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We have worked with many demand or lead generation companies over the past 10 years. Most of the time when they come to us, they ask us to help them increase the number of people they convert into a free trial, a free download, or to create an account. Conversion Isn't an Event, it's a Process We always like to focus first on increasing the number of leads towards the top of the sales funnel. However, without the next step, consumption, the companies don't necessarily achieve their better but usually unstated goal of increased revenue. This is the same fuzzy focus that has companies intent on getting more clicks to their PPC ads just so they can show the increased traffic numbers without focusing on converting that visitor into a lead or sale. To tell you the truth it is not as hard to get visitors to take the uncommitted step, as it is getting them to actually use and consume the product. When you optimize for customer experience you really need to take the whole scenario from awareness (clicking your ad) through conversion and ultimately to consumption (and ideally to evangelism) into account.

In this second installment, our email and ecommerce experts turn their attention to two critical issues: frequency and standing out from the holiday crowd. So, do you send more email?

Online, pictures are worth more than words, they're worth dollars. But how many dollars depends on how effectively product images *speak* to customers. We're talkin' details. Just like textual product descriptions describe a product in detail, enlarged images and alternate views better describe your products. And many products cannot be fully described with words.

With 60% of online shoppers cite free shipping as a reason they are more likely to shop on the web (Harris Interactive, July 2008), if you use free shipping as a marketing vehicle, you want to make sure you communicate your offer at every touch point. In the current issue of eM+C magazine, you'll find my article Get Your Site Into Shipping Shape This Season with ideas on how "get the most mileage" out of your free shipping offer from search engine to shopping cart (this version includes screen shots):

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.

Too often, webmasters either perform no keyword research, or do their research on an ad hoc basis. As a result, they miss out on many opportunities to drive more traffic to their sites. In this article, I'll explain why planning is so essential and should be closely aligned to your business strategy.

Most of marketing is now measurable, directly or indirectly. With digitally produced and distributed marketing - particularly channels such as search engine marketing, online advertising, email marketing, post-click marketing, and web site optimization - it's often practical to test dozens or hundreds of ideas within a short time. So if you have more than one competing suggestion for "what will work best", the solution is "test them and let's find out". The answer is quantifiable, not emotional.

This post is a recap of today's webinar: The eCommerce Platform of the Future. The on-demand version will be available shortly. About our guest speaker As Senior Analyst for ecommerce technology at Forrester, Brian researches and reports the impact of technology advancements, operational needs, and changing consumer behaviors on online retail. His expertise spans B2B and B2C retail and online travel, with a focus on multichannel strategies, user experience design and technology. Brian holds more than 11 years of experience in eCommerce and online marketing, serving senior roles for retailers such as Amazon.com; Classmates Online, Inc.; Eddie Bauer; Expedia.com; and The Spiegel Group.

Sucharita Mulpuru and Forrester Research recently released a report called Myths And Truths About Online Customer Reviews. The report covers a lot of ground, but I want to hone in on customer behavior after reading negative reviews. Many retailers have avoided adding reviews for fear negative reviews will hurt sales, despite the proven conversion benefits they deliver. From the report, here are 7 actions consumers take after reading not-so-shining reviews (customers may take more than one action)

Since its release in 2007, the last volume of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, has garnered 3,286 reviews from Amazon.com customers. While response has been overwhelmingly positive for the book, several hundred Amazon customers rated the book as mediocre or worse. Because of a very subtle yet clever feature, Amazon makes the best of both the positive and negative reviews easy to find. And that feature, based on our calculations, is responsible for more than $2,700,000,000 of new revenue for Amazon every year. Not bad for what is essentially a simple question: "Was this review helpful to you?"

Guy Kawasaki comes through with more straight talk...and solid recommendations from an experienced entrepreneur who uses Twitter to great advantage.

Healthcare Executives Lists' Athletic therapists list can help you reach famous athletic therapists. These therapists advice on preventing sports injuries and give immediate care for reconditioning...Read more

If you use Google Analytics, you have likely experienced its value in understanding your shoppers and how they interact with your site. But there are deeper levels of understanding to attain. If you start tuning the data you feed to Google Analytics by "tagging" your URLs, you can generate reports of your advertising campaigns and traffic sources, and therefore gain even more meaningful insights.

Google Analytics is undoubtedly the most widely used web analytics application. Emerged from and based upon the analytics-package developed by Urchin Software Corporation (which was bought by Google in April 2005), the tool has become publicly available for free under the new flagship of Google Analytics. In May 2007 the application was heavily edited, developed and released; the design was simplified and more advanced featured were added. Over years Google Analytics managed to gain on popularity because of its simplicity and many advanced features for curious site owners and professional marketers.

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.

'm often asked what I think the hottest trend in ecommerce is and I believe it's video content. So I'm excited to see more new technology emerge that can embed video right into retail email, and retailers experimenting with it. Anna Yeaman reports one retailer boasting a 20-27% click through rate without linking to video, and 51-65% with links to video. And Forrester Research reports video in email can increase click through by 2-3X.

As Whitney Hess stated earlier this year: UX Design isn't just "a step in the process." Users themselves experience much more than just the look and feel of an application.

Content is the engagement metric on the World Wide Web. Users or Net enthusiasts arrive on the Net expecting informative, engaging content and recreation. All that can be read heard and visualized on the WWW is content.   Content is not only the written word, it is everything on the World wide web that fills the … Making Most of An Engaging Content for Digital Marketing Read More »

A video-sharing platform YouTube is an American company based in San Bruno California. It is among the top-ranking social media platform with more...

On the face of it, viral marketing optimization (VMO) bears little resemblance to more established digital marketing practices. In retail and lead generation the basic principle to optimizing conversion is long established as driving people into the funnel and then pushing them down it. Viral Marketing turns this funnel upside down. The viral marketing end is really a beginning. Success starts at that single point of conversion and moves wider and the benefits of optimizing the viral funnel get compounded in ways other marketers can only dream of.