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With four people dedicated to chat and email responses, Memorysuppliers.com is one of thousands of ecommerce companies adding chat to its marketing and customer service mix. And why not? A February 2008 study from Forrester Research, "The ROI of Interactive Chat", found merchants with click-to-chat options (also known as "reactive" chat) earn a 15 percent return on investment (ROI) on the chat service itself. Merchants with chat invitations and pop-up windows tied to user actions (also known as "proactive" chat), meanwhile, earn a whopping 105 percent ROI.

E-mail marketing is one of the more effective and less expensive ways to retain and engage customers. In fact, early this year comScore found that e-mail had a 4.4% sales conversion rate in the US. In a survey by MarketingSherpa and ad:tech, 44% of marketers said that e-mails to house lists had "great ROI." CMOs told Epsilon researchers that e-mail was the marketing tactic that they would cut last-but that doesn't mean subscribers don't cut e-mail newsletters. According to an Epsilon and ROI Research study, 55% of e-mail subscribers in the US and Canada unsubscribe from opt-in e-mails occasionally-and 14% do so frequently.

Once the party's over, are you leaving customers out in the cold? Thank you pages typically don't receive much design or marketing attention. After all, by the time a site visitor sees a Thank You page the chase is over, right? The visitor purchased a widget, filled out the signup form, or downloaded a white paper - in other words, the web site has won, and another conversion stat has been chalked up in the company's analytics package. Success! Check out our positive ROI!

It's been a long held concept that natural search, aka SEO, is a top internet marketing tactic for acquiring better conversions, leads, and ROI. Now, eConsultancy has collected data and documented a study in the U.K. showing that natural search is the best tactic for generating online leads, concluding it is greatly underused despite the fact that it outperforms nearly all other types of online marketing.

Fireclick, an industry leading provider of web analytics services, is proud to introduce the world's first publicly-available web analytics benchmark index. The Fireclick Index provides an objective comparison of key metrics across a variety of segments. Compare the performance of your online business to the many successful industry leading web sites using Fireclick today!

We all want to know which sites, search engines and keywords are sending us traffic. But what about direct type in traffic? When people access your site URL by typing it in from memory, it can be a great indicator of your brand preference, success of your offline and online marketing efforts and customer satisfaction. If you're smart and lucky, you named your site your main-keyword-dot-com and you get search traffic from visitors who use their address bars as search engines. For example, a search on "reusable bags" sends you automatically to "reusablebags.com" which sells…you got it, reusable bags.

What are FUDDs? We're not talking about wabbit-hunters or the beer of choice in Shelbyville. FUDDs are fears, uncertainties, doubts and deal breakers that influence consumers' purchase decisions. How you address them can have a huge impact on your conversion rates. PayPal and ComScore recently conducted a study on shopping cart abandonment and discovered customers' top reasons were

As Avinash Kaushik says: Analyzing data in aggregate is a crime against humanity. … If you want to find actionable insights you need to segment your web analytics data. You need to separate out the various Sources, Behavior and Outcomes.

Last April, I posted a script that allowed paid search advertisers to view the exact search queries of their visitors. This was essentially a free tool that gave website owners the ability to weed out ineffective keywords and put more money toward the precise phrases that were really driving their business. Google Analytics doesn't do this out of the box. It will tell you exact search queries for visits from organic listings, but for paid search, you're stuck with the keywords that you're bidding on. With broad and phrase matching, these could vary pretty drastically from what the visitors typed into the search engine.

A landing page is any page on a website where traffic is sent specifically to prompt a certain action or result. Think of a golf course… a landing page is the putting green that you drive the ball (prospect) to. Once on the green, the goal is to get the ball into the hole. Likewise, the goal of the copy and design of a landing page is to get the prospect to take your desired action.

The perception that search engine optimization is a limitless source of free traffic and sales is one reason that SEO campaigns sometimes fail to live up to expectations. Yes, SEO efforts can deliver excellent returns on investment. But how much expected return is realistic? This article will help you estimate the potential growth in traffic and sales that SEO efforts can drive to your site.

Every visitor comes to your site in their own personal "buying stage." The buying stage is a wide spectrum, but we generally break it into Early, Middle, and Late stages:

Are you selling your white papers short with poor merchandising? Many sites offering "free" white papers, case studies, or resources in exchange for some visitor information utterly fail to merchandise their downloads. Yet if your website doesn't treat your white paper as containing valuable information, your visitors won't either.

A test that checks how many customer & how many company related words appear.

Cross-selling and upselling is a popular tactic among online retailers in hopes of increasing average order value, items per sale and improving customer service with relevant suggestions. Amazon shared that cross-sells were responsible for 35% of its sales in 2006! According to the e-tailing group's 8th Annual Merchant Survey Report (of 190 ecommerce executives), 55% of retailers will include cross-selling and upselling in their merchandising activities this year. But cross-selling and upselling is one of the most difficult activities to do well and effectively measure, as evidenced in the e-tailing group's findings:

Most companies measure keyword performance - and especially PPC keyword performance - based on one factor: did that word or phrase bring converting visitors to the site on the visit in which they converted.

Yesterday, Jeff Sexton blogged about the importance of watching your cost per visitor (CPV) and revenue per visitor (RPV) trends. One of the best ways to get a handle on optimizing these key performance indicators is to get a better sense of your traffic mix. Instead of looking at your traffic by what marketing efforts are bring the most amount of visitors and converting best, look at your visitor mix as a starting point.

I've written about this before, but new reports keep reinforcing the point that most organizations don't know what to make of their Web Analytics, meaning they can't take action to improve their site based on the information they have. And while the best bet in these situations is simply to hire an expert guide, that may not be an option for you (or maybe you're just a hard-core DIY-er when it comes to website improvement). If that's the case, here is a quick and dirty 5 step process to get you started:

E-commerce firms should turn to commercial, off-the-shelf, or open source software as a replacement for current custom web development initiatives to save up to 35 per cent of their ongoing maintenance and licence costs, Gartner advised in its report "Cost Cutting in E-Commerce, 2009".

An ecommerce website, boiled down to its dry essence, is a virtual salesman at best and a slow-to-deliver electronic vending machine at worst. Consciously or not, online stores are conceived, designed, and created to sell products while making as little personal contact with a customer as possible. And as such, well-written product descriptions can have a significant impact on a store's success.