What a waste! E-Mail is a critical component of e-commerce but it just thought of as a retention tool but flashy banner ads that are placed in God knows where are where we spend. Ouch. Not only are banner ads taking a majority of the budget there is very little knowledge of where they are being run and the audience that is seeing them. Behavior targeting/vertical ad networks might help that but we are a long ways away from marking that happen.

SAO PAULO/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Wal-Mart Stores Inc said on Thursday it will branch out into electronic commerce this year in Brazil, where it plans to invest 1.2 billion reais ($722.8 million) to keep up with fast-growing consumer demand.

Hector Nunez, chief executive of Wal-Mart Brazil, said the plunge into e-commerce will be a crucial part of the U.S. retailer’s growth strategy in Latin America’s largest country, where an economic boom is lifting millions out of poverty.

“We’re … entering into new channels, the most important being e-commerce that we will launch in the second half of this year,” he said at the company’s international analyst field trip in Salvador, in northeastern Brazil.

So we all know that annual growth of 20-50% in US e-commerce operations are a thing of the past and that competition is stronger than ever before. Check out the compete.com chart on target.com vs. walmart.com and see why wal-mart has to invest globally. (also note kmart.com on the graph below):

The big question is $700MM is a TON of money. You could bootstrap, and I use that term lightly, a site for 1% of that and be competitive to what wal-mart is going to be doing in Brazil. That is why the internet is the great divide. Long tail vs. head. Good luck wal-mart you are going to need it. Hopefully you have realistic expectations and give it time…..

This is a great article in Fast Company about how American Greetings focused on two distinct segements and is becoming sucessful both in reach and revenue. Very good read for brands trying to understand how they can play in the new media landscape.

Kiwee.com (American Greetings site)

Last week, Wall Street and Madison Avenue were abuzz with the news that Google Paid Search Ad clickthroughs had gone flat in terms of volume. But just as traders dumped the stock and caused its share price to plummet, others were questioning that decision. But one factor that everyone seemed to ignore was the little fact that this year contains a full extra day worth of potential business. This got us thinking - what does that extra day really mean in terms of online marketing?

Looking at our data we know that in January in the U.S. there were 600 billion page views which would be a daily average of 20 million page views. In the 4th quarter of 2007 internet ad spending totaled $7.3 billion or about $81 million per day according to the IDC in a recent ClickZ article.

Combining this with published ad revenue numbers, it would appear that US pageviews collectively have a CPM to marketers of about $4.18.

So marketers will be spending $81 million today that they would not have in the previous three years. In the spirit of GoldenPlace.com’s bizarre marketing efforts (hey, they apparently work…here we are creating buzz), we came up with some ways marketers could spend this money when the year is one day shorter, to put this all in perspective.
What Else Could Leap Day Ad Revenue Buy?

Give 400,000 kids an OLPC with your logo on it
Buy 17% of all goods for sale on eBay for that day
Give 550,000 JitterBug phones to seniors in need with your logo on them
Fund Barack Obama’s campaign for another two months
Take over Digg’s advertising for 2 years 6 months
Buy A New Ferrari 599 in every color available in the 8 bit spectrum (256)
Buy up ALL of Google’s Adword’s inventory for the next 7 days.
Rent Necker Island from Richard Branson for 5 years and send you favorite customers there ($300,000 per week)
Buy 40 million Compete.com credits and eat your competitor’s lunch
Pay 1 hour 40 minutes of the interest on the National Debt.

The Treasury has made it easy for individuals to reduce the debt. You just have to give a “Gift to reduce Debt Held by the Public“…

…it’s just too bad they don’t take paypal.

Look for them to continue to have troubles if the holiday season does not perform like last year. Now lets watch staples and see if they can overcome the - going into November.

Basically, Staples.com and OfficeDepot.com were the same with OfficeMax.com pulling in a respectable $2.6B, yes BILLION. So that was 2005. Now lets look at what is going on now. Check out the compete.com chart below which includes the most current visitor data for October:

What is cool is that you can download the data you can see the 12 months prior visitor data which I downloaded to Excel below:

Okay, a couple of things stand out.

So the questions are:

Will OfficeDepot.com overtake Staples.com?

My educated guess is that holiday sales at the big office supply sites are going to struggle vs. last year. Look for them to promote more in the upcoming months due to the current downturn in visitors to their sites. OfficeMax.com has a big hill to climb and needs to push hard quickly.

]]> http://www.greggpoulin.com/staples_officedepot_officemax/feed/ http://www.greggpoulin.com/navisite/ http://www.greggpoulin.com/navisite/#comments Thu, 08 Nov 2007 01:14:32 +0000 http://greggpoulin.com/?p=19

Nice move NaviSite. So how bad is it when not only do your customers sites go down during a migration but then you admit to them that the servers their sites reside are on a truck headed to MA from MD. NICE. You can just hear the conversation, hey it is going to cost $$$ to lease servers and transfer the sites. Ah, gas prices are much less than that, lets just drive them.

Here is the CNET article

]]> http://www.greggpoulin.com/navisite/feed/ http://www.greggpoulin.com/adtech/ http://www.greggpoulin.com/adtech/#comments Wed, 07 Nov 2007 01:26:32 +0000 http://www.greggpoulin.com/adtech/ This was one really large conference. I heard various figures from people but it looked to me more on the floor than usual. Of course the big facebook announcement really led the charge.

There were three floors of booths packed in at the Hilton New York - so many that I didn’t come close to seeing all of them since we had a catch a plan back to Boston.

Big thanks to everybody who came by the internet oldtimers event on Monday night. It was a great success and we were really happy to sponser it this year.

]]> http://www.greggpoulin.com/adtech/feed/ http://www.greggpoulin.com/18/ http://www.greggpoulin.com/18/#comments Tue, 11 Sep 2007 13:48:38 +0000 http://greggpoulin.com/?p=18

Recently I spoke with Erika Morphy of the E-Commerce Times regarding the approach that I have taken at Stride Rite regarding the e-mail marketing programs.
Check it out here

Want to learn more about a pillared approach to e-mail marketing? Give me a shout and I would be more than happy to show you how to have a robust e-mail marketing program.

]]> http://www.greggpoulin.com/18/feed/ http://www.greggpoulin.com/e-mail-marketing-for-consumer-related-companies/ http://www.greggpoulin.com/e-mail-marketing-for-consumer-related-companies/#comments Thu, 06 Sep 2007 15:49:08 +0000 http://greggpoulin.com/?p=15

Recently I spoke with Dianna Dilworth of DMNews regarding the current state of e-mail marketing in the footwear industry. She also interviewed leaders from Zappos.com and Simply Soles. Props to Dianna for looking beyond the fluff and getting to the data/approach companies are taking.

Check it out here

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