Online marketing offers many advantages over its traditional brethren from a metrics perspective. You can, for example, examine click-through-rates to a promotion, to a blog or to an article to your website, and with eCommerce you then analyse whether that online interaction has led to a number of sales. At the core of this marketing effort is also the ability to collate customer data, which can be used with the help of a customer relationships management (CRM) system...

Instant and text messaging has been around for a while now, and so people are used to sending messages to each other and to the organisations with whom they have a relationship.

An increasing number of people are therefore comfortable with communicating via live chat: a web service that enables customers to chat with sales representatives, technical support engineers or customer service agents via a...