Retail. It’s always evolving. When an industry is affected by digital habits, the economy and customer changes, businesses need to evolve with the industry to get ahead. To help your retail business keep up, Total Retail published “Total Retail’s 50 Best Retail Tips of 2018.” These tips have been sourced from articles published on their website and in their e-newsletter throughout the year.

Although all fifty tips were helpful, we picked our favorites and came back with the six most important takeaways, which are relevant and actionable. 

By nature, I am not a contrarian. I have written research papers, articles and books that are well researched and cite multiple sources. I seek agreement among more than one expert on best practices. That’s a safe and establishment point of view.

The article below originally appeared in the April 2018 edition of the J&C Newsletter. If you are not already receiving the newsletter, sign up on the form at the bottom of this article.

It has been difficult to gain much traction in the retail industry over the past few years. A downturn in the economy coupled with the arrival of the digital marketing age turned the entire industry on its head. Consumers were tight-fisted with their retail spending dollars, and it got even harder to draw in those who were still spending into the individual stores.

Many retail marketers say they know everything about their customers. I recently had a conversation with a CMO for a well-known store who said, “We do demographic, geographic, age ranges, household incomes; we do segmentation and post ads on Facebook and tweet at least 10 times per week. We combine that with the information we collect in our loyalty program as well.” The list of buckets seemed to go on and on.