Joe Keenan

Here, we feature a chart from The Amazon Effect report that depicts how retailers view Amazon’s position in the marketplace relative to

Calvin McDonald, president and CEO, Sephora Americas, opened his keynote presentation at Shoptalk in Las Vegas with a simple question

Chief executives of some of the country’s largest retailers, including Target, Gap, Best Buy and Autozone, headed to Washington,

L.L.Bean is in the middle of a political skirmish over its namesake heiress and her support of President-elect Donald Trump.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Amazon.com plans to open convenience stores that sell milk, produce and other consumables, as wel

Fraudulent orders are a concern for all online retailers, and for good reason. According to a study from LexisNexis, annual fraud costs reached $32 billion in 2014, a 38 percent increase over 2013. In addition, preventing fraudulent orders has gotten more expensive for retailers, costing $3.08 per every dollar lost to fraud last year, up from $2.79 in 2013. With this in mind, online retailers need to be on the lookout for instances and patterns of fraudulent purchases. A recent report from Forter, a fraud prevention solution provider, can help them do that.

Providing a seamless experience for consumers in every channel they interact with your brand is a goal for most companies. Easier said than done, but the financial industry has done a better job at this than most. In a session yesterday at the Integrated Marketing Week conference in New York City, Margot Vaughan, group head and senior vice president, MasterCard Advisors, and Linda Gharib, senior vice president, digital marketing, Citigroup, discussed how their companies are leveraging omnichannel strategies to better serve their customers.

In tomorrow's Retail Online Integration webinar, Personalizing the Online Shopping Experience — Thinking Beyond %%FirstName%% (register for free here!), David Pyrzenski, a product consultant for digital marketing technology provider Silverpop, will discuss personalization tactics online retailers can take that will drive more engaging campaigns, more loyal customers and, ultimately, more sales. To give you a sneak peak into some of the topics David will address in tomorrow's webinar, I interviewed him last week. Here's that interview:

In advance of next month's All About eMail Virtual Conference & Expo, I sent a few questions to the event's closing keynote speaker, Jay Jhun, the vice president of strategic services at email marketing-focused digital agency BrightWave Marketing, to get a sneak-peek into his thoughts on some of the topics he plans to cover. Here's a portion of that interview:

With consumers increasingly using their mobile phones for most any task (e.g., shopping, banking, checking emails, etc.), they've come to expect the same seamless experience on their smartphones as they get on a desktop PC. As a result, marketers must optimize their brand's mobile presence — website and/or app(s) — to satisfy today's always-connected consumers.

In his midday keynote presentation at last week's All About eMail Live! conference in Atlanta, David Daniels, CEO and co-founder of The Relevancy Group, a provider of marketing consulting and research services, highlighted five trends that email marketers need to be aware of if they hope to succeed in today's crowded marketplace. Daniels also offered up takeaway tips for attendees on how to leverage these trends to their advantage.

Hawthorne's Pizza, a five-store chain in Charlotte, NC, wanted to grow its business through new customer acquisition as well as increasing the spend of customers already frequenting its restaurants.

With smartphones seemingly glued to consumers' hands, marketers have realized they need to leverage the mobile devices in order to reach their customers and prospects. This is most definitely true for email marketers. According to digital marketing agency Knotice, 36 percent of all emails are now opened on mobile devices. Brands have been presented with a choice: develop a mobile email strategy or be left behind.

Using video as a marketing tool wasn't a novel idea for Lenovo when it approached SundaySky, an online video platform provider, to inquire about its services. The technology company had already been using video as a marketing tool for its outreach videos and product walkthroughs. Using video as a means to deliver personalized shopping experiences to consumers throughout its vast online product catalog was something entirely different, however.

In a keynote presentation at the Retail Email Exchange conference in San Diego, Kevin Hillstrom, president of MineThatData, a cross-channel retail marketing consulting firm, discussed how segmenting your customers based on factors such as age, geography and past behavior can go a long way in determining how successful your email program is.