Web Marketing Strategy Update

If you want to improve your website sales conversions — and I’m sure you do — have a read of MarketingSherpa’s new Ecommerce Benchmark Guide 2007.

This is not the latest, greatest marketing twaddle of some Internet marketer who’s been online all of 5 minutes, but no-nonsense, “just the facts please” information from people in the trenches that will help you:

• Raise shopper-to-buyer conversions and increase buyer lifetime
• Improve search engine marketing ROI, despite rising costs per click
• Reduce shopping cart abandon rates
• Increase email open rates, number of clicks received and conversion rates
• Compare your own marketing stats to those of your peers
• Ensure your marketing tests and site revamp ideas are approved by management

The completely new guide contains a whopping 223 charts & tables, with data from 1,913 ecommerce marketers’, and results from surveys of 2,449 online shoppers. There’s also “best-of” data from 30 independent research organizations, plus 6 brand new eyetracking heatmaps for sites like Best Buy, Circuit City, Wal-Mart and others.

This could prove important to many affiliate marketers:

From MarketWatch

Expanding into the U.S. market, Rakuten Inc., a Japanese Internet portal operator, said Monday it is buying LinkShare Corp., a privately held U.S. Internet marketing firm, for $425 million.

Tokyo-based Rakuten said it expects the cash deal to close in four to six weeks and allow it to expand into the U.S. market.

Rakuten, founded in 1997, operates a diversified Web portal business in Japan and also owns the Rakuten Eagles, a professional baseball franchise.

New York-based LinkShare, which specializes in performance-based marketing, claims more than 10 million e-commerce relationships and a list of more than 500 clients that includes J.C. Penney Co. Inc., Avon Products Inc. and Dell Inc.

“LinkShare’s performance-based marketing expertise across affiliate, search and e-mail capabilities provides Rakuten with an excellent first step to launch our U.S. operations and continue our international expansion,” Hiroshi Mikitani, Rakuten’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement. “We can leverage LinkShare’s client relationships and technology advantages worldwide, so that LinkShare will be able to achieve significant growth in the future.”