Online Marketing

Marketers that use interactive data effectively — tracking each person’s clicks, opens, purchases, views, com­ments, etc. — can engage individuals with communications tailored exactly to them, at convenient times and in manners they prefer, to boost conversions, revenues and profitability.

That comes from Paul Madden, a presenter on the "Automating Twitter" panel at Search Engine Strategies New York, held last month, and owner of Crea8 New Media. Madden "specializes in the darker arts of black hat SEO," and "actively explores as many methods for automating and benefiting from social media as possible," according to his speaker bio.

PROBLEM: Chinaberry, a cross-channel retailer of children's books, craft kits, toys and games, wanted to increase its online conversion rates. SOLUTION: Partnered with a provider of personalized product recommendations (PPRs) for online retailers. RESULTS: Overall site conversion for the Isabella brand website jumped from 4.7 percent in November 2008 without PPRs to 6.8 percent in November 2009 with PPRs.

B-to-B companies are notoriously cheap, so here are some free tools and services that can improve your online marketing know-how and creative efforts.

Last week we saw highlights from the "Think with Google: Future of Multi-Channel" summit. Today we learn from Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist at Google, about measuring offline marketing impact online and measuring online impact offline. Watch the short 5-min video on non-line driven analytics.

The current buzz about GPS-based marketing on smartphones may be obscuring a whole slew of location-based marketing opportunities for retailers: namely, geo-targeting opportunities that have nothing to do with mobile devices. That's because an overwhelming majority of online purchases are still made from notebooks and desktops, and the general location of these devices can be determined by IP address. This simple fact of internet technology means any online store has the potential to market and merchandise relative to location. But does it makes sense to do this, and what geo-targeting strategies should you use?

Steve Spangler has managed to make science cool … and at the same time earn a living. For the teacher turned retailer, the focus has remained the same: to educate kids, particularly about science. And if that means turning bottles of Diet Coke into erupting geysers in the process, all the better. Founded in 1990, Steve Spangler Science is the offshoot of a man's lifelong obsession with science. After 11 years as a science teacher, Spangler shifted directions. He decided to bring his passion for science to a wider audience, and a mail order catalog offering educational toys and science-related products was born.

Too often marketers see the different components of their overall strategies as being at best separate and at worst in competition with each other. Integrating them saves time, money, resources, and delivers a better product or service.

Amazon.com Inc. pulled the plug on its marketing affiliates in Colorado after the state enacted a law that imposes new sales-tax regulations on online retailers. On Monday, Amazon sent an email to members of its associates program, who earn a fee for providing links to the online retailer on their own Web sites. In the email, Amazon informed them it was ending its business with them as of that day. "As a result of the new law," Amazon said, "we have decided to stop advertising through associates based in Colorado." The Seattle retailer added that it would continue to sell to Colorado residents and advertise through other channels.

Part of the attraction of search advertising is that since it targets consumers toward the bottom of the purchase funnel, ads are served to users likely to convert. But display ads appear to a wider swath of consumers, pulling some into the purchase funnel and thus energizing search.