Did you hear the one about the guy who went to a digital party and an analog turntable stole the show?

Well it’s no joke. This happened to me last week at Dx3 in Toronto. As Canada’s premier digital marketing event you’d be right to assume that most of the attendees were looking for the latest and greatest tools to help propel their marketing forward.

And there were a lot of emerging technologies that will definitely influence how retailers connect with consumers in the coming years. Everything we do, from eye movement, to what we pick up and where we walk in the store can be tracked and used to provide a more customized and predictive shopping experience — especially when a mobile device app related to the retailer is installed and running in the background.

There’s no question that new tech is definitely sexy.

So what does it say when a setup with vinyl records and a turntable stops these folks dead in their tracks to test out the player and talk about their favourite records and music?

For one thing it demonstrates the passion people still have for tactile interactions and just how important these experiences are to sparking real sales conversations.

Obviously I wasn’t attending Dx3 to sell records to digital marketers. But I did want to make the point that having real records and a turntable was a much more effective strategy to start conversations than simply having an iPod plugged into a speaker. That’s because in an increasingly digital world the novelty of analog automatically separates itself from the constant din of marketing messages flooding inboxes.

As vinyl is to mp3s, so print is to email. In two words — more interesting.

This tied in nicely to our promotion of RevenueDriver™ — a proprietary system that integrates with eCommerce shopping carts to print and mail custom postcards with offers and incentives that is only triggered when a customer abandons a shopping cart.

Our most popular line of the week was “Learn to love your abandoned shopping carts with RevenueDriver^TM.”

One of the other trends I noticed is the idea of the digitally integrated retail marketplace. This uses data to follow consumers from online to offline shopping experiences. It’s certainly not some sci-fi future; it’s already happening and we’re glad to have positioned ourselves at the front of this revolution.

If you’re in charge of your eCommerce strategy then I would love to talk to you about our no-risk trial of RevenueDriver™.