There’s an interesting article over at SEOmoz about some tests being run between Yahoo paid advertising and Google paid advertising. According to this article, Yahoo paid advertising is half the price and double the ROI.

Can it be? I didn’t have much luck with Overture when I tried it a few years ago, but I plan to give the Yahoo program a try. I know that advertising for different industries can react differently to ad programs based on the demographics of the search audience, and the article does not mention what industry the “customer” is involved in.

It’s an interesting finding, nonetheless, and one to pass on. I’ll be testing to see if it’s true for my ecommerce venture.

A new study by Silverpop reveals that most marketers can take care of low-hanging fruit to improve their email performance.

If you’re looking for an edge on your competitors, try taking a look at your confirmation message, or the message you send a customer that has just subscribed to your email marketing program. Including an exclusive offer or coupon in that message could lead to an instant sale.

Anther study from Jupiter today found that targeted, personalized email yields a greater return on investment. This is what I wrote about in 2002 in an article for Workz.com on email personalization. The issue with “personalization” is that it means different things to different people. If you’re interested in reading more about this, see my article.

There’s new research from eROI concerning the best day of the week to send an email marketing campaign. For some time now, the best practice has been to avoid sending on weekends since you miss people surfing at work, perhaps the best place to reach an online buyer.

The new research supports this notion, and also finds that midweek continues to be a good time to send an email campaign. Mondays and Fridays have the lowest response rates, with Wednesdays ushering in the highest number of clicks.

One other finding of the study is that quarterly response rates to email marketing campaigns have decreased year-over-year.

There are certainly ways to combat low response rates. First, make sure your list is sanitized (make sure you handle bounces properly, handle unsubscribes in a timely manner, etc.). There will always be a subset of people that subscribe because they like the products you sell or the information you publish, and many email marketing recipients are what I call “lurkers”—they receive and open the email, but only skim it and get rid of it.

A couple of ideas to convert lurkers to buyers is to catch their attention. One method that’s worked well for me is to make a list comprised of only lurkers and present them with a percent-off coupon good for the next 24 hours or two days. Of course, you will also want to include some products that are popular, but don’t take the focus away from the coupon/offer.

Another method to improve response rates is to simply mix it up. There are quite a few online retailers out there that simply put their newest products in email. Others only run the same top sellers over and over again. Nothing draws attention like a hot offer, exclusively for email customers, or a free gift with purchase. Mix it up a little and be original, and always remember to track your results.

I’m in the market for a broadband provider — Comcast cable internet access just isn’t cutting the cake for me. With so many outages, I’m ready to try something different. Heading home in the car today, I heard a radio ad for Verizon Broadband Access, a wifi broadband internet provider. The ad said to check out verizonwireless.com for details.

Tonight, I logged onto verizonwireless.com, and there’s no mention of Broadband Access on the homepage. Deceptive advertising? Probably not, but I would not have found any information on Broadband Access unless I clicked a tiny “Site Map” link at the top of the page, scanned the page and found information on Broadband Access.

The moral of the story? If you’re advertising cross-channel, especially radio or TV, make sure you put information about what you’re advertising on your homepage. Make it easy for your users to find the information they’re looking for.

A recent study by Hostway, a Chicago-based web site hosting company, found that web companies better fix customer annoyances or risk losing their business forever.

Online business has been around for a while now, and customers expect a superior customer experience from ever site they use. Here are the four biggest customer annoyances that the Hostway study listed:

1. pop-up advertising (34.9 percent)
2. registration log-on pages (16.7 percent)
3. software installation (15.7 percent)
4. slow-loading pages (9.1 percent)

Many ecommerce sites employ the first 2 annoyances, and take note that all four annoyances can be fixed by online retailers — they are not out of their control (except for the fact that network slowdowns can cause slow-loading pages on occasion).