Group items tagged

While online shopkeepers are experts in their industries, they might not be expert at understanding their payment processing service or its statement, which can include adjustments, interchange charges, service charges, fees, and chargebacks.

A few months ago I went through the process of configuring a custom wheelchair at Spinlife.com. I needed help understanding the options and called customer service. Lisa walked me through the process like a knowledgeable saleswoman and prepared a custom quotation for me which I received by email.

While we examine the trends in 2010, there are clear patterns on the role and influence of multiple IT stakeholders within the IT decision-making process. These founding serve as a guide post on the strategic framework for IT marketers.

What should be the role of marketing in the semantic web? Should there be any? According to the W3C, the semantic web is about common data formats that make it easy to integrate and combine data from diverse sources. It's about mapping ideas expressed in human language to data in a way that facilitates automatic processing, where software can programmatically comprehend how different pieces of data are related. It's a web behind the web of animated banner ads and branded UI designs.

Chargebacks are frustrating and expensive assaults on a retailer's bottom line. But practical and smart merchants can learn from some chargebacks, improving their stores' performance, customer satisfaction, and operational excellence. When a consumer asks his or her credit card company for a refund, a merchant can suffer a chargeback. That is, the credit card company will reach into a merchant's bank account and take the total amount of the transaction that's being charged back. Then, any one of three or more different types of organizations-issuing banks, merchant banks, and payment gateways-could charge the merchant a fee for its trouble. Throughout this process, no one bothers to inform or ask the merchant.

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.

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.

This article highlights 5 further principles, heuristics and approaches for effective web design - approaches which, used properly, can lead to more sophisticated design decisions and simplify the process of perceiving presented information.

Personalization, done effectively, is a lot more than making product recommendations or using technology to welcome a visitor by name. Smart personalization is the process of providing more relevant content and offers to your visitors based on their preferences and behavior.

adCore™ is a next generation online advertising technology which fully automates your paid search activities. The system takes you through the entire SEM process from keywords and ads creation through campaign optimization and maximization and down to reporting and monitoring. adCore™ takes your business to a new level of performance and efficiency.

I want to share this great tool

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:

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.

This post is a little different than what you might be used to. Instead of talking at you, I would like to talk with you. I would like to propose a blogging outline, not actually blog on the given subject (yet!).

When evaluating and improving copy I work through these 10 steps one at a time.