Lots of blogs around the holidays start running postings offering predictions for the year ahead.  We corralled some of our blog’s contributors to ask them not for what they think might happen in 2009, but what they wish would happen.  ‘Tis the season, after all, for wish lists.  Here’s what our usual suspects wish the interactive marketing elves would leave in their stockings:

Carl West – Director, Client IT Services
I’d like to see faster broadband speeds in the US.  Asia and Europe have faster Internet access speeds than we do here in the States.  Faster broadband provides a better experience for end users, a great platform for advertising, and more opportunities for interactive agencies.

I’d also like to see the transition from IP4 to IP6.  IP6 would expand the Internet enough to allow unique IP addressing.  This provides end users with greater security and businesses with more flexibility.

Jeremy Kolonay – Director, Web Software Services
I wish that everyone in the world would abandon use of Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 in favor of Mozilla Firefox or at least Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.  It is a royal pain (not to mention costly and sometimes impossible) to develop rich web applications that require the use of lots of technologies that didn’t exist when MSIE6 was released (and I’m not even referring to bleeding edge technologies).  Of course, in an ideal world I would love to see the universal adoption of Mozilla Firefox as the platinum standard of web browsers.

I also would like to see the continued proliferation of full featured mobile web browsers like Safari on the iPhone and the WebKit powered browser in Google Android.  It would be great if we could develop a web page once and then have it be seen everywhere. (more…)

The Police have a song about “too much information running through my brain.�  Can this also hold true for metrics and the data that they can provide?  We asked two of our analytics experts, Director of Interactive Marketing Michael Wunsch and Interactive Marketing Manager Amberly Stitzel, to sit down for a few minutes and offer their thoughts on data volume, data value, and making sure the former doesn’t smother the latter.

Is there such a thing as too much data, and is there a point when you have too many metrics pulling too much data?

Amberly: My point of view is yes because if you are measuring things that aren’t important to your business objectives, then what is the point?  What’s the point of measuring something just because you can if you are not going to take away any actionable data on it rather than just being bogged down by hundreds and hundreds of points of data?

Some of your different indicators can also contradict one another.  Some can go up and make others go down.  It’s better to focus on just the ones that are important to your marketing campaign.

Michael: I tend to agree.  I think part of it is setting up goals.  Where there is breakdown is when there aren’t goals set up in the very beginning.  Metrics of what you want to track ought to ultimately relate to what your goals are.  For example, if your goal is to increase the number of people who fill out a contact form, looking at page views and time on site become irrelevant versus looking at what is the optimal time on site for someone who actually fills out the form.  So if there aren’t clear cut goals, there can be way too much data.

Set your goals and then build your metrics based on what your goals are instead of tracking fifty things and hoping something sticks because this can lead to data overload.

So metrics and goals shape how much information would be considered too much?

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If you are a brand that has done some interactive marketing and aren’t satisfied with the conversion rate you’ve been getting, what can be done to help you attain conversion success?

First, take a step back from your conversion page and take a look at your interactive marketing campaign.  Has it been designed and executed properly?  Are there any tweaks or modifications that can be made to the existing campaign to better its chances to drive user conversion?  If there are any flaws in the program, this can hurt your chances at achieving conversion success.  So making any necessary corrections can benefit your conversion rate.

The degree to which your conversion rate will improve will vary.  Interactive marketing that is riddled with flaws can receive a significant spike in its success rate when it gets an overhaul, but a campaign that is already operating at nearly peak efficiency may only receive a percent of improvement after minor changes to work out its kinks are made.  The right adjustments will lead to a conversion rate improvement, but depending on how well the campaign was working to begin with determines whether these corrections will lead to subtle or dramatic increases in conversion rate. (more…)

If your website is being hosted in a shared server environment and you are wondering what advantages that switching to a dedicated environment might provide, I can offer three for you to consider: safety, security, and control.

• You can enjoy the safety that comes from having your own dedicated IP address.  Your IP address is how your server is identified on the Internet.  So if someone else on your shared server is flagged for doing something questionable like sending spam or hosting an adult website, because you have the same IP address that they do, your site can also suffer any punishment that they might receive as a result of their actions (e.g., getting blacklisted).  In extreme cases, you might even get blacklisted from search engines like Google, which can be very bad for your brand’s marketing.

• You would receive the security that comes from the server belonging to you and you alone.  No one else would have physical access to the server other than you or someone you authorize, like an admin team.

• You would have greater control over the server because only your site(s) would be on it.  You wouldn’t need to worry about the needs of any other company’s sites, like a required software package, slowing down your server’s speed and affecting the performance of your website.  You would also be able to make any tweaks of modifications to the server you want without having to be limited by the requirements of the server’s manager because, unlike on a shared hosting environment, you would be the one setting the rules.

Moving from a shared server to a dedicated one is kind of like moving from an apartment complex into your own home.  You aren’t just another tenant; you’re the king (or queen) of your own safe and secure castle.

Hard economic times have led to a sharp decline in consumer spending.  To counter this, online retailers have turned to e-mails offering sale prices and discounts with the hopes of getting consumers to loosen their purse strings and make a purchase.

The problem is that this wave of e-mails, while utilizing the retailers’ pre-existing contact database, is for the most part not being properly customized to make sure the recipients are receiving offers that are of interest or even apply to them.  And as a result, customers who might have benefited from a specific offer have now been turned off by the deluge of non-specific ones popping up in their inboxes, driving some to go as far as opting out of receiving e-mails from these merchants altogether.  Rather than sparking consumer interest and conversion, these randomized e-mails have instead led to customer dissatisfaction.

Massive frequency deliveries of homogeneous e-mails are not proving to be the right path for retailer success.  Resources need to be devoted to crafting the right offer for the right recipients rather than drowning consumers in random offers that may not apply to them at all and are less likely to lead to conversions.  Value, not volume, holds the greatest conversion potential for these e-mail offers.  Retailers need to refocus their efforts to avoid turning off their consumer bases permanently.

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