They say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but we just can’t wait to tell you about the Shop.org Summit! We were on the expo floor all three days meeting current enterprise clients and doing one-on-one consultations with prospective clients.

From what we heard, it sounds like many retail store owners took advantage of the online boot camp on Monday- the questions we got were insightful, and the knowledge of ecommerce was of the highest caliber. Countless good discussions were had about ecommerce best practices and the Volusion enterprise platform.

We had a surprisingly high number of store owners stop by to pick up our case studies and whitepapers, and we would like to congratulate Shahzad L. Paul again on winning the new iPod touch! (more…)

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Spending on online video advertising is still small compared to total online spending and television spending, but last year it grew by 126.5%. According to recent studies, online video advertising spend is expected to continue on its upward trend- increasing by an average of 41% per year over the next five years.

With online video popularity soaring and more video advertising platforms available than ever before, your company should seriously consider integrating online video advertising into your marketing mix. YouTube is a logical place to start because of its sheer size. In fact, YouTube revealed recently that:

• In a given month more Americans visit YouTube than watch the Super Bowl on average
• Every 45 seconds approximately more than 12 new hours of video are uploaded

YouTube’s Sponsored Videos advertising program is already being utilized by a wide variety of companies. Sponsored Videos reach a huge audience of online video viewers and are incredibly easy to set-up (think Google AdWords with only half the steps). (more…)

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It’s that time of the year again- the Shop.org Annual Summit is taking over Las Vegas.

Image compliments of www.shop.org/web/summit09

The summit is a three day event for retailers- starting today with an online ecommerce bootcamp, and concluding Wednesday after two days of intense workshops and seminars. Keynote speakers include Terry Lundgren, Chairman, President and CEO of Macy’s Inc. and John Donahoe, President and CEO of eBay Inc. just to name a few.

Volusion will be on the expo floor all three days. Expo hours are 5:30 pm-7:30 pm Monday, 10:00 am-5:30 pm Tuesday, and 10:00 am-3:00 pm Wednesday. Stop by booth #100 and see us to pick up your McCain/Obama online store case study, ecommerce whitepaper and enter our drawing for a chance to win a sleek new iPod touch!

We will be tweeting from the event, so make sure to follow us at www.twitter.com/volusion for Shop.org updates.

Members of the Volusion team- Adelle, Justin, and James will be there to answer any questions you may have. We look forward to meeting you!

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In light of Facebook recently announcing that that they are now cash flow positive, we felt it was important to look at how the “Big Four” of social networks are stacking up these days. In Internet Retailer’s August publication* profiles for Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Twitter were compared on the basis of everything from unique monthly visitors to time spent by visitors on the social networks, to how many of the Internet Retailer Top 500 companies were using them. The results were a bit surprising!

Appeal

In terms of unique monthly visitors, YouTube and Facebook swept MySpace and Twitter. The great appeal that YouTube and Facebook command is likely as a result of the mass appeal strategy that they have both mastered.

YouTube started mainly as an amateur home video and performance video platform. Since then though, YouTube has allowed businesses into the party too, letting them post their branded video content, training videos, commercials, and more.

Similarly, Facebook started off with a base of just college students. Eventually they expanded to allow high school students as well, and now people of all ages can join the site. They then went a step further, inviting businesses to create a profile, build a fan page, and use all of the applications and features offered.

MySpace never really embraced all users. They didn’t ban businesses from joining, but they didn’t make it easy for businesses to set themselves apart from teens looking for friends and bands trying to gain exposure. The result was a poor user experience for business owners and very little perceived return.

Twitter is letting businesses do their thing, but it has only been around for a mere two years compared to Facebook’s five years and YouTube’s four years, so we don’t really know what it can do yet. There have been rumors that Twitter may be rolling out “premium accounts” for businesses looking for a more business-specific experience on the social media platform. We shall see! (more…)

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Email marketing is more popular than ever before! Almost all companies seem to be utilizing email campaigns these days because they are a relatively inexpensive marketing approach. But some businesses are not getting the most out of their email marketing.

In a recent eMarketer study more than a third of email marketers surveyed said they did not test their email campaigns at all.

While testing can be time-consuming, it is the most vital part of running a successful email campaign. With that in mind, why don’t all marketers take the time to test their email campaigns? Most reported that they simply didn’t know how!

I sat down with Ashley Boening, an email marketing specialist, to discuss email testing. Here is the information he shared with me:

Body Copy

Personalization vs. Standardization

Personalizing emails with customer names or by user level can be very attractive for email marketers because it offers the appearance of a personal relationship with the customer. While certain personalization efforts like touting membership level perks and rewards standings can excite customers and encourage them to buy more frequently, overtly personalizing based on things like purchase history can actually achieve the opposite.

Sometimes personalization can feel fake to customers or make them worry about what you are doing with their personal information. In general, you should keep personalization genuine and only use it if it will actually benefit the customer. The key to achieving this is subtlety. Instead of saying, “You bought X so you might be interested in buying Y as well!” try simply sending them an email advertisement for Y.

Calls to Action

Images (buttons) vs. Text (links)

People are more likely to click on buttons in emails rather than links. If all your calls to action are in images, however, and customers’ email clients block those images, your email success will be limited. The best compromise is to have some calls to action in buttons and some in links as backup in case the images don’t make it through to the recipient.

(more…)

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