Each month, we'll be interviewing one of our fab employees here at Whereoware. For June, we're pleased to introduce Monique Aguero, one of our Online marketing managers!

Video has always been a powerful form of communication. In recent years online videos have seen massive growth. In fact, justtoday 89 million people in the United States are going to watch 1.2 billion online videos (Com Score).

So right about now you are probably thinking ‘great video is popular, but how does it apply to my business?’ Studies have shown that video not only helps you convert more customers to purchase, but it also makes it easier for people to find you online. Video provides visitors with an extra way of assessing the product. It allows them to see how it moves, sounds, or works and gives them the extra information they crave when purchasing online.

This week we welcome a guest post from one of our Senior Online Marketing Managers, Faith Albers. Faith is Silverpop Certified and played an integral role in setting up the PaperStyle.com campaign that won Silverpop’s Crawl, Walk Run Programs competition. Here, she shows you the easiest way to set up a birthday campaign – even if you’re not collecting birth dates!

One of the most effective targeted campaigns a company can run is Abandoned Cart. Abandoned Cart emails target shoppers who added items to their cart, but did not complete a purchase during that visit. Customers who receive personalized, targeted emails like this are more likely to return to the website and complete their orders than customers sent generic blast emails. 

Each month, we'll be interviewing one of our fab employees here at Whereoware. For May, we're pleased to introduce Shaun Pezeshki, a front-end developer!

 Capture, convince, and close.  Those three words define the goal of every email: capture your audience, convince them of your message, and close the sale.  But it's difficult to do this if your email is sub-par.  Here at Whereoware, we use a checklist to review every email we create, in order to assess its overall effectiveness.  In doing so, we consider things like:  

• Is the Sender name recognizable and trustworthy?
• Has the preview pane been optimized?
• What about the call to action - is it informative? Clickable?

Sound like something you could use?  We've created a handy .PDF copy of our checklist complete with explanations and definitions. Feel free to check it out for yourself; it's never too late to start optimizing your emails!

If you’ve looked at your Google Analytics keyword list in the last year or so, you may have run across two unusual keywords: (not set) and (not provided). For many of you, these may even be your most popular keywords – by far.

If that seems odd to you, don’t worry. Despite what you may be thinking, your customers aren’t going to search engines and typing in the exact words “(not set)” or “(not provided),” parentheses and all! But what are they doing? How are these specific keywords sending visitors to your site when you’ve done nothing to attract them? Let’s take a closer look.

This week, we welcome a guest post from one of our Senior Web Marketing Managers, Michelle Graves. Michelle is Silverpop Certified and works with some of our most high-profile clients. Here, she walks us through using website behavior to create relevant personalized emails.

Inspired by the success of the 2012 Gift and Home show survey, Whereoware once again conducted a survey of retailers and vendors at this year’s shows, looking for information on their social, technological, and selling habits. Once collected, this information was combined with data from our own clients, and some key patterns arose...

When we do our company reporting each month, we exclude branded keywords, in order to better understand how the people who don’t already know about us are finding our company. Rather than putting more effort into attracting those who are already interested, we need to make sure we capture the traffic that “doesn’t realize they need us.”

To do so, we have to clear out all of that branded noise in order to see what these people are actually searching. We wrote about how to do this a few years back (see Google analytics tip: how are prospects finding your site? filtering out branded keywords.), but the method we mentioned then involves typing in keywords one by one to create an advanced filter. Excluding branded keywords one at a time can be a long, arduous process. However, there is a much more efficient method, one that relies on Regular Expressions rather than a simple search.