In cheerier news, high-touch retailer Nordstrom has purchased two customer technology companies: mobile clienteling app BevyUp and messaging-based e-commerce system MessageYes. The deal is apparently as about adding expert staff as much as using the specific products.
Direct mail remains a nutritious part of your complete marketing mix. But innovation is rare. So it’s exciting to see printer Quad/Graphics touting a new platform that can run tests “at a fraction of the cost of traditional mailing testing.” Their trick is to have an online survey panel preview mailer elements and then pick the best combination. Clever and effective but I had imagined something more magical.
More bad news: GlobalWebIndex found personalized Web site recommendations ranked a dismal 17th on the list of product discovery sources. Ray of hope: they were ahead of ads in movie theaters. Most cited sources were search engines, TV, and word of mouth.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.