Thanksgiving and Black Friday may be another three weeks away, but many retailers are starting this holiday season a month early. Indeed, Walmart and Amazon launched their first round of holiday sales on November 1, and many others are following suit.

To prepare retailers for the competitive holiday season, we are launching our free Black Friday + Cyber Monday checklist. This document helps you assess your team’s marketing and operational readiness for the holiday rush, and highlights many common holiday mistakes and oversights that your team can avoid. The checklist covers timely eCommerce and retail subjects such as:

This Thursday, October 30, we’re excited to participate alongside 100+ companies for Startup Open House Toronto. If you’re around the Queen and Spadina area, drop by our Toronto office between 4-7 PM at 130 Spadina Ave, Suite 405 (click here for a map) to learn more about our company – and meet our friendly team!

We are proud to work with great organizations such as the Canadian Opera Company (COC), Canada’s largest producer of opera performances. The COC is a great example of a team that has embraced predictive analytics to improve their guest experience and drive revenue growth for the organization.

As a result, we’re delighted to see our partnership with the COC featured on MarketingSherpa last week! In this piece, journalist Erin Hogg reviews some of the innovative strategies and ideas that the COC has implemented to drive ticket sales and grow their base of season ticket holders. This article offers timely lessons fit for any arts and entertainment organization looking to grow their ticket sales and improve their fan experience.

If your inbox is anything like mine, then you have noticed a recent rush of marketing emails offering fall discounts, Halloween sales, or product announcements just in time for Thanksgiving. This is no surprise – the end of summer signals the start of retail’s most important quarter, and retailers are ramping up their email marketing in preparation for the Q4 rush.

With so many marketing messages arriving in our inboxes, what makes some emails stand out amidst all the noise? In today’s blog post, we’ve picked 5 great fall emails from major retailers that offer some insights on how your company can write more attractive and compelling email marketing messages.

Let’s consider this paradox: in a 2012 survey by Econsultancy and Google, only 14% of marketers believed that last-click attribution was a “very effective” process of revenue attribution – yet the same survey revealed that more than half of them continue to rely on it for their day-to-day reporting.

Today, customers are likely to make multiple touch-points with your business before making a purchase, from email newsletters to web searches to customer service requests. Basic models such as first- or last-click attribution can only tell you part of the customer journey, and ultimately contributes to an inefficient use of marketing spend. As the former U.S. Postmaster General John Wannamaker once said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” Clearly, there is a wealth of data from e-mail, web, and other sources that can provide a better picture of the digital customer than a simple last-click analysis reveals.

After many years spent working with businesses of various sizes, we’ve begun to notice patterns around the successful use of data and analytics. Many businesses tell us they want to be “data-driven” or use analytics to achieve their goals. One aspect that is often overlooked when it comes to using analytics is the role of team culture, or business culture, in actually making use of the insights generated by analytics.

All of the effort that goes into measuring and analyzing data is wasted without a commitment to actually use the data to promote meaningful behaviors and initiatives. This is easier said than done – just like personal habits, people tend to get excited about a new tool or metric, but often stop tracking or measuring performance after a week or two.

If you run an online business, then you have probably encountered the challenge of replicating the sort of active customer interactions where traditional retail excels. Customers walking into a physical store can interact with your sales representatives, have their product questions answered, or test out these items in person.

Holiday retail is more important than ever. According to Retail TouchPoints, consumer spending is expected to grow by 3.5% this holiday season. What’s more, eCommerce is projected to grow at an even faster rate, by another 9-12% over the 2013 holiday season.

This hits close to home with us at Canopy Labs; some of the retailers we work with generate more than 50% of their annual revenue during the holiday period, with their biggest sales days around Thanksgiving and in December. With such a quick ramp-up in traffic and sales, companies need to make sure they get their marketing strategy down well in advance of the holidays. Here are 9 tips on preparing your company for the busy months ahead.

Email marketing is a tricky business – send too few emails, and you risk missing out on sales opportunities; send too many, and you could be alienating customers or driving up unsubscribe rates.

“Brand spam” – in other words, an overload of communication messages from businesses – is today’s leading reason for unopened and flagged emails by consumers. John Fleming, a Marketing Director at research firm Webtrends, says: “As consumers, we’re happy to sign up to receive updates from brands, but only bother to open the ones we find relevant. This means companies are wasting loads of money sending us things we just don’t care about – and in many cases it’s turning us off.”

Earlier this month, Marks & Spencer announced the launch of its “Only M&S” strapline, the first time its Food and GM divisions are being placed under a single marketing campaign. This follows a £150m re-launch of the M&S.com website in February, and the company’s plans to expand its eCommerce offerings and strategies will help them stay ahead of customer expectations and competition on high street.