When competing for a share of shoppers’ hearts and wallets, promotions are a good way to increase traffic and sales, which in turn can help you become more profitable. Promotions draw in new customers and infrequent shoppers, and all those socially-oblivious laggards who just don’t see the need to shop with you (until now ???? )

As we enter the final quarter of 2017, let’s look at three major factors that will continue to be hot topics for leading retailers in 2018. In a world with increasing retail competition, innovation will be the key to success.

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday around the corner, it’s the perfect time to re-introduce your brand or store with customers who may not have made a recent purchase. Marketing automation and CRM solutions can generate follow-up emails and trigger behavioral-based campaigns to keep shoppers engaged with your store. And the new holiday shoppers you attract can be made to feel like they, too, are part of a special community well after the initial purchase is made and the holidays are packed up and put away.

Got a handle on inventory? If you know how much to sell, when to sell it and who is buying it, you are more than one step ahead of the competition. Larger companies should be automated with solutions such as bar codes and RFID tagging, but too many are not making the investment.

Mobile wallets are a great way to offer customers discounts and promotions as well as to make it easier for them to pay for purchases. Discounts, promotions, and efficiency are all factors that drive loyalty.

Think of all of the information out there that you could use to make decisions if you could just harness it long enough to let an analytics platform investigate it for patterns and trends: Social media, Google search result data, Non-profit published information, Demographics information from census surveys, Nielsen ratings for web pages and TV ads.