Multichannel Marketing

Marketers buying time during the Super Bowl broadcast face challenges in determining the return on investment of their spots. They’ll face even more challenges if their websites aren’t designed to handle resulting surges in traffic… and Yottaa.com, a website optimization firm, is betting they aren’t.

Yottaa has released its predictions for the five sites most likely to either crash entirely or slow down considerably during the big game. They are, in order of likelihood: more

Let’s be honest: A lot of what turns up in email inboxes is pretty ho-hum. You click through on a message if there’s a discount or free shipping on something you have an immediate need for, but otherwise, you delete or ignore a whole heck of a lot of messages because there’s a “been there, done that” vibe.

This past weekend, for the first time in ages, an email hit my inbox that made me want to revive our “Emails We Love” headline. The honor goes to Barnes & Noble, and an email for the Nook tablet.

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1. Perfect the “outside of the envelope.” There’s a reason this is first. If your email isn’t opened, it’s not going to convert and it can’t get opened if it’s not delivered. Outside of the envelope things that make a difference: the “to” address, the “from” address, the subject line and the format/deliverability.

2. Use a series of emails, not just one. There’s not a day that goes by that someone doesn’t tell me that they have an abandoned cart program, when they only have ONE email. One email does NOT make a program. Many consultants think three emails works best. I’ve found that most of the “3 is the magic more

Are you working on your web plans for 2012? Here are 10 of the must-haves every website (no matter how big or small) should include:

NAVIGATION AND INTERNAL NAVIGATION:

Internal search is one of the most difficult things to master. Even with a fancy package, you can’t change the fact that users are often abysmal at finding what they want. However, you can look at the top 100 searches you’ve had on your site in the past 12 months and make sure those words (the words and phrases the users searched for) are better represented in your navigation.

It’s important to remember that the order in which you present the results is critical to your success in search. Take the 100 top searches and conduct them yourself, one-by-one. Review each result. It’s critical that the item you most want to sell is first and the rest are in descending priority. more

For the holiday season, Barnes & Noble is wasting no time in taking advantage of the liquidation of Borders Books over the summer.

This week, the book selling giant has been sending emails to former customers of the now-defunct Borders retail chain offering holiday discounts such as 30% off book purchases and free delivery by Christmas.

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comScore reports that consumers have spent $30.9 billion online so far in November-December, a 15% increase over the same period in 2010. While Cyber Monday still holds the record for the heaviest online spending day of the year for the second consecutive season, last Friday’s Free Shipping Day still pulled in an impressive $1.07 billion.

Was “free shipping” the email buzzword last Friday? On December 16, 39 emails came into my personal inbox. Twenty-four of those messages featured free shipping pitches either in the subject line or body copy.

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