About Forrester
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Shar serves Marketing Leadership professionals. She is a leading expert on how businesses can leverage interactive marketing channels and technologies to drive sales and deepen customer relationships. During her 12 years with Forrester, Shar has been instrumental in the development of many of the company's interactive marketing program evaluation methodologies, training courses, and marketing planning tools and has also been part of Forrester's sales and consulting organizations.
Shar's research focuses on overall interactive marketing strategies; crafting efficient, effective interactive programs; organizing for interactive marketing; and integrating interactive channels into the rest of the marketing mix. Specific subjects addressed in Shar's research include email marketing, online advertising, search engine marketing, ad serving and targeting, interactive budgeting and forecasts, and interactive marketing organizational models.
Shar returned to Forrester in 2004 after several years away working in marketing consulting. Shar served as research director for marketing research boutique, TideWatch, where she led internal strategy efforts and client strategy projects. Shar was also a consultant with Carlson Marketing Group's Business Strategy Consulting team, developing CRM and email programs for clients including British Airways, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, and Home Depot. Shar began her career at Forrester in 1997 during the early days of the Internet and has written research on customer loyalty, ad networks, and marketing measurement and planning.
A popular speaker, Shar has been seen on stage at ad:tech, MITX, DMA, and the Email Service Provider Coalition events, among others. She is on the board of SEMPO — the search engine marketing professionals organization — and is also widely quoted in the press including such media outlets as BusinessWeek, Fortune, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal and is a frequent guest on CNBC and National Public Radio.
Shar is a graduate of Harvard University.
We are a messaging vendor and are thinking about different ways to price our platform/services. What is Forrester's take on a plan?
What works in digital marketing to drive online and in-store traffic for a consumer electronics retailer during the holiday period (October thru December); with a specific focus on Black Friday and...
Organization: The Social Intelligence Playbook
Finding and acting on insights gleaned from online and social discussions requires the right combination of a clear objective, business planning, technology, and, most importantly, people to do the...

Follow The Customer Life Cycle To Influence Pre-Store Purchase Decisions
Shopper marketing is expanding beyond the brick-and-mortar world as frugal and in-the-know consumers use technology to inform their purchases. This shift will create a proliferation of marketing...
How Social Intelligence Bridges The Gap Between Diverse Disciplines
Customer Intelligence and public relations aren't obvious bedfellows. The two teams sit on opposite sides of the marketing and strategy organization but share similar goals and will now share a...

Marketers should format emails for convenient mobile access. Do this by following Forrester's principles of convenience — create mobile emails that are immediate, simple, and contextually...
Strategic Plan: The Email Marketing Playbook
This report articulates a strategic plan for how interactive marketers can improve their email programs today and create humanized, integrated messages in the future. We recommend marketers build...
Offline And Online Paid Media Placements Will Drive Earned Media Success
Earned media is exploding. Born from traditional public relations (PR), its rapid adoption by marketers is being driven by new opportunities to drive word of mouth through social media. But earned...

What is Forrester's take on how healthcare companies have responded to the rise of social media? How will healthcare companies gain traction in the social media space? What are good and the bad...
Responsys, ExactTarget, And Experian CheetahMail Lead The Market
In Forrester's 37-criteria evaluation of email marketing vendors, we identified the six significant providers in this category — Epsilon, ExactTarget, Experian CheetahMail, Responsys,...

Consumers delete fewer email messages, integrate email promotions with personal emails, and forward promotional emails more today than in past years. But email marketers shouldn't be too smug about...
Our client is set to approve a direct marketing program that is testing a multiple contact approach against a single contact approach. What we would like are any industry benchmarks or examples that...
Four Ways To Strategically Add Value To Multichannel Marketing
Marketers continue to treat digital channels as an afterthought of their integrated campaigns, instead of as strategic assets. But it's time for marketers to rethink their approach to multichannel...
Oreck decided it was time to get smart about impression delivery across multiple channels. Working with partner Knotice, Oreck created a unified view of the customer to effectively target and deliver...

Executive Overview: The Email Marketing Playbook
The rules for how to best message your users are changing. Now your customers check their email, text messages, and social media posts in parallel. Even trickier: People tap their inboxes from...

What are some great examples of automated, highly personalized, multichannel communications programs? My company has a few programs in pilot mode, but it seems that this concept of highly automated,...
Stay Ahead Of Privacy Legislation By Creating A Value-For-Data Exchange
Recent advances in audience targeting point to a digital marketing future that leverages consumer data to create personalized messaging and drive higher conversions. However, this potential is...