I have a friend who works in the online marketing department for a multi-million-dollar clothing retailer in Canada. Because they’re still stuck in the dark ages and don’t yet have an online store, the company’s web marketing team consists of four people.

A week ago, my friend called me to ask, “What’s the industry average time spent on a site?” Her boss asked her to find out because she was doing a presentation to the marketing team and would be attempting…

...continue to read "Are Your Analytics Reports Breaking News or Listing Facts?"

Have you ever noticed that if you really want good information about a product, you’re much more likely to find that information in a product review than in the product description itself?

Why aren’t product descriptions more helpful?

Here’s one thought: Men and women may care about different things. Product descriptions may not be speaking to both genders’ needs. In product reviews, men talk about what they care about, and women talk about what they care about. This may be one reason why…

...continue to read "Using Customer Review Keywords to Pick Up Women, Men"

The other week, Holly wrote about using video to build better customer relationships. But what if you have a specific product to sell?

Here’s a great example of using video to sell a book online:

Riverhead Books and Penguin Books hired Lindsey Testolin to make made the words of Daniel H. Pink and the illustrations of Rob Ten Pas come to life in the shape of a film trailer — complete with gratuitous needle-dragging-on-record sound effect to suggest a sudden change of expectations.…

...continue to read "Johnny Bunko Sure Knows How to Market a Book"

Who: Page Zero’s Andrew Goodman and Mona Elesseily

What: From the event website:

Google AdWords. Yahoo Search Marketing. Microsoft adCenter. Together, they take in nearly $20 billion a year from advertisers. The reason for their success is simple: measurable, direct responses from target customers… without intrusive methods. Fabrice Taylor recently wrote that Google AdWords is like a “smart bomb” that threatens to push many old media models into obsolescence.

Is it time to get your company up to speed?

This hands-on, intensive half-day seminar is designed…

...continue to read "Page Zero “Winning the Paid Search Game” Seminar, Toronto"

Here they are, the top 10 converting retail sites for March 2008*…

1. Office Depot – 20.9% 2. QVC – 19.0% 3. Vistaprint – 18.3% 4. Roamans – 18.1% 5. Lands End – 16.2% 6. eBay – 15.7% 7. 1800flowers.com – 15.5% 8. Ebags.com – 15.3% 9. L.L. Bean – 14.6% 10. Pottery Barn Kids – 14.2%

Last month, when Snapfish and Vistaprint found their way to February’s list (at the #1 and #2 spots respectively), Bryan wondered whether they were being tracked for the first time or if they had done something specific to…

...continue to read "Top 10 Online Retailers by Conversion Rate: March 2008"

I got an email from Facebook this morning, informing me that I had been invited to the wedding of one of my best friends:

I repeat, I got an email from Facebook this morning, informing me that I had been invited to the wedding of one of my best friends.

Apparently, he and his fiancé — also a friend — are worried their close friends, all devout music geeks, might buy tickets to this concert in September (a legitimate fear in my case) and thus have…

...continue to read "Have We Gone 2.0 Far? Facebook Wedding Invites!?"

Want to ramp up the conversion rate on your lead generation site?

Lead generation sites fail to convert for three basic reasons:

1. Visitors don’t understand the value they get in exchange for giving their information.

2. They are informationally challenged and collect too little, too much, or incorrect information.

3. You haven’t established trust and set proper expectations of what to expect when doing business with you.

Obviously, each is interrelated and flow from one to the other. There might be a few more reasons,…

...continue to read "3 Reasons Your Visitors Don’t Convert to Leads"

So, it wasn’t exactly Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood (”I’ve abandoned my CAAARRRRRRT!!!”), but when Jeffrey told me today that he still hadn’t bought his nephew the Fisher Price Grow to Pro Basketball hoop after two weeks of putting it off, I assumed he was being dramatic.

Jeffrey claimed to be sticker shocked from shipping cost inflation, a common reaction while shopping online. One minute, you think you know the whole price. Then — bam — you proceed to checkout,…

...continue to read "How to Increase Shopping Cart Abandonment"

Is it really such a bad thing to have a website that stinks?

In the second and final installment of Bryan’s interview with Ralph Wilson — recorded at February’s Search Engine Strategies conference in London — the two shift their focus from personas (as discussed in Part 1) to improving landing page conversion by creating better “scent” for the visitor.

In the video, Bryan talks about a study conducted by usability guru Jared Spool that shows, among other things, that…

...continue to read "Bryan Eisenberg on Websites That Stink (in a Good Way)"

Adobe Flash has been habitually misused by design-centric website developers — so much so that a few of us at FutureNow tend to wince when it’s even mentioned in passing.

It’s not that we don’t like Flash. When used purposefully, Flash has the potential to dramatize a product or service’s benefits in ways that static pictures and text can’t quite match.

The micro-site for the Sigma DP-1 camera (choose language preference to start) is a good example of Flash done right.

Notice how the choreographed presentation…

...continue to read "10 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Using Flash"