Retailers had very happy holidays.

US retail e-commerce sales (excluding travel) for the fourth quarter of 2006 were the highest they have been in four years, according to the US Census Bureau. eMarketer senior analyst and e-commerce specialist Jeffrey Grau said that the disparity between e-commerce and total retail sales is significant.

Read Full article at eMarketer.com

Contributed by Lisa Andrews http://www.coresense.com
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Customer reviews have long been part of cutting-edge sites like Amazon.com (AMZN) and Netflix (NFLX), but the practice is spreading dramatically these days to a broader array of retailers. By the end of 2006, 43% of e-commerce sites offered customer reviews and ratings, almost double the 23% figure at the end of 2005, according to New York research firm MarketingSherpa.

In a survey of more than 1,300 people, MarketingSherpa also found that as much as 50% of customers aged 18 to 34 have posted a comment or a review on products they have bought or used. “That’s substantially more than the 34% who said they have downloaded music files,” says Stefan Tornquist, the firm’s research director.

A huge part of the reason for this success is the confluence of social computing and the success of sites such as FaceBook, MySpace, and YouTube. People obviously love to chat and share details and snapshots of their lives. And customer reviews let folks do just that. What’s more, the reviews empower customers to influence how another person sitting in another corner of the world shops.

Read the Full Article at BusinessWeek.com

Contributed by Lisa Andrews http://www.coresense.com
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Analyzing e-mail isn’t as simple as learning open and click-through rates. There’s a lot of information beyond those basic metrics that tell us a great deal about how we can more effectively use e-mail.Most analytics programs (and some e-mail vendors) allow e-mail to be tagged. Typically, this occurs in some form of a hierarchy, but sometimes it occurs via simpler metadata tagging. While every organization espouses its own best practices on tagging e-mail, I usually find tagging structures don’t answer the specific business questions I (and my clients) are asking. To be fair, each industry has its own business needs.

Our clients tend to be multichannel retailers (B2B and B2C). In this column, I’ll discuss how we tend to categorize e-mail for this industry. Of course, the actual tagging and hierarchies we use are tailored to specific clients and are confidential. But below is the high-level starting point for most of our clients.

We divide e-mail into major categories. The two we typically come across with all of our clients are campaign and triggered e-mail.

Read Full Story by Jack Aaronson at ClickZ.com

Contributed by Lisa Andrews http://www.coresense.com
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According to fellow columnist Jeanniey Mullen, 74 percent of the general population will open and read service or confirmation e-mail within an hour of receipt.

Think about it. You usually send a confirmation e-mail to a customer or highly interested prospect, such as someone who just placed an order or has registered for your Webinar. Since the confirmation is usually sent within minutes of the transaction, it’s highly likely the recipient is still in a very receptive state of mind toward you and your company.

So why do so many companies still waste this excellent opportunity to upsell, cross-sell, or further cement customer relationships?

Usually, it’s because confirmation e-mail messages aren’t generated by the marketing department. They usually comes from customer service. Yet as we know well, everything that touches the customer should reflect your brand and create a selling opportunity.

Read Full Article at Clickz.com

Contributed by Lisa Andrews http://www.coresense.com
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Software as a service, or SaaS, is arguably the most talked-about trend in IT. Bill McNee, CEO of Westport, CT-based research firm Saugatuck Technology, says that 55% of small and midsize companies currently have at least one SaaS application running, and recent studies reveal that 61% of North American companies with revenue of more than $1 billion plan to adopt one or more SaaS applications in the next year.

Several industry experts estimate that, by 2010, 30% of new software will be delivered via an SaaS model. And virtually all new software venture money is flowing to SaaS startups these days, rather than to traditional enterprise software companies. While such indicators are impressive, the question remains: How does a multichannel merchant know whether SaaS is the right choice for order and warehouse management?

Read Full Article at Multichannel Merchant

Contributed by Lisa Andrews http://www.coresense.com
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Here’s something to think about. How many times have you typed in a URL address only to come up with a page “404 Error”.

Hmmm, your thinking OK what did I do wrong or worse yet, that person gives up and never makes it to your website at all. Here is a way to change all that.

Read Link from Entrepreneur Magazine for a quick fix  

Contributed by Kim Sapienza http://www.coresense.com
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