""We really love this new website you've built! Now we'd like to send out an email to all of our customers, friends and anyone, and it should look exactly like the website except with a spinning mailbox at the bottom, and have my photo, and my cat's photo…" Ever had that conversation with a client? You've built plenty of websites in your time and could knock off a blog template in your sleep, but HTML email? Seriously? HTML email has the reputation (often well deserved) of being a horrible design medium."

"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."

"Users like the simplicity of messages that pass into oblivion over time, but were frequently frustrated by unscannable writing, overly frequent postings, and their inability to locate companies on social networks. "

This widgets allows you to display your website's statistics in your netvibes's page. Available statistics : - visits - pageviews Available period : - Last week - Last Month

Shopping online is risky. Customers rely on relatively small, 2-D product images or sometimes video to get an idea of the actual 3D product they are potentially buying. One of the most common reasons for online returns is the item appeared different on the site, and the customer expected a different color, higher quality, different size or other attribute than what was perceived from the image. If a customer has a negative experience buying online, even if only once, the buyer will likely be more cautious for every future online purchase. This wary customer needs more trust-builders to convert. Common concerns include sizing and color fears.

This structure of URLs is one element of a problem called internationalization. The internet evolved (or was intelligently designed for those not down with the Darwin ;-p) in a way that made TLDs (Top Level Domains like .com, .info, or .org) almost completely useless for determining the intent of a website. (The exception to this is regulated TLDs like .gov, .edu and some country specific TLDs) In theory, a .com is supposed to only be used by companies and .org by nonprofit organizations. Obviously, this does not happen. Combine this with the current trend to misuse country specific TLDs (ccTLDs) for shorter domains names (Hint: Bit.ly has nothing to do with Libya) and you can easily see why the semantic value of TLDs has became a relatively poor metric for categorizing websites.

We are proud to launch the new ClickTale Real-Time Monitor, which enables you to see where visitors are coming from, and watch exactly what they are doing in Real-Time! See precisely which pages they are browsing, as well as all their mouse moves, clicks, scrolling and keystrokes. This is an industry first in web analytics, and we are proud to be able to offer it to you today, for FREE!

Like fashion and architecture, web design enjoys an ever changing ebb and flow as trends become popular, become mainstream, and then become passé. To maintain a modern and aesthetically-pleasing look, web designers should examine current trends, estimate their staying power, and implement those techniques that will have the best and longest effects.

Is social media/Web 2.0 for retail just hype or an essential part of doing business in the 21st century? The Wikipedic definition of Web 2.0 is "a second generation of services available on the World Wide Web that lets people collaborate and share information online." Wikipedia, being a user-generated knowledge base, is itself Web 2.0. In the ecommerce context, Web 2.0 includes leveraging social commerce on your own site, blogging/podcasting and participating in social networks like Youtube, Facebook, Twitter - and anywhere you or your customers can create and share content. Retailers often wonder what Web 2.0 / social media activities to be involved with, so this post ranks what I believe are the top 10 Web 2.0 activities for ecommerce based on their business impact.

I have reached the conclusion that most organizations have a blog simply because they feel they should. Many marketing departments fail to "get" blogging and have poorly visited blogs with few comments. Because their blog fails to perform, they conclude that blogging is an ineffective marketing tool and either remove it entirely or leave it to languish.

The video explains how to setup a brand monitoing dashboard using free available tools such as google alerts, social mention, techonarti search, twitter search, wordpress search and off course netvibes

The idea that ads that engage us emotionally work better than those that don't might provoke a, "Well, duhhh!" reaction from Neuromarketing readers. Surprisingly, though, I still encounter business executives who don't believe they are swayed by emotional factors when buying things, and often doubt that others are either. So, for those uber-rational decision-makers, here's the hard data…

Here's the first thing to remember about frame switching as it applies to copywriting: All copywriting stories are "nested." Matryoshka+doll-1In writing copy you inevitably create - at a minimum - one frame of reference: the one between your authorial voice and the reader. In fact, copywriting teachers often advise aspiring writers to "talk" onto the page as if they're talking to a best friend, simply because that mental exercise animates that almost invisible frame of reference in the mind of the writer.* Writers who forget that frame of reference tend to produce artificial, corporate-speak copy.

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

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.

Organizations take time to change and adapt. That's the one big lesson I've learned since I started in the web business back in 1994. It's easy to stand on the outside and pontificate about what needs to be done. It's much harder to drive the necessary change within an organization, no matter how well managed that organization is. And the larger the organization is the harder that change becomes.

Last week, Brendan tackled how to answer the 5 unanswered questions customers face in the shopping cart (other than shipping costs). According to a recent study by PayPal and comScore, 45% of US online shoppers had abandoned shopping carts multiple times in just three weeks.

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.