Recent Posts by Megan Van Vlack

Would you order from a menu that just listed "chicken" or "fish," without any details? Would you buy clothes from a store that asked you to enter your full name, address and credit card data by hand every time you came in to purchase? Believe it or not, when it comes to online shopping consumers encounter these scenarios, and others like them, far too often. So how can merchants up their game to the best industry standards — and, more important, at least meet their...

Some industries are notoriously slow to catch on to new technologies for a variety of reasons. In the financial services sector, marketers have long been stymied by concerns about security and reputation on public pages, poorly-executed strategies and missed opportunities. That's changing fast in the relationship era of marketing. Overall, the banking industry's presence on social networks rose 31 percent in 2012 from the prior year, according to a recent Marketo blog post. The...

The online display advertising market is booming again — it's expected to reach $17.7 billion this year — thanks to the availability of consumer information that enables marketers to deliver highly personalized messages. But there's a catch. New research suggests that personalized ads aren't always effective, and can actually be a waste of a digital marketer's money. That, at least, is the claim made by two business school professors in a new report. Essentially, their...

When it comes to social media marketing, Facebook's on a roll. For starters, the world's largest social network just disclosed that mobile, its most closely-watched business, is growing fast and now accounts for 41 percent of total revenue. The news comes just weeks after Facebook rolled out one of its most promising services to date: an advanced search engine known as Facebook Graph Search. Though only available via desktop computer and in the United States for now, Graph...

For a lot of folks in the digital marketing world, social media marketing has become a can't-live-with-it-can't-live-without-it proposition. Why? Because they know their customers are using Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest and so they must be, too. But when it comes to measuring the bottom-line results of a social media campaign? Forget it. As a result, many marketers -- and their counterparts in finance -- are passive about the ROI on social media campaigns. Too...

It's one of the biggest mistakes marketers make. Research shows that 60 percent of chief marketing officers are more focused on attracting new customers than they are on retaining existing customers, even though it costs much less to keep a current customer than to get a new one.  So what can marketers learn from Makers Mark, the whiskey distiller, and Lady Gaga, the pop star? Plenty, argues Jackie Huba, a marketing expert and co-author of the Church of the Customer blog. Lady...

Consumers are constantly asked to share their phone numbers, email addresses or zip codes -- both online and off. But how many of them are told what happens with that personal data? Not enough, says Bryan Pearson, the bestselling author of the soon-to-be-released book, The Loyalty Leap for B2B, and president of Air Miles, a credit card rewards program based in Canada. Pearson says the lack of transparency is one biggest challenges facing digital marketing today. The good news...

Call it the incredibly-shrinking video ad. For decades the 30-second prime time TV spot ruled advertising. Then came the 15-second YouTube plug. And now? The latest in the customer relationship management arsenal that those who work in the social media marketing and video marketing space are capitalizing on - the 6-second looping video app. Marketers at the forefront of digital advertising are embracing micro-videos in their messaging. Why? Because their target customers are...

Massive cyber attacks against U.S. companies have become a major scourge. The theft of millions of customer passwords, credit card numbers and other customer data has become so worrisome that President Obama earlier this year issued an executive order to better protect businesses and key national assets. Companies too are working hard to protect their customers from hackers. Today the Online Trust Alliance, a non-profit membership group dedicated to identifying best practices...