WW's Digital Transformation That Drives Growth in a Changing World

Omni-channel customer journeys and personalization are key principles in WW's (formerly Weight Watchers) path to digital transformation and meeting the dynamic needs of today's customers. In this keynote session, WW's Chief Product Officer will discuss how the company approached digital transformation and the successes they're seeing from it so far.

Let's Get this First Party Data Started - Growing Ecommerce in the Value Exchange Economy

In an environment where Big Tech and government policies are increasing data privacy restrictions, tapping into the value exchange economy is the true path to ecommerce growth. With fresh insights from CommerceNext's 3rd annual marketing benchmarking study, this session explains why marketing that focuses on first- and zero-party data is critical so that brands can create valuable experiences that encourage customers to "opt in" as third party data phases out.

How THE YES Adapted Shopping for Today's Customer Needs

Customer needs have changed driving huge shifts in online shopping behaviors. Mobile commerce will account for 73% of all retail ecommerce sales by 2021 (Statista) and 80% of shoppers are more likely to buy from a company that offers personalized experiences (Epsilon). These accelerating trends have driven THE YES to create a new shopping experience that is both mobile-first and personalized. Learn how THE YES is adapting to today's customers and how you can do the same.

The Activist Consumer: Why Sustainability & Social Responsibility Matter

Consumers are leaning into social change, and so too must brands. Accenture reported that 63% of surveyed global consumers prefer purchasing from companies with a purpose that reflects their own values and beliefs. In this session, we talk to brands embracing sustainability and social responsibility to share their experience with the activist consumer. We also ask them how they balance their mission with their bottom line.

Think Different: Why Lands' End is Embracing Gen X

Lands' End is zigging while other brands are zagging. While most retailers and brands are focused on Gen Z and younger customers, Lands' End is investing in Gen X, a generation that thinks about the future, is both nostalgic and tech-savvy and embraces online and offline. In this session, Chief Customer Officer Sarah Rasmusen will describe Lands' End's marketing efforts that keep Gen Xers loyal to their brand.

Discovery Shopping: How to Create Confidence and Inspire Self Expression

How do you inspire customers to make a purchase when they are just browsing without a hard sell or aggressive promotions? The answer is discovery shopping. When a customer is "just looking," discovery shopping helps create an engaging and personalized experience that not only convinces them to buy, but also builds loyalty. In this session, you'll learn the ins and outs of discovery shopping from a brand that has embraced it to the core.

Today's Customers, Tomorrow's Growth

Consumer data privacy has become the new tech battleground. In response, operating systems and platforms have increased data protection and limit many of the mechanisms organizations previously depended on for targeting and attribution - fundamentally shifting the consumer data ecosystem. Tapestry has embraced these changes as part of its consumer centric transformation - embracing customer retention strategies while adopting digital marketing and measurement strategies in anticipation of the new normal. Tapestry's Chief Digital Officer Noam Paransky will join us to share how Tapestry has been adapting customer experience and marketing in response to today's customer needs.

New Advertising Strategies for a New Era of Growth

The next era of growth will be framed by both opportunities and challenges. On the one hand, economic growth is driving consumer spending to new levels. On the other hand, privacy changes by Apple and Google diminish traditional marketing tactics. This panel discusses the expected shifts in 2022 advertising strategies, along with the measurement tactics and channels showing the most promise for growth next year.

How Fender Embraced Community and the DTC Playbook to Drive New Growth

Like many traditional brands, Fender's focus pre-Covid was on educating consumers and driving them into stores. Forced to pivot due to Covid, Fender leaned into the community to drive online growth through email and text messaging. Learn how the iconic brand hyper-personalized their communication, using segmentation to talk to the right user at the right time with the right message. The result was an over 4X increase in Fender Play sign-ups, doubling the size of their community and creating a solid ecommerce foundation for growth.

Optimizing the Customer Journey: Ecommerce Experiences that Delight Customers

The customer journey has evolved in the last two years, fueled by ecommerce growth and shaped by changing consumer behaviors. In this session, hear how leading brands are creating exceptional customer experiences that truly delight customers. We'll discuss the new customer journey across online and offline channels and how ecommerce needs to adapt, as well as innovative strategies for creating sticky ecommerce experiences.

Why DTC is Eating the World: The Future of Brands

Shopify reports that two out of every five Americans have made a purchase directly from a brand or manufacturer, bypassing marketplaces and big box retailers. By 2022, the number of DTC ecommerce customers will hit an all-time high of 103 million. Brooklinen is at the center of this trend and has pulled off the amazing feat of managing skyrocketing growth while remaining profitable. This conversation will get at the heart of how DTC is gaining market share by winning the hearts and minds of consumers.

Experiment Your Way to Growth

Customer behavior and expectations are changing quicker than ever before. Adapting to meet these expectations becomes harder as growth goals increase. This session will demonstrate that with the right strategy in place and an approach centered around the customer experience, you can depend on an experimentation program to help you scale, maintain agility through rapid growth and properly adapt at the speed of changing customer behavior to soar past your goals.

CMO Next: How Poshmark Navigates The Changing Marketing Landscape

With more data privacy restrictions, greater competition and increased costs for paid channels, business as usual is a recipe for irrelevancy for retailers and brands. Despite this marketing landscape, Poshmark, a leading social marketplace for new and secondhand style, continues to experience significant growth. This discussion will provide a CMO POV on how a brand has successfully navigated a highly dynamic marketing environment.

Building A Modern Marketing Org for Today's Growth Challenges

Marketings orgs require tricky balancing acts while navigating a landscape of customer behaviors that are constantly in flux. On one hand, marketing requires specialized expertise that the broader organization may lack understanding of or even view with suspicion. At the same time, marketers must collaborate closely with the rest of the organization to support broader corporate goals. All while everyone feels they "know" marketing and supply a steady stream of ideas and critiques. Hear practical advice and lessons learned on how CMOs can succeed in such a dynamic environment.

Shopatainment: Is Livestream Social Commerce the Future?

Shopping is not only about securing the necessities of life; it also makes us happy, relieves stress and helps us create our personal identity. Shopatainment - a $137 billion / year sales juggernaut in China - taps into those unconscious forces by blending entertainment, commerce and content into extremely engaging livestreaming video. In this session, we will discuss how two leading US retailers are turning to Shopatainment’s prioritization of entertaining video over product images to take their customer engagement and revenue to new heights.

How AR Can Enhance Advertising & Drive New Engagement

Ecommerce has come a long way, but there are still some aspects of the in-store experience that are just hard to beat like being able to touch and see the product, determine if it fits your space and style, and easily ask questions. In this session, we'll demonstrate how today’s technology can help you create ecommerce experiences that are as good as (or even BETTER than) in-store experiences. We’ll discuss how AR and VR technology has advanced beyond offering 360 degree product views to reach a new level of immersive experience that allows the customer to become truly familiar with a product and bond with the brand.

Loyalty: Say Hello to New Communities and Goodbye to Cookies!

Now, more than ever, marketers must find creative ways to get consumers to share their personal data. In this session, we will examine the methods retailers are using to encourage consumers to provide their first party/zero party data.The goal being to create an “invited personalization” at scale that not only promotes loyalty among existing customers but also provides opportunities to engage new, high-value consumer communities.

How Marketing and Ecommerce Collaborate at Crocs to Fuel Growth and a Seamless Customer Experience

Marketing and ecommerce often operate with different playbooks — marketing focusing on brand and storytelling and ecommerce immersed in performance marketing. In this session, we'll hear how the marketing and digital chiefs at Crocs are operating from the same playbook and generating amazing results. Crocs reported that digital represented more than a third of global Q2 2021 revenue after growing 25% during the quarter.

How Mented Cosmetics Engages SMS Subscribers with a Layered Segmentation Strategy

Mented Cosmetics, a makeup brand founded by women of color and designed for diverse skin tones, has created a mature segmentation strategy to engage different groups within their SMS audience. In this session, you’ll learn how the brand uses customer attributes like engagement level and VIP status to tailor their campaign messages to the individual subscriber. Plus, discover campaign ideas for the upcoming holiday season—from product launches to daily deals to early holiday-inspired promotions.

Shopping at the Edge: How to Meet Your Shoppers Anywhere

Shoppers are turning to new channels - social, voice, even gaming. If your brand isn’t there, they’ll turn to competitors who are. Quickly expand to new touchpoints, create unified omnichannel experiences, and unlock new international markets with a composable and connected approach to commerce.

6 Steps to a Successful Headless Commerce Transformation

Come in on time and on budget with these 6 steps to a successful headless commerce transformation. Learn from leaders who have executed headless projects for tips and best practices to follow, as well as pitfalls to avoid.

Upselling One-time Buyers: The Growth Milestone You Can't Afford to Ignore

Fact: two-time buyers are 9x more likely to make repeat purchases than one-time buyers. Converting the second sale is a growth milestone you can’t ignore—yet, it’s also one of the most difficult marketing challenges you will face. In this session, you’ll learn a foolproof 4-point framework for converting one-time buyers into repeat purchasers with timely, targeted, cross-channel engagement.

Demystifying Headless Commerce: What It Is and Why You Need It

When it comes to the customer experience, even the most beautiful and engaging online sites will fall short if the backend is slow and the buying process is fragmented. In this breakout session, we discuss how headless commerce decouples the front and back ends of your site, allowing API flexibility to any front end you choose: digital storefront, voice, mobile, auto and more. Learn how Headless Commerce can create the best possible customer experience to drive revenue growth.

How Staples managed to acquire 53% more new customers via Paid Search

Earlier this year, Staples started questioning the effectiveness of their Paid Search program. They had been seeing a very strong Return on Advertising Spend, but, like many other retailers, they were selling to existing customers – people who would have bought anyway. Staples kicked off an engineering project to access their first-party data to provide signals to Google’s AI bidding system. Within weeks, a 10+ years-old Paid Search program saw a step-change in performance and raised immediate awareness among C-suite executives. Learn how to steer AI-based bidding systems to find new pockets of customers, and future proof your digital advertising campaigns!

Advanced Multichannel Marketing Strategies for a Cookieless World

Third-party cookies are “crumbling” and with them your ability to track consumer behavior. In this session, we will demonstrate how to turn your first-party data into personalized, relevant customer experiences that build loyalty. Learn what it takes to become a brand that consumers love by keeping track of past, present and future consumer behavior and how to adjust as your customers’ change direction.

How Leading Brands Are Bringing Humans Back Into the ECommerce Equation

Ecommerce has become a formulaic DIY shopping experience while competing with Amazon continues to get harder. Today's consumers demand more and want better online experiences. The most innovative retailers are addressing the problem by leaning into "H-Commerce" (H is for human) and building intimate, highly-personalized 1:1 experiences. In this panel discussion, attendees will walk away with real examples of how leading retailers are bringing the human touch to online channels to increase repeat purchases and LTVs.

Mastering Marketplace Advertising: The Who, The What and The How

Retail media and advertising on marketplaces are proving to be scalable marketing channels for DTC brands. But, it can be difficult for a marketer to know not only which sites to advertise on based on customers' purchase behavior but also which products will benefit most from ad spend. This session brings clarity to the ever-changing landscape, the technology being used and how to take a data-driven approach to marketplace management.

Personalization: The Mind, Heart and Soul of Customer Experience

During the pandemic, customer acquisition became a problem easily solved. Consumers, as the data showed, were eager to shop online, discovering new brands and products as they looked for ways to fill their time at home. Now that the customers have arrived, businesses are now tasked with keeping them. In this session, we look at how personalization helps you enhance the customer experience by ensuring you put the right product in the front of the right customer at the right time -- driving conversions and establishing loyalty that will have customers returning to your brand again and again.

Keep Your Eyes on the Prize: Unlocking the Keys To Attribution

Marketers dream of mastering attribution, but there is no single silver bullet solution. Businesses need to use multiple methods of measurement to get the most accurate insight. Learn how to leverage mixed media modeling (MMM), multi-touch attribution (MTA), incrementality testing and other methodologies to set yourself up for long-term success.

Crushing Creative on Social! Making the Most out of Snap, Tiktok, Facebook, and Instagram

While there is little doubt that creative is a critical lever in digital commerce; it always seems to take a back seat when it comes to dynamic product ads. Between time and volume pressures, very few brands have invested in creating engaging, fresh and interesting ads that properly tell the brand story. Join this session to learn how the best brands in the world are turning to AI and automation to bring creative and storytelling back into their dynamic product advertising.

The New Ecommerce Journey: 5 Ways to Optimize Digital Experiences

Given the pandemic-driven surge of online spending, there has never been a better time to level up your optimization game. While most brands look for anomalies in the data or survey customers occasionally to find where to make site improvements, we’re going to demonstrate how deep insights into customer problems (like rage-clicking) can help you optimize digital experiences better than anything else. We’ll also cover best practices on how to get your team to better empathize with your customers allowing them to quickly implement meaningful site changes.

Next Generation Direct Mail & Catalog Strategies for DTC Brands

As the digital marketing landscape has become more expensive, marketers are looking to alternative channels outside of Google and Facebook to drive new customer acquisition and retention. This has fueled a resurgence in direct mail, from small formats to full- size catalogs. Direct mail has incredible capabilities for targeting and measurement, which have driven more advanced strategies around segmentation, contact frequency, form factors and creative. When integrated with a digital contact strategy so that the consumer receives multiple contacts across online and offline channels, response rates increase double digits. Join this session to hear about Made In’s great success with direct mail and learn how direct mail can work for your brand.

How To Use CDP For Ad Targeting That Really Hits the Mark

Retailers have a problem: how do you serve consumers with relevant advertising in the face of ever-stricter privacy controls? The answer is to use a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to unify your online, offline and IoT device customer data to show you when and where to advertise. In this session, we will show you how a CDP can help you understand consumer behavior across locations, devises and even time enabling you to make your ads personalized, relevant and, most importantly, profitable.

Drive Loyalty and Revenue with Leading Edge Digital Customer Experience

To keep customers coming back, you need to make sure they can easily reach you whenever they need help - through the channels they prefer. Join this session to learn how retailers use messaging to create personalized, end-to-end engagement for greater customer loyalty. You'll hear real-world examples from leading companies and discover how you can deliver CX success in your organization.

Moving with Speed: How Walmart Launched the Exclusive Gap Home Brand in Record Time

As consumers rapidly shifted to working from home during the pandemic, they needed furnishings that were both functional and beautiful. Suppliers and retailers had to swiftly accelerate their decision-making process and adopt innovative technologies to meet this demand. The new Gap Home brand at Walmart is a great example of how two, iconic retail brands moved with speed to develop, design, build and ship products from a new brand in only 6 months. This session will show how a big organization can respond quickly and nimbly if they work smart, leverage technology and keep the customer at the center of everything they do.

The Lord & Taylor Story: Rebooting for Conversion and Lifetime Value in the Next Normal

Lord & Taylor was America’s first department store, operating continuously from 1826 to February 2021, when they finally closed their remaining 38 stores. The pandemic had accelerated the transformation of brick and mortar retail resulting in Lord & Taylor being reborn as a digital native ecommerce destination. This session will dive into the power of marrying a great brand with a blank canvas. Join us as we demonstrate how an iconic retailer is using customer identity and shopping history to evolve their site experiences for the Next Normal.

Linear TV: New Strategies for Measuring Performance and ROI

TV’s got the wrong rap. Many believe TV can only be used for top-of-funnel branding and storytelling, but that’s a myth. In this session, we demonstrate how TV can target with precision to reach new audiences and how to spend your TV budget with accountability, transparency and flexibility.

Achieving True Personalization by Activating Your First Party Data

The death of cookies doesn’t mean the end of personalized experiences. In fact, there’s already a more effective alternative: activating your first-party customer data. This session will delve into how to use first-party data to engage customers in a completely new way—with personalized language that truly resonates. We will also be unveiling new research on how consumers feel about protecting their privacy while expecting personalized experiences from brands.

Next Generation Gifting: How Customer Experience Can Drive Revenue

The US gifting market was estimated at $653 billion in 2020 and expected to grow to $816 billion by 2024, according to Coresight Research. Yet, a recent Pulse Survey by RetailDive’s studioID revealed that 86% of retail executives do not believe that their companies’ digital gifting capabilities are where they should be. In this session, we will discuss how retailers can capitalize on the rapidly growing gifting economy by focusing on the four pillars of digital transformation. The first 25 session attendees will receive a QR code on site that allows them to receive a free gift card of their choice courtesy of GiftNow.

How Podcasts Have Transformed Audio Advertising

DTC brands are all over podcast advertising and now marketers are more pod-curious than ever. In this session, we’ll have two leading DTC brands tell us what’s worked and what hasn't in this channel. Let their experience inform those of you who are ready to dip a toe in the podcast pool.

From Performance Media to Media Performance: How the Farmer’s Dog Drove Exponential Growth with TV

TV’s got the wrong rap. Retailers often balk at the investment size and time horizon required to see ROAS from TV brand building efforts. Instead, many now claim that TV should be bought and managed just like digital performance channels. Retailers that believe this myth quickly find themselves hitting a wall, and never realize TV’s (linear and/or CTV’s) full potential to deliver a step change in scale. In this session, learn how The Farmer's Dog challenges several current DTC conventions – in data analysis, media planning and buying - to drive new customer acquisition with precision, accountability, transparency and flexibility.

How to Thrive In the Great Consumer Digital Shift: Lessons from a 2021 Cross-Channel Study

Learn how to use the trends uncovered in Cordial's 2021 Cross-Channel Study to create a competitive advantage with your email and SMS campaigns. Debuting at CommerceNext, this study surveyed over 2,500 consumers and marketers on changing buying habits in the face of the rising COVID-19 Delta variant, what messaging channels consumers will engage brands through moving forward and how marketers – including Bob’s Discount Furniture - are responding to these shifts to drive the highest ROI, lifetime value and loyalty.

How Tapestry Makes Digital Its Most Customer Centric Store

The past year may have been ecommerce’s time to shine – but as customer expectations increase – the stakes have never been higher. Digital stores that were designed to be available and “open” 24/7 are now expected to deliver personalized service . Tapestry – the house of brands including Coach, Kate Spade, and Stuart Weitzman is taking on the challenge by taking a data driven approach to translating in-store service into digital capabilities and tactics. Join Quantum Metric’s Elissa Quinby, formerly of Amazon, as she chats with Tapestry’s VP of Digital, Roshan Varma on how teams can blend traditional methods with modern technologies to deliver reliable and engaging online experiences for customers.

Using Modular Video to Scale Personalized Experiences in Real Time

If customer experience is the new competitive battleground, then video is your weapon of choice. In this lunch session, we’ll hear from the fastest-growing supplements brand REDCON1 on how they drive revenue by creating truly personalized video content at scale and - best of all - doing it all in real time. Learn why CMO Ryan Monahan is all-in on modular video to enhance their digital customer experiences and accelerate growth while reducing costs and scaling content.

Women in Retail Breakfast: Leadership Lessons on the Way to the C-Suite - Retailers Only

We want to see more women in the C-suite and this session will offer leadership advice from some of the leading women in the CommerceNext community! The panel will explore strategies for career growth and leadership, how the current environment has reshaped leaders and retention and hiring strategies in this competitive job market. Bring your questions and leave inspired for the next step in your career journey.

ow Delta Stole Christmas: The Impact of Everything on Holiday 2021

The Delta variant looks like it might try to steal Christmas (and all the rest of the Holiday season) from all the good retailers and DTC brands. Material shortages, factory slowdowns, and shipping delays are threatening to create empty shelves and long lines for holiday shoppers. All is not lost - it can still be the best time of the year because Jason “Retailgeek” Goldberg is here! In this session, Jason will provide you with the facts and insights retailers need to best navigate Holiday 2021.