Retail & Restaurant Marketing

SUMMARY: If your latest Web analytics report sets off the alarm for a major site overhaul, do you wait until the next scheduled update or tweak a few things and hope for the best? Or do you call an emergency meeting to get a redesign on the front burner?

See how a major eyewear retailer completely face-lifted their struggling site by adding new features, including a lead generation system that lets consumers schedule appointments online. Page views have doubled, and consumers and stores alike love the new self-service options. read the complete case study

SUMMARY: Internal political battles and headaches are a built in part of the job for ecommerce marketers at multichannel companies.

Get five specific tips to win over brick and mortar retail store managers to the ecommerce cause from MarketingSherpa's exclusive interview with GNC's Rod Kight.

His top advice -- don't measure Web success on ecommerce profits. Here's why: read the complete article

SUMMARY: "The salon market is expected to see growth, albeit slow, and reach $35.1 billion by 2012 at a CAGR of 2%." view the complete research record

SUMMARY: Wholesalers who supply products to independent retailers still depend on face-to-face meetings as their bread and butter even as ecommerce evolves. But one national wholesaler has embraced the Internet to boost orders for their reps.

See the steps they followed to create an email newsletter program. Retailers who subscribe are ordering 36% more often than those who don't, plus their orders are 13% larger. read the complete interview

SUMMARY: For the past five years, brick-and-mortar retailers have been (slowly) shifting marketing dollars away from TV toward online; that shift is still happening, but today online is not the only medium benefiting from it. Event marketing, word of mouth and traditional print advertising may also soon be seeing a lift, says George Anderson, Editor-in-Chief RetailWire.

Here are the top four trends Anderson has spotted in retail marketing for 2006.

Trend #1. Comparison shopping online, purchasing offline

Over the... read the complete article

by Anne Holland, President

Although I live in a fairly small town on a not-so-big island, every day as I drive to work on the mainland, I pass signs for eight different garden centers.

Obviously it's a garden-crazed community that I live in. But even so, with eight garden centers duking it out on the main road (not to mention the ones off it), the competition for marketshare is ferocious.

It's also tremendous fun for those of us... read the complete blog post