Web Marketing Strategy Update

The Prince of Print, famous — perhaps infamous — as a larger-than-life copywriting genius, passed away in his sleep on Sunday, April 8th.

I missed this at the time, but if you haven’t heard of him, you need to. Gary was one-of-a-kind and nothing short of a legend in the world of direct marketing. A man whose reputation preceded him, he inspired marketers and copywriters everywhere.

For years now he’s been freely giving away all his old paid subscription newsletters he began publishing in back 1986 at The Gary Halbert Letter, which is where I first got to know of him.

His newsletters are packed with marketing tips and ideas — tons of real gems, which he was adding to every month as he shared his thoughts on Internet marketing. I’ve been going on and off for years now. The only thing is many are pretty long, and finding the time to read them all is why my visits always remained erratic, despite the best intentions.

He also published his, The Boron Letters on the site. Written to his youngest son, Bond, when Gary was imprisoned at Boron Federal Prison Camp or, “Club Fed” as he called it, he described this series of letters as “the most precious gift I have ever given him… and… the most precious gift… anyone else could possess.”

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.