Few things put customers as at-ease with using a brand as a testimonial from another customer. Some studies peg the boost to conversion rates at as high as 200%, though most caution that a 25-50% increase is more likely. With these kinds of numbers, marketers should be leveraging every opportunity they have to add "social proof" to their conversion process, and a good number of them have. According to the Marketing Sherpa Landing Page Handbook survey of marketers, on a scale of 1-5, marketers rated customer reviews a solid 3.5 for effectiveness.The big caveat to the testimonial subject is that as the trust level of the testimonial decreased, so did the boost to the final conversion rate. Trust, when it comes to product and service... Read More

Leverage your brand name with Yahoo's Rich Ads in Search (RAIS) served on both Search.Yahoo.com and Bing.com. Currently, RAIS are only available using exact match, exclusively for brand terms. These ads appear in the first position only at the top of the SERP above organic search results so you can take full advantage of the available real estate. Rich ads displace the standard text ads on the right, meaning, since the rich ad is the only ad displaying in mainline position, all other ads that would normally show up in mainline position would move to right rail placement. What's more, Google currently does not have a similar offering to own the space above organic search.Rich ad campaigns are also managed in AdCenter with the rest... Read More

Landing pages are a visitor's 'first impression', much like a handshake, so, make it a good one. Offer value and be engaging. However, consumer expectations change. Consequently, it's important your landing pages meet their expectations and evolve according to what they expect. For example, you may consider landing pages to offer a different experience for visitors that are coming to your site for the second or third time, and offer 'mobile-ready' functionality.  With the advent of mobile, QR codes may be a good option to bridge the gap between on and offline. These create a great opportunity for 'on-the-go' visitors allowing them to take action at a later time; plus, you can track and optimize them, and they're easy to use.... Read More

You desperately want to play the role of alluring song siren to the leads...but just as in the Homeric world, the online world is as elusive with many distractions and obstacles that make qualified leads hard to come by. You are starting off from scratch; the only people that are currently interested in receiving the product that is your email marketing initiative are you and your secretary... so the question becomes where to start and how to get more people into the database?The more people you send to, the bigger the chance of success = a common misconception of email marketing.  You could be sending emails promoting cars to an audience only interested in planes of which 1/1000 will convert, or you could send it to 20... Read More

It started like any other day, I read some news, I copied the link to an article I thought was worth sharing (Paul the oracle octopus winning the 2010 FIFA World Cup is fascinating), and I pasted the link into my facebook status.  Then I went back to the domain from which I copied the link and saw it...the plugin.  There it was my facebook picture, my full name, my action (shared) and the name of the link.  This year facebook rolled out some integrated Facebook plugins to be spread accross 100,000+ websites.  Washingtonpost.com is just one of those sites that implemented this.  When people visit their site and are simultaneously logged into facebook, and have indicated that their profile is public in their... Read More