"It's a battle of the plans, and the person with the stronger plan wins," says Steven Kraner at Hightechguru.com, and it's the main reason why high-tech salespeople fail. Technology buyers are often formally trained to manage salespeople, extract as much information as possible and maintain control over the sales process. ... more

"The holiday season is the most important time of year for retailers, when aggressive goals are set for increased traffic and sales, both in-store and online," says eROI's Alex Williams in a MarketingProfs article on key takeaways from his podcast with Chad White of Smith-Harmon. As you experience this holiday season's campaigns ... more

At this time of year, food merchants—from purveyors of gourmet treats to large-scale grocers—are focused on one goal: getting customers to add more items to their shopping carts. 'Tis the season of the impulse buy! Marketers who want to encourage unplanned purchases this holiday season may find the following bit of ... more

Ever wonder how great search results end up that way? Well, in a recent post at the User Interface Engineering blog, Jared Spool says there are no shortcuts to search-result success. According to Spool, "There is no way you can produce a great search-results page [on your website] without spending ... 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

"We all have opinions about what constitutes spam," begins a post at the Marketance blog. Indeed, while some would argue that meeting the letter of the CAN-SPAM law puts you in the clear, others insist such legislation is merely the jumping-off point for best practices. In the end, spam is ... more

"The pumpkins come out, the days grow shorter, the weather cools, and there's no mistaking that the holiday season is upon us," says Karen Talavera in an article at MarketingProfs. And though marketers face the challenge of lingering recession worries, you can still add holiday sparkle to a subscriber's inbox, ... more

The top online-retail category by average order size ($) in September was automotive, followed by computer hardware in second place, and event and movie tickets in third. more

September's top online retailer—based on conversion rate—was food home-delivery and mail-order service Schwan's, followed by florist ProFlowers, according to Nielsen. more

Even though things are starting to look up, companies are still a bit wary about spending limited dollars in a tough economy. Might there be a devilish tactic lurking somewhere out there that will break through their uncertainty? Susan Fantle says yes. In a recent post at the B2BMarketingSmarts ... more

When you have products or services that customers don't buy on a regular basis—for instance, big-screen televisions or luxury excursions on the Orient Express—targeted email offers based on previous purchases may not be the best way to determine what they want next. That's why Sean Duffy of the UK-based EmailCenter ... more

Research coming out of Penn State reports that 20% of tweets—those wee messages published on Twitter—are brand-oriented. And not the way you'd naturally expect. While researchers originally thought they'd find lots of brand engagement in the form of product reviews or referrals, what they discovered was this (hold on to ... more

"Hoping to keep its 119 rooms filled," writes Hugo Martín at the Los Angeles Times, "Hotel Erwin on Venice Beach is offering an unusual promotion for its countercultural clientele: an Ink and Stay package that includes $100 toward a tattoo and a bottle of tequila to numb the pain." The ... more

In a post at the Email Wars blog, Dylan Boyd praises a recent message from Banana Republic. The minimalist email used simple text on an all-black background to announce an online sale that took place on 09.09.09. The copy read like this: "9 Hours Only! 20% off our favorite styles ... more

"Marketers who embrace demand generation and lead nurturing programs must generate a lot of content to keep those programs running," Ardath Albee notes in a recent post at the Marketing Interactions blog. But generating content for content's sake alone never gets the job done, she adds. To be effective, lead-gen ... more

For the small-business owner, getting your name out via local search is a must. And to many marketers, that means optimizing for Google's universal results. After all, Google is the leader of the search-engine pack these days. But as David Mihm points out in a recent article at Search Engine ... more

The economic downturn in the technology sector has put a squeeze on resellers' margins. Not surprisingly, many value-added resellers (VARs) are looking to their professional services—not just products sales—to hit their profit goals. Others are evaluating partnerships and rethinking marketing strategies. But with client demands at through-the-roof levels, selling approaches ... more

This summer, Pear Analytics released a study that got plenty of play in the Twitter/blogosphere. According to the Pear research, 40.5 percent of the messages published on social-media-darling Twitter are "pointless babble," and a mere 8.7 percent of tweets have pass-along value to others. The piece won itself a lot of ... more

"If you're interested in building a flourishing online brand and website that generates links and traffic organically as part of your Internet marketing efforts, it's important to develop an active base of subscribers and fans," says Adam Singer in a recent post at the Online Marketing Blog. Here are a ... more

"It seems to me that this is the time when marketers should be pushing the envelope, yet it seems like most aren't," says DJ Francis in a post at the iMedia Connection blog. Instead, he says, they are buying into several recession-marketing myths that could do them more harm than ... more

A question many small businesses face when money is tight is whether to invest in pay-per-click (PPC) search marketing or search engine optimization (SEO). The answer, says Claudia Bruemmer in a recent blog post, is both. "Start a PPC campaign to gain visibility in the search engines and define the ... more

When Melissa Marron recently checked out the lead-generation-related results of the MarketingProfs' Marketing ROI & Performance Evaluation Study, it prompted her to ask this question of her fellow B2B marketers: "Why do we have to think of [lead] quality and quantity as mutually exclusive?" And in a recent post at ... more

According to Madison Riley and Brooks Kitchel of Kurt Salmon Associates, retailers often respond to sluggish sales by slashing prices and hoping to beat the competition on value. But there's a problem. "Contrary to the common practice of deep discounting in troubled times," they argue, "competing on compelling products is ... more

Everywhere we look, ever since we can remember, we see that price ending: .99. But does using this just-below-a-round-number pricing system always produce optimum results for merchants? Might other pricing options produce better results? Some researchers recently took a fresh look at pricing, and their results suggest it may be time ... more

"Are you on an SEO honeymoon?" asks Ben McKay in a recent Search Engine Journal post. You know you are, he says. when you can think of simple ways to increase your client's search-engine rankings and garner fast results. But what happens when you've picked all the low-hanging fruit? "You've ... more