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E-Commerce
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When we make really good offers to customers or prospects and they buy, thatโs the moment to ask for a referral. After all, they want their friends and business associates to get the same great offer they just got, right? Below is an example from www.photostamps.com, which has a great idea and offer. Please scroll down, click on the postage-stamp-size image and note how the marketer makes it so easy for me to give it a referral e-mail address or two. The only thing thatโs missing is the ability for responders to upload their personal distribution list.
The better you make your
Rather than the awe-inspiring equivalent of a moon landing as Microsoft had hoped, the rollout of Outlook 2007 instead has been greeted by the business community as a giant leap backward for e-marketing. Thatโs because Outlook 2007 regularly mangles most higher end image- and animation-dependent marketing e-mails, due to Microsoftโs decision to โdumb downโ Outlookโs design and image-rendering capabilities. โMicrosoft has taken e-mail design back five years,โ says David Greiner, co-founder of Campaign Monitor, an e-mail tool provider. The problemโs been further compounded by the rollout of Vista, Microsoftโs new Windows operating system. It has forced consumers and businesses to adopt Outlook 2007 whether they want to
Say what you will about this wonderful trade we call the catalog/multichannel business, but whichever way you spin it, you canโt go very far if youโre unprofitable. Thatโs why above all else โ the marketing, the merchandising, the creative, the e-commerce, etc. โ weโre most interested in helping our readers make more money. So we bring you our annual binge of tactics and tips extracted from all of this yearโs issues of Catalog Success, our weekly e-newsletter Idea Factory and our biweekly idea exchange e-newsletter, The Corner View. Our editorial staff went through every article weโve produced this year to give you a nice,
At a presentation I gave at the recent Online Media, Marketing & Advertising Conference in New York, I offered several tips and insight on Web site testing strategies and landing page optimization. First, here are the top three common mistakes search marketers make when dealing with a mature search campaign: 1. You rest on your laurels and donโt think to improve. Marketers periodically need to reassess and re-evaluate the specific keywords theyโre bidding on, as well as the creative (ad versions) that are shown to make sure theyโre still performing up to snuff. Keep in mind that other competing advertisers may update and refresh
I see a dilemma growing in our industry. It involves balancing which e-commerce functions should be kept in-house vs. those that should be outsourced.
Before we answer that question, a little historical perspective is in order. First, take note that five years ago, most of us thought e-commerce was a lot less complicated than itโs turned out to be. Right? That said, the next five years will bring increasing levels of complexity in e-commerce.
I also want to point out that most B-to-B companies I know have gone through several e-commerce employees/teams and/or organizational structures. As the function has evolved, weโve struggled to
People who buy and hold domain names for the purpose of eventually reselling them for a profit are called โdomainers.โ Itโs now big business, particularly given the Internet trend of โgoing localโ and the rush to own local Internet real estate. Think โAtlantaDoctors.comโ or โMidtownChineseFood.comโ as two hypothetical possibilities. Minneapolis-based investment bank Piper Jaffray & Co. estimates Internet local ad spending will grow from $5 billion to $25 billion in the next decade.
Each B-to-B cataloger should be a domain-name acquirer in its own market niche for three reasons.
1. Make sure you own the domain-name real estate related to your brand, product
Good news for American multichannel marketers: The growth rate of the Internet continues to make Chinaโs economic expansion seem paltry. After all, China is only growing at a measly 11 percent! But thereโs bad news, too: 10 years of uninterrupted, 20-plus percent growth has encouraged software companies to produce a seemingly never-ending flood, or plague, of new site features. Who has the time, energy, money or development staff to try all these new site features? So how do you know which one(s) to work on? And how do you make sure you get the most out of the ones you do invest in?
Some family-owned businesses have trouble adapting to change. At times, thatโs been the case with cataloger-retailer Edwin Watts Golf. But as it nears its 40th anniversary, Edwin Watts has rolled with the frequent punches in the discount- and brand-driven golf equipment industry. Founder Edwin Watts opened his first retail store in 1968 and launched a catalog eight years later. The company debuted its Web site (www.edwinwattsgolf.com) in 1998, one of the first online golf equipment shopping sites in the industry. Through the years, the company has managed and prospered from change. Yet, no change may prove to be as worthwhile as an investment itโs
As a cataloger/multichannel marketer, youโve long understood the importance of double-checking all aspects of your marketing programs to make sure everything is in order. No doubt, you visit your printer when youโre on press to monitor print quality. You do bindery checks to inspect book assembly. You likely use mail decoys to confirm delivery. You also probably โmystery shopโ your own company to monitor your call center and shipping teams. You surely double-check your printing and postal invoices for accuracy. The same attention to detail applies to online marketing. As paid search marketing grows in importance and consumes a larger share of catalogersโ
Welcome to our groundbreaking benchmark survey on catalog/multichannel mailing and marketing practices! This is a joint venture with multichannel ad agency Ovation Marketing, and the first in what will be an ongoing, quarterly series of surveys covering different aspects of the catalog/multichannel business. The survey contains a statistical analysis of a questionnaire we sent to the entire Catalog Success e-mail list in late August. The first two questions screened out any noncatalog decision makers. That left us with completed surveys from 175 catalogers โ 97 consumer, 78 B-to-B. Click on any or all of the sets of responses under โRelated Content,โ to the right.