Consumer Analytics

Long Beach, N.Y. – For five-store women’s specialty retailer Ooh La La Boutiques, maintaining strong customer awareness is critical for successfully competing with larger, more established brands in its crowded vertical. Add in the impact of Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath on this chain which is located in and around Long Island, and you have a business in need of personal connection with its customers.

EVERETT, Wash. — Bealls is looking to Fluke Networks to help it address network issues and monitor the performance of its applications in the wake of the retailer's growing e-commerce business.

Fluke's Visual TruView solution will give the retailer comprehensive visibility into all key systems and applications across more than 500 network locations, enabling immediate remediation of performance issues and minimizing the impact on its 13,000 employees, customers and sales.

A carefully designed customer experience is the cornerstone of modern omni-channel customer relationship marketing. Retailers painstakingly craft marketing messages and engagement strategies that a customer will encounter at a specific time, in a specific place, via a specific channel. The experience often has some flexibility built in so it can adapt to individual customer behavior, wants and needs.

Williams Lake, B.C. – Canadian e-commerce company UNA Global LLC is opening a new online retail site, FitnessConnections4U.com. The site specializes in at-home fitness products such as weights, benches, exercise mats and vitamins and supplements. It also offers a free blog with product reviews, exercise routines, safety precautions, and articles.

Hicksville, N.Y. - The battle between the board of Men’s Wearhouse and its founder and former chairman, George Zimmer, continues to have a significant negative impact on the company’s online image.  According to a report by GenSent Insights, the company’s sentiment score, a measure of the tone surrounding a brand on a scale of -100 to +100, plummeted from an average of + 68 in mid-June to a low of -52.  The sentiment on Twitter alone fell from an uncommonly high score of +93 to a low of -80. 

Retailers share online insights

Speakers at the recent Internet Retailer Conference & Exposition in Chicago discussed how the retail industry is using a number of digital technologies to assist performance in areas such as CRM, marketing, driving customer traffic and converting sales. Following are a few brief highlights:

San Jose – Brick-and-mortar retail sales soared during this past spring, according to new metrics from RetailNext. Using its in-store analytics platform to collect metrics on millions of shopping trips to department stores and specialty retailers nationwide, RetailNext studied and released its analysis of traffic, conversion, sales, and average transaction values (ATV) for the spring season, including the four holidays of Easter, Mother’s Day, Memorial Day and Father’s Day, as well as the days leading up to Father’s Day and Easter Sunday.

ERP solution helps online sports retailer Fanatics respond to customer demand

Retail at its core is a pretty straightforward industry. Regardless of a retailer's vertical, sales channel(s), customer base, or any other distinguishing characteristic, at the end of the day the goal is pretty much the same. Jay Omdahl, VP enterprise resource planning for online sports merchandise retailer Fanatics, sums it up succinctly: "Get the best product at the right time to the right place."