Eric Martindale

Enabling quick and effective feedback is the first step. There single channels era is dead. Brand selling must be a single interconnected system of many channels. Customers must be able to see or purchase a product in one channel, and flow seemlessly to another channel OF THEIR CHOICE. If they purchase your product in retail, they need to be able to scan a QR and easily end up on your site, your socials, or your email. (This will double as your lead collection.) Make it hard, and you’ll never hear back from a customer. Make it easy, and they will help you guide your product strategy.

Retail media is your surgical knife for moving slow moving inventory. On most platforms, you can focus on critical SKU’s, measure sales in real time, turn campaigns on and off at will, and adjust your budget as often as you want.

To target Gen Z, a marketer has to go far beyond the type of content they are consuming. More than ever, shopping has become extremely nuanced. Where does Gen Z prefer to shop? How do they prefer fulfillment, in-store, pickup, or delivery? How and when do they do their product research? What apps or socials do they use? *When* do they do their product research? While scrolling, before making a purchasing decision, or while walking the isles? This is where unified commerce becomes extremely important. Gen Z doesn’t see the discovery, research, or shopping boundaries that othergeneration see. They expect to flow seamlessly between channels, apps, and formats.

Two different things, both valuable. Personalization makes people feel connected and included. Should never take a backseat to automation. Automation brings speed, convenience, and simplicity. Automation tools should never automate personalization. They automate away the mundane and friction points.

If there’s an escalation in complaints, there’s almost always an underlying problem. Your ecommerce team needs the ability to temporarily pause order fulfillment until the root problem is identified. Even a few days of lost sales is better than a speed of negative reviews, lost customers, even sickness or injury.

Measure, analyze, adjust, iterate. Far too many marketers embrace the art of marketing, but not the science. Marketing is - or should be - equally analytical and iterative. Marketing is more than developing a good creative. It is measuring impression count, share of voice, CTR, CVR, ROAS, etc. Math doesn’t lie.