Sometimes, it feels like every brand is competing for the same square inch of customer attention. This is why real customer engagement today comes down to understanding what customers need at that moment and responding in a way that feels natural, helpful, and human.

Rohit Agarwal, CEO at The Weather Company, captured this idea well at the Customer Engagement Summit:

The more we can know about our customers, the more we can anticipate what their next best action or next biggest need is, and then how we can super-serve that. For us, it’s about delivering messages at the right moment, in the right way, via the right channel.

Affiliate marketing has evolved beyond simple link referrals; it is now about recommending a complete technology stack. For brands to succeed, they require a suite of tools that work in harmony. This shift presents a strategic opportunity for affiliates and agency partners. By promoting interconnected solutions, partners can provide more value and create more durable client relationships. As we look to 2026, the most successful partners will be those who understand how to build and recommend these powerful ecosystems. This article explores top partner and affiliate programs, built around a central hub of customer engagement.

How retailers are preparing for agentic commerce and the future of online shopping. E-commerce is entering a new era. As consumers shift from search bars and filters to AI-powered conversations, retailers are reimagining their digital storefronts to deliver faster, more intuitive, and more personalized shopping experiences. This new report from Total Retail and iAdvize explores how agentic commerce, where AI agents guide product discovery and purchase decisions, is redefining the online customer journey.

AI is changing how apps grow. See where it adds value across the funnel, how to deploy personalization and automation, and how to measure impact in a privacy-first mobile ecosystem. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are becoming essential to mobile marketing. Growth teams face more data than they can manually process, user journeys that span multiple devices and channels, and rising expectations for relevant experiences. At the same time, privacy frameworks such as Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) and SKAdNetwork (SKAN), along with changing rules and regulations, e.g. the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), have impacted  when and how marketers and developers can access user  data, making predictive modeling and the ability to gain insights from aggregated data sets critical to sustainable campaign optimization and performance. 

Many B2B organizations lack clear insight into their revenue opportunities. Demand processes may still focus on individual leads, even though more than 80% of B2B purchases involve groups of three or more people. They also may fail to recognize multiple selling opportunities within an account.

Forrester’s B2B Revenue Waterfall was designed to accommodate this complexity. It ensures that marketing and sales teams are aligned around customer value. This alignment is critical in identifying and addressing opportunities within buying groups — so teams can maximize revenue potential and achieve their growth goals.

Why do buyers stick with certain brands? It’s simple: they find ongoing value at a price they are willing to pay. Yet, that’s not how many marketers are continuing to manage their loyalty programs. Instead, they’re stuck in a loop, banking on rewards points and mediocre discounts that customers often forget about. Loyalty programs today are missing the mark, becoming stale and ineffective due to a failure to grasp what truly drives loyalty: a consistently fulfilled brand promise within a unified customer experience that makes it easy to make a purchase or and targeted loyalty benefits that solve a problem.

With the peak trading period of 2025 just weeks away, retailers are making their final preparations. To support them, we spoke with top industry experts who shared their best advice for getting ready.

Read on to discover strategies for:

Increasing customer engagement

Approaching pricing and discounts

Ensuring operational speed

Optimising delivery and fulfilment

Increasing customer engagement

Being global isn’t enough. Around the world, today’s shoppers expect more – more relevance, more convenience, more consistency. We surveyed over 6,000 consumers across the US, UK, France, Germany, and the Netherlands to find out what they really want from enterprise retailers – so you can win their loyalty. We found out:

• What shoppers demand from enterprise retailers in exchange for their loyalty