The new year is upon us. Everyone has taken yet another vow to exercise more, eat right, stay under budget, and meet deadlines. That was all well and good until the morning of Jan. 6 when the first fire of the year was raging, you discovered that sales goals had just been bumped another 2% over the “final” plan, and 1996 performance reviews were due by Friday. Welcome to 1997.

We can’t help you with the performance reviews, but we’ll do our best to provide ways to improve the return on your online marketing efforts. During the coming months we’ll explore the tactics listed in the chart below and on the next two pages. We believe every retail banking product can be enhanced with an online sales or service component. We believe every brick and mortar branch can leverage the Web to improve its performance. And we believe every financial institution should at least be testing online marketing and promotion.

But its no longer good enough to wax eloquent about the wonders of online financial services. It’s time to deliver the goods, to prove that the online channel can increase sales and/or decrease costs. Beneficial’s new 2-Minute Online Loan, which debuted the first of the year on Intuit’s TurboTax Web and Block’s Conductor Web (see p. 8), is a step in the right direction. It’s easy to use, and delivers an easy-to-understand value. That should translate into incremental sales for Beneficial and a nice income stream to Intuit and Block. What they’ve done isn’t rocket science, it’s just a creative application of existing technology. How will you respond to competition from real-time loans?