SLI along with Salesforce.com and Omniture are sponsoring Exact Target’s Route 1 to 1 seminar series titled “The New eMarketing Essentials”. This 13 city seminar tour will help put email, analytics, CRM and search solutions to work in ways that will help your marketing investments perform better.

This week we will be in Atlanta, GA on Tuesday April 22 and in New York City on Thursday April 24.

For more information on the various cities and to register visit the Route 1 to 1 site.

Jay Shaffer, the VP of Marketing for our partner PowerReviews, wrote an interesting post last week about their competitor Bazaarvoice (who is also one of our partners). It’s interesting because Jay is openly accusing Bazaarvoice of trying to copy some of the PowerReviews capabilities. It’s a very aggressive approach to this sort of problem.

While not taking sides in this issue (as they are both our partners), we typically try not to be so openly critical of our competitors in these situatations because we don’t want to highlight them or tell them what they’re doing wrong.

As to the validity of what Jay is saying - I’ll let you read his post and talk to each company to decide for yourself. Because they’re both partners of ours I’ll remain neutral. We do have customers who are happy with the service from each of these companies. As far as I know they are the only vendors out there who will help you implement reviews on your site (let me know if I’m wrong). We have some customers who implement reviews themselves - as a rule I would recommend against this - the experts will do a better job (it applies to site search as well - but I’m biased about that). However I do recommend having reviews on your site - there are many benefits.

I doubt Bazaarvoice will respond directly - they probably don’t want to have a public slinging match.

Last week Coremetrics announced that they making free ecommerce data available to their customers for benchmarking. Their announcement included some sample data including the fact that 15% of consumers used site search, resulting in a conversion rate of 5.6%. The conversion rate is interesting when compared to some of the other conversion rates in the sample data: from natural search traffic the conversion rate is 1.66%; from comparison shopping engines and affiliate networks it is 1.97%; and from direct load it is 3.29%.

This is yet more evidence showing that the conversion rates for people who use site search are relatively high.

As to the question around the value of the benchmarks - I think they’re still worth having even though it is hard to compare because of the variety of ways of measuring metrics like conversion rates.

For those of you who couldn’t make it - here’s a recap of day one at SMX Sydney by Neerav Bhatt. Neerav wrote up SLI as one of the vendors with interesting products and snapped this picture of the intrepid traveller Ed Hoffman.

There is no question that search drives revenue: it brings customers to your site, it connects customers to products, and it can be used to trigger relevant offers on your site. Making the most of your search opportunity isn’t simple: you have SEO, paid search, paid inclusion, advertising, site search, and site merchandising. All seem to have different paradigms, tools, reporting and lingo, and making trade-offs can be a challenge. But there are steps you can take to optimize your customers’ search experience, and reap increased and more profitable revenue as a result.

Attend this free webinar to hear:

• How marketers manage their search campaigns and tools, based on a survey of marketing executives

• How a leading retailer achieved 10x expected incremental revenue through automated user-generated search optimization

• The impact of recommendations and personalization on revenue

• A practical approach to testing online campaigns

• Whether search results pages convert better than category pages.

Takeaways: At the close of this session, you will:

• Compare your own search-driven revenue results to our benchmark (Sue is presenting her survey results)

• Understand better how to automate search optimization for the long tail of searches

• Be able to apply proven tactics for testing email and PPC campaigns

• Gain useful insights on your products and services based on the language of your visitors and customers

Speakers

• Ed Hoffman – VP of Worldwide Field Operations - SLI Systems

• Sue Aldrich – Senior Vice President, Senior Consultant/Analyst - Particia Seybold Group

• Jay Greenberg – Director, eCommerce - Spencer’s

Register Now

I came across a new search engine today: RedZee. Apart from the cute but slightly annoying logo the main thing that is different about them is the way they present their search results. I am always interested to see new ways of presenting search results - maybe there is something we use to improve the site search experience for our customers. Unfortunately I didn’t find that at RedZee.

The search experience is something like Apple’s coverflow which is used for browsing through albums. Apple’s coverflow has never pushed my buttons - I’ve always seen it as more of a gimmick. I definitely didn’t like the interface for searching - mainly because you have to use your mouse to scroll through the results. You only see the title and description for the result that is currently at the top. This interface would probably work better for an image search.

There are a few other issues - presumably the most relevant result is the one at the top - is the next most relevant one to the left or the right - which way should I go? It looks like they show the homepage of the site, rather than a shot of the actual page you’ll go to. So in this example for a search for cars the Apple homepage shows featuring the MacBook Air, even though the result is for Apple’s trailer for the movie Cars.

To the RedZee people I say nice try - I think you’re one idea closer to a good one.

I just saw the latest IMRWorld e-commerce figures that were released by shop.org. They showed that online revenue grew 17% last year and despite the economic downturn is forecast to grow 16% to about $204 billion this year.

So what does this mean if you’re running an ecommerce operation? It means that even if the rest of your organisation is belt tightening in response to the recession that you have a strong case to continue to invest in improvements to your site and the way it is promoted.

We’ve just released our latest podcast - with Richard Sexton from Carolina Rustica. These guys are a relatively small operation with a really interesting history. I found it particularly interesting to hear Richard’s talking about:

• how he expects the economic conditions to impact their growth,
• the transition to a new ecommerce platform powered by DMinSite 
• how they’re using site search as navigational pages
• the interaction between their phsical and online store - their customer service reps are based in their store.

Note: You can also see the interview Google did with Richard Sexton which is about how they are using Adwords.

Next week we’re attending the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Sydney event in Sydney, Australia - April 10 - 11, 2008.

The event has attracted some impressive international speakers including; Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President, Search Products & User Experience, and Danny Sullivan, Editor-In-Chief of SearchEngineLand.com and host of the Daily SearchCast podcast.

SLI will be exhibiting and we welcome you to stop by our booth.

Last week we sent out our latest edition of Telescope on Search, our monthly email newsletter on; site search, seo, search engine marketing and usability.

The March 2008 Newsletter contains:

• Black Forest Decor Discovers the Importance of Site Search Size and Placement - An article that highlights the benefits received by increasing the size and improving the location of the site search box.
• Recent conferences where we are exhibiting, including some special discount offers.

The image below is how the site looked before the site search box was changed.

The image below is how the site looks after the changes to the site search box.

To read the complete newsletter click here. You can subscribe to our newsletter at our newsletter page.