2007 September

By Crystal Silvas According to a new study by the Email Experience Council, welcome e-mails are apparently on the rise. The Email Experience Council (EEC) is the Direct Marketing Association’s group that focuses on the e-mail marketing industry. According to the study, seventy-two percent of major online retailers send out regular welcome e-mails this year, up from sixty-six percent last year. In its second annual report titled “Retail Welcome Email …

E-mail is perhaps one of the most important channels in customer retention, and yet many marketers aren’t taking full advantage of its many possibilities. This is what Silverpop’s latest study, released last week, said. The new report, titled “2007 Retail Email Marketing Study,” reviewed opt-in practices, message content, creative design and opt-out management of the e-mail campaigns for one-hundred fifty major retailers in North America and the UK. The study …

Urban wear is an emerging fashion style that got its roots from the inner cities and eventually spread to suburban malls. Also referred to as “hip-hop clothing” (because it’s heavily influenced by the hip-hop culture) urban apparel was first created by brands like Phat Farm, FUBU and Mecca. These days, wholesale urban apparel encompasses all clothing that celebrates urban street life. While it used to be synonymous with hip-hop clothing, …

One of the most popular social networking sites on the Web, MySpace.com has just launched an initiative to capture and collect personal information from the profile pages and blogs of its one hundred-ten million active users, and then use that to target ads. This news was announced to investors on September 18th during the quarterly investor conference, according to a company spokesperson. According to the spokesperson the company hasn’t issued …

By Crystal Silvas Before the extremely important Q4 selling season begins, the biggest focus is on maximizing this major once-a-year revenue opportunity. The brightest marketers have devoted at least part of their budgets to behavioral targeting for the upcoming year, but retailers should also be aware of behavioral targeting opportunities to cross- and up-sell to customers during the holiday shopping season. This can be done for both returning and new …

By Crystal Silvas All online retailers should be leveraging the power of the consumer information available to them. Marketing by creating segments allows advertisers to focus their campaigns on certain subsets of potential customers that are “most likely” to purchase certain offers. If done correctly, this helps insure the highest ROI. However, it does depend on what is being sold because there are differences in what to consider when defining …

We left emerging search engine race horses galloping up the inside race track last time we scanned which engines are winning or losing, in Search Engines Duke It Out: Goliath vs. David vs. David’s Brother. To recap: Yahoo! “knocked Google down a peg” in customer satisfaction – Yahoo! improved 4% in user satisfaction vs. Google’s 3.7% decline. Tier 2 engines showed greatest user satisfaction improvement (Ask.com) and largest customer satisfaction …

By Crystal Silvas Forrester Research and Shop.org have recently released the latest installment of their study titled “State of Retailing Online 2007”. According to this study, online retailers are getting savvier when it comes to using social media and utilizing higher quality images. Many online retailers have expressed their desire to improve product detail pages and content. 80% of those surveyed said they’ll be focusing on adding alternative images to …

By Crystal Silvas According to Wikipedia.com, the French term “a la mode” refers to anything that is currently in fashion. How fitting that this stylish little phrase shares its name with a successful Orange County, California based jewelry company, Alamode Fashion Jewelry. Since its inception in 1980, Alamode Fashion Jewelry has worked diligently to secure its place as a leading jewelry manufacturer and wholesaler. They have become experts in this …

By Crystal Silvas Since its humble beginnings in 1989, Just For Laughs Enterprises Inc. has grown from a small family-owned retail store into a full-fledged design house and importer. Specializing in the manufacture of fun, “Just For Laughs is the company for items geared at putting a smile on your face.” They have a wide variety of playful novelty products to choose from including key chains, gag gifts, stuffed animals, …

By Crystal Silvas Forrester Research has just conducted a study for RevenueScience comparing behavioral targeting practices to contextual advertising. The study showed that online customers are more receptive to behavioral target advertising than they are to contextual methods—between 10 and 22% more receptive, in fact. Two thousand thirty-five online consumers were surveyed in fourteen different categories. According to Marla Schimke, VP of marketing at RevenueScience, “Using advertising that consumers are …

By Crystal Silvas The buzz around the Web seems to be dancing around holiday marketing. I know it may seem premature to some of you out there, but it really isn’t. Yes, I realize that the stores are just now rolling out the Halloween candy, and Christmas and Hanukkah are months away, but if you want your search terms to be ranking during the holidays, you better start preparing for …

The Newspaper Association of America (NAA) says that ad spending on newspaper Websites reached $796 million in the second quarter, which represents an increase of about 19.3% when compared to the same period last year. Since NAA began reporting ad spending in 2004, this has been the thirteenth quarter of double-digit growth—in a row. Newspaper Website advertising currently represents about 7% of total newspaper ad spending. (The percentage for the …

According to research conducted by William Blair and AdGooroo, the growth in total number of search engine marketers exceeds the growth of industry sales. In fact, the total number of advertisers has increased an estimated twenty percent between February and July 2007. Blair partnered with AdGooroo to examine the search engine marketer trends that drive this twenty billion dollar market. “We culled data from AdGooroo’s database of keyword advertising to …

You’ve heard it here a million times: while Google may be the most popular and well-known search engine in the U.S., it doesn’t necessarily make it the best engine for finding relevant information. Often times Google turns up very irrelevant results in its SERPS as its spiders must crawl the entire vast and ever-expanding world wide web. That’s why many businesses have shifted their SEM dollars opting to advertise on …