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Yesterday I came across an article on eMarketer that showed that Behavioral Targeting brings clear benefits to publishers . However when consumers are asked about Behavioral Targeting or data collections by websites they seem to dislike it. It is clear from the first chart that behavioral targeting is working for everybody i.e. publishers, advertisers and consumers. If it were not working for consumers then publishers would not charge premium for it and advertisers would not pay premium for it. So why are consumers so concerned?  As I have stated before the biggest issue seems to the lack of consumer education and the perception of behavioral targeting . Anybody will get concerned if you tell them that the websites are collecting too much personal information about them. The issue here is how the question is framed and the context it is posed in. If asked in a different way the responses would be different than shown in the chart above. Let’s see how the answer will differ based...

Forms are everywhere on the internet, some convert great while other don’t. There are several factors such as call to action, images, copy etc. that all contribute to the success of a form. However, even a well designed form might not convert well if some fundamental things are not taken care of. In this post I am listing 5 fundamental things that could be preventing the visitors from converting. Consistency in Call to Actions – Consistency in call to action is critical for conversions. You cannot underline few links and not the other within the same context. Be consistent with your formatting. Making some links underlined while other not underlined makes user think harder than he/she should and increases the chances of bailout. See below; do you see the inconsistency in the links? I almost gave up on finding that “Register Now” link (yes it is obvious now because I have highlighted it). Captcha – Captcha is meant to stop automated computer programs (spiders) from filling th...

Picture from CNET.com Twitter has grown leaps and bound in last 4 years and now has over 190 Million members worldwide. Many companies have now jumped into using twitter as a means to provide customer support. Why? Well because more and more people are getting on twitter and it is way less expensive then phone support. Recently I turned to twitter for help with one my services. There were two main reasons for me to turn to twitter 1. publicly complain about the company because I was not happy with the service and phone customer support 2. I was hoping that someone at the company will pay attention and get back to me. I achieved both. I was pleasantly surprised to find that these guys were paying attention and immediately responded. So how was my experience? Well not much better than phone support. Though the twitter support agent tried her best but she was limited by the process and to some extent the technology. I think twitter could be a great customer support tool. However, we ha...

Email open rates and click through rate have both declined over recent month as reported by eMarketer (Avg. Open rate is 11.2% while Avg. CTR is 1.6%). This seems like a bad news for emails. What is going on? Is Social Media responsible for this decline or are there other reasons? Who knows what the future holds for email marketing but for now email is alive and marketers can improve both the open rates and click-through rates by just doing a little bit more than they are currently doing. The key to email success is giving customer what they want and in a format that they want. Nothing revolutionary but something that’s often forgotten in email marketing. All this boils down to Segmentation and Personalization Testing To address the first point, read my blog post “ 7 Ways to Create Relevancy in Emails . In this post I am addressing the 2nd point i.e. Testing. Below are 15 things that you should test in your email campaign. Open Rate Improvement Below are the 5 things to test to i...

Past weekend, WSJ published a story titled Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets on online tracking and advertising ( behavioral targeting ). It appears to me that the author of this article is either confused between malware and cookies is or she is just doing what she is supposed to do to sell the story i.e. using words that instill fear in people. The article projects any tracking, business and advertisers do to serve relevant ads or personalize the users experience on web, as malicious. Businesses have been trying to understand consumer preferences and then make personalized recommendations ever since the humans existed. We do it offline all the time. So how is online tracking for the same purpose malicious? My dad used to run his clothing store in India, way before internet existed. He used to gather all the information (in his brain) about consumers browsing and purchase behavior to make personalized recommendation to existing customers and new customers. He used all that informat...

Declaring things dead is nothing new. Every day someone declares something dead. For example, in 2007 many people were declaring page views and even web analytics dead . Well here we are three years later and neither of those is dead yet. Now many Social media “experts” including Facebook’s COO have declared that email is dead and social media will takes it place. Ben and Jerry’s in UK dropped their email campaigns in favor of social media . Is email really dead? Is it a question of either or will both exist going forward? Email is Still Alive Few recent studies show that email is not dead (yet). According to an article by eMarketer, email still drives shopping over social . 37% of the shoppers prefer email as the promotion delivery method while only 9% prefer social. Considering that social media (online social media in its current state) is still in infancy these numbers are great but this also shows that email is not dead yet. According to ExactTarget’s “Subscribers, Fans and Fo...

Shoppers, via their online and offline actions, provide a ton of information to the marketers. Smart marketers can and should leverage this information to understand shoppers motivations and needs to create a better relationship with the shoppers and ultimately make more money for their organizations. Every customer touch point is a goldmine of data. It starts from the keywords that shoppers use to arrive to your site, the links that they click on to get to your site (and the sites they visited before they came to your site), clicks on emails, clicks on banners, every click and every action on your site, purchases etc.. All these actions by the shopper provides you with the information that you can use to follow the shoppers. What does following the shopper mean? In simple terms, following the shopper (visitor) essentially means using the shoppers behavioral data to understand the shoppers’ needs and then serving them with personalized ads/messages/offers , wherever you see them onlin...