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Describes using ecommerce to establish 4 primary mktg & sales process tactics: awareness, access, persuasion and fulfillment.

Author says Netcos do a poor job tracking performance; mgrs should look at amt of traffic to site; rate visitors are converted to buyers; frequency buyers return for purchases; and if buyers spend more when they come back (free registration req'd)

In this age of increasing product parity, the race goes to the swift. Article talks about focusing on five types of channel speed.

As competition forces companies onto the Web, business partners--resellers, retailers, distributors, dealers, and even internal sales forces--are sometimes pushing back. Channel conflict, aka disintermediation, is turning into a battleground.

Winning companies use multiple routes to market to create an interlocking network of sales and service channels to rapidly deploy resources to sell and service customers according to what each customer needs and values

Readability scales can help you make your persuasive copywriting more accessible to your audience.

In the literary world, "good writing" may be notoriously difficult to define. But on the Web, good copy has two clear, easily understood objectives: It elevates your search engine rankings, and it attracts qualified traffic and holds the attention of your prospects and customers.

On the Web, your words carry a lot of weight. Fortunately, you can build verbal muscle, fast.

Following are five tips you can apply right now (with a minimum of time or technical hassle) to dramatically improve the effectiveness of your Web site writing.

If companies served up e-mail right, consumers would beg for it, says Hans Peter Brøndmo, founder of Post Communications.

Here's a big idea: Ideas are driving the economy. Here's a bigger idea: Ideas that spread fastest win

If your web store is getting zillions of hits a month, business must be skyrocketing, right? Not necessarily. Many online retailers monitor visitor traffic as a measure of their stores' success. But in a study they assert is one of the first in-depth analyses of online visiting behavior using Internet clickstream data, two Wharton researchers explain why high traffic streams to a website need not necessarily mean an increase in business and point out that commonly used measures of web store success such as number of hits, page views, and average time spent at a site provide only generalized information about customers.

Article talks about why the click-through rate (CTR) is increasingly less meaningful as a metric of sales and marketing success and also talks about more useful metrics

Article discusses the disconnect between how e-commerce companies are currently approaching online branding and research that shows how users are discovering web sites

Advice on how to better measure returns on marketing campaigns, including what questions marketers needs to pose to their engineering teams.

Now that everyone understands the importance of tuning websites to maximize the user experience, the industry is scrambling to figure out how to measure it. This article discusses a new company, WebCriteria, that offers a service which is built on a model describing how users behave on websites. The model is based on usability tests with live surfers, where measurements were made of how different web page features such as load time, number of links, and size and placement of graphics affected surfer behavior.

"Now, let me ask you a couple of very simple questions. Did you concept-test your web site? Did you brand-test your web site? Did you test your web site's navigation ease and appropriateness? Did you test that visitors understood your web site and its functions, aims, and purpose, both before launching it and after it went live? If your answers to any of these are "no," I have to ask you why!" Read more...

Di-Ann Eisnor is a master at persuading busy people to pay attention to digital brands. Her secret? If you want to move people to the virtual world, move your messages to the physical world.

Scott Bedbury knows brands. The man who gave the world 'Just Do It' and Frappuccino shares his eight-point program to turn anything -- from sneakers to coffee to You -- into a great brand.

Article highlights author-activist Naomi Klein, and her ideas on how branding is invading public-space (e.g. schools, community, etc.). According to Klein, "The companies that have most aggressively stalked people as consumers are the same ones that, as employers, have abandoned them...The branding economy has been built on the back of Third World labor." According to Klein, she is "interested in the way that utopian aspirations of branding are affecting our culture." Read more about these and other interesting ideas, like branding ideas vs. products, the brand boomerang effect, and the failure of social institutions.

AllBusiness.com resources about trade shows. Includes a service to find trade shows, several How-To articles (including a Guerilla Guide), a couple of checklists, and some useful sample forms & agreements

When it comes to brand management, Kevin Roberts says that only two things are wrong: brands and management. Today, says Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi PLC, brands are history. Looking forward, companies need to establish their products and services first as "trustmarks" and then, upping the ante even higher, as "lovemarks."

Be honest with them: Brand building is different on the Web, where marketers must focus on users' heads, not their hearts.

Note: eMarketer is a fee-based site

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While marketing online can be anything but traditional, common sense and old-school principles need not get thrown out the window. Hollis Thomases answers some typical questions and provides a list of resources.

article talks about advantages of email marketing and the implications of its growing popularity.

Cynthia Typaldos, president and CEO of RealCommunities, has built a site for aspiring community builders. Does your community meet her standards?

Note: Business 2.0 is now part of CNNmoney and some older articles are no longer available

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This article describes how the hype surrounding one-to-one marketing has been anything but deserved. It also examines the technologies that were supposed to deliver on the promise of one-to-one, but haven't yet replaced the human touch (incl. profiling, email, dynamic content, data mining, and collaborative filtering). Online and offline privacy issues are also discussed.

InformationWeek research shows the move toward personalizing customer communications. See their charts for more specific details

For a searchable repository of market data check out our Market Research Center

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Those of us who drive along highways in the Northeastern U.S., stay at Marriott Hotels worldwide or shop for consumer goods on the web are experiencing the benefits of conjoint analysis, a research methodology used to measure consumer preferences that was first developed by Wharton marketing professor Paul Green in the late 1960s. In a recent talk with Knowledge@Wharton, Green discusses, among other things, new ways to "bundle" information, the pharmaceutical industry's targeted advertising campaign, and the role of the Internet in the global marketplace.

Wharton marketing professor Barbara Kahn writes about the importance of turning customers into advocates who will not only develop loyalty to your company's product or service but will also spread the word to other potential buyers. The article discusses the concepts of customer portfolio management and relationship marketing.

This December 2005 study sums up the existing research and statistics on consumers' attitudes and behaviors, and puts them into the context of the actual success of "green" products and sustainable lifestyles marketing strategies. Then, based on an in-depth analysis of various marketing strategies and campaigns from both small alternative companies and mainstream groups in industries such as clothing, cosmetics, detergents, food retail, automotive or water management, the study identifies the key factors of success and provides a toolbox to practitioners.

Note: Darwin Magazine is now dead. Some articles are moving to CIO. I will try to update the links when I have time...

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This article by Seth Godin, author of Permission Marketing and now Idea Virus talks about his self-coined term for increasing sales by giving away your product.