Welcome emails garner 86 percent higher open rates than regular promotional mailings. What other life cycle marketing programs should you be running?

If information is accurate when collected, loyalty programs have a better chance at engaging consumers and actually seeing the benefit that a loyalty program can provide.

Black Friday online traffic increased 7% in 2012 versus 2011 as the top 500 retail sites received more than 193.8 million total US visits. So far this Holiday week of online traffic to the top retail sites is up 10% on average. Online retail traffic was up 1% on Black Friday compared to Thanksgiving Day 2012 traffic this year. Amazon.com remained the top visited retail site on Black Friday while Walmart was the second most visited retail site. BestBuy moved up to the 3rd most visited site while Target was the 4th most visited site. JC Penney moved up from being the 8th most visited retail site on Thanksgiving Day to the 5th most visited on Black Friday. Among the top 5 sites, JC Penney saw the biggest day-over-day growth at 26%. Looking at the top 20 retail sites on Black Friday, the Apple Store site saw the biggest day-over-day growth at 99%. Check back for CyberMonday insight and a weekly recap of this week. Learn more about the author, Matt Tatham

Time to polish off our crystal ball and give predictions from consumers’ fingertips of hot products of the holiday season. See what made the list.

My Experian Marketing Services’ colleagues and resident data experts Bill Tancer and Marcus Tewskbury answered the above question for marketers during our recent 2012 Holiday Planning Webinar. The webinar recapped key 2011 holiday marketing results, plus featured trends, benchmarks and recommendations for a successful and profitable 2012 holiday shopping season.

Thanks to simulcast streaming of games online and via mobile apps, die-hards are better equipped to keep track of multiple games at once. Those who stream games online live in every corner of the country, but some locales are more likely to log on for their March Madness fix than others.

I’ve had several requests to provide some numbers on finance.google.com in light of their redesign this week. Here are some quick daily stats from this week: On Wednesday 12/13/06, Google Finance ranked 16th in our Business & Finance – Business Information category with .78% market share of visits for the category up from last Wednesday’s 22nd position with .68% market share. Still the industry leader, Yahoo! Finance with 37.3% market share for the category, has over 50x the market share of Google Finance. Here’s a daily marketshare of visits chart for Google Finance: With a clearly compelling set of features and slick design, why is the gap between Google Finance and Yahoo! Finance so large? Aside for brand and switching cost issues, One possible explanation is the differences in distribution channels for the two finance sites. For 12/13/06, Google received 57% of its traffic from the Google homepage (www.google.com) primarily from search on stock ticker symbols. Yahoo! Finance in contrast received only 1.7% of its traffic from search with over 55% of its traffic coming from the Yahoo! front page and My Yahoo! pages.