A/B Testing: The difference one line can make

by Ros Hodgekiss Many reasonable folks out there spend a lot of time and frustration in the search for the ‘perfect’ call-to-action. The good news is that with A/B testing, you can chose two suitable one-liners, then let the crowd decide which is their favorite! If you’re curious about the difference one line can make when it comes to the responsiveness of your emails, here’s a quick example. We launched a survey amongst a group of active customers, to help us prioritize improvements to our app this year. As we were keen to receive as many responses as possible, we ran an A/B test...

Fedex uses YouTube and Hulu to go after small business

NEW YORK (Reuters) – FedEx is famous for memorable television commercials, but like many big companies, it is following customers as they navigate from the television to the computer and in turn, shipping much of its marketing to the Web. One of the package delivery giant’s biggest Web campaigns, running on YouTube and Hulu, is a series of three-minute parodies called “1-2-3 Succeed!” starring comedian Fred Willard. Read...

Email Marketing Lessons from 2009 and How to Apply Them in 2010

Here are some interesting statistics about email marketing. The analysis is compiled from over 30 billion emails sent by Epsilon in 2009, across multiple industries and hundreds of clients. Read...

Small businesses go social to stay engaged with customers.

Small businesses are beginning to see how social media can help them stay connected to their customers. Last year social media adoption grew from 12% to 24%. Connie Steele, who is a director at Network Solutions (as you probably know a provider of online solutions for small businesses) said that “Social media can be the best friend for small business owners who constantly seek new ways to attract new customers and retain the ones they have at a relatively low cost.” Read...

Does an online initiative translate to offline sales?

by Jennifer Van Grove Last year Dunkin’ Donuts’ “Create Dunkin’s Next Donut” generated more than 130,000 donut submissions and 174,000 votes. But does that translate into offline sales? David Tryder, manager of interactive and relationship marketing, said that last year’s contest, “met expectations on the business side,” and the company, “saw a healthy response in donut sales during the promotion period.” Read...

What Street Vendors Can Teach Businesses About Twitter

Ok, I’ll be the first to admit that I have been hesitant to jump on the social media bandwagon. That being said, it has been an eye opening experience to see how so many companies are using it to grow their business. This post was written by Ann Handley, the Editor in Chief of MarketingProfs. It is a great example for someone who doesn’t understand how social media can fit into your marketing plan. Read more… What Street Vendors Can Teach Businesses About...

Measuring up email and social media

by Ros Hodgekiss Depending on how much effort you put into your monthly newsletter or social media efforts, the capacity for each channel to drive traffic to your site can be quite variable. We found that a whole month of Facebook updates and tweets drives roughly half as much traffic to our site as our monthly newsletter does over the same period, meaning that the social media crowd (roughly 9% of this combined audience) generated 30% of resulting traffic from Facebook, Twitter and email: Read...

Five Technologies That Will Keep Shaping the Web in 2010

by Dave Sparks As we’re coming to the end of this year, everyone starts to look towards the next one and there will no doubt be an upsurge of articles predicting the web trends of 2010 in the next days to come. However, in this article, we’ll be talking about what’s actually driving these trends now, and what they mean for the future of the internet. Read...

The Evolution of Web Design

by Cameron Chapman. Since the first websites in the early 1990’s, designers have been experimenting with the way websites look. Early sites were entirely text-based, with minimal images and no real layout to speak of other than headings and paragraphs. However, the industry progressed, eventually bringing us table-based designs, then Flash, and finally CSS-based designs. Read...

8 ways we increased ecommerce sales by 10,000%

by Paul Boag A 10,000% increase in sales over 5 years. Sounds incredible doesn’t it. Just to make that an even more incredible, their average customer is in their 80s! Who said the elderly don’t use the internet. When we started working with Wiltshire Farm Foods their monthly revenue was a 100th of what it is today. Of course in reality that success was not down entirely to us. Matt Curry, our client at Wiltshire Farm Foods has put his heart and soul into that website and as I say in Chapter one of the Website Owners Manual, it is the site champion who makes or breaks a site. Read...