Loyalty Marketing

St. Petersburg, Fla. -- Valpak’s new coupon app for Apple Watch will deliver watch wearers savings in a high-tech way for the traditional coupon-mailer.

The coupon app will be available for download for Apple Watch and will mark an early Apple Watch entry for coupon companies.

New York -- High-profile retailers can make a high-impact difference when they use their clout to do good.  

Case in point: Ann Inc., parent to Ann Taylor and Loft, donated more than $4.3 million to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation to fund groundbreaking cancer research. The brands parlayed successes from the 2014 spring and fall campaigns and have brought the company's total corporate donation to $22.3 million in the past 10 years.

In theory, the launch of a limited-time, 250-piece Lilly Pulitzer designer collection on Sunday, April 19 should have been a major coup for Target. Instead, it was a major disaster in marketing, CRM, and operations. By now, the story of how consumer demand for Lilly Pulitzer overwhelmed Target’s website and stores has been told many times. Let’s look at three lessons retailers (including Target) can learn from this experience.

Know Your Customer

Seattle – Net earnings rose 16% to $494.9 million in the second quarter of fiscal 2015 from $427 million a year earlier at Starbucks Corp. Cost of sales grew at a slower pace than extremely strong revenue growth, which helped boost profits.

Starbucks plans to open 1,650 net new stores globally during fiscal 2015. This includes 600 new stores in the Americas, half licensed; 200 new stores in Europe/Middle East/Africa, primarily licensed; and 850 new stores in China/Asia-Pacific, primarily licensed.

As retailers feel the pressure to raise wages for employees, GameStop is focusing on education by giving staffers an incentive to enter the classroom.

GameStop is launching a new scholarship for its employees that would allow them or their children to go to college. The program is called “Power to the Scholars,” a reference to the “Power to the Players” slogan the company has popularized over the years.

By Melanie Curtin, OpiaTalk

Promotions, discounts, and coupons, oh my! It’s easy to have a love/hate relationship with them. On the one hand, they’re proven to bring in business and boost conversions. On the other, they can cut into margins.

It’s often assumed that the bigger the promotion, the better it will convert. But what if it’s not about the promotion itself? What if it’s more about the delivery?
 

The old expression, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime,” was taken to heart at Whole Foods where a recent fundraising campaign will provide loans to help people improve their lot in life.

Whole Food held concerts and craft fairs and thousands of small events that raised $4.6 million with the goal of alleviating global poverty. To achieve such a lofty mission, the retailer isn’t donating money to food banks to provide hand outs, but rather using the dollars to fund a microlending campaign.

Volatile demand for firearms seems to be easing at Cabela’s, which reported a profit rise of 6.9% in the first quarter despite a drop in same store sales.