What’s so hard about personalized email?

Behavior driven personalization of email (and just about anything else, like in-app notifications or text messages) isn’t easy for most applications today. In most cases, the  activity related data is locked away in an analytics application, while the actual content is located in a content management system or content repository. Marketers or  Developers looking to send email based on user behavior on sites or in apps face...

We are all in love . . . with our phones. And where our love and attention goes, advertising usually follows. 

Though, strangely, display advertising on our beloved phones just doesn’t seem to be taking off. 

I don’t think it will.  Not to the same extent that text and display ads have seeped into every nook of desktop-based media. 

There’s one simple reason. Not enough room. 

Jonathan Baskin coined a particularly compelling phrase to describe...

We're delighted to announce that we've been recognized in the National Association of Home Builders' Annual Pillars of the Industry Awards for our work with our client Gables Residential on Gables.com. Here's the video! (click on the 4th one) and of course you can also check out the press release from Gables. 

Anyone reading this blog post probably knows that there are a lot of players involved - and of course we couldn't have asked for better client partners than the team at Gables. ...

Ready to kill zombie marketing investments in selling materials? 

It just so happens, we’re in the middle of the budgeting season for many companies. It’s the time of year where heads of departments, CIO’s, CMO’s, and CRO’s (Chief Revenue Officers) put together their plans for how and where they are going to invest company resources to drive growth and profits. 

The overwhelming tendency is to pick up the plan from last year and tinker.  2013 doesn’t...

I've started a blog at http://ThomasAKlein.com for me to write exclusively on the subject of Customer Engagement Strategy. Just in case you were wondering, TomKlein.com was taken, so don't start calling me Thomas or think that I've gone highbrow or something. 

So, what's this new blog about? 

Customer Engagement Strategy is the fundamental rethinking and redesign of core customer processes - applying new technologies to achieve dramatic improvements in critical customer measures...

With an iPad (and really any tablet), you can now arm the sales force with a sharable computer. 

But what about all of those laptops that CIO’s have been buying for years? 

They’ve been put to use creating PowerPoint presentations.  Not great ones, either.  

But ask a sales person how many times she has let a client or prospect “drive” her laptop to surf the web together? 

It just doesn’t happen. 

By bringing together a tablet...

Step 1 - Where are you taking your business and what makes your brand compelling?

Once you’ve decided to develop a strategy to guide your eCommerce investments (as opposed to following a more bovine approach), it’s important to first establish a high level business ambition and clarify just what your brand stands for. Only then will you have the context for considering potential investments. 

Your business ambition is just that. What business are you in, what target...

We’re in a new era of eCommerce. The barrier between the online and the offline world has crumbled. 

 Just about every consumer has a smartphone in her pocket. Many stores have tablets available for use in store by either consumers or sales people. Concepts that used to be restricted to online, such as product lookup, live-chat, and even self checkout are now perfectly viable in a physical location.  

Are you ready? 

In the same way that enterprise systems...