Trends

Content marketing gets three times more leads than paid search advertising, according to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI). It costs 62 percent less than traditional marketing, Demand Metric has found. That's impressive, but can you confidently say you fully understand how it works?

Amazon, Apple, Google and the Zigbee Alliance are teaming up on a new IP-based standard for smart home device connectivity. Connected Home over IP will be an open source project. A working group will define a specific set of networking technologies to enable communication across smart home devices, ...

For the last 15 years I've written year end articles on where we've been and where we're going in CRM and more broadly in tech. This year, as I went through the pieces I wrote, it struck me that the major topics that were important in 2019 would be equally important in 2020. In my mind there are sev...

Amazon third-party sellers will not be able to ship Prime customers' orders using FedEx Ground and FedEx Home, as of Wednesday. "We have seen a drop in the delivery performance of FedEx Ground and FedEx Home ship methods for Seller Fulfilled Prime shipments," Amazon told sellers. The restriction is ...

Measuring Broadband America, a 10-year-old FCC program to ensure that Internet service providers deliver on their connection speed promises to consumers, has become unreliable. Companies including AT&T, Cox, Comcast and Verizon reportedly have been employing tactics to make their performance num...

In order to deliver superior customer experience, companies should combine human talent with technology, including much-needed digital expertise, to turn their current revenue and growth strategies into customer satisfaction. The companies that truly succeed engage their customers and strengthen the...

The world of paid digital advertising is changing fast. Over the last year alone, marketers have had to adapt to big changes on Facebook's platform. They now have to reckon with the continued growth of Amazon, which is taking an ever-larger bite out of online advertising budgets. Even Google, long t...

The fundamentals of delivering a good customer service experience in 2020 will be much the same as in 2019: Customers will expect convenient in-channel resolutions that take little effort on their behalf. However, with the rise of friction-free, asynchronous, and personalized private messaging chann...

E-commerce doesn't look the same today as it did in 1995. A company called "eBay" burst onto the scene that year, and Jeff Bezos shipped Amazon's first book order. That unleashed a flood of online shopping, and businesses and consumers never looked back. In the past two and a half decades, e-commerc...

More shoppers. Increased sales. Larger orders. This year's five-day stretch between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday left echoing "cha-chings" ringing through the retail atmosphere. A record 190 million Americans shopped during Thanksgiving weekend, and they're not done yet. This will be the first year...

Consumer packaged goods, or CPG, are the everyday items consumers use, such as food, beverages, clothes and household products. These products are ones that require regular replacement or replenishing. Due to the frequency of purchases and the low cost of switching brands, this market is extremely c...

We're used to discussing mergers and acquisitions in the tech sector, but splitting a company into two parts is a rarity. Analysts always have to ask who benefits and how? Shareholders? Other stakeholders, including customers? Employees? Why does this not happen more often? Surely businesses outgrow...

If Black Friday is the biggest sales day of the year, is it necessarily the best? For many small merchants, it seemed Black Friday was more beige than black. Black Friday is the biggest sales day of the year, but it's often dominated by massive merchants. For smaller businesses, there are other peak...

As consumers start to tackle their holiday shopping lists, retailers are scrambling to finish preparations for what's likely to be a record-breaking year. Total sales could break through the $1.1 trillion mark for the first time in history. Cyber Monday alone racked up an estimated $9.4 billion in s...