Dave Evans, of Digital Voodoo, recently focused his ClickZ column on measurements and how they can be used to to tune campaigns.

Dave wrote the following about Be Greeted.

How do you save a potential customer who’s about to abandon ship? Conversion Sciences’ Brian Massey reminded me of Be Greeted, an application that facilitates chat with customers. His clients use BeGreeted to offer a chat with potential customers who’ve spent a longer-than-normal amount of time on a given page. Think of this as the digital equivalent of walking over to a customer and politely asking, “Can I help you?” Want to dig deeper? Take a look at a recent Conversion Rate Experts post on 14 free tools that can help you understand why potential customers abandon your site.

Dave went on to write about Be Greeted customer, Bazaarvoice.

One of my favorite add-on ratings platforms is Bazaarvoice’s Ratings and Reviews platform. Turnkey, comprehensive, and in widespread use across the top 100 online retailers, Ratings and Reviews is a great platform for many applications. Outside of turnkey platforms, there are rating-and-review modules available from Drupal, Joomla, and other frameworks that make it easy to build ratings and reviews into your commerce system. Whatever approach you take, providing on-the-spot, self-directed assurance to your customers that they are about to make a smart choice builds consumer confidence. That means not only superior conversion rates but also an enhanced likelihood that the conversations about the purchase will be favorable because your customer actually purchased the correct product given her specific needs. This social factor pays big dividends when you account for the impact of the social media within your overall marketing program.

We are happy to be in such good company … including our good friend and recent content marketing Webinar speaker, Brian Massey who prompted Dave to take a look at our service.

BtoB Magazine’s survey of “2009 Marketing Priorities and Plans” was just released. Their survey of B2B marketing executives indicated 66.5% will increase online spending in the coming year.

MediaPost’s Online Media Daily also reported on several recent analyst forecasts, one from GroupM and the other ZenithOptimedia.

“GroupM projects online’s share of total ad spending will rise to 13%, while ZenithOptimedia forecasts it will climb to 12.1% from 10.3% in 2008.”

Not surprisingly, 2009 marketing spend is being allocated to marketing tactics that are able to be measured against results.

“Internet advertising continues to grow rapidly as advertisers turn to it for its innovation and accountability, which is particularly important in a recession when every line of a budget must be justified,” ZenithOptimedia wrote in its report.

The BtoB survey asked marketers which online tactics they plan to spend more on in 2009.

• Topping the list is e-mail marketing, cited by 68.3% of respondents, followed closely by Web site development (66.3%).
• Other online platforms that will see significant budget increases next year are search (50.0%), online video (46.6%) and social media (46.6%).
• B-to-b marketers also plan to increase spending on webcasts (42.9%), banners (30.6%) and sponsorships (25.7%).
• Some traditional media platforms will also see increased spending next year, including direct mail (36.9%), events (31.0%), telemarketing (21.8%) and print (20.6%).

Highlights of the survey include:

1. Customer acquisition top priority for B2B marketers in 2009.

BtoB’s survey found that customer acquisition is the top marketing goal in 2009, cited by 62.2% of respondents. Customer retention was cited as the top marketing goal by 20.6% of marketers, brand awareness by 12.4% and other marketing goals by 4.8%.

2. Two-thirds of B2B marketers will increase online spending in 2009.

Of the various media platforms b-to-b marketers will use next year, online is a clear winner, with 66.5% of marketers planning to increase their online spending.

3. B2B Marketers are moving traditional media into online.

Many traditional b-to-b marketers are shifting more of their marketing dollars online, which costs less than traditional media and delivers trackable results.