We’re heading over to Boston this week for the NEMOA Spring Conference. To find out more about this event and what the New England Mail Order Association is all about check out www.nemoa.org.

We’re hosting a round table on Thursday morning (7:45am – 8:45am), come along for breakfast and join the discussion.

We have just released an interview with Jack Love, President and CEO of Vertical Web Media – better known by their brand Internet Retailer.

Jack discusses his career in publishing from starting as a journalist through to Internet Retailer. He talks a lot about the upcoming Internet Retailer show in Boston (June 15-18) which is going to be their biggest and their best. A lot of online retailers I talk to say this is their favorite show. But don’t take my word for it - listen to what Jack has to say about it.

Next week we’re heading down to Phoenix, AZ for the eTail West 2009 conference.

This event  is one of the largest conferences in the ecommerce industry and has an impressive list of speakers as well as a good mix of vendors.

When I was at the Internet Retailer design show in Miami last month I noticed that more and more retailers are using video on their site. Fat Brain Toys president and co-founder, Mark Carson showed me an example of video on their site that shows kids playing with one of the more popular toys on their site – the Bilibo. Videos like this help potential customers get a much better sense of how the product works and how it looks.  As well as improving conversions I’m sure they will also help drive traffic if the videos are posted on YouTube and the like.

In addition I had the pleasure of sitting next to Cynthia Morgan one evening. Cynthia is president of Quadras Integrated – an agency that now specializes in producing video for online retailers.

All this talk got me thinking about how we can incorporate video into site search. I started sharing some ideas with an engineer who was walking past my office and he informed me he had already implemented them and more for an existing customer, etrailer. It doesn’t seem that long ago that that I was intimately familiar with the search on all of our customers’ sites – including how they were laid out, how many searches they got per day, what the top search terms were and a host of other details. Now we are running the search for over 350 sites it’s just not possible to do – although this is a problem I’m happy to have. It’s nice to see that their is innovation happening that I don’t know about.

Here are the ways etrailer are incorporating video with site search using the example search  sway-control:

1. Products that have video associated with them show an icon beside the listing. In this case the icon is a fairly small “TV” icon. You can try something larger, more prominent if you want to highlight the video more.
   
2. They show videos that are related to the products shown in the search results on the search results page. In this case they are shown at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the video takes you to a page where the video is played.
   
3. They have a facet at the top that shows just the videos and articles when you click on it

SLI conducted a Trends in Ecommerce survey last year. 32 percent of the participating retailers indicated they intended to pilot online video in the next 12 months. If  you are one of the retailers that is doing this – I recommend you look to highlight the videos in your site and navigation. This will make more people aware that you have the videos and should help with your conversions.

This week SLI is exhibiting at the SMX West Conference. The event is being held at the Santa Clara Convention Center which is nice as its only 15 minutes from our office.

SLI is exhibiting plus we are running a Theatre Presentation -Wednesday, Feb 11, 2009 at 11:20am on Internal Search & Navigation Best Practices & Their Impact on SEO.

We found out recently that we were one of five companies selected for Shop.org’s Innovation Contest as part of the Shop.org Strategy & Innovation Forum. Alongside companies like BazaarVoice (an SLI partner) and others, we have the opportunity to give a short presentation about our innovative idea – leveraging site search data to dramatically improve the results of email marketing campaigns.

Our “idea” was based on a few client projects where we teamed with our partner ExactTarget to create highly targeted, personalized email marketing messages tailored to individual shoppers at our clients’ sites. By incorporating site search data about visitors’ search activity and data about their shopping preferences and behavior, companies can create email messages that contain popular search results for preferred items (e.g. “women’s shoes”), brands and styles of each customer, and see amazing results. In some cases, our customers saw a 250% higher open rate, a 400% increase in click-troughs, and 300% increase in sales. They also saw a 400% decrease in un-subscribes, a pretty significant measure for email campaigns.

There is so much marketers can do with site search data beyond showcasing products in search results – and many marketers aren’t even aware. Using the data for highly targeted email messages is just one way to extend the ROI of site search and make it worthwhile for your business. If you have any thoughts to share about this, we’d love to hear from you. And if you’ll be at Shop.org in Orlando next week (Feb 2-4), drop by our booth (#307) or come hear us talk about our Innovation Idea. It might be something you can replicate too.