As some of you may know, Iterable participated in eTail West 2017 last week. The conference, one of the most influential events in retail, welcomed more than 1,000 industry experts to share best practices.
Among the speakers were Iterable’s CEO Justin Zhu, who discussed how to optimize shopping cart abandonment campaigns, and Lindsey Greenwald from our Enterprise Sales team, who moderated an interactive roundtable during the Pre-Conference Email and CRM Summit.
Now that we’ve returned from balmy Palm Springs, we’d like to share our four key takeaways from our conversations at this year’s eTail West.
1. Mobile-First Marketing
Reports show that 60 percent of America’s online consumers use mobile devices for shopping. Creating a seamless shopping experience on mobile is crucial to retailers, according to industry leaders at the conference.
Iterable has been an active player in increasing mobile user engagement. We enable intelligent mobile messages including SMS, push notifications and in-app notifications, among many other channels (email, web push and social media).
Our intuitive workflows and drag-and-drop templates help marketers save time from data wrangling and tech-savvy campaign setup. Iterable also provides deep linking capabilities on both Android and iOS devices to ensure a smooth transition between message and mobile app.
2. The Catch-22 With Amazon
Working with Amazon can be both a blessing and a curse for retailers — the e-commerce behemoth handles up to 30 percent of all online goods sold in the U.S., about half of which come from third-party sellers, but conference speakers simply had to point to bookseller Borders as a cautionary tale of what happens when an Amazon partnership sours.
Interestingly, despite its firm hold as America’s #1 e-retailer, Amazon does not actively engage new users via email during the first couple weeks after signup. According to our User Engagement Top 100 Report, Amazon did not send out a single email over the course of our research — a ripe opportunity for other businesses interested in capturing consumer attention.
3. Making Big Data Actionable
Leveraging big data remains a significant challenge for many retailers. Getting a 360-degree view of your customers is nigh impossible if all your data is trapped in numerous siloes. Today’s growth marketers are looking for efficient, cost-effective ways to maintain a single source of information across web, email, social and other marketing channels to improve campaign results.
This year’s eTail West saw a rising demand for robust business intelligence tools, analytic platforms and machine learning technologies. When it comes to expanding your martech stack, Iterable’s trusted partners like Segment make it easy to collect, manage and route all of your data to better inform your marketing messaging.
4. The Lofty Goal of Personalization
Because of the struggle to make big data actionable, most marketers in retail find it difficult to go beyond blasts to targeted campaigns. The current reliance on creative and IT resources makes it challenging to test messaging and change strategic direction on the fly.
For larger retailers working with legacy marketing technology providers, it can take months to iterate on a project, which is exactly why marketing professionals list a lack of executive buy-in as a top hindrance to their efforts.
Iterable’s growth marketing platform is agile, so marketers can achieve personalized messaging and make tweaks ad-hoc without engineering support. It enables sophisticated segmentation and A/B testing across all channels for more effective campaigns. Marketers can now spend less time justifying their programs and more time engaging their users.
Do any of these takeaways resonate with you? Request a demo today to see how Iterable can help you go beyond the basics of marketing and achieve exponential business growth.
