MarketingSherpa Blog

2008 has come and gone and I have a folder loaded with a year’s worth of Sherpa articles I’ve written. Here are a few of my favorites, from which I’ve pulled out nuggets of wisdom to share.

1. 7 No-Cost SEO Tools

Wil Reynolds, Founder, SEER Interactive, laid out seven free tools that marketers can use to improve their search marketing. Among those is SEO Quake, a free Firefox plug-in that lets you reorder search results based on factors like their sites’ number of web pages, links from Yahoo!, Alexa rank, domain age and others. Reordering the results can give you great insights into why a competitor is beating you on SERPs.

2. Pimp My Lift, Viral Campaign

Easily the funniest article I wrote last year, this case study outlines how a forklift dealer created a microsite where visitors could design their own forklifts, complete with shiny rims, flame decals and attractive models. A single press release sparked news stories across the globe. This campaign showed that being risky and risqué–within reason–can bring in a lot of press.

3. Explode Customer Reviews

Not all audiences are social. Some might need prodding to interact with site features like ratings and reviews. This article described how a label printer manufacturer surged customer reviews by about 1000% by sending a simple email 30 days after the customer’s purchase. The email asked “Are you satisfied?” with two big buttons, “yes” and “no.” Those who clicked “yes” were taken to a product review page. Those who clicked “no” were taken to a page with links to customer service phone numbers and links to product review pages.

4. The Psychology of “Yes”

This article described some of the vast research done by Robert Cialdini, Regents’ Professor of Psychology and Marketing, Arizona State University, on the psychology of influence. The article pointed to studies that proved why marketing concepts like free gifts (given without any conditions) and expert testimonials are helping companies sell more.

5. Measuring Visitor Engagement

Quantifying how “engaged” visitors are with your website is not easy. This article broke down an engagement calculation created (mostly) by metrics pioneer Eric Peterson, CEO and Principal Consultant, Web Analytics Demystified, Inc. By combining metrics click depth, time spent on site, time since last visit and others, marketers can create campaigns that target site visitors who are moderately or intensely engaged.

About Adam T. Sutton

Adam T. Sutton, Senior Reporter, MarketingSherpa
Adam generates content for MarketingSherpa's Email and Inbound Marketing newsletters. His years of experience in interviewing marketers and conveying their insights has spanned topics such as search marketing, social media marketing, ecommerce, email and more. Adam previously powered the content behind MarketingSherpa's Search and Consumer-marketing newsletters and carries that experience into his new role. Today, in addition to writing articles, he contributes content to the MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa blogs, as well as MECLABS webinars, workshops and summits.

Prior to joining MarketingSherpa, Adam was the Managing Editor at the Mequoda group. There he created content and promotions for the company's daily email newsletter and managed its schedule.

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Categories: Consumer Marketing, Marketing, Research And Measurement, Search Marketing Tags: customer reviews, engagement, research, SEO