Happy Cyber Monday! Today is the unofficial start of the online holiday shopping season. A few days ago, we celebrated Black Friday, which signifies the busiest shopping day of the year, as consumers headed to traditional, brick-and-mortar storefronts to take advantage of amazing doorbuster deals. Online marketers use Cyber Monday discounts to entice shoppers who were unable (for whatever reasons) to get the deals they had hoped for on Black Friday. Read the full article…
Archive for November, 2009
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Cyber Monday Ushers in Online Holiday Shopping Season
Cory Grassell
30Nov
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What Email Marketing Usability Says About Brand Identity
Cory Grassell
Lately, we’ve talked about best practices of website design and development to improve the overall user experience with your brand (see Improve Website Usability With On-Site Search Box, for example), but email marketing also sends a strong message about your brand’s identity and interactive experience. For example, just as you have a limited amount of time to capture your website readers’ interest before they return to the search engine results page, your email marketing messages must do an effective job of quickly reeling in your readers.
Put yourself in your readers’ shoes; they receive multitudes of email messages per day. Many emails get deleted and never read. For some, your email marketing is the first encounter they have with your brand. So how do you create an effective email campaign that gets noticed and reaps positive, measurable results? Read the full article…
25Nov
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Benefits of Video Captions on YouTube and Google Video
Tara Daniels
Last week, YouTube and Google Video “upped the ante,” so to speak, on their captioning technologies. YouTube and Google Video will now use automatic speech recognition (ASR) combined with YouTube’s existing caption technology to create automatic captions within videos. Automatic captions (a.k.a. auto caps) benefit several groups, including the deaf, the hearing impaired, non-English speakers, Web searchers and video posters.
The benefit for the hearing impaired and non-English speakers is fairly obvious — people who would not otherwise understand the content of an online video are now able to read the spoken content via auto caps. But what are the implications of auto caps for online video search? Read the full article…
24Nov
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Yellow Pages Directory Opt-Out Options Give Consumers a Choice
Jill Jansen
If you are like me, every day you walk into your apartment building and see a stack of unused phone books piled up on the lobby floor. Eventually, some of these books will be picked up and used by residents of my building, but there are also a handful of books that will remain in their packaging, ultimately getting thrown out or recycled. While studies show print Yellow Pages usage is continuing to decline and Internet Yellow Pages usage continues to rise, it is not a surprise that some publishers in the industry have created plans that now leave the choice up to the consumer as to whether or not they would like to receive a Yellow Pages directory. Read the full article…
23Nov
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Improve Website Usability With On-Site Search Box
Cory Grassell
If you’re looking for an effective way to simultaneously enhance the user experience with you website and encourage online sales, an on-site search box is an often-overlooked feature that you can easily and affordably implement on your own. Did you know that nearly 50 percent of revenue from e-commerce sites is generated by the on-site search engine? Read the full article…
19Nov
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Getting Back to Basics — Local Search Varies by Product, Search
Jane Wamsley
Getting caught up in the coolest, newest thing is easy. For marketers, that “thing” these days seems to be mobile search. While there’s no doubt mobile search is here to stay and be taken seriously (heck, I even blogged about mobile search before), sometimes, you just have to take a step back and say, “What’s really best for my client?” Read the full article…
18Nov
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Effects of Video-Game Advertising on Online Search
Michael Solms
I came across an interesting article recently about how comScore plans to track the effectiveness of in-game ads on video gamers’ online behaviors. Advertising on consumer video-game consoles such as Xbox and PlayStation 3 is becoming a popular trend, popular enough that comScore sees value in conducting a study to gauge its effectiveness. For the first time, comScore has partnered with a video-game provider, Microsoft’s Xbox LIVE system, to track the results of advertising on online search. Read the full article…
18Nov
