce initiatives, such as enhancing customer engagement, collecting and analysing customer behaviour, and personalising the experience, are currently the top priorities for retailers.

Among the survey's key findings:

• 95% of the respondents indicated customer experience/ customer engagement is one of their top three current initiatives;
• 3% have the ability to identify the customer when she walks in the store, and another 72% plan to implement this within five years;
• 16% currently have real-time retail from POS (which offers the "Amazon" experience in the store) and another 63% plan to implement within five years;
• 28% currently use mobile marketing and another;
• 62% plan to implement this within five years (and 56% plan to implement mobile marketing within two years);
• 81% have implemented some type of customer database, typically as part of a CRM or loyalty platform;
• 22% of retailers have implemented real-time analytics and 61% plan to implement it within two years.

"It was impressive to learn how many retailers are now focused on implementing the technologies to deliver Unified Commerce, but there is still a lot of work to be done to deliver these capabilities," said Boston Retail Partners' principal, Walter Deacon. "Delivering unified commerce requires seamless execution of the right strategy, technology, and business processes."

The looming challenge is that while marketing has become the centre of the unified commerce organisation, it is often still on its own with regards to developing marketing technology strategies and evaluating and selecting technology.

With the importance of multiple key marketing initiatives to achieve a seamless shopping experience, retailers need to examine ways to improve the unification of Marketing and IT to successfully implement these projects. Many larger retailers have consequently developed a role in the organisation that helps bridge this gap: a senior-level role responsible for working with IT to develop a marketing technology strategy and evaluate and implement the technology.

"To deliver the seamless experience, retailers need to gather, analyse and disseminate customer, product, pricing and inventory data in real-time," concluded Boston Retail Partners' principal, Ken Morris. "Leveraging technology, unified commerce provides the platform and real-time retail is key to delivering the experience. Retailers that successfully deliver this will develop and adopt a unified approach for strategic customer initiatives, technology, business processes and execution."

Have you seen The Marketing Operations Playbook?

Learn the insider's tricks and techniques to super-charge your company's marketing operations, build up your market share, make more sales through repeat business and customer loyalty, and prove your marketing's true worth through analysis and reporting.

The Marketing Operations Playbook walks you step-by-step through the techniques, metrics, reporting, analysis, marketing models, technologies, tools and innovations for successful marketing strategies - both traditional and emerging - with expert guidance from thought leaders in every major market.

Find out the best ways to gather, analyse, and act on customer data to increase profitability, build your brand, empower your customers, beat the competition, reduce churn, and increase customer profitability. This is the marketing book you can't afford to be without.

Find out what works - and what doesn't - and who's succeeded, and how they did it. See how the world's top brands keep their competitive edge against all odds.

This comprehensive and practical guide to the latest ideas in marketing operations hands you over 200 packed pages of strategy, best practices, do's and don'ts, practical know-how, facts and figures, and ideas to optimise your marketing strategy, boost sales, market share, increase ROI and profit.

This book aims to hand you all the facts, figures and research data you need for the best decisions for a more profitable, more engaging marketing strategy. It also highlights all the facts, forecasts and trends identified by our experts from the global Marketing Factbook's vast database of market data, news, studies, research and articles, and presents you with an invaluable library of ideas and practical support you can call upon at will.

With The Marketing Operations Playbook at your side, you'll gain to a true goldmine of easily adaptable and up-to-date strategies, walk-throughs, trends, research and market data, plus all the supporting arguments you need to build a solid, profitable marketing strategy: All the know-how, strategies and ideas you need to get your own Marketing Playbook right, first time.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)