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After a challenging 2020 holiday season, retailers are preparing for another round of holiday shopping in 2021, this time with the hope that some amount of normalcy will return to consumer spending and shopping behavior. This report explores the trends that are shaping the 2021 holiday retail season and what they mean for retailers in the coming months and beyond. It also provides suggestions for how retailers can prepare for this year’s holiday shopping season, apply forward-thinking solutions, and draw insights from the hard-earned lessons of 2020.

This report explores how consumer packaged goods' retailers can adapt their marketing and operational strategies to meet the demands of tomorrow’s retail customers. It provides industry benchmarking information, analyses of key trends in consumer shopping behaviors, and suggestions on how to leverage omnichannel and digital channels to develop next-generation shopper experiences. Download your copy today!

Retailers faced unprecedented challenges in 2020. To meet safety precautions and protect both customers and employees from COVID-19, they had to significantly alter their store operations and adopt new methods of completing transactions. Now, retailers are taking the lessons they’ve learned in 2020 and applying them to their fraud prevention strategies. This report will explore what steps retailers have taken to prevent fraud in the past, how they will incorporate fraud prevention into their customer experience and revenue strategies in the future, and what types of solutions they’ll need to stay ahead of fraudsters in the years to come.

Direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands were dominant in the startup environment during the last decade. But to create a viable business, D2C brands must evolve beyond influencer marketing and internet ads to reach a more sustainable omnichannel business model. This report explores what’s driving the next generation of D2C businesses. Here, you’ll find benchmarking information and find out what strategies and technologies are driving the D2C industry.

The process of building customer relationships and selling products on social media, known as social commerce, has taken on more importance over the past year. As the retail world shifted to digital channels, brands sought to build more meaningful customer experiences for customers on the social media platforms they frequent the most. This report explores how retail brands are shifting their social media strategies among changing consumer habits and digital shopping trends, and what that means for the future of the retail industry.

Retailers can no longer look at the impact of fraud as simply ‘the cost of doing business.’ Now, identifying fraud patterns, building cases for prosecution, and improving coordination with law enforcement are top of mind for retail fraud professionals. But their success hinges on their ability to identify the partnerships, technologies, and skillsets required to accomplish these goals. This report also explores retailers’ long-term strategies, ambitions, and the means by which they hope to improve fraud prevention methods as they shift to a more proactive security posture.

Although the pandemic resulted in significant losses for the retail sector—Forrester predicted a $2.1 trillion loss globally—it also forced retailers to innovate faster. In the coming months, retailers and other consumer-facing organizations will need to gain significant traction in their digital transformations to meet the demands of the fully digitized consumer. In this report, we explore how retailers responded during a time of immense disruption and discover what lessons can be applied in 2021.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, retailers have witnessed a dramatic shift in consumer behavior. Adapting to this change has been one of the major challenges retailers have had to overcome in 2020. Some challenges they have faced include disruption to the supply chain and the economic hardship of government-imposed lockdowns, causing many well-loved brands across the globe to file for bankruptcy and countless people to lose their jobs. The pandemic has impacted retail businesses that rely heavily on customer loyalty solutions. Now more than ever, there are opportunities for retailers to build and grow their customer base by reimagining how they leverage customer loyalty solutions within their engagement strategy.

Retail organizations are striving to meet evolving consumer demands through the deployment of new omnichannel strategies and innovative customer experience (CX) technologies. Within this context, CMOs must meet a new set of challenges and customer expectations. In this report, we explore the perspectives, roles, and strategies of today’s retail CMOs. We share how CMOs are adapting to a changing retail landscape and what technology tools they’re advocating for within the organization to meet business-critical objectives.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers shifted rapidly to digital channels as brick and mortar stores closed their doors for safety purposes. This signaled a massive deployment of digital assets by retail companies, including spending on advertising. Smartly.io and eTail launched a study to determine how retail organizations were spending their marketing dollars on social media advertising. In this report, we explore how retail brands are adapting to disruption and changing consumer habits in the next year.

When Lowe’s wanted to acquire new customers and increase their loyalty, it targeted the military—a group whose love of DIY aligned with its brand. It gave everyone in the military community a 10% discount and tied the offer to its MyLowe’s loyalty program. The strategy paid off. The company enrolled millions of veterans into MyLowe’s, doubled the number of in-store military purchases, and kept them engaged. “The engagement rate on our military campaigns is 2-3x higher than other campaigns we are running.” --- Lowe’s

COVID-19 has disrupted traditional channels and fundamentally changed shopper behavior, putting ecommerce front and center. Consumers have moved online and that’s where they’ll stay. If you’ve shifted customers into your ecommerce channel, that’s a good start. But it’s not the end game. Now you need to earn their loyalty by building a direct relationship and owning the customer experience. These five strategies will help you accelerate your direct-to-consumer (D2C) efforts and spark loyalty that outlasts the pandemic.

Retailers invest countless resources to prepare for the traditional holiday shopping season. But non-traditional holidays like Mother’s Day, tax-free holidays, and even ‘Amazon Prime Day’ are reshaping the retail timeline, pushing retailers to change their seasonal strategies. In this report, you will learn how eCommerce retailers are improving the way they understand seasonal and holiday events and sell in those contexts year-round. You will also learn how experimentation, personalization, and automation factor into eCommerce retailers’ seasonal sales strategies.

As consumers increase the frequency of their cross-border eCommerce purchases, global retailers must face down growing rates of international fraud; simplify fulfillment amidst the proliferation of cross-border fulfillment partners; and better market to local consumers—without disrupting privacy and other regulatory concerns. They must do all this while maintaining business continuity during an unprecedented time of global change and disruption. In this report, we explore how retailers are improving international eCommerce in the face of four major challenges, including fulfillment, payments, fraud, and email marketing.

A customer data platform (CDP) is another iteration in a long line of customer management technologies. It joins a thriving ecosystem of business intelligence software that is already well known to most B2C companies. But it is also a technology that some companies either haven’t adopted or are still attempting to leverage. In this report, you’ll learn how B2C companies in the U.S. and Canada are currently using customer data technology in their efforts to better understand their customers. You’ll also learn how companies are using their CDPs to improve their data management capabilities, their media strategies, their risk and compliance programs, and other initiatives.

Retailers must determine the best balance of their digital technologies—the right ‘tech formula’ for long-term retail success. But as customer expectations and digital fluencies evolve, retailers need a constant education about what’s working and what’s not in terms of digital customer experience (CX). The eTail Digital Playbook is your real-world guide for long-term digital success. In this report, we measure the adoption and success of new CX tools to identify which digital technologies are all hype and which are business-critical.

As more consumers than ever turn to marketplaces and shopping platforms, brand manufacturers must adapt in kind. Old strategies relied on wholesale retail and physical brand stores. In this report, we explore the current platform environment to determine how brands decide on which platforms to sell and advertise. Discover the strategies and expectations among B2C brand manufacturers for multichannel marketing, advertising, and sales.

For retailers, customer expectations are evolving as quickly as the technologies they must employ to meet them. As personalizing experiences and providing seamless connections between environments grow in importance, retailers must find superior ways to leverage data and produce lasting relationships with their customers. In this report, we explore the impact of data technologies on retailers’ ability to optimize customer experiences and design customer “communities” that facilitate consistently positive outcomes.

Fresh for 2019, this new mobile report will show you what your peers are up to in the hot field of mobile commerce. 

In our second briefing of 2019, you’ll learn more about what strategies major retailers are currently implementing in order to stay ahead of the competition.

Along with mid-summer heat comes the first thoughts towards a season that defines retail success. The holidays may be half a year away, but at eTail we know that savvy brands are already starting to think about their holiday campaigns. That's why we've created our annual Holiday Report, which you can access here! See which strategies your peers are using to make the holidays joyous for their brands. 

With Amazon’s stranglehold on the eCommerce market, other online brands are finding it increasingly difficult to compete. But there's an unlikely contender for the eCommerce crown - and it comes in the form of the world’s largest company by revenue, and king of the physical retail space: Walmart. 

In consumer markets, brand identity is a critical—and difficult to define—component of business success whose contributions to KPIs are becoming more quantifiable than ever before. In this report, we ask marketers and creatives critical questions about their approaches to strategy, channels, platforms, and design and how they contribute to a new era in brand decision making.

In this Director's Report, we discuss the top 8 industry challenges affecting all retail companies. We also cover how retailers can convert present challenges into opportunities for growth and development with forward-thinking strategies.

In our first briefing of 2019, we give a glimpse into how major retailers are finding new paths forward and positioning themselves for success.

In the retail ecommerce industry, the process of creating digital design assets can be time-consuming and costly. From idea conception to publishing, an interactive design faces many barriers to going live, including access to technical resources and creative compromise. This how-to guide will help you build a business case for investing in a no-code digital experience builder.

As ecommerce marketers, your time and resources are likely dedicated to the noble cause of building site traffic. From email campaigns, to social media, to SEO, to retargeting ads, all roads (hopefully) lead to your ecommerce site. This is the core goal of every marketing effort, to drive traffic to your site. Which is why there is nothing more frustrating than seeing only a fraction of that hard-earned traffic convert.You know what to do, but your CMS has real limitations that slow you down. What if there was a better way? A way to create immersive experiences that not only drive a higher return on acquisition campaigns, but also drive stronger brand loyalty. You can! Best of all, you can do it without being dependent on your CMS or development resources.

When it comes to the holidays, some things never change—but your customers’ expectations aren’t one of them. If your plans for holiday readiness haven’t changed much over the years, you may miss out on opportunities to increase year-over-year sales during the time you need them most. In The New Rules of Holiday Readiness, you have access to Industry experts as they share insights, strategies, and expectations for the holiday season. You’ll also enjoy our eTail East Holiday Checklist—the best gift a retailer could ask for.