You Can Incentivize Google Plus Reviews…Just Not in the Way You’d Think It’s bad form to offer customers hard incentives to write you reviews. That includes money, products, work, massages, Starbucks cards, Chuck-E-Cheese tokens, or anything else of tangible value. On Google Plus it’s also against the rules. 7 A/B Testing Resources for Startups and Solo Developers This post originally appeared on Dyn.com, a world leader in managed DNS, powering the best brands on the web including Gowalla, Mashable, Twitter, Wikia and more. Follow @DynInc on Twitter. If you need a simple, inexpensive way to figure out what's going to make your website's users click on that big, red button, you've come to the right place. A/B testing is one of the easiest ways to figure out whether one specific variable of your website is working. It could be a button color, a bit of web copy, an image — something extremely finite that may (or may not) have a measurable impact on desired actions, be they conversions or a simple click-through. In an A/B test, the variable changes as users visit the page; user actions are recorded and analyzed; and the developer (or startup) is able to take action based on the results.
Network Theory (Part 19) joint with Jacob Biamonte It’s time to resume the network theory series! We’re writing a little book based on some of these posts, so we want to finish up our discussion of stochastic Petri nets and chemical reaction networks. But it’s been a long time, so we’ll assume you forgot everything we’ve said before, and make this post as self-contained as possible. 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers - Smashing Magazine Being a web designer is not easy. Not only do we need to have a good understanding about visual design, typography, information architecture, psychology and a plethora of other disciplines; in our work, we need to take care of so many details, so that our job becomes more and more time-consuming, requiring dozens of tools, attention span and an effective workflow for beautiful, timely and functional results. And this is where small time-savers become handy. Be it a handy checklist, batch installer, dummy image generator or converter from Excel spreadsheet to HTML — all these things can save us a couple of minutes every day, making our work easier and more efficient.
Offermatica Offermatica Corporation develops and markets a Website content testing and performance optimization platform. The company develops software to test, measure, and optimize Internet marketing and advertising campaigns. It provides multivariate promotion testing, form and landing page optimization solutions for online advertisements, onsite merchandising, electronic mail campaigns, and pay-per-click listings. The company has strategic alliances with Coremetrics, DigitalGrit, Fathom Online, Outrider, and Bolt | Peters User Experience.
It’s unwise to incentivize positive skewed reviews Is there anything you can’t get delivered to your front door? (And yes, home renovators will attest you can even get a front door delivered to your front door.) The burgeoning subscription model can offer convenience to customers, but only if companies honor established consumer protection principles. The FTC’s proposed settlement with snack seller UrthBox, Inc., serves as a compliance reminder to industry members about consumer reviews and the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act. San Francisco-based UrthBox delivers goody packages once a month to snack-hankering consumers. Consumers could sign up for one-, three-, or six- month subscriptions at a monthly cost of between about $20 and $200, depending on the size of the box.
Localytics Adds Features To Complete The Picture For Mobile App Developers And Marketers Boston-based Localytics is fleshing out its mobile app analytics and marketing platform in a major way today with a variety of new features to help not just with customer acquisition, but also with monitoring and maintaining customer relationships over the lifetime of an app. The three big new areas Localytics now addresses with its platform are Lifetime Value Tracking, Customer Acquisition Management and Real-Time Funnel Management, all of which serve to help determine long-term engagement value. Localytics is introducing these new features based on the theory that most marketers spend all their time and money on the front end of the sales cycle, getting people to download the app, and then aren’t really concerned about whether that person will become a quality user over the long term. This isn’t just good for companies, Localytics argues, but ultimately benefits the consumer, too, since it enables developers to create a better app experience that’s more likely to meet a user’s needs.
3D printed FOBO bipedal walking robot and Spool bot Jul.18, 2012 FOBO is the fourth prototype from Project Biped by Jonathan Dowdall. It is a 3D printed self-contained bipedal robot and can walk balanced without falling over if it stops. It has 8 DOF (degrees of freedom) and uses an Arduino Uno microcontroller to actuate 8 servo motors. It can detect obstacles using its ultrasonic range sensor. Once there is an obstacle FOBO turns until the path is clear, then continues on its way. Build a Killer Website: 19 Dos and Don'ts I’m continually surprised by how many people call my design company with very firm ideas about what they want on their business website and yet, they haven’t thought through some of the most basic questions first. For this reason, our first question is always “Why do you need a site?,” not “What do you want on it?”
SaaS integrated email marketing solution Lyris Technologies – now Aurea Email Marketing – is a leading digital messaging platform. For more than 20 years, Lyris solutions have helped companies engage in customer conversation, increase conversion, and achieve higher returns on marketing investments by better automating, integrating, and optimizing customer engagement programs, like email marketing. The Lyris solutions portfolio includes award-winning messaging automation software, digital marketing strategy and deliverability services, and a flexible integration framework that revolutionizes the way marketers can extend digital messaging across the enterprise. Lyris delivers mature, field-tested email marketing capabilities, as an industry leading cloud-based or on-premise solution that lets customers easily, segment, target, and measure the effectiveness of email campaigns on every device. Lyris Technologies – now Aurea Email Marketing – is a leading digital messaging platform.
The Case Against Incentivized Reviews Research shows that 95 percent of shoppers read online reviews before they make a purchase, which might convince marketers and business owners alike to use incentivized reviews to boost their business’s online reputation. However, incentivized reviews are a controversial gray area. Some brands leverage them to increase their exposure and reputation, but doing so puts them in serious legal trouble for violating rules and they could face potentially massive financial penalties.