By Crystal Silvas

According to a new study by the Email Experience Council, welcome e-mails are apparently on the rise. The Email Experience Council (EEC) is the Direct Marketing Association’s group that focuses on the e-mail marketing industry. According to the study, seventy-two percent of major online retailers send out regular welcome e-mails this year, up from sixty-six percent last year.

In its second annual report titled “Retail Welcome Email Subscription Benchmark Study,” the EEC analyzed the welcome e-mails of one hundred-eighteen of the top online retailers, tracked via RetailEmail.Blogspot. The study identifies a number of best practices and benchmarks in the areas of merchandising, relationship-building, deliverability and CAN-SPAM compliance.

Jeanniey Mullen, EEC founder and a senior partner and executive director for e-mail and dialogue services at OgilvyOne Worldwide said, “There has been a tremendous increase in the adoption of welcome e-mails this year. I think that over the past year e-mail’s positioning has changed from being strictly a direct marketing tool to being more of a customer relationship [component]. A welcome message is a good way to start this relationship.”

E-mail is perhaps one of the most important channels in customer retention, and yet many marketers aren’t taking full advantage of its many possibilities. This is what Silverpop’s latest study, released last week, said.

The new report, titled “2007 Retail Email Marketing Study,” reviewed opt-in practices, message content, creative design and opt-out management of the e-mail campaigns for one-hundred fifty major retailers in North America and the UK. The study reviewed the registration procedures, marketing messages and opt-out practices of companies including Coldwater Creek, Hershey Direct, Marks & Spencer and American Girl.

“We’re still seeing a lot of marketers who are not taking full advantage of what is available when it comes to e-mail,” said Silverpop Managing Director Mike Weston. “Retailers are faced with the challenge of retaining customers and e-mail is an excellent channel to build customer relationships.”

Urban wear is an emerging fashion style that got its roots from the inner cities and eventually spread to suburban malls. Also referred to as “hip-hop clothing” (because it’s heavily influenced by the hip-hop culture) urban apparel was first created by brands like Phat Farm, FUBU and Mecca.

These days, wholesale urban apparel encompasses all clothing that celebrates urban street life. While it used to be synonymous with hip-hop clothing, it now includes clothing for street skaters and surfers as well. It has evolved branching into a few different categories including brand driven hip hop clothes Sean John, Enyce, Akademiks and L-R-G to hip hop music influenced brands Vokal, Snoop Dogg and Rocawear.

Urban clothes range from tees, jackets, pants, shirts, wovens, hats to much more. Brands like Sean John, Enyce and Akademiks offer street inspired clothing as well as fashion-forward styles. You can find brands like these (and more) by visiting http://www.urbanclothingultd.com.

One of the most popular social networking sites on the Web, MySpace.com has just launched an initiative to capture and collect personal information from the profile pages and blogs of its one hundred-ten million active users, and then use that to target ads. This news was announced to investors on September 18th during the quarterly investor conference, according to a company spokesperson. According to the spokesperson the company hasn’t issued a statement about this news to press and would not comment further.

This hasn’t stopped others in the industry from speculating about what this change could mean for MySpace and online advertising as a whole. MySpace may be able to nearly double its revenue, from $40 million a month to $70 million a month due to the data mining project according to Perry Solomon, VP of business development and general manager of data mining services provider Media Solutions, FAST Search and Transfer.

By Crystal Silvas

Before the extremely important Q4 selling season begins, the biggest focus is on maximizing this major once-a-year revenue opportunity. The brightest marketers have devoted at least part of their budgets to behavioral targeting for the upcoming year, but retailers should also be aware of behavioral targeting opportunities to cross- and up-sell to customers during the holiday shopping season. This can be done for both returning and new customers alike, and it’s not difficult to do.

“Cross-selling” and “up-selling” involve directing a customer’s attention to products and services that complement or increase a purchase while it’s still in progress. Good e-commerce sites are a great way to study cross- and up-selling strategies. Try making a purchase at Amazon.com without being offered recommendations for additional products you should be using. (“People who purchased this item also bought this one…”) Behavioral targeting offers an enlightened follow-up on communication and sales opportunities. This can be leveraged for cross- and up-selling to people browsing or shopping the Web. These techniques can substantially boost your online sales, especially during a season characterized by benevolence and wanton spending.

By Crystal Silvas

All online retailers should be leveraging the power of the consumer information available to them. Marketing by creating segments allows advertisers to focus their campaigns on certain subsets of potential customers that are “most likely” to purchase certain offers.

If done correctly, this helps insure the highest ROI. However, it does depend on what is being sold because there are differences in what to consider when defining market segments.

According to Jeff Rosenzweig, senior manager of CRM and e-mail marketing at Travelocity, “It is key to define your life cycle stages and objectives and then design your communication strategy accordingly. Inspire, convert, cross-sell, get feedback and inspire others with it.”

Travelocity employs behavioral segmenting for its customers using such attributes as shopping and booking behavior, subscriptions, geography, psychographic interests and hobbies. Demographics like socio-economic status, marital status and presence of children also come into play.

We left emerging search engine race horses galloping up the inside race track last time we scanned which engines are winning or losing, in Search Engines Duke It Out: Goliath vs. David vs. David’s Brother.

To recap: Yahoo! “knocked Google down a peg” in customer satisfaction – Yahoo! improved 4% in user satisfaction vs. Google’s 3.7% decline. Tier 2 engines showed greatest user satisfaction improvement (Ask.com) and largest customer satisfaction decline (AOL) in that same University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction survey. We also noted the classic Little Guy vs. Goliath in search marketing: The Open Source Search Project called LAMP (or David’s Little Brother) is taking on Tier 1 Market Dominant Goliath, Google.

Not SEM Dark Horses Anymore

By Crystal Silvas

Forrester Research and Shop.org have recently released the latest installment of their study titled “State of Retailing Online 2007”. According to this study, online retailers are getting savvier when it comes to using social media and utilizing higher quality images.

Many online retailers have expressed their desire to improve product detail pages and content. 80% of those surveyed said they’ll be focusing on adding alternative images to their Websites in the near future while 72% said they would begin to integrate lifestyle photography. 63% are going to be adding social media tools like videos and user-generated customer reviews.

The report shows a 25% growth in e-commerce sales in 2006 as compared to the previous year, which is great considering that the expected growth rate was only estimated at 20%.

By Crystal Silvas

According to Wikipedia.com, the French term “a la mode” refers to anything that is currently in fashion. How fitting that this stylish little phrase shares its name with a successful Orange County, California based jewelry company, Alamode Fashion Jewelry. Since its inception in 1980, Alamode Fashion Jewelry has worked diligently to secure its place as a leading jewelry manufacturer and wholesaler. They have become experts in this field over the course of the past twenty-seven years.

While their production base is located in Dong Guang, China, they are able to offer fast and reliable service because they also have branches in Dubai, USA, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. They boast a production level of half a million units per month and their sales channel spans most of the world.

By Crystal Silvas

Since its humble beginnings in 1989, Just For Laughs Enterprises Inc. has grown from a small family-owned retail store into a full-fledged design house and importer. Specializing in the manufacture of fun, “Just For Laughs is the company for items geared at putting a smile on your face.” They have a wide variety of playful novelty products to choose from including key chains, gag gifts, stuffed animals, 3D greeting cards, stretchy toys and more.

One of their newest additions just made its debut at the ASD/AMD Trade Show in Vegas last month. They’re called “Little Stinkers” and they’re the cutest little keychain air fresheners ever. These miniature plush toys are soft, silly and—you guessed it—smelly (in a good way, of course!) They come in four different scents including wildberry, vanilla, coffee and fruit pop. All scents were formulated and made in the U.S.A. and each scent comes in three different styles.

By Crystal Silvas

Forrester Research has just conducted a study for RevenueScience comparing behavioral targeting practices to contextual advertising. The study showed that online customers are more receptive to behavioral target advertising than they are to contextual methods—between 10 and 22% more receptive, in fact. Two thousand thirty-five online consumers were surveyed in fourteen different categories.

According to Marla Schimke, VP of marketing at RevenueScience, “Using advertising that consumers are receptive to is crucial, and behavioral targeting is clearly the best performer. When marketers use behavioral targeting, they can be sure that 93% of the audience receptive to their ad shop online, and those consumers make a more attractive online advertising target because they represent a higher income bracket, spend more money online and shop online more frequently.”

By Crystal Silvas

The buzz around the Web seems to be dancing around holiday marketing. I know it may seem premature to some of you out there, but it really isn’t. Yes, I realize that the stores are just now rolling out the Halloween candy, and Christmas and Hanukkah are months away, but if you want your search terms to be ranking during the holidays, you better start preparing for the season now. Besides, being prepared for this exceptionally busy time is a great way to help alleviate some of the stress associated with this time of year.

The Newspaper Association of America (NAA) says that ad spending on newspaper Websites reached $796 million in the second quarter, which represents an increase of about 19.3% when compared to the same period last year.

Since NAA began reporting ad spending in 2004, this has been the thirteenth quarter of double-digit growth—in a row.

Newspaper Website advertising currently represents about 7% of total newspaper ad spending. (The percentage for the same period last year was only 5.4%.)

However, the total spend on newspaper advertising decreased 8.6% down to $11.3 billion in Q2. Print ad expenditures decreased 10.2% down to $10.5 billion when compared to Q2 last year.

This change seems to illustrate a shift in the way businesses use newspapers to advertise. People in general are spending more time online and they are finding alternative news sources to the hardcopy newspapers of yesteryear. This presents a huge opportunity for advertisers and should definitely be kept in mind when appropriating ad funds.

According to research conducted by William Blair and AdGooroo, the growth in total number of search engine marketers exceeds the growth of industry sales. In fact, the total number of advertisers has increased an estimated twenty percent between February and July 2007.

Blair partnered with AdGooroo to examine the search engine marketer trends that drive this twenty billion dollar market.

“We culled data from AdGooroo’s database of keyword advertising to glean insight into industry composition, industry growth, market share, seasonality and company-specific trends,” the report says. “In total, we believe the global marketplace comprises more than five-hundred thousand advertisers and that about ninety percent advertise with Google.”

Additionally, the study found that Project Panama, which serves fewer, more relevant ads with each search, is affecting Yahoo’s advertiser base. The system is helping Yahoo to attract a surge of new advertisers after the launch. However, the study found thatYahoo faced fallout due to the relevancy-based ranking, which hurt some advertisers and its efforts to clean up the advertiser base.