Direct marketers have long struggled to achieve the ultimate goal of getting the right message to the right person at the right time—and thereby gaining a sale. Now, the advent of location technology has added another dimension to that time-honored formula: getting a marketing message to the right place. In a ... more

In a recent post at the Online Marketing Blog, Adam Singer summarizes Charlene Li's keynote at Search Engine Strategies San Jose last summer. Co-author of the business bestseller Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, and a MarketingProfs presenter, Li examines the intersection of search and social media. According ... more

In March 2008, Amber Duick began receiving email messages from a criminal fugitive who identified himself as Sebastian Fowler. "Amber, mate!" read one missive. "Coming 2 Los Angeles. Gonna lay low at your place for a bit till it all blows over." Over the course of five days, he advised ... more

Marketing messages with personalized subject lines usually fail to impress DJ Waldow. "[Most] of those emails use my first name as the 'hook' to get me to open," he writes in a recent post at the Email Experience Council blog. "This never works for me. Never. I know it's fake. ... more

Warren Katz uses a post at the Elephant Bites blog to discuss the recession-driven microtrend of "glamping"—a freshly coined portmanteau for glamorous camping. In essence, its proponents want the low-budget benefit of a holiday in the great outdoors, but don't care to leave all the luxuries of home behind. "So, who ... more

Not all Spanish speakers want the same thing from a website—many more factors than just language are at play.That's why, Tamara Barber explains in a post at the Forrester blog, research on customers' preferences led Best Buy and Allstate to dramatically different conclusions: "Best Buy," she notes, "has learned ... more

Your site visitors are not one big herd of cattle moving from Point A to Point B. So to optimize response, you need to segment your visitors and your analysis. more

Have you heard the concept of “giving the gorilla the banana”? In post-click marketing, the gorilla is the audience you want to convert and the banana is the reason they clicked your ad in the first place. more

The art of aligning your strategic objectives with the needs within your clickstream is critical to targeting your message and converting those people who are the best fits for your offering. more

Sheena Iyengar is a full professor in the Management Division of the Columbia Business School. I learned of her work in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. Iyengar is one of the leading experts on choice, and how choice impacts our decision-making. She is also my new hero. more

Sometimes, when we talk about segmentation, we can get caught up in thinking about it as merely categorization—we’re deciding what labels to put on people into and who belongs where. This is like thinking of segmentation as a kind of filing system. more

Segmentation is immensely valuable. Behavioral targeting of ads is hot because—surprise, surprise—when you give people more relevant messaging and content, you get better results. more

Pre-conversion segmentation offers you a chance to learn far more than what you can learn after conversion because you're dealing with a much larger pool of respondents. more

Social networking sites accounted for more than 25% of all UK display ad impressions in August. Although younger social networkers were delivered the highest percentage of ads, a sizable percentage of impressions reached every age group. more

Most businesses are well aware of how to market to Generation Xers (those born 1961-1981) mainly because so many people in business today are part of Generation X. But as Gen Xers move into midlife (the oldest are 48, and youngest are 28), we are seeing a dramatic shift in ... more

You've probably heard a lot that the days of "push" messaging—a mythical golden age when marketers could feed passive viewers whatever rigmarole the ad department pleased—are dead. So true. But for you, it's not a bad thing; it's a chance to develop long-term, even downright codependent relationships with users. And there ... more

Let's say a travel company sends out a series of email messages with a variety of offers. Campaigns 1 and 3 produce average clickthrough rates of just over 4 percent; campaigns 2 and 4, however, generate rates of 6.68 percent and 6.4 percent, respectively. "Clearly, emails 2 and 4 resonated ... more

"Something that we preach at eROI is to TEST TEST TEST," says Ryan Buchanan in a post at the company's blog. "We believe that testing should be an integral part of every email marketing campaign." If you're not sure how to get started, eROI comes to the rescue with a ... more

It takes a lot more than Harry Potter's brand of wizardry for marketers to understand the spending habits of what is commonly referred to as the youth market—those between age 6 to 18. In fact, it requires a flexible understanding of the subcategories within this vast network of youth. And success ... more

We've seen Sarah Haskins critique advertising that patronizes women, and now it's time for Bryan Safi's take on commercials that handle gay topics with varying degrees of respect. In this occasionally off-color video from Current TV, he begins with a few ads that use gay men as the punchline for ... more

Comedian Sarah Haskins is back with another Target Women video at Current TV that skewers gender-based advertising clichés—this time it's the Doofy Husband. "Being a woman isn't easy," she says in a mock serious tone. "We work, we take care of the house, we raise children, and we do it ... more

In a move to shove Yahoo off its display-ad perch, Google last Thursday launched its DoubleClick Ad Exchange, which the company promised would streamline and improve how display ads are targeted at and delivered to a desired audience. more

In Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, Thomas Davenport and Jeanne Harris explain how Best Buy used data collected on 60 million U.S. households to create eight customer segments. And with the insights it gained, the company devised new formats that cater to specific segments in a few ... more

Online dating sites figure prominently in the list of top 15 lifestyle-related websites, in addition to blogging, children's, and miscellaneous other sites catering to niche audiences. more

"It's high time email marketers assess campaign performance in terms of the business and marketing goals, objectives, and contribution expectations that matter," says Karen Talavera in an article at MarketingProfs. She recommends placing data into two broad categories to drill down to what really counts: Process Metrics—which are diagnostic in ... more