The Top 10 Retail Posts of 2014

Another year is almost over and it's time to look back at what #RetailTuesday posts you liked the best. Every Tuesday (well, almost every one anyway), one of your Yaffe retail experts write a post that we feel will be of benefit to retailers – both those who are our clients and those who are just looking to improve their retail business.

According to Google analytics, here are the top 10 retail posts on Yaffe Tidbits this last year as judged by you, our readers:

10. Will Millennials Kill The Hyped Sales Event For Retailers? Millennials are fast becoming the power consumer group with the largest spending power. They are an important group for retailers. But they tend to look at the world differently than generations past and are willing to pay more for products/services that follow the same belief systems they do. Combine that with social media's ability to see the truth behind any hyperbole and does that mean that soon big sales events won't work for retailers? This post explores those questions and provides some answers.

9. Is the Newspaper Circular Dead as a Valuable Retail Medium? Newspaper circulation is down. Some papers only deliver on a few days a week. The younger generations don't subscribe, choosing to get their news from the internet and social sites like Twitter. So, is it worth the money to still do big retail circulars? That's the topic we explore in this post.

8. New Tactics & Tools to Make Retail Direct Marketing More Efficient. In this post, our EVP in charge of direct marketing lists off varous ways that you can use the latest tactics and tools (especially data and digital driven ones) to make your direct marketing efforts bring you better ROI.

7. Yes, You Can Target Retail Customers Through Facebook & Get Great Results. This post was a case study in how we took a client's data and social and combined them to target both customers and look-alikes. It got great results and we shared some of the statistics that made it work.

6. How To Use Your Database & Twitter To Find New Customers. The the previous post, we talked about using your data and Facebook to target customers. In this post, which was slightly more popular, we talk about how to combine your database and twitter to find customers.

5. 15 Tips To Improve Your Retail Business. Back in April, we asked our Yaffe team members to each submit a tip or two on how retailers could improve their business. We took 15 of the best tips and put them into one blog. You can see them all here.

4. Maybe You Shouldn't Tie Your Sale Into This Holiday. Sometimes what may seem like a good idea to a retailer with all good intentions really isn't. Such was the case of this retailer who made a bad tie in to Martin Luther King day.

3. The :15 Second TV Spot vs. The :30 TV Spot – A Creative Perspective. This year our Executive Creative Director wrote a post in response to one of our most popular posts of all by the media department, "6 Reasons To Use 15-second TV Spots to Power-Surge Your Media Budget." As you can see, this too was a pretty popular post, coming in at #3.

2. How One Poorly Timed Email Can Undo $Millions of Marketing Money. Your customers are gold. If they've opted into your email list, even better. But you need to be timely in your messaging to them or you may be sending the wrong message or be too late to save someone from going over to the competition.

And the number 1 retail post this year was: The ROI of Being Kind to Your Customers. Last January, one of our art directors blew a tire on one of Detroit's famous pot holes. The difference in customer service policies from two different companies showed very clearly how one was getting a good ROI and one was losing customers. It was a good illustration of how good customer service policies (or bad) can greatly affect your bottom line.

Hope you enjoyed this review and found some nuggets you might have missed. Here's to next year and more great retail insights and better business for all!

Mike McClure, Yaffe Tidbits editor