WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

Looking at different ecommerce metrics is like gazing into the night sky: there are so many data points you can (and should) track that the information available feels...infinite. Connecting and integrating data across different channels and platforms can be a full-time job, and as a result, teams are constantly playing catch-up with all of the numbers and data points they’re tracking across spreadsheets and dashboards. Enter an ecommerce dashboard.

IN THIS GUIDE YOU’LL LEARN
- How moving beyond dashboards can uncover new growth opportunities
- Tactics for deeper analysis based on churn, product, and pipeline data
- What type of solutions inspire faster, more collaborative analytics workflows
- How top companies use Mode to accomplish these goals

Technology is the future of customer experience. These statistics show the grow of new technology and how it impacts everything about the future of customer experience.

The golden era of AI is here. But how can organizations best harness the technology and integrate it seamlessly into their CRM? This MIT report explores the next-gen powers of AI for CRM. Download the whitepaper for a deep dive on how Salesforce Platform, embedded with Einstein, turns customer data into predictive insights to deliver the most personalized, intelligent experiences for both customers and employees.

That said, a handful of forward-thinking malls are leading the way in advanced analytics. They’re using prescriptive and predictive analytics—built into user-friendly tools with strong data-visualization capabilities—to make smarter business decisions. In this article, we home in on how malls are using advanced analytics in an especially critical part of their business: revenue management. They’re determining the best mix of stores, understanding and planning store adjacencies that drive higher consumer spending and longer mall visits, and engaging in more-informed rent negotiations with tenants. It’s paying off: malls using these tools have increased their leasing revenues by double-digit percentages.

Daisy Intelligence is one such artificial intelligence vendor. The Toronto-based company focuses on retail merchandise planning: promotion, pricing and demand forecasting optimization. We spoke with Gary Saarenvirta, CEO of Daisy Intelligence with the intention of finding answers to the following questions:
Why might grocery vendors or supermarkets need AI?
How can retailers leverage AI for optimizing merchandising decision making?

Check out the top-performing retailers and ecommerce companies as evaluated by Sailthru's experts in retail personalization and customer experience.

What would the impact be on your business if you could improve the effectiveness of your advertising by 25%? This document outlines the different parts of a good advertising setup and provides advice on best practices.

Majority of websites are generic, one-size-fits-all, and unvarying. And email isn’t much better with manual input, static cadences, and fixed content. Marketers and audiences deserve better, though. As big data, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and deep learning become larger influences and more attainable, now is the time for digital marketers to seize upon the potential these technologies offer. Brands can now build custom on-site and email experiences for individuals that are automated and personalized by incorporating predictive modeling, journey mapping, and algorithms.

The most anticipated slide deck of the year is here. Key takeaways:

• Global smartphone growth is slowing: Smartphone shipments grew 3 percent year over year last year, versus 10 percent the year before. This is in addition to continued slowing internet growth, which Meeker discussed last year.
• Voice is beginning to replace typing in online queries. Twenty percent of mobile queries were made via voice in 2016, while accuracy is now about 95 percent.
• In 10 years, Netflix went from 0 to more than 30 percent of home entertainment revenue in the U.S. This is happening while TV viewership continues to decline.
• Entrepreneurs are often fans of gaming, Meeker said, quoting Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and Mark Zuckerberg. Global interactive gaming is becoming mainstream, with 2.6 billion gamers in 2017 versus 100 million in 1995. Global gaming revenue is estimated to be around $100 billion in 2016, and China is now the top market for interactive gaming.
• China remains a fascinating market, with huge growth in mobile services and payments and services like on-demand bike sharing. (More here: The highlights of Meeker's China slides.)
• While internet growth is slowing globally, that’s not the case in India, the fastest growing large economy. The number of internet users in India grew more than 28 percent in 2016. That’s only 27 percent online penetration, which means there’s lots of room for internet usership to grow. Mobile internet usage is growing as the cost of bandwidth declines. (More here: The highlights of Meeker's India slides.)
• In the U.S. in 2016, 60 percent of the most highly valued tech companies were founded by first- or second-generation Americans and are responsible for 1.5 million employees. Those companies include tech titans Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook.
• Healthcare: Wearables are gaining adoption with about 25 percent of Americans owning one, up 12 percent from 2016. Leading tech brands are well-positioned in the digital health market, with 60 percent of consumers willing to share their health data with the likes of Google in 2016.

If you collect email information at the point of sale for your loyalty program, you can import store transactions directly into AdWords yourself or through a third-party data partner. And even if your business doesn’t have a large loyalty program, you can still measure store sales by taking advantage of Google’s third-party partnerships, which capture approximately 70% of credit and debit card transactions in the United States. There is no time-consuming setup or costly integrations required on your end. You also don’t need to share any customer information. After you opt in, we can automatically report on your store sales in AdWords.

Instacart is excited to announce our first public dataset release, “The Instacart Online Grocery Shopping Dataset 2017”. This anonymized dataset contains a sample of over 3 million grocery orders from more than 200,000 Instacart users.

For each user, we provide between 4 and 100 of their orders, with the sequence of products purchased in each order. We also provide the week and hour of day the order was placed, and a relative measure of time between orders.

• 70% of retail decision makers globally are ready to adopt the Internet of Things to improve customer experiences.
• 73% of retailers rate managing big data as important or business-critical to their operations.
• 78% of retailers say it is important or business-critical to integrate e-commerce and in-store experiences, so an omnichannel experience is delivered to every customer.
• 87% of retailers will deploy mobile point-of-sale (MPOS) devices by 2021, enabling them to scan and accept credit or debit payments anywhere in the store.
• 90% of retailers will implement buy online, pickup in store by 2021.