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 Subscription Benchmark Study,” the EEC analyzed the welcome e-mails of one hundred-eighteen of the top online retailers, tracked via RetailEmail.Blogspot. The study identifies a number of best practices and benchmarks in the areas of merchandising, relationship-building, deliverability and CAN-SPAM compliance.

Jeanniey Mullen, EEC founder and a senior partner and executive director for e-mail and dialogue services at OgilvyOne Worldwide said, “There has been a tremendous increase in the adoption of welcome e-mails this year. I think that over the past year e-mail’s positioning has changed from being strictly a direct marketing tool to being more of a customer relationship [component]. A welcome message is a good way to start this relationship.”

This year the EEC has for the first time tracked the passage of time between subscriptions and the delivery of welcome e-mails. While most retailers deliver their welcome e-mails within ten minutes of sign-up, nineteen percent take more than twenty-four hours to deliver and nearly a third of those take over a week.

The report also found that fifty-eight percent of welcome e-mails were CAN-SPAM compliant in terms of including both a mailing address and unsubscribe method, versus fifty-two percent last year. Additionally, sixty-two percent of welcome e-mails asked subscribers to whitelist them by adding an e-mail address to their address book, up from forty-nine percent last year.

HTML-based welcome e-mails were also one the rise this year, with seventy-nine percent of retailers sending out e-mails using this format, up from sixty-nine percent last year. The remaining twenty-one percent sent text-only welcome e-mails.

The report also showed that seventy-five percent of the welcome e-mails included the retailer’s brand name in their subject lines, which remained consistent from last year. “I think that the retailers who use their name in the subject line are going to have better results,” Mullen added.

Retailers appear to be moving away from incentive offers during sign-up, as thirty-two percent of welcome e-mails include a discount, reward or incentive, down from thirty-four percent last year. If you would like some more information on this report, please visit http://www.emailexperience.org/Login-Whitepaper-Room.

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 reviewed the registration procedures, marketing messages and opt-out practices of companies including Coldwater Creek, Hershey Direct, Marks & Spencer and American Girl.

“We’re still seeing a lot of marketers who are not taking full advantage of what is available when it comes to e-mail,” said Silverpop Managing Director Mike Weston. “Retailers are faced with the challenge of retaining customers and e-mail is an excellent channel to build customer relationships.”

The report found that one of the biggest challenges for e-mail marketers is list growth. It suggested that a valuable method for adding to a company’s database is to include a registration box or link on the home page. Despite this fact, UK retailers are nearly twice as likely as US companies to bury opt-in requests within their Websites.

The study showed that more retailers today are merely asking for an e-mail address. In Silverpop’s 2005 version of this same report, it found that nearly four in ten retailers asked for names, physical addresses, and e-mail addresses. Additionally, twenty-four percent of retailers in 2005 required even more detailed information, like telephone numbers, personal interests and demographic information.

However, while in 2005, only thirty-seven percent of retailers requested just an e-mail address, a full sixty-one percent limited their request to just the e-mail address this year!

With a growing number of e-mail clients blocking images, the popular postcard-style layout has fallen out of favor among e-mailers. In 2005, the postcard format was the format of choice for fort-four percent of the e-mails reviewed by Silverpop. This year, styles were a little more varied. While twenty-six percent of e-mails were postcard-style, thirty percent were designed like letters or newsletters and nineteen percent featured a single pane of text and art atop rows or columns below.

While retailers’ e-mail layouts have changed, the incentives to buy have largely remained the same. In both 2005 and 2007, three in ten retailers offer “percent off” sales while eleven percent offer free or discounted shipping.

E-mail marketers are also keeping CAN SPAM-compliant by making it easy to opt-out of e-mail programs. In 2007, almost six in ten companies sent recipients wishing to opt-out to pre-populated Web forms, while only thirty percent of retailers did this in 2005. However, retailers still use this opt-out time as an opportunity to reconnect. This year, thirty-two percent of e-mail opt-out links led to a preference center allowing registrants to make changes to their subscriptions, while in 2005, only twelve percent did this.

These days, wholesale urban apparel encompasses all clothing that celebrates urban street life. While it used to be synonymous with hip-hop clothing, it now includes clothing for street skaters and surfers as well. It has evolved branching into a few different categories including brand driven hip hop clothes Sean John, Enyce, Akademiks and L-R-G to hip hop music influenced brands Vokal, Snoop Dogg and Rocawear.

Urban clothes range from tees, jackets, pants, shirts, wovens, hats to much more. Brands like Sean John, Enyce and Akademiks offer street inspired clothing as well as fashion-forward styles. You can find brands like these (and more) by visiting http://www.urbanclothingultd.com.

For more information, contact:
urbanclothingultd.com
2509 Pelican Bay Drive
Panama City Beach, FL 32408
Tel.: 850-234-1505
Website: http://www.urbanclothingultd.com

This hasn’t stopped others in the industry from speculating about what this change could mean for MySpace and online advertising as a whole. MySpace may be able to nearly double its revenue, from $40 million a month to $70 million a month due to the data mining project according to Perry Solomon, VP of business development and general manager of data mining services provider Media Solutions, FAST Search and Transfer.

“We’ve moved from the ‘build it and they will come’ stage to the ‘they are here, let’s understand what they like and deliver it while making money’ stage,” Solomon said. He said that MySpace may use targeting tools to add value to the user experience. He also suggested that users should have the choice to opt out if they don’t wish to participate. This will help to maintain a good level of user control and privacy.

“Members of MySpace communities won’t have a problem with this,” Solomon predicted. “In fact, they will probably benefit. If they are willing to be marketed to, provided the marketing is relevant, this all becomes part of their conversations and adds value to the experience.”

There is an enormous amount of insight from the collective user data on social networking sites, like MySpace. The information users post about themselves from their likes to dislikes to how and where they spend their time and money, can all be mined and used for improved targeting, according to Solomon.

“MySpace’s strategy, along with the other social networking sites, is to move from being a content-aggregation site—which is what the social networking sites are—to a hub of content, community and commerce,” he said. “Today, they provide tools and environments to build community and aggregate content. Now the challenge is to mine that community and add value to the experience by adding information to help members do more.”

For media companies with loyal user bases and great content, there exists a great opportunity to build stronger communities around users, and then monetize those communities by delivering relevant, targeted advertising, content promotions and offers, upsells to subscriptions or premium offers and related e-commerce offers. Solomon said that there should be no challenges, provided that the social networking operators deliver relevant messages.

A key requisite for these social networking sites is to have a strong technology foundation that can draw insight from the community members’ feedback, their collective behavior across the community, and deliver targeted, relevant advertising, offers and introductions.

“Users will benefit if they receive information which is relevant and addresses their needs,” Solomon said. “If the targeting is effective, users will see messages that address what they like, messages with which they can engage.”

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 customers alike, and it’s not difficult to do.

“Cross-selling” and “up-selling” involve directing a customer’s attention to products and services that complement or increase a purchase while it’s still in progress. Good e-commerce sites are a great way to study cross- and up-selling strategies. Try making a purchase at Amazon.com without being offered recommendations for additional products you should be using. (“People who purchased this item also bought this one…”) Behavioral targeting offers an enlightened follow-up on communication and sales opportunities. This can be leveraged for cross- and up-selling to people browsing or shopping the Web. These techniques can substantially boost your online sales, especially during a season characterized by benevolence and wanton spending.

You can begin by looking over historical purchasing patterns. If you find that buyers of product A often buy product B or C, either in the same transaction or later on, then they’re obvious candidates for follow-up ads for product B or C. See how that works? Re-targeting can be used to designate a cookie for product A buyers and to deliver ads featuring products B and C after the initial sale. But we already do that all year round, so what makes this season different?

Behavioral marketing lets advertisers target individual consumers rather than portions of content or categories of consumers. When consumer purchasing patterns change, like they do in seasons of amplified spending, this approach allows marketers to make adjustments in an efficient, timely and profitable way. Allowing consumers to take the lead, following their trail, and then responding to their hints is what sets behavioral targeting apart from other methods.

Most consumers browse, shop, and buy differently during the holiday season than they do during other times of the year. Trends materialize quickly and the response window is quite small. Many high-involvement purchases sold during this season are excellent candidates for cross- and up-selling opportunities. Sellers of clothing, electronics, products for the home, etc can offer higher quality, more expensive products, upgrades, insurance, or service offerings.

There is a challenge involved in holiday up-selling during the holiday season, however. For instance, if an item is given as a gift, marketers unlikely know anything about the recipient and therefore can’t up-sell them directly. A more comprehensive approach must be taken in order to give gift recipients a reason to come to the site so that they can be identified and receive a cookie. Once you segment gift recipients, you can reintroduce the brand plus additional sales opportunities through targeted promotions and offers. There’s also a larger percentage of new buyers to many sites during the holiday season, so re-targeting pixels aren’t available. (Those shoppers are holiday buyers, not regulars.) Special techniques must be used to address the follow-up to those sporadic buyers.

It’s probably possible to target gift-givers differently if you are able spot them based on their behavior. You might consider creating a segment of buyers who have items gift-wrapped if there are appropriate up-sell opportunities. But don’t forget about the other effective tactics that can be used. E-mail maintains its position as the most effective means to incremental sales. Using behavioral targeting to identify candidates for up-sell with the specific objective of adding them to an e-mail list is an excellent way to integrate two channels for a common goal. Rich media ad units that capture e-mail directly in the advertisement represent a productive and quantifiable use of behavioral targeting.

A practical approach to maximizing the holiday shopping season starts with knowing your customer (and potential customer) base. Behavioral targeting should be applied in a skillfully crafted plan to create awareness, motivate action, and to develop an ongoing dialogue with your customer base. In the holiday season, behavioral targeting should be a progressive and focalized effort.

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 market segments.

According to Jeff Rosenzweig, senior manager of CRM and e-mail marketing at Travelocity, “It is key to define your life cycle stages and objectives and then design your communication strategy accordingly. Inspire, convert, cross-sell, get feedback and inspire others with it.”

Travelocity employs behavioral segmenting for its customers using such attributes as shopping and booking behavior, subscriptions, geography, psychographic interests and hobbies. Demographics like socio-economic status, marital status and presence of children also come into play.

Rosenzweig says that segmentation allows for more relevant ads, and relevance can drive up to a twenty-fold increase in performance. “Be compelling and personalize,” he said.

EDining Advantage helps clients gather information about people who have eaten at their restaurants. When customers visit certain restaurants they are asked to fill out cards with information such as name, e-mail address and birthday. The cards are then sent to EDA in postage-paid mailers and are processed. Each customer is segmented by restaurant and is sent offers via e-mail.

According to Jason Smith, founder and CEO of eDining Advantage, “A forward-to-a-friend button can increases traffic to a site and to the restaurants themselves.”

Smith also said that seventy-eight percent of prospects look forward to receiving any type of e-mail from a business they frequent and ninety percent of AOL consumers expressed a strong desire to receive discounts and special offers from businesses.

Columbia Sportswear Co. started its e-mail program in 2003 and sent the same general e-mails to its entire database.

“Our company philosophy was everyone is interested in everything,” said Daria Colner, Internet marketing manager for Columbia Sportswear Company.

The company was seeing an open rate of about eighteen to twenty-seven percent and a click-through rate of about four to fifteen percent.

“We were not as successful as we could be,” Colner said.

That was when Columbia decided to develop a better approach to get click-through and open rates up through segmentation.

The company created seven categories based on identified customer profiles. As a result, the open rate is now fifty-two to sixty-nine percent and the click-through rate is nineteen to twenty-three percent. Jenny Craig also uses segmentation to discern which offers should be sent to what prospects.

“We focus on inactive clients most of all, as it is easier to win a client back then it is to attract new ones,” said Robyn Davidoff, director of integrated marketing for Jenny Craig.
The weight-loss company uses personalization and segment-based messages and offers, and phone numbers at the bottom of each e-mail are segmented in order to track which campaign a prospect is calling in regard to.

“Test subject lines. Create two or three subject lines and send out a small percentage with each subject line,” Davidoff said. “The one that works best should be sent out with the remainder of the names.”

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 decline (AOL) in that same University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction survey. We also noted the classic Little Guy vs. Goliath in search marketing: The Open Source Search Project called LAMP (or David’s Little Brother) is taking on Tier 1 Market Dominant Goliath, Google.

Not SEM Dark Horses Anymore

Did you spot two specialized search engines racing up the inside track toward the finish line? These emerging niche-targeted engines are Local and Vertical Search. They offer search marketing opportunities to wholesalers and retailers – from networks and databases accessed with focused keywords, to paid-ad programs that often deliver better returns on each ad dollar spent.

Local Search. Every time a reseller seeks suppliers with regional distributors, or when potential customers search for a place to purchase goods in a brick-and-mortar store, they enter geographic words to narrow their searches. Localized keywords include an address, city or zip code.

While Piper Jaffray Investment Research estimated nearly 30% of all search queries by end 2006 were “local searches,” researchers also estimated that most results listings still came from localized keywords entered into general search engines. However, that unfocused approach is changing.

Specialized local search engines rapidly close the gap with general search engines, whose results might be localized only if searchers enter the “right” keywords. Emerging local search sites include:

· Local Directories – Electronic databases from traditional phone book and business directory publishers, such as SuperPages.com (converted Yellow Pages listings); and YellowBook.com (competing local directories publisher who also converted to online listings and has localization contracts with major search engines for large metro areas across the U.S.).

· Local Tabs on Major Engines – Data management companies, such as Acxiom and infoUSA, acquire local phone book commercial listings and convert them to searchable databases. Such localized search channels are then licensed to Tier 1 search engines who feature Local Search site tabs. (Local.Google.com; Local.Yahoo.com; Local.Live.com and CityGuides.MSN.com)

Local search engines and major engine local channels offer paid-inclusion ad contracts, online display ads inserted in traditional yellow pages categories, and pay-per-click ad contracts. Piper Jaffray projected local search will hit 50% of all searches, and may reach $25 Billion in U.S. transactions. Specialized, local search engines are likely to continue up the infield and overtake smaller generic search engines.

Vertical Search. When searchers are professional or work-focused – and are more “cluey” – they bypass general search engines entirely. These niche-targeted and self-selected professional searchers jockey up to Vertical Search Engines.

Vertical search engines and directories are organized around an industry, profession or category of interest. Verticals are developed by industry specialists, and therefore deliver more relevant, topic-filtered results. (A 2006 Outsell study reported a 31.9% failure rate among business users searching on general search engines; respondents found too many irrelevant results.)

Specialized vertical search engines also deliver better returns on ad/marketing dollars — compared to conversion rates for paid-inclusion or pay-per-click ads run on general search engines — because VSEs attract more targeted, motivated searchers. (Based on research cited above, Outsell forecast a growth rate of 15% a year for business-to-business and specialized vertical search engines; projecting $1 Billion in VSE revenues by 2009.)

That’s why search marketing industry watchers now bet on Vertical Search Engines, labeling them “the new portals” and the “golden” track of search. By the way, the term “cluey” above, coined by Eric Cho at Search Engine Marketing Hints, describes how searchers are more specific and focused when they seek products, services and information online. (As in, they have more of a clue.) Cho predicted such “cluey” searchers push VSEs into front-runner positions, reaching nearly 50% of future search market share.

Examples of successful vertical search engines now overtaking Tier 1 and 2 engines for relevant search results and better ROI include:

· Network of wholesale vertical search engines/directories affiliated with TopTenWholesale.com. (You’re reading one of this network’s e-newsletters.) TopTenWholesale affiliate VSE communities serving wholesaler, importers, distributors and resellers of various categories of apparel and general merchandise include Wholezilla.com, OffPriceNetwork.com and WholesaleU.com.

· Business.com, VSE for business decision makers, which is being acquired by R. H. Donnelly, another specialized data operation in yellow pages and online local commercial search.

· Medstory.com, a specialized searchable database on drugs, procedures, clinical studies and medical experts.

When you plan winning campaigns – using search engine optimization, paid-ad campaigns and market-segmented search marketing — keep your eye on the local and vertical search engines pulling up the inside stretch. Dark horses no more!

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 their Websites in the near future while 72% said they would begin to integrate lifestyle photography. 63% are going to be adding social media tools like videos and user-generated customer reviews.

The report shows a 25% growth in e-commerce sales in 2006 as compared to the previous year, which is great considering that the expected growth rate was only estimated at 20%.

The report found that this channel continues to grow and is likely to continue growing for about a year more before the online channel reaches the point of saturation. The study projects steady growth for online retailers including a shift in sales from their offline counterparts, which seem to be growing at a snail’s pace.

About 27% of online retailers surveyed said that they currently have live Web chat services on their sites and 33% say that adding this service to their sites will be a priority in the coming year.

About a third of online retailers see product customization as powerfully valuable and highly effective, so it makes sense that nearly half of those surveyed said they would consider online customization applications for their sites in the coming year. 49% of retailers surveyed said they currently have such applications in place already.

The most effective tool for customer retention still seems to be e-mail marketing which is why nearly three-quarters of online retailers say that they utilize e-mail marketing strategies to inform customers of new products and services as they become available.

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 field over the course of the past twenty-seven years.

While their production base is located in Dong Guang, China, they are able to offer fast and reliable service because they also have branches in Dubai, USA, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. They boast a production level of half a million units per month and their sales channel spans most of the world.

What makes Alamode stand out from other jewelry manufacturers is their unwavering dedication to quality; Alamode’s wholesale fashion jewelry is 100% hand-made. Craftsmanship of this caliber is difficult to find. That is why they are considered to be one of the higher-end jewelry manufacturers of the world.

Their Website is pleasing to the eye and easy to navigate. Their homepage features sections for brand new products as well as limited offers. Users may browse the site based on product type or even by price category, e.g. “On Sale” or “Outlet.” The site also features a comprehensive Q&A section, an informative “Helpful Info” section (with birth stone tables, international size conversion tables, color charts, etc), and even a new customizing tool for aspiring jewelry designers.

For more information, contact:
Alamode Fashion Jewelry Co.
10152 Chapman Avenue
Garden Grove, CA 92840
Toll Free: 800-622-4404
Tel.: 714-636-4237
Website: www.alamodeonline.com

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, 3D greeting cards, stretchy toys and more.

One of their newest additions just made its debut at the ASD/AMD Trade Show in Vegas last month. They’re called “Little Stinkers” and they’re the cutest little keychain air fresheners ever. These miniature plush toys are soft, silly and—you guessed it—smelly (in a good way, of course!) They come in four different scents including wildberry, vanilla, coffee and fruit pop. All scents were formulated and made in the U.S.A. and each scent comes in three different styles.

Shaped like ice cream cones, berries, coffee mugs or frozen popscicles, these goofy little guys talk when you squeeze them, and they’re a bargain at only $2.50 a piece. They can be purchased by the dozen in colorful display boxes measuring 4”H x 9W” x 8.5”D. The display boxes include keychains of one scent in three assorted styles/colors. To order these and other products, please contact:

JFL Enterprises, Inc.
4900 Train Avenue
Cleveland, OH 44102
Toll Free: 800-837-7799
Tel.: 216-458-0680
Website: www.jflenterprises.com

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 receptive to is crucial, and behavioral targeting is clearly the best performer. When marketers use behavioral targeting, they can be sure that 93% of the audience receptive to their ad shop online, and those consumers make a more attractive online advertising target because they represent a higher income bracket, spend more money online and shop online more frequently.”

This study serves as proof that behavioral targeting is the best bet for reaching a very valuable, highly qualified audience. It’s crucial that marketers integrate behavioral marketing into their online marketing strategy.

The study also said that leveraging the general online activities and habits of the online consumer is key. According to the study, marketers should “Take advantage of the multiple steps of the purchase funnel where online shoppers leverage the Internet for more than just purchasing online—also for researching their purchases, whether the purchase execution is online or offline.”

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 season now. Besides, being prepared for this exceptionally busy time is a great way to help alleviate some of the stress associated with this time of year.

Let’s face it: Life can get hectic during this time of year. That’s why it’s so important to get started early. All of the great holiday specials and advertisements in the world won’t help your site’s traffic during this busy time if you haven’t adequately prepared. We all know that search engine rankings don’t happen overnight, so it’s imperative that you take a proactive approach to get your holiday terms and specials ranking during the holidays rather than after when it’s too late. That’s why you should start in September. This is the time you should be optimizing some of your text, page titles and headers for search terms that performed well for you last Christmas. Do your research!

Unfortunately, most keyword research tools only provide data for the last thirty to ninety days, so if you research holiday keywords now you’re not likely to get very accurate results; not many people out there search for holiday terms between June and August. That’s why it’s wise to revisit data from last year. It’ll probably reflect what’s going to happen this year a lot more accurately.

I know it’s tempting to wait until November; I tend to be a procrastinator myself. But hear me out this time. If you wait until the last possible second and rush through your planning, it’s unlikely you’ll see much of a return on your design investment, not to mention your valuable time, and you’ve heard the old adage: “Time is money.” This isn’t rocket science, people. But don’t you worry. If you start now you still have plenty of time to ensure that your holiday specials are well thought-out, marketed, ranked and profitable come holiday time. Here are some ideas to help you get the ball rolling on your holiday marketing plan:

What to do in September.
This is the month you should start writing up some good text for your upcoming holiday specials. This is the fun part! Get super creative. Perhaps even make a game of it. Have some of your wittiest friends over to help you come up with some fun titles. Once you’ve got this down, figure out what you want to promote during the holiday season. Come up with a few different choices for products and use your friends and family to help you. Ask them what they would buy if they were customers. After you make your final decision and are happy with it, get this info to your Webmaster—stat! Also, make sure that your supply chain can accommodate your specials so you can avoid not fulfilling time-sensitive orders during this crazy time. Nothing is more frustrating to holiday shoppers, and you want to keep these people happy if you want them to come back eventually.

…and in October.
Now is the time to start putting your holiday promotions up on your site in highly visible places, especially the homepage. If you don’t want to put your specials directly on your homepage, at least place links to them there, and be sure to use eye-catching graphics. (Think eye candy.) It’s important to make your specials visually stimulating so that you can entice your shoppers to buy. Fun and festive designs work well this time of year. Make sure that all pages featuring holiday specials are very well optimized. This is when proper use of headings, meta descriptions and heading tags becomes important. Also, don’t forget to incorporate those all-important keywords into your copy, and weave them in naturally to avoid appearing spammy.

Design e-mail marketing blasts to go out to every single person in your database. Hopefully you’ve been preparing ahead of time and already have a database which includes every online buyer you’ve had in the last few years, plus potential customers who are likely to be interested in what you have to offer. Basically anyone who you think wants to be exposed to your holiday specials should be included on this list.

Once you’ve taken the time to write up a good blast, go ahead and post it on your site. If you have a newsroom or blog, post it there. Then advertise it on other blogs linking back to your promo page. Also, add the link to your e-mail signature so that everyone you e-mail can see it. Once you’ve got the blast up on your site, optimize the new content and get the search engines looking into what’s going on ahead of time. If you do this early enough in October, these pages should be indexed and ranking by Hanukkah.

Now you’re ready to send out the first e-mail blast. You probably won’t get a lot of buyers early on, but that’s perfectly ok. The purpose of this e-mail campaign is to plant the seed. Next you should write three more e-mail marketing blasts to capitalize on the early bird shoppers of early November, the Thanksgiving week and Black Friday shoppers, and the procrastinators who wait until the last possible week to start shopping. Business will probably be picking up in a month or so, and you don’t want to worry about constructing e-mails then. For a worry-free November, have them saved and ready to go.

Gobble, gobble! Here’s your November plan.
If you’ve followed this plan meticulously, now is the time to start reaping all the benefits of the past few months’ hard work. (Hooray!) In the beginning of the month you should send out the next e-mail blast, targeted to those early bird shoppers. In the middle of the month send out the one written for Thanksgiving week. Hopefully you have a great e-mail marketing team who can do this for you. If you have these written and ready to go, you can give your team instructions on when they should be sent out so that you don’t even have to worry about it.

Go check out some social networking sites, like MySpace or Facebook. Find out where people are talking about holiday and online shopping and then let those people know you’ve got holiday specials and packages. Links from these sites certainly can’t hurt.

Oh my goodness, December already!
Now for the home stretch. This is the time to send out your final e-mail blast. Take advantage of last-minute shoppers by offering them “one-click” shopping from the homepage. You should feature a description of your holiday special and provide a link to “buy it now.” Make sure the link leads directly to the credit card form. Instant sales! You can even offer up packaged deals or free gift wrapping. Also, many procrastinators love the phrase “free shipping”, so try wrapping some of the shipping cost into the product price. This creates the illusion of an awesome discount— icing on the cake of the “package deal” you’re already offering them.

So the lesson of this article is to plan ahead. Make sure and get lots of relevant content up on your site, and be sure to do it nice and early. This time of year is extremely competitive, but if you have a good strategy in place that makes execution easy when you’re crazy-busy, the holidays won’t seem so hectic. So take heed of my advice and get on board with those early holiday revelers. If done right your season should be merry and stress-free. Happy holidays!

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 same period last year was only 5.4%.)

However, the total spend on newspaper advertising decreased 8.6% down to $11.3 billion in Q2. Print ad expenditures decreased 10.2% down to $10.5 billion when compared to Q2 last year.

This change seems to illustrate a shift in the way businesses use newspapers to advertise. People in general are spending more time online and they are finding alternative news sources to the hardcopy newspapers of yesteryear. This presents a huge opportunity for advertisers and should definitely be kept in mind when appropriating ad funds.

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 glean insight into industry composition, industry growth, market share, seasonality and company-specific trends,” the report says. “In total, we believe the global marketplace comprises more than five-hundred thousand advertisers and that about ninety percent advertise with Google.”

Additionally, the study found that Project Panama, which serves fewer, more relevant ads with each search, is affecting Yahoo’s advertiser base. The system is helping Yahoo to attract a surge of new advertisers after the launch. However, the study found thatYahoo faced fallout due to the relevancy-based ranking, which hurt some advertisers and its efforts to clean up the advertiser base.

The study concluded that Google is still seeing stable growth.

“While seasonality is a factor, we believe that Google continues to enjoy steady growth in its total number of advertisers and dominates the industry with about three times more advertisers than Yahoo and nearly 10 times more than MSN,” the report says.

Google’s AdWords system is serving up a stable number of paid listings per search. AdGooroo forecasts continued steady and consistent improvement in revenue per search and feels Google is the “best pick” in the sector.

The study also found that competitiveness for paid search is on the rise. Advertisers appear to be very seasonal with bidding strategies. The report highlights the fact that about one-half of Yahoo and MSN’s advertisers are also advertisers with Google, and that these networks attract approximately thirty percent and ten percent of the total universe of search marketers each month.

“[What is] more important to consider is the pace at which the advertiser count is growing,” the study says. “We view this information as valuable, since it provides some insight into the growth and vitality of the medium, as well as the potential competitiveness of keyword marketing.

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 more niche-specific search engines, vertical search engines. As Laura Tiffany states in a recent article on Entrepeneur.com, if you’re a B2B company and “you’re looking for highly targeted business purchasers, it may be wise to go vertical.” You can get the full scoop by visiting http://www.entrepreneur.com/technology/article183770.html.