Author: Jonathan Corley
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From Mass Markets to Personsonalized Experiences
Creating personalized experiences for your customer is historically an expensive alternative to mass marketing, but recent advances in CMS technology, cloud storage of customer data, and associated analytic capabilities have made this increasingly possible and practical for marketers. In the digital age, customers are in control, and this is especially true online. Industry leaders are…
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Outcomes and Interactions in Sitecore’s xDB
Interactions are the small snapshots of your customer’s dialogue with your brand. A few basic interactions include web visits, pages viewed, or emails opened. Sitecore’s xDB automatically stores all of these interactions in a Contact record. Over time, these interactions can lead to an Outcome. Outcomes were introduced in Sitecore 8, and they are becoming…
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Further Migration to the Digital Frontier
There’s no turning back. We’re turning our calendars toward 2016, and today several platforms alerted me with a look back at this day in my posts from recent years. Notifications like these have become so routine that I forget we weren’t always generating content incessantly. I recently discovered a 1936 Walter Benjamin essay where he…
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The Future of Fitting Rooms
Every year around the holidays, retailers gear up for billions of dollars in merchandise returns. A recent study released by The Retail Equation identifies the day after Christmas as the busiest return day in all of 2014. Soft good retailers tend to see the biggest jumps in return index following the holiday season. These retailers…
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Planning Fallacies for Complex Projects
I often find myself making simple judgment errors during planning sessions for large projects. Agile teams consistently embark uprepared for high risk projects because they underestimate odds they will face. Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow describes a common planning fallacy as “a lethargic unwillingness to think about what has happened during similar projects in the…
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Sitecore 8 with xDB turned off
“Will the Email Experience Manager module work in Sitecore 8 with analytics turned off?” A client in the middle of an upgrade to Sitecore 8 reached out recently about the impact of using Sitecore 8 without xDB. Sitecore introduced their Experience Database in version 7.5. Whether it’s called DMS, xDB, or Experience Marketing capabilities these…
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Forbes Predicts 5 Retail Tech Trends We Will See by 2020
“Stores will become like museums — we will go to see something, to learn and be entertained” Thomas Keenan, adjunct professor at the University of Calgary and author of a book called Technocreep, which explores the future of technology. Retail stores will embrace showrooming Analytics will be commonplace in physical stores Payments and transactions will become totally…