According to the MarketLive Performance Index 2007 approximately 96% of visitors to an e-commerce website will not make a purchase and nearly 58% of shoppers will abandon their cart before completing their order.

To put this into perspective, imagine a brick and mortar store had the same ... Click to read the article details

What are your customers' experiences with your company's e-mail campaigns? Unfortunately, too many marketers are making the wrong assumption about their customers and missing the mark when it comes to balancing business goals with consumer needs.

Forrester Research Study

In ... Click to read the article details

A business often has more than one target audience it wants to reach with its website. Different customers mean different sales appeals and a homepage needs to be able to direct visitor traffic to go to the right places to get information or make a sale.

In order for visitors to find the ... Click to read the article details

Building customer trust online is a combination of good branding, good design, and good content. A website needs all three components to be successful in creating a climate of trust that encourages sales.

Branding is about finding a specific idea that you stand for, finding a way to own ... Click to read the article details

A website is only as good as its content and navigation. When visitors come to a site, they need to quickly get the answers to their questions and quickly find the information they need to make a decision.

Anything you do to interfere with that decision making process is going to cause ... Click to read the article details

Knowing what people want and how you can persuade them to buy is the #1 secret to business success.

You earn wealth by serving other people; by finding the things they want and giving it to them in the form of a product or service. Entrepreneurs who understand this secret will never have ... Click to read the article details

Has e-mail taken control of your life? As a small business owner, I know e-mail rules my day. The first thing I do in the morning is check my e-mail and the last thing I do before I go to sleep is check my e-mail. In between, I am monitoring my e-mail like an air-traffic controller. I'm always ... Click to read the article details

E-mail is the fastest and most inexpensive method of marketing, but it is often the most unreliable. One of the biggest concerns facing online business owners is how to get legitimate e-mail past the spam filters.

Even though people have agreed to receive your company's e-mail, it still ... Click to read the article details

Every email you send out represents your company. Are you sending out the right impression?

Here are five tips on how to create email that makes the right impression:

1. Make sure your subject line is not the message.

A subject line should concisely tell the reader what ... Click to read the article details

As business owners, we all want to have a successful sales experience with our customers. But sometimes we tend to sabotage that effort, because we try too hard to sell (both on our website and in person). Do you recognize yourself in the following scenarios?

*At a networking meeting, ... Click to read the article details

A successful website is one that encourages interaction with the visitor and becomes the first choice for the customer when shopping online. In order to do this, a website needs to be memorable and create a "stickiness" that makes visitors want to come back again and again.

An online ... Click to read the article details

Someone asked me this morning, "How fancy does a website need to be to get more traffic?" Ok, define "fancy" and define "traffic." Both terms are open to interpretation.

Generating Traffic

A big misconception is that a website needs high traffic to be successful. It doesn't. Let ... Click to read the article details

A Web site can be your number one marketing tool if you keep refreshing it with new information and make it valuable to your target market.

How long has it been since you made any changes to your Web site?

For many companies, once they put up a Web site, they are done. Yeah, ... Click to read the article details

As a service provider, one of the best ways to market your business is to offer free presentations at association meetings. It's a great way to share knowledge and build relationships. However, you've got to entertain as well as inform.

While reading the newspaper this morning I noticed a ... Click to read the article details

Do you have the correct e-mail signature on all of your outgoing e-mail?

For many entrepreneurs the answer is no. In fact, I see a tremendous number of e-mails from small business owners that do not even have a signature line, let alone a correct one.

Are you guilty of just ... Click to read the article details

Is there a language barrier on your Web site? No, I'm not talking about someone who doesn't speak English. I'm talking about the actual communication that goes on between your Web site visitor and your Web site content. Sometimes the communication breaks down and your message is not understood. ... Click to read the article details

It may seem strange to compare a website to an office plant, but there are similarities.

If you don't water your plant, give it fertilizer once a month, avoid extreme temperatures and make sure it has adequate sunshine, the plant will not thrive. Eventually it will start turning brown, ... Click to read the article details