MindgruveMacarta went to Palm Springs last week to attend eTail West 2025, one of the premier digital retail innovation conferences of the year. While the event sessions focused on AI, innovation, and the rapidly changing landscape of digital media and eCommerce, our conversations with retailers revealed immediate priorities that brands need to address before they can fully capitalize on emerging opportunities. How do brands build on past success and realize new gains this year? What struggles are they facing that might keep them from achieving those gains? We spoke with over 40 brands at eTail West about their current goals and challenges, and here are the top 3 things that we heard from other attendees over and over:
“I need to understand and implement incrementality.”
Marketers exist in a world of finite resources, so spending those resources in the most efficient way possible is essential for leadership success. Enter incrementality testing — a powerful method by which marketers who want to optimize their spending can gauge the precise impact of their campaigns. But what exactly is incrementality? Allow us to explain.
Here’s the problem with a lot of digital campaigns: When you run ads on platforms like Google or Facebook, they claim credit for every sale that happens after someone sees your ad. But the big question is: Would some of those sales have happened anyway? In other words: Would the same customers have made purchases regardless — through loyalty, organic search, word of mouth, or your other marketing channels like email or outdoor ads? Or was Facebook truly responsible for all the conversions?
How incrementality works.
If Facebook reports 100 sales from your ads, but 40 of those customers would have purchased from you regardless, then your ads only really generated 60 incremental sales. That insight changes everything about how you should allocate your budget.
To measure incrementality, run a simple experiment:
- Show your ads to one group of customers (the test group).
- Don’t show your ads to a similar group (the control group).
- Measure the difference in conversion rates.
- That difference represents your true marketing impact.
The control group can still purchase from you via other channels than the ones on which your test campaign is running, and might see your other marketing efforts elsewhere. You can even set up your marketing efforts so that 90% of your target audience sees this campaign (the test group) while the other 10% does not (the control group). If your test group converts at 1.5% and your control group converts at 0.5%, then your true incrementality is 66.7%. Translation: Your own marketing caused ⅔ of your reported conversions.
“I work with several different agencies to manage brand, marketing, and media across channels — but no one is working together.”
Collaborating with other channel-specific agencies makes sense up to a point, but for today’s omnichannel marketers, it often causes more trouble than it’s worth. Many brands at eTail West expressed frustration with their agency relationships, which they thought of as fragmented. In particular, they cited challenges in maintaining consistent messaging and measuring accurate cross-channel performance.
Agency collaboration or consolidation
Creating a collaborative agency model or consolidating contracts to a single agency so it turns into the brand’s full-service partner offers several advantages:
- Ensures holistic performance measurement. Consolidation helps brands evaluate agency performance in light of overall business — rather than purely channel — growth. That approach helps eliminate the all-too-familiar problem of finding success in a silo.
- Smooths friction points for internal teams. The internal marketing teams of a brand often find themselves turned into the de facto project managers coordinating between various agency partners. Consolidation or a defined collaboration model helps brands reduce that burden on their staff and streamline communication.
- Creates a better customer experience. Agency consolidation can help ensure that brands are creating consistent messaging and planning customer journeys that feel cohesive across all touchpoints.
In an increasingly competitive marketplace, customer retention has become just as critical as acquisition. It may even be more valuable. The brands we spoke to emphasized the growing importance of creating customer loyalty and maximizing lifetime value.
“Once I get a customer, I need to keep them coming back.”
Update your customer journeys for today’s world
To build lasting customer relationships, the brands at eTail West said they needed to:
- Get to know their audience and customers. Find out what the interests and pain-points are for customers — beyond the ones that led them to purchase from a brand. Adjust and test targeting strategies accordingly.
- Remember that customer paths can be unpredictable. Understanding that purchase journeys are meandering and that marketing strategies can impact them in various ways is crucial for customer retention.
- Apply real data to their personas and customer journeys. Move beyond theoretical customer personas to data-informed insights about real customer behaviors and preferences.
- Use data sources outside of their own first-party data. Tools like Amazon Marketing Cloud can provide valuable insights beyond what first-party data might reveal.
Building niche communities
Today’s customers want more than just products — they want to belong to niche communities that they identify with. Building communication strategies that maintain their loyalty is essential to building trust over time.
Pampers, while a diaper company, launched the Pampers Smart Sleep Coach app, which helps parents optimize naps and bedtime so their babies sleep better. A is a great example of building a niche community, the app offers a sense of community and support, connecting parents to Pediatric Sleep Consultants when needed, and offering content pieces from pediatricians and sleep and mindfulness experts. Pampers’ marketing approach, which takes the needs of parents seriously and addresses them with empathy, fosters long-term loyalty — and generates additional data on customers that can inform their marketing efforts in the future.
The themes we heard at eTail West 2025 underscored how brands need efficient resource allocation, streamlined agency relationships, and stronger customer connections to thrive in 2025. As a tried-and-true performance marketing agency, MindgruveMacarta has a long history of understanding how true marketing impact often uncovers opportunities to dramatically improve results. Our integrated approach makes the difference — eliminating silos, connecting strategy to execution, and delivering consistent experiences that keep customers coming back.
Want to ask a question or learn more? Get in touch with us today.
