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Feeds for Marketing/Ecommerce Research [Ecommerce, web marketing and development news and research by Michael Bloch of Taming the Beast.net ]

1. World’s worst phishing attempt?
I have a love/hate relationship with spam and phishing emails. It’s usually the latter but sometimes an attempt by a phisher is so pathetic, it makes me laugh. Like this one I received today. Firstly the following message had about a hundred other folks’ email addresses in the cc line. Then there’s the message itself. –Pathetic phishing [...]

2. Email - getting the message right
A pre-sales conversation via email can be particularly challenging as there’s so many additional threats relating to mixing up the message and confusing a potential target. Here’s an example: “And if you decide to purchase a purple flomble from us today, we’ll take an additional 20 off” 20 what? 20 bucks, 20%, 20 armadillos? For the sake of perhaps [...]

3. Facebook, Twitter, Blogging & Youth
Blogging isn’t such a popular activity with teenagers and young adults nowadays and Twitter even less so according to a recent survey. A report released by the Pew Research Center has found blogging has fallen among teens and young adults while rising among older adults. The culprit affecting the young ‘uns blogging? Social networking sites, mainly [...]

4. Neuromarketing research continues
Back in 2008, I wrote about an emerging technique called neurologically optimal advertising. 2 years later, it’s still being developed and is now more widely known as neuromarketing. If you are paranoid, read no further :). In 2008, researchers were tinkering with a combination of eye-tracking, galvanic skin response (GSR) and electro-encephalograms to gauge response to ads. [...]

5. The power of brands
I have a policy - to never participate in unsolicited telephone surveys. Usually all they have to do is say “survey” and I politely say “no thanks” and hang up before they can respond. I broke this rule recently without even realizing it; purely because of the company involved. Or was it that company? The phone call [...]

6. Touchy spam filters
It’s quite amazing what will trigger some spam filters and send your communication to email hell. I received a notification the other day stating my email didn’t make it to its destination - and this was the reason: – Microsoft Forefront Security for Exchange Server has matched a filter. Filter name: “KEYWORD= Blocked: jerk” State: Purged – Either Forefront Security is a [...]

7. Company news web pages
Many online merchants have company news pages, but sometimes they can work against a business rather than for it. The biggest problem can be keeping it current. With so much going on in a business, it’s these little things that can be easily overlooked. But put yourself in a prospective customer’s shoes for a moment. They are [...]

8. Apple iPad - no Flash support
I thought my last post somewhat relating to the Apple iPad would be the only one for the week as new gadgets aren’t my core interest, but this issue is pretty important. It seems that Apple have left out support for Flash for the iPad. It’s a pretty odd move given the device is very [...]

9. Not about the Apple iPad
The Apple buzz machine has excelled once again. If any other company had released the iPad, would the coverage have been the same? I doubt it, Apple just has it down to a fine art. I was just out at Google News and found over 15,000 news articles mentioning the Apple iPad since Mr Jobs heralded its [...]

10. Great Australian Internet Blackout
The Great Australian Internet Blackout is currently under way - a protest against looming censorship of what comes down the tubes of the Interwebs in the Land Down Under. The Australian Federal Government is going ahead with plans to make Aussie Internet Service Providers act as censors for all Australians. Targeted at what the government [...]

11. Getting more from Twitter & Facebook
Twitter and Facebook can be great for boosting your online sales; but many merchants use it for sales messages only and often defeating themselves in the process. I’ve been taking a look at a few Twitter profiles and Facebook fan pages today belonging to online merchants and noticed the ones who seem to generate the most [...]

12. 30,000 Adwords advertisers terminated
According to an estimate from AdGooroo, more than 30,000 advertisers were permanently suspended from the Google AdWords system last December. This estimated purge represented approximately 5.3% of active advertisers at the time says AdGooroo After hunting around a bit for evidence of such a slash and burn, I found many reports of advertisers receiving a termination [...]

13. Google getting smarter on synonyms
Getting machines to understand the nuances of the English language is a big challenge, particularly when it comes to search engines - but it’s one that Google is rapidly overcoming with features such as it’s synonym system. To illustrate the issure, Google cites the example of the terms “photos” and “pictures” - often meaning the same [...]

14. Turning time burglars into assets
Have you ever had an ongoing debate with a customer or peer via email that’s sucked up a lot of your time? Often that time is wasted. Here’s how to turn it into something more constructive and possibly profitable. The sites I’m involved with at the moment see tens of thousands of visitors a day all [...]

15. Affiliates need full strength reporting
I was approached to join an affiliate program today and everything looked good until I logged in. The statistics area was “under development”. Something I’ve learned over nearly a decade of affiliate marketing is affiliate programs that don’t have an interface with statistics, real-time statistics or very close to it, tend to not perform so well. [...]

16. Google may pull out of China
This isn’t just a rumor. Google has had enough of the constraints placed upon it by the Chinese government and will cease filtering results, knowing full well this may be the end of Google.cn. The straw that broke the camel’s back appears to have been an attack on Google’s servers in mid-December originating from China that [...]

17. A survey no-no
If you’re requesting customers to participate in a survey; be sure the request at least appears to comes from you. Some of the world’s biggest brands make the mistake of outsourcing surveys to other companies who don’t give much thought to reassuring potential respondents. For example, I received a note requesting feedback on an Apple product I [...]

18. Survey: natural vs. PPC search
Some interesting results on a survey carried out with ten big box retailers regarding their spend on PPC keywords and resulting traffic vs. traffic from free listings; i.e. natural or organic search. The survey was carried out by Conductor and found that as a group, the top ten big-box retailers spends approximately $678,000 per day on [...]

19. USA online population stagnates
A recent survey indicates that the American online population seems to have remained static in terms of percentages. Time to tackle the final frontier of local holdouts - the 65+ age group. In a national survey between November 30 and December 27, 2009, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found 74% of the [...]

20. M-commerce & cart abandonment
2010 will be the year for M-Commerce - ecommerce via smartphones and other handheld devices. After years of it being the Next Big Thing; it finally is. However, this poses some challenges for online merchants. I never thought I’d see the day I’d be buying stuff via a cell phone; purely because I hate the damned [...]

21. Ecommerce a top performer
If you’re involved with ecommerce, you are part of one of the best performing industries in the past decade. That knowledge and a few bucks will get you a cup of coffee ;). IBISWorld identified the top 10 best industries based on accumulative revenue growth from 2000-2009.. and the winners are: Voice Over Internet Protocol Providers (VoIP) [...]

22. Customer complaints & merchant excuses
The silly season is often followed by the complaints season. While some customers will whinge and exaggerate for the sake of it or in order to try and squeeze something out of a merchant they aren’t entitled to, others have valid complaints that need to be dealt with very carefully. A colleague of mine was fuming [...]

23. Beta and premium online services
The word “Beta” comes from the second letter of the Greek alphabet and directly translates to mean “full of bugs”. Well, that’s actually not true, but you would sometimes think it’s the case. In the world of the web, “Beta” usually means something that’s not quite perfected, but good enough for general release for further testing [...]

24. Online advertising - the big CPM earners
If you’re only getting a few bucks per thousand impressions for advertising on your site, these figures will certainly make you drool - or if you’re an advertiser, make you cringe. While the economic crisis put the brakes on CPM rates for many publishers, some sites can still command quite mind boggling figures. AdAge has a slideshow [...]

25. Spending more time online
It probably won’t come as any surprise that we’re spending more time online than ever - and more of us are spending our cash via the Internet too. According to a recent survey by Harris interactive, the average hours spent online have increased from 7 hours in 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2002, to 13 hours a [...]

26. And so this is Christmas
To all the marketers out there - now that the silly season is almost over (aside from the post-Xmas sales); have you given much thought to the year ahead regarding your career? Consider becoming a “green” marketer. By that I don’t mean replacing the light bulbs in your office with CFLs and switching from a desktop computer [...]

27. Page load times - you’ve got 10 seconds
What’s more important - a snappy site design that is slow to load or a rather plain looking site that zips along? Once a hot topic during dialup days, then somewhat ignored due to the wide adoption of broadband; page load speed is again getting attention. I’ve never really understood why some web site developers want [...]

28. Terrific Tuesday trumps Green Monday
Green Monday didn’t turn out to be the online spending frenzy predicted, but last Tuesday more than made up for it. According to comScore, Green Monday (Dec. 14, 2009) saw $854 million in sales - down 1 percent versus year ago. The Monday was predicted by some to set new spending records. However, Green Monday’s fizzer was [...]

29. Survey : ebooks boom
2009 will probably be the year remembered as being the real beginning of ebook popularity thanks to rapid Kindle and other e-reader uptake. The growth rate of e-book trade sales was an incredible 176% this year and the time ahead looks good for ebooks in all sorts of formats - half a billion dollars worth [...]

30. Online spending and Green Monday
Black Friday, Cyber Monday and.. Green Monday? It has very little to do with the environment, more so with greenbacks and this year’s Green Monday may have been a bottler. ComScore’s latest holiday online spending report states for the US holiday season-to-date, nearly USD $21 billion has been spent online. This represents a 4-percent increase on [...]