GTM360 Blog

In our past articles (click here and here), we took QR codes for granted wherever we found them and focused on their underlying technology, shared tips on how to get them right and suggested a few goals for after they scanned correctly. For a quick recap, QR codes enable smartphone users to visit websites and landing pages, download mobile apps, add contact info directly from business cards to their phonebooks, and do lots more – all this without the hassles of typing long URLs [...]

We always recommend short or prefilled forms to reduce friction and thereby boost conversion on B2B websites for various CTAs like whitepaper download, webinar registration, request for quote, and so on. We’re now happy to propose another form of call-to-action that’s even more frictionless: Social sharing. By avoiding forms altogether, social sharing can bolster website conversion more than short or prefilled forms. Here, prospects and customers land on a company’s website to learn more about its products and services and simply [...]

What data breach? Are you talking about the one that happened at Heartland in 2009? Or, maybe the Fidelity one from 2011? Again, no? Oh, you’re referring to the latest one that led to the arrests in New York of several people who fraudulently withdrew $45M from several ATMs. By now, it should be obvious what’s different about the latest breach. If not, read on. High-profile breaches in the past, like the ones that hit Heartland Payment Systems and Fidelity National [...]

Here’s our latest success story: Retail Bank Sees Strong Uplift In Online Customer Acquisition CRO boosts conversion of website visitors to customers Kotak Mahindra Bank is one of the fastest growing and most admired financial institutions in India. Since its inception as a nonbanking financial company in 1985 and as a bank in 2003, the Kotak Group has leveraged technology to fuel its growth and enhance its stature. Soon after savings account interest rates were deregulated in India around a [...]

In How Can Organized Retailers Respond To Showrooming?, I’d written about the new shopping trend in which consumers use a physical store as a showroom to touch and feel a product but ultimately buy it from an online competitor – often at a lower price. Although showrooming hasn’t yet become mainstream, it’s bound to gain traction with rapid smartphone adoption and availability of comparison shopping mobile apps like RedLaser. Since it eats up their salesforce bandwidth without leading to sales, showrooming [...]

According to a Barron’s article titled The End of Cash?, the use of cash as a percentage of retail spending in the USA declined from 36% in 2002 to 29% in 2012. Extrapolating these figures – by using the same negative CAGR that works out to around 19.5% per decade – we should see the end of cash usage by 2202, that is, 190 years from now. An Excel model used to arrive at these figures can be downloaded from [...]

We’re happy to announce that Computerworld has named our LBS app Location Based Task Reminder (LBTR360) as a Top 10 Android app in the to do list category. Click here to read the full Computerworld report. As explained in greater detail here, LBTR360 is a reusable, LBS mobile app framework using which we develop custom developed solutions for a wide array of location based usage scenarios such as: Geo-fenced offers (e.g., “Whenever my loyalty program member comes within 100 feet [...]

An old friend of mine from my alma mater, IIT Bombay, who is now a tenured professor at the North Carolina State University, was recently carrying out a sponsored study on supply chain dynamics in various parts of the world. In this context, he reached out to me a couple of months ago to seek my inputs on the state of play of logistics in India. Having worked in the software industry for much of my career, I pled ignorance [...]

The short answer: Forever. Now for the long version. As noted here, many stores are unable to survive on the face of skyrocketing real estate costs. Although this post focused largely on standalone stores, mall-based stores face an even graver existential crisis since they incur 50-75% higher rentals than their high street counterparts. When we keep witnessing stores, like the one in the adjacent picture, closing down, it’s natural to wonder if the malls housing them will follow suit. IMO, there [...]

Over five years ago, I’d written a post titled Cheque Deposit Systems — Are They Really Worth It? During the next couple of years, I’d found this equipment to be down every other time that I’d visited the bank’s branch to pay my credit card bill. My overall poor experience with this technology led me to conclude, in a follow up post titled Technologies Without Tradeoffs, that CDS was a bad tradeoff between cost reduction and customer convenience. I then discovered [...]