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.

If you’ve considered podasting in your marketing, you’ll be interested in this item I came across on WebProNews

Podtrac, a new podcast advertising company, has teamed up with Mediamark Research Inc. (MRI), a provider of magazine audience and multimedia research company, to provide advertisers and podcasters with demographic information about listeners to help them make better advertising choices.

The partnership hopes to bring the same kind of statistical information provided to networks and advertisers in traditional media to the podcast circuit.

MRI and Podtrac will provide ratings data, including an index of the data to MRI’s Survey of the American Consumer as a free service to any podcast through Podtrac. The Survey of the American Consumer is a national probability study of U.S. adult’s demographics, media and product usage, attitudes and lifestyle.

Podcasters will start by implementing Podtrac’s free Podcast Audience Survey. Podtrac will calculate indices to the Survey of the American Consumer for individual podcast survey results and provide the data to advertisers and podcasters free-of-charge.

“The Podtrac Survey together with an index to the Survey of the American Consumer provide a powerful tool for advertisers to determine the fit of a specific podcast audience for the target of their advertising,” said Mark McCrery, CEO of Podtrac.