Bloggers Digest – 3/7/2008

It’s Friday, and time for another link roundup.

• Web analytics master Avinash Kaushik explains how the free 4Q exit survey tool can help you “kick some major butt.” Avinash and iPerceptions co-created this tool to help you gather qualitative data on the usability of your website, reason customers came to your site and any other comments they may have. Everything you can’t gather through traditional web analytics.

• Internet Retailer offers 10 great tips for effective online chat, without it becoming a cost-center. Retailers like Ted Baker and Orvis share their best practices such as offering chat only to profitable customers, or using geo-IP targeting to exclude visitors outside your shipping area.

• MyEmma Counts Down the Top 10 Trends for Email Design. We’ve covered a few of these trends here on Get Elastic, including writing in a warm, personal voice and designing for images off.

• In other chat and email news, Carolyn Gardner shares an email that invites customers to chat live. I think this is a nice way to build awareness that the site offers personal chat to those that want it. But in light of the Internet Retailer article, this could be a “miss” rather than a “hit.”

• Attention affiliate managers: what promotion is preferred by affiliates? Free shipping. Internet Retailer reports the results of an affiliate publisher survey, read on to discover the other top promotions.

• Attention Adwords customers: page load time now affects your Quality Score. Barry from Search Engine Roundtable gives you the scoop along with recommendations from Google on how to reduce page load time.

• The New York Times ran a story on Walmart’s employee-posted The Checkout Blog. One concern that any business who encourages team members to blog in addition to their regular jobs is finding time to write regularly – a concern shared by Walmart.