The recent focus on "customer experi­ence" has a lot of people revisiting Web site designs, call center processes and cus­tomer relationship management platforms. It also means looking closely at your direct mail programs to ensure they are keeping step with other go-to-market channels.

Walgreens is using behavioral tar­geting to engage customers in its stores. The nation's largest drugstore chain has partnered with Catalina Marketing to print targeted coupons in its 6,000 stores, which are given to customers based on their purchasing behaviors, as they receive their receipts.

Google is far from being unseated as the dominant player in the US search market. Accord­ing to ComScore data for July, Google led the core search market with 61.9% of searches conducted in the US.

Kansas City, MO-based Commerce Bank has tapped Epsilon marketing agency Purple@Epsilon for full direct marketing services. The bank, which has nearly 350 locations in Missouri, Illinois, Kansas, Oklahoma and Colorado, is working to ramp up customer acquisition for its retail business unit.

There are sophisticated and expensive analytical Web report­ing tools that can help steer you successfully through your toughest Internet marketing decisions. Affording these tools is tough when you are still fairly small; but having the right infor­mation can help you to play in the big leagues.

E-mail marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies businesses use to communicate with customers. As more businesses are using e-mail to market to their customers, marketers face the daunting challenge of ensuring that their e-mail campaigns stand out from the crowd.

Consumers start much of their online shopping with search engines. What is sometimes lost in the discussion is that 80% of customers then go offline and transact locally.

One challenge facing online retailers is analyzing the mass of avail­able consumer data, to better market their product offerings. Now, research being done by the Georgia Institute of Technology, with a $3 million joint grant from the National Science Foundation and Department of Homeland Security, aims to make the science of analytics and mining large data­bases more effective for marketers.

A taste for food-related coverage has helped this magazine sector hold steady.

Marketing success depends on matching the product to the market at the right time. In financial services, target marketing is typically based on analysis of response lists, customer data and campaign data combined with compiled data. In general, at the beginning of a campaign, the target selection criteria are mainly driven by knowledge gained from analysis of past performance.