Digital Marketing Blog

Email open rates drop 3%

MailerMailer's latest Email Marketing Metrics Report (pdf) takes a look at open and clickthrough rates, the best days of the week to send emails and how personalisation and subject lines can affect open rates.

It finds that emails with subject lines of 35 characters or less are 28% more likely to be opened, and that open rates have declined overall so far this year.

by Graham Charlton 24 October 2007 13:32pm 1 comment

Interview with Philips online sales VP Gilles Domartini

Consumer electronics giant Philips has just launched a major redesign of its consumer website to improve usability and help shoppers “fully experience and interact with products as though they were right in front of them.”

The firm says it’s its biggest upgrade for three years. New features include a Google Maps mashup showing the location of retailers' outlets, as well as tools to allow greater interactivity on product pages. Philips also deployed technology to improve communication with retailers about stock availability and lead generation.

We spoke to Gilles Domartini, Philips Consumer Electronics’ VP & GM of online sales and marketing, to find out a bit more about how the company's e-commerce strategy is changing as brands seek to interact more closely with consumers.

by Richard Maven 24 October 2007 12:29pm 2 comments

Online returns processes could be improved - study

A quarter of online retailers could be affecting their customers' loyalty by failing to provide information about how they can return unwanted purchases, according to a new study.

E-commerce solution provider Snow Valley assessed 70 UK e-commerce companies and found that a sizeable minority didn’t provide decent directions about how to send purchases back.

by Richard Maven 24 October 2007 11:44am 0 comments

Adsense coming to Facebook?

Google is apparently looking to tap into the Facebook widget ‘phenomenon’ by serving Adsense ads on third-party applications created for the site.

Steve Rubel has linked to an article in AdAge that quotes Google CEO Eric Schmidt as saying:

“How will those developers get paid for those services? We would like to have our ads in those applications.”

by Richard Maven 23 October 2007 13:23pm 0 comments

Men dominate web design jobs - survey

A survey of 33,000 web professionals by A List Apart has come up with some interesting findings on the make-up and morale of the web design industry.

Unsurprisingly, the research reveals that the average web designer is white, aged between 25 and 32 and likely to be male.

Among the respondents, only 14.3% of creative directors or art directors and 12.6% of web directors were female.

by Graham Charlton 23 October 2007 10:20am 1 comment

Mothercare launches social network

Mothercare has launched an online community for parents in a bid to boost its online sales.

Gurgle.com, as it is called, is a joint venture between the retailer and MediaBurn, a digital marketing company focusing on social networking sites.

by Richard Maven 23 October 2007 09:59am 0 comments

Affiliates bag Dragons' Den funding

Dragons' Den investor Theo Paphitis entered the world of affiliate marketing on last night’s show, handing £200k to web entrepreneurs Emmie Matthews and Ed Stevens for 30% of their business.

Their site, GamingAlerts.co.uk, offers odds comparisons and an alert system from “major online casinos, online poker rooms, online bingo sites and online sportsbooks”.

by Richard Maven 23 October 2007 08:50am 2 comments

Social networks drive more traffic to retailers

UK etailers are attracting more and more business from social networking sites like Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, according to new stats from Hitwise.

The data shows that the amount of UK web traffic retailers receive from social networks increased by 153% in the first nine months of this year.

by Richard Maven 22 October 2007 17:09pm 0 comments

Style.com figures show measurement difficulties

The New York Times has shone another spotlight on problems of web audience measurement, highlighting disparities between different metrics firms and web publishers.

Aside from its reference to 'hits', the article is quite informative and points to some major discrepancies in the visitor numbers of fashion site Style.com.

by Graham Charlton 22 October 2007 16:54pm 0 comments

Facebook opens app directory to search engines

Facebook has opened up its application directory so that search engines can index third-party services created for the site and what users say about them.

The move should provide developers of Facebook apps with more visibilty and a wider audience.

by Graham Charlton 22 October 2007 16:31pm 1 comment