Tuesday, October 25, 2005

More e-Commerce Growth

If anyone is looking for confirmation of the tremendous growth in e-commerce, it is certainly evidenced in the latest Google earnings report.

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Friday, October 21, 2005

DM Internet Sales Projected to Rise to 43 Percent

Eric Dukart, who directs Sundog’s Customer Insight Group, just returned from DMA 05, the Direct Marketing Association’s national convention in Atlanta. In an article dated yesterday, DM News, the mouthpiece of that organization, reported that a Multichannel Marketing 2005 survey of direct marketers projects Internet sales will leap to 43 percent by 2007. Keep in mind these figures are specifically for companies that are considered direct marketers. One of the interesting findings of the survey was that 33 percent of Web sales were incremental...sales that wouldn’t have occurred if people would have had to order via phone or the mail.

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Friday, October 14, 2005

Many Companies Are Leaving Money On The Table

According to Nielsen/Net Ratings, the total number of searches in August on all the major search engines exceeded 5 billion! These monthly figures keep climbing at a torrid pace. Getting a high ranking on popular search engines can translate into a great deal of additional visits to your Web site, and this can ultimately have a big effect on sales.

Another iProspect study also indicates the importance of ranking high in search engine placement. It demonstrates how quickly people drop out of the search process beyond the first few pages. Based on the study results, here are the cumulative totals regarding the average search depth by a person using a major search engine:

- Searcher only viewed the first few entries: 22.6%
- Searcher stopped after the first page: 41.2%
- Searcher stopped after the first two pages: 67.0%
- Searcher stopped after the first three pages: 81.7%

If a company doesn’t show up on the first two pages of a search, only 1/3 of the people who are looking for information will find them via the search engine. Other studies have shown that appearing on the first three search pages of Google alone can increase unique visitors to a company’s Web site 10-fold and result in double the sales!

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Wednesday, October 12, 2005

It Really Shouldn’t Come As A Surprise

A report released Tuesday, October 11, clearly demonstrates that “marketing-ready” organizations achieve more than a 15 percent higher return on marketing investment (ROMI) than companies that are less prepared . The report was researched and developed as a collaborative effort between the Aberdeen Group, American Marketing Association (AMA) and SAS. The results were drawn from over 600 AMA members who participated.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that companies doing a better job of managing customer and stakeholder relationships enjoy improved results. What did surprise some of the researchers was the magnitude and clarity of the correlation between these marketing best practices and improved marketing success.

The report defined “marketing-ready” enterprises as companies that 1) possess and utilize data-driven enabling technologies to facilitate better customer relationships and, 2) refine that data to create a unified view of customers across functional areas within their companies i.e., services, sales, marketing, support, etc. I think marketing-ready also implies companies that have the people, products and systems in place to fulfill and exceed their customers’ expectations.

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Monday, October 10, 2005

Robot Cars Great…Where’s Our Hover Car?

Only one year after Grand Challenge 2004, where the robot cars barely left the starting line, Grand Challenge 2005 saw five teams cross the finish line. Last year was an embarrassing assembly of bad robot drivers, but this year’s field clearly passed chauffeur school.

Stanford’s “Stanley,” a diesel-powered, Volkswagen Touareg R5, took six hours, fifty-three minuutes and fifty-eight seconds, to navigate the 131.6 mile course in the Mojave desert. Stanford will receive the $2 million prize from contest organizers, DARPA. And can expect lucrative U.S. Defense Department contracts, to build robot vehicles for the armed services.

I think the other four teams should now get on with more important things, like finally building those hover cars we’ve been expecting since 2001. 

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