Pressure is ramping up on retail and ecommerce teams as the gap widens between consumer expectations and what retailers can actually deliver. Shoppers increasingly expect personal, seamless experiences at every touchpoint, but many brands are getting bogged down by fragmented data, clunky tech stacks and the never-ending grind of “just getting campaigns out the door.” Beyond the Basics, InternetRetailing’s new bluepaper in association with imagino, digs into why this customer engagement gap is growing — and what leading retailers are doing to close it.
First, the report explores what’s holding marketing teams back, from disconnected data silos and internal politics to tools that are slow to deliver value. It shows how these pressures create a conflict: teams must nail the foundational campaigns and deliver innovation, yet the operational drag makes both difficult.
The solution? A transformative CEP
To solve this, the blue paper details how a transformative Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) can stabilise core activity — welcome programmes, promotional cycles, re‑engagement journeys and transactional messaging — while opening space for smarter experimentation and rapid iteration. imagino’s low‑code, zero‑copy CEP model unifies customer data into a single 360‑degree profile and enables real-time omnichannel activation without heavy IT dependency, empowering marketers to move faster with more confidence.
The paper also outlines six foundational building blocks for innovation along with a practical checklist of capabilities retailers should demand from a future‑ready CEP, including actionable intelligence, orchestration, usability, scalable governance and pragmatic AI. It looks at how publishing giant Hachette Livre replaced legacy systems, unified 10 million contacts, and now sends 12 million monthly emails and 1.6 million personalised recommendations – resulting in lower costs, strong ROI, and newly empowered teams.
Interested in finding out more?
If your team is still stuck firefighting the basics, this report is essential reading. Find out how retailers are building the foundations that free them to innovate — and how you can, too. Read the bluepaper here.
