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As a result of its online customer community, a company can get much more than basic product feedback. It gains deep insight into the needs of customers, and creates ever-greater customer loyalty by embracing customers as co-designers. Most importantly, the company goes directly to the source for product enhancements, pulling new innovations and ideas directly from the minds of the customers who use, buy, and recommend its products. This is the holy grail of customer-centered product design. Online customer communities can enable the connections, host the conversations, and facilitate the processes that make routine innovation possible.

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We design our marketing campaigns for "rational" buyers. But do buyers ever act rationally? In a preview of his keynote at the MarketingProfs event next month, NY Times bestselling author and MIT Prof Dan Ariely talks about the irrational factors that influence buying decisions.

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Viral marketing has been all the rage in recent years: Companies are intoxicated with the idea of creating the next video that spreads across the Internet and becomes a viral sensation. But for every successful viral effort there are countless attempts that totally miss the mark. Here's where David Meerman Scott comes in. Scott understands why ideas spread in a Web 2.0 world, and he educates his clients on why the "old school" rules of PR and marketing are totally irrelevant in a time of content-sharing on YouTube and Twitter.

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If you've heard it once, you've heard it a thousand times: subject lines matter when it comes to email marketing. Think of subject lines like the headline of a newspaper article. If it grabs you, you start to read. Over the past few months, the author collected subject lines from all sorts of senders, all based on how they grabbed him the second he saw them. What you'll see here is quick analysis of what he liked or despised. The hope is that after perusing this piece, you get a sense of what other marketers are doing and how you can be better, resulting in more opens, more views, and more purchases.

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An engagement between a buyer and a seller begins with a single point of contact. It could be as a sale or an inquiry that, with the appropriate follow-up, can be converted into an ongoing experience for both the seller and the buyer. It is such an experience or set of experiences that create what we define as an engagement—or at least the potential of creating one.

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As a marketing professional, you likely work in a specialized function that may feel like a silo in your company. But you're also best positioned to break down the walls between your function and others (like R&D, sales, finance, and so forth). It's not an easy task, but the following five tactics can help.

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HTML email marketing is now thriving and widely encouraged for its strong ROI and results. Pundits predict an ROI of $45.65 for every dollar spent on email marketing in 2008. Email was also voted best marketing vehicle for customer retention, according to Jupiter Research. HTML email has come a long way, but there is one major pain point that remains: compatibility across all major email accounts.

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Today's technology offers ample opportunities to start conversations with and among customers, fans, foes, competitors, and the press—any person or group who cares to listen and, perhaps, act on the messages received. By some estimates, 85% of the information companies collect is not in a form that they can access or analyze—it is unstructured. The Gartner Group reports unstructured data doubles every three months while seven million web pages are published every day. This cacophony presents the one of the biggest challenges companies face today.

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One of the biggest challenges that marketing departments face is producing marketing tools that actually get used by the sales team. You want to create marketing tools that help sell products, not collateral that sits on a shelf. So how do you do it? How do you create a marketing tool that not only gets used but also can reinforce your marketing messaging so that everyone is speaking the same language?

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You may or may not be using the basic segmentation strategy of RFM (recency, frequency, monetary): dividing your email mailing list into a few buckets based on recency in ordering or visitation to the site, the number of times they've ordered or visited the site, and the lifetime spend. But here's a better approach to segmentation.

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As web marketers seek new ways to boost conversion rates and improve the site experience of their visitors, interest in multivariate testing is on a feverish rise. But those unfamiliar with the techniques are often unclear about where to start, or how to ensure success.

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by Lester Wunderman

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Nearly all search engines use spiders (also known as robots, their original name) to go out and scour the Web looking for Web pages. These search engine spiders then bring the data back to be indexed by the engine. Since roughly 1996, individual meta commands have been used on individual Web pages to modify how search engine spiders behave. The most useful of these commands are fairly universal and respected by almost all search engines. Here are some of the more popular ones and reasons you might want to use them (or not).

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When Bob Lutz of GM or Jonathan Schwartz of Sun set up their blogs, they probably didn't worry too much about the review with Legal. But how does, say, a midlevel corporate marketer or product manager set out to create an "official" blog with the sanction of Legal?

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Online users expect more today from Web sites, and competition is fierce. Marketers should be considering how to change their sites to keep up with customer expectations of the Web, and to increase conversions and enhance the brand experience. In fact, all companies with public-facing Web sites may soon be challenged with a redesign. There is opportunity for marketers to take the lessons of customer-centricity and put them to work to optimize customer relationships online.

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: Writing

Email marketers must keep in mind that a consumer who decides to opt in to the brand's email channel is likely a fan of that brand. Do not lose those consumers by making the following mistakes.

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If you hadn't paid much attention to title tags until now, but you implemented the basic concepts covered in part one of this series, you are already well on your way to creating a better user experience as well as a more-optimized search experience. Of course, most of us aren't satisfied with just the basics.

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Ever sigh to yourself, "There just aren't enough hours in the day!"? You're not alone. Most marketers are overloaded and under-resourced. But it doesn't have to be that way. And managing your time more efficiently isn't the answer. Nor is simply delegating. You also need to be discerning about what you take on. In fact, when was the last time you prioritized your "to-do" list based on what will help further your marketing career instead of merely what will get you through your week?

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We may all be tightening our belts a bit more soon. As a result, our marketing budgets will be under even more scrutiny, and marketing professionals will be held even more accountable for the money they invest. The pressure for marketing to demonstrate the contribution and value it is making will increase... yes, even more.

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Mobile technology continues to develop. The number of consumers with mobile devices capable of retrieving and viewing email continues to increase rapidly. The early adopters of the Blackberry have given way, in numbers at least, to those using what are fast becoming fully functional internet-ready devices. With multiple mobile platforms on the market and mobile phone companies vying for the sale of not only the devices but also the data plans that supply the bandwidth, these "mini-messengers" are in the hands of millions of consumers. Could your email be more mobile friendly?