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Response rates are almost always higher for new subscribers to an email list. According to the "Email Marketing Benchmark Guide" by MarketingSherpa, subscribers click through at a 25 percent higher rate in their first month than in their second, and 67 percent higher in the first month than after the first year.

The IAB Ad Unit Guidelines are intended for marketers, agencies and media companies for use in the creating, planning, buying and selling of interactive marketing and advertising. The IAB's Ad Sizes Working Group meets on a bi-annual basis to review proposed new ad units and issue updated voluntary guidelines as appropriate. The process whereby these new units are reviewed and considered can be downloaded here.

"For a website, gaining RSS subscribers requires hard work as visitors prefer to subscribe websites with fresh/quality content & expect this to be continious. On the other hand, RSS subscribers are very valuable loyal readers which follow the website regularly. So, for a website, it is very important to analyze "how visitors become RSS readers" like: * from which websites do they reach to yours * which page of yours is the one that gains you most subscribers, etc. Google Analytics, besides all the simplicity it offers, has a very functional event tracking method for analyzing custom events which we will be using to track new RSS subscriptions and see how to analyzing them deeper."

Harjiv Singh, Co-Founder and CEO International of Gutenberg Communications,on how Indian companies can build global brands as part of "Branding in India," an event organized by Columbia Business School 's Center on Global Brand Leadership in New York

It is greatly ironic that algorithms, the quintessential example of all that is not human, would be so fundamental to social media. Last week I wrote a post about how Google gathers user data. This week I continue by exposing how popular social media websites use algorithms to utilize user data. Although humans power social media, it is algorithms that provide the frameworks that make user input useful. As proven by the countless social sites online, finding the correct mix of participation and rules can be extremely difficult. Below are some of the algorithms that when combined with the right people have proven successful.

eKomi is a leading independent quality rating system for online businesses, similar to the rating systems of eBay and Amazon. With a authentic seal of approval you can boost trust of new customers and prove yourself to be a serious top-quality merchant. Give your customers the opportunity to independently give their feedback, help your visitors decide upon their purchase, collect highly valuable customer feedback information, and increase your revenues.

Fill in the form information and click the Generate URL button below. If you're new to tagging links or this is your first time using this tool, read How do I tag my links? If your Google Analytics account has been linked to an active AdWords account, there's no need to tag your AdWords links - auto-tagging will do it for you automatically.

In ecommerce, one of the most important things is search. And right now, search has been moved to a whole new level with what is called blended search. Blended search is when the search engine takes it beyond text links to include pictures, video, blogs, news and just about anything else. This is changing ecommerce search especially, because now product search is part of this.

See video product reviews by owners. Discover new products, watch product demonstrations, compare prices, and get unbiased shopping advice from people just like you.

The Christmas season is well underway for retailers which means customer service departments will be facing a battle to maintain standards. With many customers shopping online for the first time as w...

Digg launched a new images section yesterday with some interesting new features for all areas of the site, not just the images section. As well as a clever duplicate image detector every story in any...

One of the many retail emails I subscribe to is Rampage, which recently notified its mailing list of a new brand called Golden State (separate e-store).

Subscription options for consumables is not necessarily a new concept, but certainly an underused tactic of online retailers. It's far more common to see e-tailers offering tiered pricing (discounts on quantity) to increase basket size. But customers don't always want to order a case lot of something - who has room for a year's worth of coffee in the cupboard? Others don't have the cash-on-hand to pre-purchase items.

Welcome to the weekend Web, where people are spending a bigger slice of time online via wireless devices - and using a different set of sites than during the workweek. "At Google, we see the majority of our desktop traffic [in the US] during weekdays," says Matt Waddell, chief of staff for Google Mobile. "On mobile, the situation is completely reversed." Mobile browsing surged 89% in the past year, with mobile page views increasing by 127%, according to researcher M:Metrics. The increase reflects growing availability of all-you-can eat data plans and increasingly sophisticated handheld devices such as the Apple iPhone.

Cultivating a solid, permission-based email list can take a lot time. So some businesses understandably get impatient waiting around for their lists to grow. ALTFor these businesses, online contests may be an attractive quick fix. As an example, let's say a newly launched shoe e-retailer, Shoe-Fanatics.com, wants to grow its email list really fast. So it partners with a well-established fashion news website Fashion-Freaks.com, to run a contest or giveaway. Fashion-Freaks.com has been around for years, and they've built up a subscriber list composed of users with the same demographics that Shoe-Fanatics.com is looking for. Fashion-Freaks.com will send an email promotion to its readers, recommending they all visit Shoe-Fanatics.com to enter a contest, or redeem a nice coupon. When readers of Fashion-Freaks enter the contest, they can opt in to Shoe-Fanatics's email marketing list.

Hanging out at SES Chicago last week, I spent some time with Stewart Quealy, VP of content development for SES, who told me that he enjoyed my last column about the power of a great unique value proposition. He suggested that as more new faces begin to adopt conversion rate optimization, some may not be as familiar with the fundamentals as many of us are. And of course, the end of the year is always a good time to talk the fundamentals. This week, I want to discuss another conversion rate optimization basic: the call to action (CTA).

A few days ago, I wrote about the power of the word "New" to get our attention - if there's a more potent attractor out there, it's almost certainly "FREE!" For years, advertising gurus have listed "free" on every compilation of powerful headline words. Now, research conducted by Dan Ariely (a Duke behavioral economist, previously at MIT) shows us that "free" is far more effective than "almost free." Indeed, a preference for "free" seems to be another feature hardwired into our brains.

If you've added an item to Amazon's cart without purchasing in the same session, Amazon remembers. For a long time. On my last trip to the Amazon, I added a couple new items to buy. Not realizing I had left some products in my cart, I was greeted with this notice on the cart review page:

According to a new report by Forrester Research, corporate blogs are the least trusted information source of all. Only 16% of online consumers who read corporate blogs say that they trust them. You can grab a copy of this report for free by filling in a form at Forrester. The full trust scale is below, with 'Email from people you know' the most trusted at 77%.