Search Engine Marketing

If your Web site doesn’t rank in search, then it really doesn’t matter how it looks. But once it does rank, how good it looks and converts visitors to buyers is critical to acquiring new customers online.
These days, with constantly rising postage rates and mailing costs, finding new customers online is mandatory. It’s no longer a “nice to have” option. Smart online marketers realize their Web site’s search engine optimization performance is key. They also know it’s not just about how your site looks and performs, but also how your site ranks in Google and other leading search engines. It’s all about potential

You think you’re having a tough time this year? It isn’t easy being the editor of a business publication that’s all about sharing thought-provocative success stories as positive learning experiences, either. As a professionally trained journalist of 26 years, I’d certainly be having a feast this year if I were hunting for “good” dirt on struggling companies to do investigative stories on. How did Lillian Vernon and The Sharper Image both come crashing down? Where did RedEnvelope go wrong? Plenty of carnage out there. But that’s not what we’re all about here at Catalog Success. We strive to help you through good times

When I talk to catalogers these days, I often ask about their online acquisition performance. Inevitably, they respond by telling me about the percentage of their total orders they’re now taking online and how efficient that is. (If you’ve read my previous posts, you’ll know that I believe taking orders online, while efficient, has some downsides.) After I listen politely for a moment or two, I probe a little deeper by acknowledging their online order performance and restating my question. “Yes, but how many new customers are you finding online? New customers that weren’t driven there by a catalog mailing or some other offline

Search engine marketing is one of the most important advancements in marketing since television. Millions of people every day are simply typing their wants and needs into that little box and waiting for the good marketers to deliver solutions. The goal of every marketer is to be the one presented on that page saying, “Yes, I do that.” Before we dive into why catalogers should blog for search, here are two facts on Internet search every marketer should know. 1. According to a Pew Internet & American Life Project survey, 91 percent of all Internet users search. Search is tied with e-mail as

When I attend industry conferences, I do quite a lot of cherry-picking. After all, there’s quite a lot of information spread around, but not a lot of it’s relevant to catalogers and multichannel marketers. So for this week’s edition of The Corner View, I took it upon myself to attend many sessions from the eTail Conference, held Feb. 11-14 in Palm Desert, Calif., and whittle down these experiences into the top 10 ideas, tips, points and company activities I took in during the event. I only attended sessions with panels that included catalog/multichannel marketers. The most noteworthy subjects they discussed included exploring

There’s that old Bob Dylan song about times a-changin’ that I won’t bother to quote further. But it seems to hold true moreso year after year, and 2008 is no exception. So while some of us continue to exchange “happy new year” greetings with one another, I’ll send along one last new year’s greeting with what I believe to be the top five actions you should act on, examine or just ponder to bring your catalog/multichannel business in sync with the times. 1. Get your matchback system working smoothly at once. Assign someone in either your marketing or operations departments to do nothing

Over the past few months, we at Catalog Success have been hard at work to further develop a hefty well of research data for our readers. In October we launched the Catalog Success Latest Trends Report, a quarterly series of original benchmarking research we’ve been conducting with the multichannel ad agency Ovation Marketing. In the coming months, we’ll also be running a series of mail volume charts provided by several catalog co-op databases. Like the Latest Trends surveys, these will run in the IndustryEye section of our print magazine. And for the past year or so, we’ve been running a regular reader poll.

In the second installment of this two-part series on how to effectively use search marketing through less-traveled options, we continue with more techniques provided by author Amber Frensley, a client strategist for search-engine marketing and optimization agency MoreVisibility, in her whitepaper, Marketing Strategies Beyond Traditional Search. Tips 1-4 can be found in the first part of this series in the 12/18 edition of Catalog Success: Tactics & Tips (formerly Catalog Success Idea Factory). 5. Display advertising. A tool used to enhance the user’s engagement, display advertising uses static and animated images (banners), as well as interactive media, including audio and video elements. Typically, online

The 2nd Catalog Success Latest Trends Report on Key Issues (January 2008)

Are you on top of today’s hottest ideas in free and paid search? Here are 14 easy-to-implement ways to get your site to the top of everyone’s results. Each could support a full article in its own right, so I’ve also provided additional links to help you dig in further. Free Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 1. Social media sites drive links; links drive rankings. Get familiar with Digg (digg.com), StumbleUpon (www.stumbleupon.com), Netscape (netscape.com) and Reddit (reddit.com), because these social-media sites can drive huge traffic. More importantly, that traffic leads to numerous inbound links, which are the rocket fuel powering your organic rankings.