7 Retail Apps for the Holiday Shopping Spike

The holiday season is coming up faster than you can say checkout, and with those impending overstuffed shopping carts comes the need for greater customer service, personalization, and a seamless purchasing process.

The good news is retail solutions on AppExchange deliver that crucial 360-degree view of your customers, powering the B2C side of the consumer experience, and helping you reach more of your customers faster. With greater service and customer personalization, the boundaries between physical and digital storefronts are gone.

Hold onto your reusable shopping bags because we’ve got a list of seven retail AppExchange apps to help you connect with your customers across the entire shopping journey, whether you’re re-engaging the dreaded abandoned shopping cart for Aeropostale, or identifying key competitive market opportunities for startups like Camp Chef.

BounceX

BounceX’s Behavioral Marketing Cloud identifies a larger portion of your funnel and enables you to deploy people-based marketing campaigns both onsite and through email.

For Trevor Brooks, Digital Project Lead of eCommerce Operations at Aeropostale, the goal was to re-engage the abandoned shopping cart on the Aeropostale website. “I was looking for a partner to provide a great service. BounceX delivers,” shared Trevor in the Dreamforce session, 7 Retail B2B & B2C AppExchange Apps To Power Your Digital Transformation. With BounceX, Aeropostale went from identifying 7% of users to 50%, as well as increasing their website conversion rate by 12%. “I don’t have to spend as much time with BounceX to get the work done, and that’s kudos to them and their service,” stated Trevor.

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CPG Toolbox

A robust, easy-to-use tool for trade planning, CPG Toolbox delivers vital information for business plan management, budget/sales objective allocation, trade promotion funding, and much more.  

A Fruit of the Loom Business Systems Analyst shared this AppExchange review of CPG Toolbox: “As a Business Systems Analyst – I have worked with CPG Toolbox for our company’s trade promotion needs. The system has been great in allowing us to effectively track trade spend and plan our promotions with ease. The settlement process has saved significant time in allowing us to efficiently create and distribute our credit memos and track deductions. The reporting feature is very user friendly and has allowed us to provide our finance team with up-to-date trade spend reports."

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DemandJump

DemandJump provides the key insights marketers need to focus marketing budget where it matters the most. With this solution, you’ll optimize your marketing budget, grow traffic, and drive revenue.

In this customer story about Camp Chef, a company that produces high quality products offering efficient ways to cook for almost any outdoor gathering, leveraging DemandJump’s competitive intelligence insights helped them understand competitors’ marketing strategies. With DemandJump, Camp Chef was able to immediately identify gaps and opportunities in a growing, competitive category, and saw a 268% increase in search revenue month-over-month.

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ICIX

ICIX offers network and solutions for trading partner collaboration and supply chain transparency in retail and consumer goods. You can build customer trust and protect your brand by helping retailers and manufacturers to effectively manage product safety, compliance, and more.

According to this case study, brands like Walmart use ICIX to deliver accuracy and automation for their complex processes. For instance, ICIX streamlines the process for safety testing and compliance for the products Walmart sells. “Anytime an item is ordered, the ICIX system...pings the testing lab data...to determine whether there is a passing test report for that item,” shared Ken Hinson, Senior Director of Product Safety and Compliance at Walmart in this same case study. If there is no passing test report, ICIX triggers a test request and that process begins.

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Localytics

Localytics is a unique mobile engagement platform that breaks down the silos between analytics and marketing, allowing brands to send more targeted marketing campaigns and understand which messages are driving positive changes in user behavior.

HSN sought a repository of push messages for their app users to reference. Localytics was able to do this by streamlining push messages and driving traffic to the HSN app, which resulted in HSN’s mobile conversion likeliness increasing by 5X. “We wanted a more personalized onboarding experience,” shared Sarah Gorman, Director of Retention Marketing at HSN in that same Dreamforce session. This 15-day onboarding process gave users a strong overview of the app, as well as common HSN terminology. “We wanted to educate our consumers in the first 15 days of downloading the app.” From there, HSN would personalize the experience with Localytics data to power relevant messages to users.

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Movable Ink

Movable Ink’s platform goes beyond automating the traditionally complex process of creating visual content. Marketers can create unique variations for every consumer — the moment they engage with it — whether in email, web, or display.

In this Movable Ink case study, the spotlight is on HSN, and how they used Movable Ink’s web-cropping technology to pull live content from their website directly into their emails. This gave customers the most up-to-the-minute deals and content, no matter when they opened the email, with no extra work required by the HSN marketing team. Now HSN customers have access to the most recent deals, making it easier for them to make a purchase.

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SessionM

SessionM and Salesforce are joining forces to deliver a fully integrated, omnichannel loyalty solution for enterprise marketers. Fueled by real time data and personalization, Loyalty Cloud maximizes the lifetime value of your customer relationships.

This case study shares the story of Red Robin, and the results of rebuilding their “royalty program” and engaging their registered royalty members with SessionM. To originally build the program, the restaurant used multiple software solutions which operated in silos, causing a lengthy process for their members, many of whom where inactive. With SessionM, Red Robin creates and sends targeted offers and campaigns, which reduces offer creation time from weeks to hours. SessionM triggers customer journeys around campaigns with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and enables customer service agents to view an individual’s purchase history and loyalty data with Salesforce Service Cloud.

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AppExchange has over 5,000 solutions to power your digital transformations similar to brands like HSN, Aeropostale, and more. Check out all of the AppExchange retail solutions right here. For even more insights, get expert advice to help you crush your holiday sales goals in the 2018 Holiday Readiness Guide.