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Testing Website Navigation

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Of all the elements that can be tested on a website, few are more important than testing the efficiency of your navigation elements. Navigation is an essential element of the Web, capable of providing a vastly improved experience for users and influencing several key performance indicators. While it may not be as exciting an element to test as pricing, it does carry major influence on creating a meaningful interaction for Web users and a profitable one for your Web enterprise.

Information portals and e-commerce sites are those that may benefit most from testing navigation. Groups or individuals focused exclusively on landing page optimization should certainly be concerned with and consider testing navigation,but when the notion of “conversion” rules the focus of every page, calls-to-action and other elements (e.g. imagery) that aid in the conversion process often take precedence. However, navigation should never be an afterthought, as it is an element that can undoubtedly move users closer to the end of the sales funnel, even from a very specific landing page.

Informed, Educated Testing
Depending on your website’s audience, understand that the navigation menu experience will change dramatically from site to site. You may find with a younger, hipper audience that users will prefer rollover menus but detest autoexpanding menus. You may find with far older audiences that text-style menus outperform Flash and hyper-sensitive flyout menus. While you can certainly make some broad guesses as to what will perform best, only testing will ensure the best experience for your audience and, therefore, the best opportunities for conversion.

Commit to Testing
Users must be able to easily find their way through a website from every page, ultimately reaching the information they want or need quickly. It’s hard to take a different point of view. When testing, both designers and site owners must understand users’ expectations of their website navigation.Finding a way to provide easy access to what users want (and with fewer clicks) when designing website navigation and structure will improve the information-seeking experience and make a positive impact on key performance indicators like time-on-site and bounce rate — important factors in everything from advertising metrics to SEO. The point is, even if you’re not committed to running elaborate tests on navigation, do recognize the importance of helping users get what they want.

How to Test Website Navigation
If you are committed to testing navigation but have not yet, selected a vendor (and don’t want to run manual tests) know that there are a variety of site testing tools available.

Online testing platforms the top nine players in the space which included Adobe Test & Target, Amadesa Customer Experience Suite, Autonomy Optimost, Google Website Optmizer, Maxymiser Content MVT, SiteSpect, Vertster Conversion Optimization Suite and Webtrends Optimize. Adobe Test & Target (formerly Omniture) and Autonomy Optimost are placed as the leaders — Adobe Test & Target excels in overall application usability, customer satisfaction and content support, while Autonomy stands out in administration, deployment options and breadth of testing techniques.

While free site testing tools such as Google Website Optimizer are attractive to many, other Web professionals demand more and these commercial vendors all provide competitive and effective solutions. Know in advance, however, that investing in any testing platform can be costly and time consuming.The cost of experimenting often depends on the amount of traffic pages receive, the complexity of experiments and, in some instances, the difference in conversion rates for your combinations. As such, know how these site testing vendors charge for their services and, based on your own needs, determine if using their services is necessary or warranted. With a little virtual elbow grease and some organization you can test navigation elements without these vendors, over time, to the same effect.

What to Test
Once it has been determined how you will test your website’s navigation (manually or by using a testing service), it is time to decide what you will be testing. A few of the more meaningful options you can select from the start include location, descriptions and functionality.

Location —Web users are an impatient lot, and they will not spend time on your site if they can’t find what they want. As such, navigation should be a prominent element of your design.But what is the optimal location for navigation? Only testing will reveal the answer.

The most common location for primary navigation is horizontally,across the top of the page. The advantage of using navigation elements in this location is that it provides additional room for content and other relevant information about products and services. By not forcing visitors to scroll down to navigate further into your site, the result might ultimately be increased page views and time-on-site. Keep in mind that should you opt to use graphics in the header of the page, consider testing navigation above and below the primary graphic. Navigation design trends today often include primary navigation bundled with images and calls to action, but providing a simple navigation path should still be tested.

While horizontal navigation is quite common today, that has not always been the case — it used to be that left-of-page navigation was the most common location. As design has matured and evolved, navigation location has increasingly taken on new forms and should be audience-appropriate.

When it comes to the location of navigation elements, consider testing new areas entirely (right-hand or left-hand navigation) or testing the presence of secondary
navigation elements in various locations around the page (the footer, for example) to determine if the presence increases page views or sales.

Descriptions — A website’s section names, particularly as labeled in the navigation, should clearly state what the user can expect after the click. General words like “resources” or “tools” are far too ambiguous and should be avoided. Using generic terminology tends to lead users to
wander, and away from the conversion path we have set forth.

Test reducing or increasing the amount of text in primary navigation. Depending on the makeup of the audience, they may need more or less descriptive text — you won’t know unless you test. Best practice guidance teaches us to settle on four to six primary sections of your website (and thus silo-ing existing content under these channels) and to focus on the naming conventions (keywordrich, of course) of those navigation links. This will offer users faster, more accurate access to the information they want.

Functionality — As important as where you
place your navigation elements and the clarity of the text individual navigational links provide is the functionality of the navigation menu itself. Web designers have a variety of options available to them when it comes to navigation functionality — from mouseover effects to dropdowns, to nested menus and more. For some ideas, look into Javascript libraries such as jQuery, Mootools, prototype or script.aculo.us.

Testing the functionality of your navigation will yield results. What should be tested is how certain effects impact key performance indicators, such as page views. Consider tracking how users interact with different navigation functionality by recording their visits — two services to consider include Click-Tale.com and Mouseflow.com.

Designing for users is important. Web designers need to provide visiting audiences with what they expect in a clear and compelling manner. The battle line is navigation. While the attraction toward using elaborate or intricate navigation is understandable, the goal is always to provide users with access to the information the website provides. Users do not have the patience or time to learn more intricate navigation, so focus on creating an experience that is both instinctive and natural.

Web Search Alternatives

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Google is the first choice in web search for more than 65 percent of the Web, while the shared efforts of Microsoft and Yahoo have earned Bing the market’s only other significant share.

Blekko
When Blekko launched back in November 2010, there were plenty of doubters who didn’t expect the startup search engine to last more than a year. While that may not be guaranteed just yet, Blekko is making good on its promise of creating a new and exciting alternative in search.

Blekko’s mission, some three years in the making before its actual launch, was to enlist human editors in an effort to eliminate spam and personalize and socialize the search experience. The team of 25 or so employees includes former Google and Yahoo search engineers and the project has received significant backing from some of the best known investors in the tech world.

The magic behind the Blekko vision was to use programming related slashtags or topic tags to create the most relevant search verticals for users. Those very users would be among the editors curating and maintaining the slashtags, and after three months Blekko reported that it had more than 110,000 human-curated tags.

Blekko clearly could not compete with the size and scope of Google’s or Bing’s indexes, but what it could — and does — do is produce more relevant, more accurate, better search results. Before Google made headlines around the globe with its Farmer Update algorithm changes, Blekko had removed the very same content farms (and many more) from its search index as a matter of standard practice — and to much less fanfare.

But what it may lack in publicity Blekko has made up for in terms of a devoted user base. Its January 2011 numbers indicated an average of 1 million queries per day and between 10 to 15 queries per second. And Google and Bing’s own publicity does them as much harm as good — the controversy over Bing’s “stolen” search results and Google’s paid links scandal with J.C. Penney being just two recent examples.

Perhaps that’s why Blekko and the alternative search options below have become favorites for many SEOs and Web professionals of every kind.

DuckDuckGo
Blekko recently forged a partnership with fellow startup search engine DuckDuckGo (DDG), in which the two companies share technologies and information in the name of improving the quality of search results for users. The partnership is sure to evolve over time, say the CEOs of both companies, but right now DDG receives access to Blekko’s auto-fired slashtags in seven categories (health,colleges, autos, personal finance, lyrics,recipes and hotels) in return for use of DDG’s proprietary feature, zero-click info.

Similar to Google’s Instant Search,zero-click info gives users the most relevant information on websites and search terms without having to click on search results. Local business listings from Yelp, word definitions from The Free Dictionary, Wikipedia entries andcontentfrom13additionalStackExchange sites are some examples of information users can find with zero-click results.

LikeBlekko, DuckDuckGo has developed quite a following and averages more than 5 million searches per month.

Greplin
Greplin is a user-authorized search engine that can search and index social services and applications such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Gmail, Google Docs, Evernote, Basecamp, Salesforce and more, and it’s adding more all the time. The startup recently announced the addition of a Chrome extension to its search presence so that users can now search their social data directly from the browser without having to go to Greplin’s website. Greplin may be the best known of a growing number of services such as CloudMagic that are designed for searching users’ social graphs for personal data and those hard-tofind items that often get lost in the cloud.

Wajam
Wajam is another socially driven search tool,but unlike Greplin it returns its results as part of your experience with Google or Bing. Where Greplin searches only the applications that have been preauthorized by the user, Wajam searches the entire Web but with an emphasis on returning personalized results from Facebook,Twitter and other social sites a user has bookmarked. It is used as a browser extension available for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer, and injects these social results into the search queries submitted to larger engines.

Quora
Quora is the extremely popular new platform that strives to be the definitive questionand- answer site for just about any topic on the Web. Like Blekko, it is largely humandriven and invites users to ask questions, provide answers and share their knowledge and comments. Questions are organized into different categories that can also be created by users, leading to a wide range and growing index of topical information.

Nobody believes that these solutions will threaten Google’s dominance in the world of search any time soon, least of all the people behind each service. But most of them seem to be much more focused on improving the Web by providing a better way to access
information.

Going Social

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The impact of social media on today’s Web is unmatched; dare I say, even by search. When it comes to “going social” with our websites and business there are as many benefits as there are drawbacks, however. Along with the multitude of brand advocates you will acquire, you are sure to encounter more than a few, very vocal detractors along the way — such is business on the Web. What’s more, the social Web moves fast — much faster than any one person can keep up with.Enter reputation management, a practice that has not gone unnoticed by businesses both large and small.

A business and personal reputation is measured by your consumers’ perception of the brand’s products and services. However, so much focus is spent looking inward that we often miss all the activity going on elsewhere — the origin of many, if not most opportunities and threats. As such, using reputation management solutions and services that accurately and affordably help manage brand equity and awareness is a wise investment.

Online reputation management software is the new must-have solution, and businesses are buying in. The Marchex Reputation Management platform was named a finalist in the American Business Awards’ New Product or Service of the Year category, for one. SuperMedia’s SuperPages will make available the Yext reputation management tool to its advertisers over the next few months. These are just two examples of noteworthy happenings in the reputation management space, among dozens of other perfectly suitable vendors clamoring for your attention.

Reputation Management in Reverse
It’s time to rethink reputation management solutions as they have been offered in the past. Ask yourself: How closely am I looking at my competition’s reputation? The likelihood that it’s only in a cursory fashion is quite good.

Identifying the companies you are actively competing against should be the first step, but there are several others. Here are a few to help you rethink reputation management. Keep in mind that while you can set up an ad-hoc solution on your own, commercial reputation management and monitoring solutions provide the deepest insight.

Track: To locate competitors, head straight to the search engines; enter search terms representative of your business and make notes of those vendors found most often, and their corresponding websites and social media properties. Spend time noting not just the website URL, but the company name and the names of their products and employees, too (take a detour to LinkedIn to find them). Once the list is complete, make those search terms and phrases the ones to track.

Follow: Should the competition already have an established audience on social media, most of the legwork is already done. For example, follow some of the competition’s followers on Twitter, taking note of those accounts. Then, after a week or so,check to see if any of those individuals have followed you back. If so, send a direct message announcing who you are, why you chose to follow them, and your intentions. It is not an uncommon practice for heavy social media users of Twitter to set up an autoresponder to greet and reply to a new follower — another opportunity to communicate with a new prospect.

Active Social Marketing in Practice: Let’s say your restaurant and a neighborhood competitor share Twitter followers. If you notice on Twitter that a group of fans was meeting for lunch at the competitor’s place, consider sending that group a note (perhaps with a coupon included) inviting them to your restaurant. You will need to constantly monitor the real-time universe for reaction but good opportunities are present.

Engage: Posting user-generated content online today is easier than ever. Within seconds, customers can post reviews, kudos, comments and complaints directly from their mobile devices and applications to any number of sites. Since most content is consumed right away, it makes sense to constantly interact with your existing audience and look to expand your social network when opportunities present themselves. Myriad social tools online offer the ability to interact with followers and competitors. Using them means gaining valuable insights about the competing business and provides a chance to make informed choices when it comes to developing strategies to increase market share. Engaging consumers in context, based on their current feelings or interactions with your brand is the only way to build mind share and loyal customers, so watch intently and tread carefully.

Monitor: Once you identify the competition, follow their core audience and engage them them, it’s time to monitor the reaction. Most reputation management services provide sentiment analysis to provide insights into the mood and tone of comments and conversations you have successfully stirred up. The final step? Repeat the process. Track new competitors and their followers, engaging that audience frequently and building your social network with one competitor’s downfall after the next. Whether you have brand equity and brand awareness or not, it has been proven time and again that knowing what customers and prospects are saying and feeling about your business is of importance — the same holds true for what is being said about the competition.

Business Marketing with Foursquare

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Foursquare, the popular social networking and activity application,recently announced
that more than 700,000 “check-ins” are taking place every day. That’s a lot of activity and it’s all centered on businesses and brands — an opportunity not to be missed. So, what is Foursquare, and how can it help your business?

In its simplest form, Foursquare works like this: Consumers launch the app from their phones (or via SMS for non-smartphones), then check in to a business when they arrive. By checking in, consumers can see if any of their connected friends are at the same location or nearby, share and discover insider tips about the location and earn points. Points are accumulated and badges earned, then used to assign a status for the individual, with the top point-getter being crowned “Mayor.” What this does is create a community — an active and competitive community — around the business itself. Users are engaged and encouraged to visit the location time and again. Essentially, Foursquare helps drive foot traffic, branding and create consumer advocates.

The Foursquare Community
Foursquare users are brand advocates by their very nature. Of course, they might not think of themselves that way — in their minds they are satisfying their own egos. But that satisfaction is derived vis-avis the business being patronized. The goal of every Foursquare user is to become Mayor of their favorite local businesses — restaurants, night clubs, golf courses ... just about anything. To do this, the user must check in from the location itself. So, the more they frequent a business, the better chance they have to become Mayor. Of course, there are other reasons for people to use Foursquare and make a run at Mayor other than simple ego stroking. And that’s where the businesses come into play.

Foursquare for Business
If you knew that a certain person was a fan of your business and was perfectly willing to encourage his friends to become fans too, wouldn’t you want to reach out to that person and make absolutely sure that they kept coming back? With Foursquare, this is precisely what you can do. One of the most popular and effective ways for businesses to use Foursquare is to offer real-world rewards to their business’ Mayors and other frequent patrons. For example, a restaurant can offer a free cocktail every time a user checks in, delivered right through the app. Or, perhaps the free cocktail is offered after every fifth visit, encouraging repeat business.
The possibilities are only limited by your imagination and perhaps your budget. Also, remember the Mayor. Be sure to offer the best deals to that individual. Not only will this encourage advocacy, but also create a competitive spirit around the title. It might just start some rivalries where the only way to get ahead is to frequent your business.

Your business might already have a Foursquare presence, so search on Foursquare.com to find out. You will find a link to “claim” your venue. From there, get started setting up your specials for users. Business owners can also promote their Foursquare presence in-store — the website offers downloadable PDFs and can send official window clings for display.

Foursquare can bring a significant increase in traffic and, ultimately, sales to any brick-and-mortar business. And Foursquare is about to reach even more users. In June, 2010, The Wall Street Journal started providing “add-to-Foursquare” buttons at the bottom of restaurant reviews and other cultural coverage. When a user clicks the button, the venue mentioned in the article is added to a to-do list on the user’s Foursquare account, along with a tip written by a WSJ editor and link to the original article. It’s a safe bet to assume that WSJ will not be the last major media outlet to promote the service.

In the end, the service offers a built-in community that is eager to engage. Help your customers check in, then check out.

GIS technology to visualize data

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Knowing your customers is vital to the success of any business. Today, a great deal of customer information is readily available. What to do with all of that data is the question many of us face. So what is a business to do? Use a map. A GIS (geographic information system) map, that is.

Geographic Information Systems Applied
GIS is all about mapping places, measurements, demographics, and conditions to identify the relationships between each piece of data. The results can vary depending on your needs; usable locationbased data, geographically organized reports, or any number of data-rich charts are among the options.

A Geographic Information System is made up of hardware, software, and data that enable an organization to understand location or geospatial information about a particular area of interest, and apply this information to meet the needs of their business.

GIS involves using the “geographic approach” to gather, process, and model data. According to GIS.com, an effective method for solving a business challenge geographically is to ask, acquire, examine, analyze, and act. For example, if you’re managing a consulting business and you need to look for a more efficient way to conduct Web research, you might collect consumer data; compare available schema, topology correspondence, and metadata; and implement a plan to reduce the amount of time your employees prepare information for their clients.

We see GIS as a combination of basic computer mapping with deep dive analytics: so being able to join facts about people and property happening at a place to the place itself. The difference between GIS and what we see as typical consumer mapping applications is the ability to perform your own analytics [and] combine that with the sort of information that you think about generally in databases or in tables.

Geospatial information has actually penetrated all areas of our lives, from GPS devices integrated into smartphones to Google Maps replacing hardcopy street atlases to 3D map flythroughs as part of every evening newscast.

We (humans, collectively) are continually presented with GIS data, making us more spatially aware than any previous generation. Traditional GIS organizations like national mapping and defense agencies use geospatial information to make time-critical decisions every day, while state and local governments may use geospatial information for tax assessments, allocating green space, and preparing for disaster and emergency response.

The most mature business space using GIS at this time is the retail marketplace,says Thompson. Think about globalization; but there’s also glocalization (a combination of global and local). [There is the] driving idea that I can give the ability to a local store manager to make decisions in their own marketplace, customize the merchandise, so I can deal with different ethnicities, incomes, or locations.

GIS In The Cloud
Advancements in GIS have now reached the cloud. Cloud computing and GIS are ideal partners because cloud innovations make collaboration, map sharing, and data collection all the more seamless. For instance, a geospatial application such as GIS Cloud (www.giscloud.com) provides the tools to create, manage, and integrate geo data on the public GIS Cloud itself or in private behind a company’s firewall. GIS Cloud lets colleagues edit mapping projects anywhere, publish updated maps to the Web, retrieve data via mobile device, stylize thematic maps, and incorporate maps into existing applications such as Google and Bing Maps.

The concern associated with GIS in the cloud is the same concern for any business using cloud computing, which is the security of data. The fear is rapidly becoming less common due to remote management and access capabilities. Besides eliminating the need for in-house hardware and IT staff, GIS cloud-based products provide shared infrastructure costs and lowmanagement overhead, and with a preconfigured, monthly package, there are no surprise costs to ownership.

ESRI offers its own SaaS platform called Business Analyst Online. The service processes demographics, consumer spending, and other commercial data to produce analytics about trade areas, buying trends, and customer service communications (based on the criteria you’ve entered). You can go in (Business Analyst Online) and type a location (store, site, etc.) and everything from starting a business as retailer to things like dry cleaning, tax, or service franchises and you can minutes, ZIP code, or town.

Web technology and softwares:Use WI-FI hotspots wisely

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Protect Yourself
The ugly fact is that someone with enough skills and determination can hack into any network, and all but the most secure, private connections can be hacked by someone of average skill and enough determination. Consequently, the most important thing you can do to use Wi-Fi hotspots wisely is to lock down your data and system.

Do not to surf without a firewall. If you do not have firewall software installed, turn on Windows’ built-in firewall protection. Because many users have third-party firewall software, we won’t detail these instructions here. You can locate available firewall programs by browsing to windows.microsoft.com and searching under Firewall (your version of Windows).

The next step is to secure your data. Windows Vista/7 give you the option of selecting a network profile (Home, Work, or Public) when you connect. Always select Public unless you trust the network and its members. Doing this prevents other computers on the network from discovering your PC and turns off the File And Printer Sharing feature. You can tweak any of these settings in the Network And Sharing Center: right-click the network icon (a monitor or series of bars, potentially with a red X or starburst on top) at the bottom right of your display. Select Network And Sharing Center in Vista; Open Network And Sharing Center in Win7.

In WinXP, File And Printer Sharing is turned off by default. To enable this feature, right-click the network (monitor) icon at the bottom right of your display and select Open Network Connections. Right-click the icon for your wireless device and click Properties. Under the General tab, deselect the File And Printer Sharing For Microsoft Networks checkbox to turn sharing off globally. When you return to a safe environment, you can re-enable this feature when necessary. In Vista/Win 7, you can also turn off the File And Printer Sharing feature manually through the OS’s Network
Connection Properties feature, but it’s easier to let Windows do it for you.

How to Connect through Windows
To connect to a wireless network, right-click the network icon and select View Available Wireless Networks (WinXP) or Connect To A Network (Vista). InWin7, select the Network icon.

A menu will pop up displaying available networks. Each OS will identify whether networks are secure. If the network you want is open, select it and click Connect. We advise not connecting to an open network unless you know it is the one you seek. Hackers set up open networks with friendly sounding names hoping that unsuspecting individuals will hop onto them.

If you are connecting to a secure network, or if you don’t know the name of the network you want, contact the network host. You’ll need the network name (also called a service set identifier or SSID) and, if the network is secure, a security key or passphrase. Select the desired network and provide the key if prompted. (See the “How To Evaluate Security” section before you complete this step.)

If you use WinXP, your network card may manage network connections, leaving you unable to connect using our instructions. To give Windows control, click Start, select Control Panel, click Network And Internet Connections, and select Network Connections. Right-click your wireless connection and click Properties. Click the Network Settings tab and select the Use Windows To Configure My Wireless Network
Settings checkbox.

Set Up Manual Connection
If you cannot locate the network you want (because some networks choose not to broadcast their SSIDs), you can set it up manually. In addition to the network, name, and credentials, you will need the network security protocol and encryption type (TKIP or AES).

To set up a manual connection in WinXP, open the available networks list as described previously and click Advanced or Change Advanced Settings (depending on the service pack that you have installed). On the Wireless Networks tab, click Add. In Vista/Win7, open the Network And Sharing Center. In Vista, click Set Up A Connection Or Network at the top left of the display; in Win7, click Set Up A New Connection Or Network (under Change Your Network Settings). Select Manually Connect To A Wireless Network and click Next.

Provide the information exactly as you were given it (uppercase and lowercase). In Vista/Win7, you can opt to see the characters as you type for confirmation. If the network is WEP and you do not see this option, select Shared. Select an encryption type if you have one. Otherwise, keep the default. After entering all this information and configuring the desired settings, click OK or Next to connect.

Evaluate Security
Most private, as well as some public, networks use one of several security standards to protect users and themselves from intrusion. You’ll encounter WEP, WPA, and possibly WPA2. The Wireless Network Connection dialog box may provide the network type. If not, here’s a hint: WEP security keys always contain 26 characters; WPA and WPA2 security keys are eight to 63 characters in length.

WEP is the least secure and easiest to crack; treat a WEP network as you would an unsecure network, setting its profile to Public unless you absolutely must communicate with other PCs. WPA and WPA2 are more impervious to cracking, so you can use a profile that is more open, such as Work, if necessary (or tweak the settings in the Public profile to open things up as needed).

At the end of the day, the responsibility for protecting your assets lies with you. Using common Internet precautions is also a good idea. Before you provide sensitive information, be sure you are at a secure site. The Web address should begin with “https” instead of “http,” and your browser should display a padlock icon or other security confirmation. Check with your email provider to see if you can encrypt your email messages. Another precaution you can take is to turn off your wireless adapter when you are not using the Internet. To turn wireless off, right-click the icon for your wireless connection in the System Tray and select Disable.

Web Technology and Softwares:Green cost cutting measures

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Energy consumes a significant portion of a company’s expenses; it’s the energy your company uses, converts, and discharges that produces its profits. Getting a handle on how you use energy, how much energy costs you, and how much energy you waste can be a real eye-opener. Small changes in energy usage can have dramatic effects on a business.

Analytics
Many business intelligence providers offer sustainability management tools designed to measure, manage, and provide data on key energy, environmental, economic, and social indicators. In addition to helping you meet your company’s green goals, sustainability management tools can also help you use your resources more economically.

Automating reporting will ensure end-to-end data gathering and presentation to those who need the analytical data. Performance monitoring can be used to look at how energy is used within your business and makes you aware of how various areas are
meeting planned goals.

Real-time energy monitoring can help to reduce a company’s overall energy consumption pinpointing where energy is being used with no real benefit, such as leaving production machinery running when workloads are low, heating areas when not in use, or fully lighting areas that only need a minimum amount of light. Real-time energy monitoring lets you identify which facilities are underutilized or operating at peak usage, allowing you to make production decisions on the fly.

Supply chain monitoring may seem counterintuitive, but not paying attention to a supplier’s energy use could result in higher production costs for your company. It can also help companies uncover anomalies early, signaling possible production delays.

The ability of business analytics to consolidate data into quickly understood information can be applied to the greening process. By monitoring current usage against desired goals, and tracking your usage over time, you can use business analytics to increase your overall efficiency, as well as to document any compliance goals you need to meet.

The Cloud
The average business PC only uses up to 20% of its computing capacity. Most of the time, corporate PCs sit idle, consuming energy but not accomplishing much of anything. We’ll get to that point later.

Cloud computing is promoted as a way to store data so that it’s available to any device, anytime, anywhere a connection to the cloud (Internet) is available. Although that’s true, that’s only half the picture. The cloud is also a post-effective way to provide software services, virtualization, and scalable computing resources. Instead of purchasing new, faster desktop computers for everyone, you can grab the necessary computing power from the cloud. Remember that 20% usage rate? Move to cloud-based services and you extend the life of your PCs. You obtain a green benefit by reducing short-term recycling needs; an economic benefit by reducing short-term PC purchases; and a long-term green effect by concentrating your computing needs into a more easily manageable central site.

There are powerful economic factors pushing us toward cloud computing. One of the major reasons is the more efficient use of power by cloud computing providers. Spreading computing loads across many users as well as time zones improves hardware utilization, while at the same time spreading fixed costs over more servers and users.

Cloud-based services aren’t limited to classic office productivity applications. A wide range of commercial services is available to address almost the entire range of business needs. By moving these applications to the cloud, you also open up the possibility of true mobility. Some of your staff may be able to perform some or all of their work from home, reducing the overall energy footprint at the office. And of course the cloud keeps everyone connected when they’re traveling.

Cloud based Tools

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Cloud-based tools make keeping contacts, calendars, and other data synced across all your mobile devices and PC platforms a lot less difficult than you might expect. People are no longer tied to a specific location or device as they roam about working on laptops, tablets, or even smartphones. The challenge is to keep everything synced so you can access the same data from each of the platforms you use.

Default systems are in place for some platforms. For ex ample, smartphones and tablets running Google’s Android operating system work best when they are connected with Google services such as Gmail, Google Calendar, and Contacts. BlackBerry devices work best with BlackBerry Enterprise Server. And Microsoft Windows Phone 7 devices work best with a Microsoft infrastructure.

If you use Microsoft Exchange Server or Office 365, keeping your data synced is relatively simple. Exchange Server maintains the e-mail messages, contacts, and calendar information, so you can ac cess the data from pretty much anywhere and any device. Laptops can connect to Exchange over any Web connection, and most smartphones and tablets can stay synced using Exchange Active Sync. BlackBerry smartphones and tablets use Blackberry Exchange Server rather than Exchange Active Sync.

If you are not using Exchange Active Sync, or if you need to keep data in sync with another PC, the above solutions won’t help. For both iOS devices and secondary PCs, the easiest path to syncing runs through Google.

If you rely on Gmail, Google Calendar, and Contacts rather than on e-mail, calendar, and contacts maintained locally, as with Microsoft Outlook, you don’t really have multiple copies of the same data to keep in sync. You can simply connect to the Google data from your various devices, and any changes or additions will occur the Google service itself, so they will be refl ected when you connect from another device.

If you use Microsoft Offi ce and Outlook, Google Apps Sync for Outlook will sync your e-mail, contacts, calendar, and notes between Google Apps and Outlook—but you must be a paying customer of Google Apps.

Alternatively, Google Calendar Sync will perform two-way syncing between Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook. You can set up e-mail on multiple computers as long as you configure each system to leave messages on the server as well, so they can be downloaded at each location.

As for syncing contacts, software can help. For example, using a product like Sync2 (dollarsignr30), or gSyncIt (dollarsignr20) for each system that you want to keep in sync will ensure that changes and additions on one PC will make their way to the other computers.

With your data synced to google, you can then set your iPhone or iPad to use google sync for e-mail, calendar, and contacts so those platforms will have access to the current, synced data. Google uses Exchange Active sync, so you add google sync to your iOs device as if it were an Exchange e-mail account, and then set your calendar and contacts to update using google sync.

Keeping spreadsheets, presentations, and other data synced among devices can be more challenging. such files can also quickly exceed the storage capacity of mobile devices, many of which have a meager 8gB or 16gB of storage.

Carry it with you: store your files on an external usB hard drive or thumb drive that you carry around.

Use the cloud: the most elegant solution is to use cloud-based storage, such as Microsoft Windows Live skyDrive or google Docs. then, as long as you have an internet connection, you can access the files from anywhere.

Ideally, you want to work offline when necessary and still have the data stay in sync. skyDrive provides a Microsoftcentric solution. When you use Windows Live Mesh, data automatically syncs from the desktop to the cloud and Windows Phone 7 smartphones integrate with data stored on skyDrive, too.

Google doesn’t offer a way to work with google Docs offline (though such a capability is expected this summer), but tools from Memeo can provide offline access to google Docs data. And the free google Cloud Connect add-on lets you sync files from Microsoft Office software to google’s cloud.

You can also turn to services like Box.net, Dropbox, or sugarsync. With each of these, designated folders on the local desktop are automatically synced with the data that’s stored online.

Wireless Carrier knows

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Consumers use phones and tablets to access everything from work email to bank accounts, but can users be sure that the data on their devices is for their eyes only?

Without physical access to the device, reading personal data on a smartphone is very difficult. the one party that has constant access to the data running to and from your phone, however, is your wireless carrier. How much does your provider know about you? Quite a lot—but for the most part, the carrier sees the information in an aggregated form that is not associated with individual users.

Hardware: Wireless carriers need to know what kinds of devices are connected to their networks so that they can provide the appropriate amount of bandwidth. For example, if the carrier knows that its users’ smartphones typically have large screens, it can conclude that those devices will probably consume a large amount of streamed video.

Alcatel-Lucent, for one, makes analytical equipment for learning what devices are connecting to a specific radio, and from how far away. Operators can then gauge where to point the antennas, and how much power to supply. Operators don’t use network intelligence equipment to find any one device’s physical location on a map. Instead, they focus on the position of devices relative to the cell tower.

‘Metadata’ about data packets: each data packet sent has a “wrapper” that includes the origin and destination, the protocol (Ip), whether the packet holds data from a real-time service such as VoIp, and the amount of data. the operator uses the information to get a rough idea of the content’s purpose, without discovering details about the content itself. Besides measuring the broadband usage of subscribers with metered plans, the wrapper helps the carrier prioritize time-sensitive data, like VoIp packets, over other packets,
such as mp3 downloads. Network intelligence data also lets carriers identify where bandwidth-hungry applications are heavily used. For instance, if mobile video chat becomes popular in a downtown area during business hours, the carrier might increase the bandwidth available to that area during that time period.

Deep Packet Inspection: DpI software captures a few packets of data flowing to or from a device, and then quickly analyzes the details of the content. This practice allows the carrier to quantify which websites users are visiting, plus what kinds of services they’re using.

DpI intelligence can help the carrier identify revenue opportunities. If, say,
subscribers are spending a lot of time on Facebook, they might be willing to pay for a higher-priced data plan if the service could guarantee them unlimited use of the app every month.

On the dark side, carriers might use DpI software for “lawful interception”—that is, to capture data for law enforcement from the data streams of “persons of interest.” And critics have cited DpI as a tool that operators may use to detect and then inhibit or block certain kinds of content—bittorrent downloads, for example—a violation of the principles of network neutrality.

Targeting individual devices may not always be a bad thing, however. Carriers might map the Ip address of a device to the subscriber’s account if, for instance, a connected device becomes infected with a virus and begins to abuse network resources. In that case, network engineers may either suspend or limit its access until the device is fixed or the offending app is terminated.

A Wealth of Information
Clearly, wireless operators can look pretty deeply into their networks. But carriers are far more interested in the habits of large groups of users than in those of single users. Carriers are looking to see if something is changing in a bad way; they are looking for trends, he says. When a wireless carrier gets a general sense of what’s going on under its umbrella, that means your service could become a whole lot smoother.

Killer Email Newsletter

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As a marketing tool, the e-mail newsletter might seem archaic compared with new media such as Twitter and Foursquare. Yet e-mail remains one of the most effective means of building relationships with customers and driving sales. Most people look at everything in their inbox, even if it’s just the subject line. In fact, e-mail newsletters have experienced a recent boom, with companies such as Thrillist and Groupon profiting largely on the strength of their mailing lists. Here’s how to make an e-mail newsletter work for your company.

Make a compelling offer
People need a good reason to add more e-mail to their overflowing inboxes. That makes the sign-up form almost as important as the newsletter itself. (Adding an e-mail address to your list without the owner’s permission is a no-no.) Clearly state what benefits subscribers can expect, such as exclusive discounts or insider industry tips. Just make sure the incentive to sign up is closely tied to your business. You shouldn’t raffle off an iPad, because the people who sign up will probably only care about the iPad, not your company.

Send often—but not too often
No business owner wants to gain a reputation as a spammer. But if you communicate too infrequently, customers may become less likely to remember your brand and less receptive to your sales pitches. A lot of companies make the mistake of not being in front of customers all year long, but then in November and December, they’ll start e-mailing every day. For most companies, sending newsletters once or twice a month is optimal.
That rule of thumb has worked well for The Girl & the Fig, which operates three restaurants and a catering business in Sonoma, California. The company publishes a monthly e-mail newsletter called Figbits, which typically includes recipes and information about upcoming events. The newsletter helped garner hundreds of reorders for her first cookbook as well as about 300 downloads of the company’s new iPhone app in two days.

Choose a clean design
Be sure to include enough white space so each element of your newsletter is easy to find, says Tornquist. Another design tip: If you include images in your newsletter, bear in mind that many people read e-mail with graphics turned off. If your e-mail consists of large graphics, readers will see blank space. E-mails in which the first thing you see is the ‘unsubscribe’ message, which isn’t good. Make sure there’s a mix of text and images.

get personal
To cater to subscribers’ interests, you will need to know more about them than their e-mail addresses. But take it one step at a time. If the newsletter signup form includes too many questions, visitors will be less likely to subscribe. Instead, send new subscribers a quick note a few days after they sign up.Send new subscribers an e-mail that asks about their careers and interests,surveying the entire subscriber list once a year to get feedback on the content.
If readers have divergent interests, divvy your mailing list into segments and send targeted variations of the newsletter to each group. Some companies also use customer data, such as recently viewed or purchased items, to create custom e-mail marketing missives. For instance, after a customer books a trip on Kayak, a travel site based in Norwalk, Connecticut, the company e-mails a roundup of deals on hotels, car rentals,and other services in the destination city.

encourage conversation
In addition to surveys, offer subscribers regular opportunities to interact. One way to do that is by including quick polls in newsletters. A site that sends users serialized versions of books by e-mail, regularly includes polls in the company’s newsletter, which has some 350,000 subscribers. In the December newsletter, asked subscribers to submit New Year’s literary resolutions— books they had always wanted to read— and linked to a forum on her website in which readers could post their answers. Included links to some of DailyLit’s classic titles, including War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

Make the subject line count
Without an attention-grabbing subject line, subscribers may not open your e-mail. Choose a specific, succinct phrase that highlights the most crucial information in the newsletter. More subscribers will open an e-mail titled 20 Percent Off Spring Styles than one called March Newsletter.

Don’t oversell
Though the ultimate goal of an e-mail newsletter is to boost sales, be careful that your missives don’t become a relentless bombardment of pitches. The best newsletters provide expert information that benefits readers. A fashion boutique, for instance, could publish a seasonal style guide; an enterprise software company could offer productivity tips for the office.
One rich source of inspiration, is the questions customers regularly ask sales and customer service reps. A great way to do a newsletter is a question-and-answer format. It invites dialogue. Business-to-business companies, can often draw newsletter ideas from the guides and white papers they send to clients and prospects. Of course, newsletter subscribers love deals and discounts, but don’t cram a lot of promotions into one newsletter, or the deals might get lost in the shuffle. For maximum impact, focus on a single offer and highlight it at the top of the page, so that subscribers see it as soon as they open the e-mail.

tie in blogs and social media
If you already publish a blog, there is no need to create even more content for your newsletter. Having a separate newsletter, a separate blog—it’s almost overkill. In fact, a newsletter is a great way to drive traffic to your blog and your social media content.
Publish excerpts of your blog posts, with links to the full content. Some e-mail
marketing services, including Constant Contact, offer tools that let subscribers share the newsletter with their Facebook and Twitter followers.

Keep tweaking
Open rates and clicks are the primary metrics used to determine a newsletter’s effectiveness. The open rate, the percentage of recipients who view the body of an e-mail, primarily gauges the quality of the subject line. The links clicked within the body of the e-mail are a direct indicator of what content subscribers find most compelling. Target numbers vary by company.
After establishing a baseline, many companies conduct A/B tests, in which portions of the mailing list receive slight variations of a newsletter, to see which version is most effective. IDES, a Laramie,Wyoming–based company that provides information about plastics to engineering and manufacturing companies, regularly tests the subject lines and content of its newsletter, which is sent twice a month to 340,000 subscribers. In November, IDES tested two versions of a newsletter promoting the company’s new search tool. Half of its subscribers saw an image-based ad with a blue button inviting them to click for more information. The others saw a text ad with a basic link. The text ad received 33 percent more clicks.

Buying Online

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More and more, consumers are leaving brick-and-mortar stores to buy online. In fact, countless reports from big brands state that online sales growth continues to outpace any in-store counterparts. In addition, a recent survey suggests that consumers are embracing online venues as a way to escape higher prices, poor selection, and dwindling sales staffs associated with the traditional in-store shopping venues. Consequently, competition on the Web is hotter than ever. Many e-tailers are improving their competitive edge by mingling the human elements of the in-store shopping experience with the power of buying online. Here are a few tips to help humanize your website and keep visitors coming back:

See Your Site through the Eyes of Your Visitors
Innovations in a technique called co-browsing enable site visitors to enlist your guidance during their visit. With co-browsing software, one can see what site visitors are interacting with on the site and walk them through the buying process — similar to interacting with a sales associate at a brick-and-mortar store. Through this process, the associate and customer arrive at the best solution, together. Cobrowsing re-creates this experience by giving visitors virtual access to a human on the other end. In fact, cobrowsing gives you the power to do everything with visitors from finding that perfect product to filling out forms at checkout. If you already have a CRM, find new ways to maximize your investment. If you are looking to add a new vendor provided service to your mix, like live chat or email, make sure that you will be able to integrate those products with your CRM. For example, by integrating a CRM with live chat software your reps will have instant access to a visitor’s previous purchases, demographics and visit history. Reps can leverage this info during their chat conversations with visitors in the same way that brick-and mortar associates recognize and work with returning customers. Such interactions with visitors help build rapport and trust, further humanizing the experience of your website.

Analyze Results
Consider this: The overwhelming majority of brick-and-mortar stores are largely unable to do genuine statistical analysis on what is working best in their shops. With the exception of high-volume big brands, most stores rely largely on anecdotal associate feedback about what works for customers and what doesn’t. Perhaps one of the greatest strengths of doing business online is the availability of products that provide data about your website which can be leveraged to improve the overall user experience and positively impact sales and brand loyalty.
Standards like Google Analytics do a great deal of heavy lifting, but there are also many complementary solutions to help you work smarter, not harder. Try testing the waters with options that drill into real-time insight and visitor monitoring. Some solutions even give you the ability to set up custom alerts, like shopping cart dollar amount thresholds or number of pages visited. “Listening” to this kind of individual and trending data gives you the power to further optimize the performance and usability of your sight, keeping visitors coming back.
With technology advancing constantly and competition sprouting up faster than ever, the need to differentiate your site by implementing new ways to transform and improve the buying experience for visitors is critical to continued success. Techniques that blend the best of shopping at a storefront with shopping online are likely to be the next evolution on the path to increasing conversions, boosting sales and strengthening brand loyalty.

Be an Efficient Marketer

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Message Marketing with MIND MAPS
To work efficiently and effectively as a marketer you need the right tools and the right approach.
As most readers are likely aware, platforms and services exist in abundance to help improve marketing campaign performance. For those more involved with strategy than execution however, a powerful opportunity exists in mind maps.
Defining Mind Mapping
Mind maps are visual diagrams which represent concepts and/or tasks that can be, or are by their very nature, connected. Using the many available solutions on the market such as Mindomo, Mindmesiter or FreeMind will provide Web marketing teams a way to understand these connections, a framework to generate ideas (brainstorm), and a means to prioritize tasks and visualize progress. The ways in which mind maps can be used are many.
Mind mapping is a great technique for just about any type of individual or team brainstorming — site creation, product creation, or problem solving. Most marketers, to their own detriment however, opt to work from “experience” and “intuition” — and often do so in a vacuum.
Mind Maps in Action
When applied to messaging and content development,however, few tools are more useful than mind maps. Web marketers can employ mind maps to identify not just the primary groups or audiences but drill down into the sub-groups to more accurately explore the interests, behaviors and beliefs of these future clients/customers — which is what can really move performance indicators in a positive direction. Let’s take a look at a practical example.
Interests: Consumers have a broad range of interests which typically have relationships all their own. One of the best ways to reveal these relationships are to map them out.
For example, if you sell a product to healthy living enthusiasts, not only do you know it is important to produce content for those interested in physical fitness, but drill further (or in a different direction) into healthy living and you might find some association with a macrobiotic diet as well — another sub-group to explore. Visually mapping out relationships early on will reveal not only the destinations to promote a product or service but entirely new opportunities for content development.
Behaviors: While consumers have a broad range of interests which can help marketers develop appropriate product/service specific content, their behavior is another aspect with which it is important to become familiar and use in content development efforts. Are these prospects only casually interested or are they hard core, power-users? The answer is important as it provides us guidance as to how content might be developed and structured. Let’s return to the healthy living example. Creating a mind map could reveal that many physical fitness enthusiasts are only casually involved. This might provide a signal to a content marketing team to create blog posts for these casual enthusiasts — for example, “Three Exercises You Can Do at Your Desk” or “Get Fit from Your Couch”.
Beliefs: The worldview or belief system of your audience is also important in determining the best possible acquisition approach through content. When a marketer can understand “why” consumers are interested and can craft messages which resonate with these beliefs, message effectiveness can go through the virtual roof. Once again returning to our example, we know that in order to sell our health living products, we will be pursuing those interested in running/jogging that do so casually. But why are they interested in casual jogging? Dig deeper and you might one possible answer is “longevity”. An entire series of articles could be created around longevity and health living, taking cues from interests and beliefs at the same time. One possible post – “How to Live to 100 in Fifteen Minutes a Day.
Get Started with Mind Maps
Mind maps provide the ability to foster an environment of collaboration, help identify the most practical solution, and provide a structure wherein an action plan can be created. When it comes to message-based marketing, seriously consider the use of the solutions as these offerings, while considered to be nothing more than a creative exercise by some, do help improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your Web enterprise. Focus not just on the needs or wants of your prospective clients, but
also on the interests, beliefs and behaviors of users for the greatest impact.

Video in Email

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With consumers becoming accustomed to watching video on web sites of all kinds, adding video to e-mail can greatly enhance its appeal. The mere mention of video in the subject line can significantly boost open rates. Deciding what type of video to include, however, poses a serious challenge, because it must be relevant to the consumer.
While many retailers opt for videos that educate consumers about a product, the entertainment value can be just as important in attracting and maintaining the consumer’s interest. Apparel retailers, for instance, can create video fashion shows, complete with models walking down the runaway to display the coming season’s fashions.
Potential drawbacks to video are that image quality and the ability of the consumer’s e-mail program to quickly download and play the video significantly influence how consumers respond to it. These problems are magnified for consumers that read their e-mail on a mobile phone, as video-playing technology readily available on personal computers may not work on certain mobile phones.
For example, while a Flash video may play on some mobile devices, it will not play on such popular Apple Inc. devices as the iPhone, iPod Touch and the iPad. If the video doesn’t play or isn’t playing properly, retailers lose their opportunity to communicate with the customer. Without knowing what type of device the e-mail will be opened on, it is becoming more difficult to confidently embed video in an e-mail. The safest bet is to leave video out of the message unless it has been extensively tested on different mobile and desktop operating systems.
E-mail marketers should also pay close attention to the size of the video file as that directly impacts download times of the message itself. “Video can add a lot of bulk to an e-mail.
One way to overcome playability and download issues is to embed an image from the video that displays a play button in the e-mail. When the play button is clicked, consumers are linked to the retailer’s server or to YouTube,which plays the video.
It’s a very seamless process and a good solution for marketers that want to include video because not all the e-mail clients can support video. It’s also a nice alternative to simply including a link to the video in the body of the message, because it adds some visual appeal.
An alternative to video is animation that plays when the e-mail is opened. Animated GIFs adds visual appeal,but without the sound. One well-known example is that of a retailer that included a chocolate bunny animated GIF for an Easter promotion whose ears were being eaten away. Retailers can also use animated GIFs to show a 360-degree rotation of a product or swap products in a hero image.
Given some of the technical hurdles retailers face by adding video to their e-mails, it is recommended marketers first determine whether the medium fits their objectives for the e-mail campaign. If the objective is to educate consumers about a product, it may be worthwhile to include a video product review submitted by a happy customer or one that demonstrates how to use the product.
Product demonstrations, for example, make sense when the consumers targeted in the e-mail campaign are likely to have limited knowledge of the product.
A health and beauty retailer that sells primarily to teens should not assume their customer base knows how to apply the product, so in this case a video can be extremely relevant. What retailers don’t want to do is simply add video because it is a trendy thing to do.
Adding technology for the sake of technology is not the best use of technology. As retailers prepare for the upcoming holiday season there are a number of tweaks they can make to improve the effectiveness of their e-mail campaigns. Identifying and encouraging brand advocates that post promotional e-mails to Facebook or forward them to friends is one way to expand the reach of e-mail during the holiday season.
Retailers can add widgets that make it easy for consumers to post the retailer’s e-mail offers to a Facebook page or forward it to a friend. Retailers will want to prominently display the buttons to activate the widgets; those widgets can also track how many additional people receive and view the message.
Brand advocates are a powerful marketing tool, especially when they use social media to take a message viral. Retailers can readily identify them and create offers they are likely to re-circulate based on past behavior. The more a brand advocate spreads the word about a retailer, the more credibility they can lend to the retailer’s brand.
Simply targeting brand advocates to take a message viral is not enough. Retailers need to make sure they are reaching the brand advocates that have the most dedicated following within their social circles.
A consumer that shares one message that is clicked on by 20 people is more valuable than someone who shares 20 messages that get only one click. Both customers have value, but retailers that want to be sure their message is viewed by the largest audience possible should be concentrating on their most effective brand evangelists.
Consumers that are just getting to know a retailer, and those who have come close to buying before abandoning a shopping cart, are also good targets for e-mail marketing during the holiday season.
Consumers that have recently opted in to the e-mail list can be sent a series of automated welcome e-mails highlighting best-selling products or popular gift ideas over a several week period as a way to expose them to the retailer’s top products.
Another quick, low-budget split test optimization opportunity is in changing the subject line to indicate the message comes from a person as opposed to a company, as some consumers respond more favorably to an e-mail from an individual. Retailers can also test subject lines that ask an intriguing question, such as ‘What are you doing this weekend?’ as a way to engage the customer.
Retargeting consumers that have abandoned a shopping cart can serve as a reminder they have an item in the cart or provide a nudge to complete the purchase, especially if the retailer offers an incentive to buy now.
E-mail campaigns can even be used to precede slower transaction days of the week to level out warehouse and shipping activity. There are a lot of ways retailers can use their customer data to make their e-mail campaigns more efficient.
Marketers can boost e-mail open rates by adding a call to action in the subject line, such as a request to share tips on the retailer’s Facebook page or web site about how to throw a memorable holiday party or decorate the house for the holidays.
A call to action that gets the customer involved by visiting the retailer’s web site or Facebook page can be a subtle way to improve open rates down the road or generate a future sale, because the message keeps the consumer interacting with the retailer.
Regardless of how creative retailers are with subject lines or e-mail content, it means little if their message does not get delivered to the inbox or ends up categorized as bulk or unimportant e-mail. The guardians of consumers’ e-mail inboxes, such as Yahoo, MSN, Google and AOL, which are often called by e-mail marketing experts Internet service providers from the days when e-mail and Internet access services were linked, are continually changing the ways they rate the reputations of bulk e-mail senders, including retailers. Engagement with e-mail—opens, clicks, replies and so forth—is starting to play a bigger part in terms of inbox placement, which means that retailers must get more timely, targeted and relevant for success.
Before, if a retailer sent messages over a clean IP and had a low rate of complaints, they pretty much landed in the inbox, but now the ISPs are trying to reduce inbox clutter and make it easier for consumers to digest their messages. Retailers need to start focusing on building out lifecycle marketing in order to successfully speak to consumers at the right time in the right way.
Other ways retailers can improve delivery rates is avoiding sudden changes in e-mailing patterns. A retailer that regularly sends 100,000 messages per e-mail campaign will most likely receive a red flag from ISPs if the merchant suddenly starts sending to 1 million e-mail addresses. The inbox providers may block the campaign as a result.
Communication is a part of maintaining a good relationship with ISPs, and letting them know in advance of sudden increases in campaign volume or frequency is a best practice Retailers should also make sure their e-mail service provider does not reuse an IP address that is also used by highly aggressive marketers, as that can raise a red flag.
It’s also advisable to put an e-mail campaign through an automatic spam checker that flags keywords in the subject line and main body that may be blocked by an ISP’s spam filter. Using an e-mail marketing system that stays up to date with the latest spam definitions is vital, because avoiding the latest spam definitions ensures a higher delivery rate. The same goes for size limits because some spam filters will block e-mails over a certain size.
Steps should also be taken to scrub e-mail lists, especially when retailers are collecting consumer e-mail addresses in-store at the checkout or customer service counter. All too often e-mails collected under these circumstances are incorrectly entered into the e-mail database, leading to bounced e-mails that damage the retailer’s reputation with the ISPs.
Verify the address before the customer walks away and have keyboard tabs that auto-fill ISP addresses such as @aol to help reduce data entry errors. Once these best practices are mastered, retailers can focus on how to integrate their e-mail campaigns with their other marketing efforts, particularly those in the increasingly vital areas of social media and mobile commerce.

Social and Mobile Marketing

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Social media and mobile may be the glamorous new darlings of retail marketing, but e-mail remains the tried and true marketing tool in retailers’ arsenal. The reason is simple: E-mail is deeply ingrained in the daily lives of consumers as a one-to-one communications tool.
Unlike the one-to-many nature of social media, where public comments are posted on a Facebook wall or Twitter page for all to see, e-mail allows retail marketers to convey their marketing messages in a personalized way. This enables retailers to tell a story in a way they can’t through other marketing channels.
Even though retail marketers are using social media and mobile to do many of the activities they used to do through e-mail, such as send coupons or post notices of sales, they are not replacing e-mail. E-mail is firmly entrenched in consumers’ daily lives. As new marketing channels emerge, e-mail is evolving to another level as a personalized communications tool that integrates with social, mobile and other marketing channels.
Personalized e-mail based on consumer data from social networking sites is the next frontier for e-mail marketing. By tapping into information consumers post about themselves on Facebook, retailers can create e-mail messages that promote brands consumers have positively commented on, offer accessories to recent purchases mentioned or pitch products their friends like or have purchased from the retailer’s web site or Facebook shopping page.
Retailers can also use that data to avoid pitching products or brands for which the consumer has expressed dislike. Knowing what a consumer dislikes reduces the chance of e-mailing promotions about products and brands that are unlikely to appeal to that customer.
Integrating social media data into e-mail is a very powerful and personal marketing tool.
Getting at a consumer’s personal information on Facebook can be tricky, because not all Facebook users make their profiles public, or they may choose to significantly limit the data available for public consumption. To gather the necessary information it is recommended that retailers encourage consumers to connect with them through Facebook.
Facebook Connect allows Facebook users to privately share their profile and friends with retailers or any entity. Sending an e-mail that requests a Facebook connection allows consumers to opt in to the program, and affords a retailer the opportunity to reassure consumers about how their information will be used.
By electing to connect with a retailer through Facebook, consumers aren’t just saying they like the retailer, they are saying they are willing to share information with the retailer, and that can take e-mail marketing to a whole other level.
Consumers that connect with a retailer through a social network can be encouraged to tell stories about their shopping experiences with the retailer or write product reviews on the retailer’s Facebook page. Those consumer stories can be excerpted and included in e-mail campaigns.
Consumer-generated content plays well with other consumers because it tells an authentic story about a situation consumers can see themselves in or an experience they can relate to. Once the stories are shared, they build on themselves, because consumers want to be a part of the community and tell their own story. This generates a steady flow of fresh content that can be used by the marketing team in e-mail and social marketing promotional offers.
Retailers can also use e-mail in conjunction with social media. They can promote exclusive sales on their Facebook page through e-mail, often requiring the subscriber to “Like” them in order to gain access to the special promotion. Some retailers up the ante and run a series of promotions to sway subscribers, such as “5 Days of Deals” in an effort to drive revenue and grow social followers.
Conversely, retailers can include sign-up forms on their Facebook pages or link to sign-up forms via Twitter to encourage social followers to receive more exclusive e-mail offers in the future.
Social and e-mail can work together to extend a retailer’s marketing reach. Retailers can gather additional information about people based on social profiles in order to e-mail to them in more relevant ways. Social platforms enable retailers to include more engagement points in e-mail; providing opportunities for subscribers to click through and speak with other customers, share stories and feedback and participate in fun events like photo or video sharing.
Knowing the behavior patterns of a consumer that is a Facebook user helps retailers understand how to better engage them through both channels. Retailers want to avoid sending e-mail promoting the same value proposition that is on their Facebook page. If the customer primarily interacts through Facebook, then the goal of the e-mail should be to entice them back to Facebook, especially if they have not been there in a while.
Retailers can use their Facebook pages to encourage consumers to comment on their purchases, and include in their e-mail messages quotes from Facebook users who do offer such comments. This kind of content is also effective for retargeting to consumers that have not responded to a prior e-mail promotion as a way to spark their interest in joining the conversation on Facebook.

Links for traffic and search engine exposure

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The one true secret of link building is that the best link has yet to be discovered. So staying on top of new traffic sources, distribution models and publicity opportunities will feed your website links that result in traffic and exposure well into the future.

Public Relations: Press releases don’t get enough credit as a means to drive website traffic, links and exposure for your websites and their underlying businesses. Services such as PRWeb, BusinessWire, PR.com, and PRNewswire are proven ways to get in front of not just the media but other website owners looking for content to feature on their sites (which means more links). While there is no guarantee that coughing up the often exorbitant fees to these providers will result in actual or immediate media exposure,you will be surprised at the speed at which you will acquire inbound links.

Classifieds: You might also be surprised at the amount of visitors that will come to your site based solely on classified advertising — free or paid. Some of the best sites available in the classified industry include craigslist, Oodle, USFreeAds, Backpage and Kijii but local newspapers are also a good way to get some attention, especially if you are working on a local or regional level. The best part about using classified advertising
to drive traffic is that the cost is often far lower than other promotional methods, if not completely free. But it’s not just the broad-scope classified sites that can generate attention. There are hundreds if not thousands of classifieds in every industry, providing an exceedingly targeted opportunity to generate new links of some notable quality.

Video: Another opportunity to gain exposure, and get links and traffic, is through the use of online video. While there are financial and time commitments to creating video, going viral can help get your website to a tipping point far faster than any other online channel. YouTube is by far the king of video sites, but there are hundreds of others including Vimeo,
Blip.tv, Viddler, 5min, Dailymotion.com, and MetaCafe. Are you distributing your videos to these outlets? Are you monitoring your videos’ success or failure, and watching the performance of others in these channels to see what’s getting noticed or ignored? If not, you need to be.If video is a serious consideration for your website, placing your content exclusively on YouTube is a good bet. Create a YouTube channel (even if you don’t have video content yet) and “friend” related users and “favorite” quality videos.The link from the YouTube Channel to your website is a do-follow link.

Content Development: The information age requires that you produce ... information. Take up a campaign to write content for others by reaching out to bloggers who cover related topics (find some guest logging prospects at BlogCatalog.com). There are many exceptional article directories where you will be able to submit your content including EzineArticles.com, Buzzle.com, GoArticles.com, IdeaMarketers.com, ArticleAlley.com and Amazines.com. These are just a few of the more well known directories but there are hundreds of others. Another very valuable opportunity is through Google Knol. Because any link from Google is worth getting, create content for a Knol and include some links — they too, are do-follow.

Getting Social: Social media has changed the way we connect with others and promote our products and services on the Web. From social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, Bebo and hi5 to microblogging services like Twitter, Plurk and Plazes — even social bookmarking services such as Delicious, Digg, Stumbleupon, Mixx, Reddit and others — “social” presents wonderful opportunities to chart the course of memes and discussions, and are widely known as effective ways to create huge streams of website traffic and, ultimately, inbound links.

Directories: DMOZ and the Yahoo! Directory are two exceptional places to attempt to acquire links to your website, but there can be incredibly long wait times (DMOZ) and high prices (Yahoo!) to get included. Consider some alternatives including Business.com, BestofTheWeb.com, GoGuides.com, JoeAnt, RubberStamped. org, Skaffe.com, SiteSnoop.com, Gimpsy.com, IPL.org
and MassiveLinks.com