A couple of months ago you may have noticed—assuming you have signed up for our newsletter—that a "tweet this" button appeared in our email header. Clicking the button results in your browser taking you to Twitter, and auto-filling the message [email title] --The VKI Studios newsletter: http://ow.ly/xxxx @vkistudios

We implemented this two months ago with a rather tedious work around. Fortunately not two weeks after our first send with this new "tweet this" button Exact Target announced social forwarding for email. However, ET doesn't have a twitter option! Facebook, Delicious, Digg, Myspace, Stumbleupon, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Linkedin and Sharethis, but no Twitter. So for those of you wanting a tweet this button, here is how I went about making one:

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another Monday eh?

Vancouver just got over the apocalypse. Red skies with lightning darting across like some kind of chthonic force was tearing from the earth and rising into the air. Oh, also there were fireworks or something.

This week we have more PNG optimization, telling stories with charts, landing page optimization, and lots of rants.

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I recently booked a flight on Hotwire.com. Overall, the process was impressively user friendly. But there was one thing that kind of irked me: the way they handled their email opt in.

It started when I was entering my contact information. Upon landing on this page, the box beside "Yes! I want to hear about great deals..." was pre-checked, as shown below:

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Previously we reviewed websites of different merchant type companies. Some of them have a chain of retail stores or use catalogs to promote products. Basically, these companies use websites as support tools, working with brick and mortar stores. Usually such websites generate just branded organic traffic in addition to bookmarked/typed-in visitors. There were lots of problems to be found...

This week let's change it around a bit and take a look at company that uses website as a main source of traffic and revenue.

Calendars.com sells all types of calendars and related accessories. According to Internet Retailer this company had more than $18 million in sales in 2007. The company's merchant type is web only. We could assume that their SEO should be way better than companies that focus on off-line channels (retail stores, catalogs, etc).

Unfortunately, this assumption is wrong: this website has many SEO related problems. Some of them are listed below.

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oh dear...

The week before last we asked whether simplification of our email newsletter's subject line might result in a greater open rate. My theory was that newsletters, as they are pre-sold, don't need to promote themselves as much. To test this I ran our email list through an excel file, added a custom column for title number, then created a dynamic subject line based on each. Ends up this process was far too complicated, and instead of working, it resulted in a 15% lower open rate (for some reason) and totally jumbled results.

So instead, David Eckman gave me the following advice on how to set up an A/B test for your newsletter. This is intended for ExactTarget, but the basic idea should work in whatever mailing system you're using.

What we're going to do is make two basic groups, randomly chosen from your subscribers.

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today is waaaaaaay too monday

Monday again? Already? Yep, and another roundup. We also started work on our new office, and you can find pictures of the pre-work state of it on our Facebook page.

This week we have tips to build a community, some great png optimization techniques, great billboards, and more html5.

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Stop fighting! Play nice!

The strengths and weaknesses of Analytics Solutions, is unrelated to how within-your-budget their pricing or lack thereof might be. Superficially, the relationship between price and the extent to which a solution meets your needs is irrational.

Whether your paid solution lacks or has out-priced a feature you need, the overlap of features is such that one solution's weakness may well be the other's strength.

While having all data in one place is ideal, it also needs to be affordable. Depending on the data, some features may work quite well in isolation, such as having Goals and Transaction data available in AdWords

The argument is that if you are already undertaking a sizable implementation of a paid solution (SiteCatalyst, WebTrends, CoreMetrics, XiTi, etc) and that since GA is free, add in GA tagging at little if any additional effort - the benefits are many and varied.

The following are specific features you may not have in paid solutions, certainly not for free:

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I'll take all three, please!

I was recently invited to run a sample usability test with UserTesting.com. They claim to offer "The fastest, cheapest way to get user feedback on your website". Yeah well, I've heard similar boasts before. How good could it really be?

As stated on their FAQ page, "UserTesting.com uses the Web 2.0 crowdsourcing model to dramatically drop the price of usability testing. It lets website owners easily get pre-screened users to rapidly do usability testing of their websites."

Today I set up a test and got the results. And I've got to say, I'm blown away. Here are my impressions:

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With so much money, SEO should be easy. Right? Wrong.

This week let's take a look at AutoZone Inc. AutoZone sells auto replacement parts and accessories through a chain of retail stores. According to company's financial information sales were $6.2 billion in 2007. Web sales were $59.3 million (as Internet Retailer estimates). As you can see the website generated less than 1% of total sales in 2007. This percentage is very low and I think that the website should be able to generate more sales for the company. Let's take a look at the website to find out what might be holding them back.

I was surprised to find such an SEO nightmare. Unfortunately, we have limited time to cover all of the problems, so we will go over just the most obvious ones.

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what's your open rate?

Back in 2007 Mailchimp ran an article on what headlines achieved the highest open rates. They cited "[companyname] sales & marketing Newsletter" as the best performing.

That's it? No numbers, no questions, no challenges, no sense of urgency, nothing? Just stating what it is? That gets a high open rate? No. They don't know what they're talking about. Their numbers are off. They're wrong.

Then last month a company we were working with decided to write a new headline for two of their newsletter. Instead of "[month] [industry] tips - [company name]" they used something with urgency, something clever.

Open rate dropped 20% for one, and 30% for the other (to a 15% and a 20% open rate respectively).

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