I’ve been eating tapas in Barcelona at Microsoft Convergence.
One area I was keen to discuss with Microsoft was retail, an industry the tech giant is doing more in, not just with vanilla CRM but also POS, end-to-end solutions and web.
I spoke to Seth Patton, senior director of marketing for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Here’s what he had to say about change in this sector.
In the past decade there has been a massive increase in the amount of data that is potentially available to marketers.
But simply having a lot of data is of no real use to anyone. It’s the quality of the data and what you do with it that counts.
If I may indulge in the use of some buzzwords: marketers need to move from big data to smart data.
A new report from Econsultancy and Acxiom investigates the complexity of the data landscape, especially in relation to marketing, and the importance of getting it right in the mind’s eye of the consumer.
Entitled Delivering Value in the Data Exchange, the report is based on interviews with brand-side senior executives as well as an online survey of 1,000 UK consumers.
B&Q recently unveiled its brand new responsive website, which came complete with a whopping £60m price tag.
Obviously this created a great deal of interest as to where exactly the money was spent. One would assume that a majority of the investment went into upgrading the backend and in-store systems.
Thankfully B&Q were happy to provide us with some insight into the work behind the new site.
Here’s what director of omnichannel Mike Durbridge had to say…
I’m at Microsoft Convergence in Barcelona. I’m also in the middle of compiling a report on multichannel marketing.
Both of these endeavours leave me bemused as to why I haven’t heard people using the phrase ‘the year of CRM’.
Perhaps it just doesn’t have the ring to it that ‘year of mobile’ always did. Perhaps it’s because a lot of the CRM action is occuring in enterprise B2B and isn’t as sexy as above-the-line brand campaigns.
Anyway, the point is that CRM, a very traditional concept, through cloud and mobile, is a sophisticated and rapidly growing market. The market in 2013 was valued at $20.4bn by Gartner.
This growth isn’t set to change pace, with Econsultancy’s Marketing Budgets 2014 report showing CRM to be the technology most earmarked for investment this year (see chart below).
Microsoft Dynamics itself lays claim to 41 quarters of double digit growth, 4.4m users and 80% year-on-year net seat growth.
It has just announced increased ‘omnichannel’ functionality and seems to be coming up on the rails in a top five of CRM providers who are all making hay – Salesforce especially.
So, I thought I’d round up some reasons for this rise in CRM.
The last time we heard, Facebook was struggling with ‘waves of disenfranchised youngsters looking for a hipper alternative’.
Twitter is apparently struggling, with a drop in daily engagement, projected sales for the next three months falling short of expectations and a stock price plummet.
Instagram has stuck the knife into fledgling platform Vine by offering similar video capabilities for its already large incumbent audience. Brands seem to prefer it too.
It’s not looking pretty out there for our favourite social networks. Of course, whether you trust any of the above reports depends heavily on how much sway you have with the respected sources and how much confirmation bias is at work.
Let’s take a look at some actual statistics to see how healthy social media channels are in 2014.
Mobile is hot, HTML5 is hot, branded experiences are hot. What’s not to like about TreSensa?
I caught up with Robert Grossberg, CEO of TreSensa, to see how the young company is faring.
Take a look..
Paid search is a key element of marketing campaigns during the festive shopping season.
What should advertisers be focusing on to succeed this year?
While Google has set out to tackle exact match domains of dubious quality, it seems this is an SEO tactic that may still work.
Indeed, a recent study found that exact match domains were able to rank highly with fewer links and less content than branded competitors.
I’ve decided to delve deeper into this issue with some examples and opinions from a cast of SEO experts…
Recent research seems to casts doubt on the future growth of the once-thriving app economy.
According to Deloitte, almost a third of UK-based smartphone users no longer download new apps in a typical month. This finding has been replicated by Comscore in the US.
Worryingly, Deloitte also reported that nine out of ten users never spend money on apps. Even the seemingly infallible Candy Crush Saga profits are slumping much faster than expected.
So, has the notoriously short digital attention span already moved on? What are the reasons behind this ‘app fatigue’, and are there any implications for the place of native apps in future business models?
This is a huge increase from the 45% of online users using click and collect last Christmas.
Obviously the main benefit of click and collect is the ability to pick up purchases when and where the customer chooses.
You don’t have to wait in your house all day for a package, or take a trip down to the sorting office before it closes on a Saturday morning if you’ve missed it.
The other benefit is that theoretically click and collect should always be free to the customer. Almost 80% of the online shoppers surveyed said they expect click and collect to be offered for free.
It’s pleasing to have so many upper case letters in a headline.
I sent some questions to Jared Field, PPC specialist at high street fashion retailer, REISS.
It’s an interesting time for the retailer, with increased numbers of stores and successful expansion into the USA.
Here’s what Jared had to say about life on the PPC shop floor.
Econsultancy has covered in-store technology fairly frequently.
From endless aisle and clientelling, to RFiD and iBeacons, to social and mobile integration.
Tulip Retail is a startup providing a tablet solution for store associates to bridge that gap in product knowledge and to tailor the experience to a customer.
We caught up with the team to find out how it’s going.