Industry tradeshows are important for many reasons - not only are professionals able to network and learn about the latest trends impacting their industry, but companies are also able to share product announcements and drive brand awareness.
Last week, Website Magazine ventured out into our hometown of Chicago to attend IRCE. At the show, our editors were able to learn more about some of the companies and products regularly covered on our blog, as well as discover new companies offering some pretty cool solutions that readers will definitely want to have on their radar.
Learn more about 11 of these companies and their technologies by checking out Website Magazine's IRCE Digital Showcase below:
Acquisitions are great, but seeing how customers are leveraging the acquired technology is better. At IRCE, NetSuite revealed a number of customers using its offerings as well as Bronto to streamline business operations and increase revenue. International Wine Accessories, for instance, replaced its Constant Contact email marketing system with Bronto to deliver relevant, accurate and timely digital engagements while segmenting customers based on a number of attributes in NetSuite, including last products purchased. With email lists automatically imported from NetSuite, IWA saves about 15 minutes per email sent. In addition, IWA's open rates have improved by 15 percent, click-through rates have improved 20 percent and email-driven revenue has doubled since IWA started using Bronto.
Natural language site search provider Celebros showed off its technology at IRCE, which includes advanced autocomplete, actionable analytics, merchandizing and dynamic landing pages. What is particularly cool about Celebros' site search offering is that it understands which word in a customers' query is a product, attribute or expression related to price or product.
B2C cloud marketing software provider Emarsys shed light on results from a recent survey of 254 retail professionals. The survey examined how US-based small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with annual revenues under $100 million are handling the competition of larger retailers. The results show that 81 percent of respondents rely on email as a driver for customer acquisition, and 80 percent rely on it for customer retention. Additionally, 73 percent of respondents ranked email as a top budget item, while one in five ranked it as a priority to invest. When it comes to the best marketing tactics, 54 percent of respondents identified cart abandonment emails as the most successful, followed by site-based recommendations (47 percent).
Email marketing software provider and Magento Premier Technology Partner Dotmailer was at IRCE showing off its platform's easy-to-use editor and automation capabilities. The platform's editor supports responsive templates to help marketers make emails look consistent across devices. What's more, the platform's CSS inliner means that users can include styles in the head of campaigns, and Dotmailer will automatically inline them and make sure they work across all email clients.
Popular digital marketing company Listrak showed off its ability to help retailers marry the in-store and online experience at IRCE. To do this, Listrak featured an interactive in-store display from Perch at its booth with products from jewelry retailer Dogeared. Listrak was then able to gather data from interactions with the display to send personalized emails to the booth visitors. This demonstrates the capabilities of Listrak's marketing platform, which includes the ability to collect data through in-store technology (like the Perch display or beacons) and use it to personalize email marketing initiatives.
We love showing retailers how we're marrying the in-store and online experience #IRCE16 https://t.co/XdnzU2MjL2 pic.twitter.com/HHkGUxlMtr - Listrak (@Listrak) June 8, 2016
Even websites for the largest companies in the world can display poorly on users' smartphones and tablets. Mobile 1st's mobile optimization platform, Mobilizer, enables Web retailers to see exactly what their mobile users see on their actual phones and tablets, quickly identify mobile UX and display issues they can easily repair problems, and optimize the mobile customer experience.
Within the last year, Pitney Bowes expanded its global ecommerce business with acquisitions of Borderfree and Enroute Systems Corp. At IRCE, the company featured its expanded Global Ecommerce solutions portfolio, which is part of the Pitney Bowes Commerce Cloud. The portfolio provides access to solutions, analytics and APIs across the full commerce continuum with speed and agility to help retailers identify customers, locate opportunities, enable communications, power shipping from anywhere and manage payments.
Customer review software provider ShopperApproved was at IRCE to show retailers the advantages of its product over other review solutions on the market. ShopperApproved can help users collect merchant, product and local reviews. The best part of its offering, however, is that when a customer leaves either a one or two star rating, the retailer is notified so they can try to resolve the issue. Once the issue is resolved, the customer has an opportunity to update or improve their initial rating.
New social deals platform Snagshout was at IRCE, showing off its platform that enables consumers to access discounts on retail products in exchange for reviews. This helps merchants gain traction on Amazon because they are able to sell items and obtain user-generated content (UGC), which can help their search ranking on the marketplace.
Performance analytics provider SOASTA unveiled its Spring 2016 release for its Digital Performance Management (DPM) platform at IRCE. The release includes advancements in front-end Web and mobile performance optimization and support for open source tools and frameworks, including JMeter. What's more, the update supports Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), which means that customers moving to AMP can continue to use SOASTA mPuls
Popular user research platform UserTesting unveiled a pretty big milestone at IRCE - the company has grown its retailer customer base more than 50 percent each year for the last four years. Among the list of ecommerce retailers leveraging UserTesting is Jet.com, The Home Depot, Amazon, Warby Parker, Dressbarn, Revolve Clothing and Crocs.