I just heard a great presentation from Tom Dickson, CEO of Blendtec. Blendtec is the company responsible for the “Will it Blend?” videos on YouTube in which Tom blends everything from garden rakes to cell phones. You can see some of them here. There have been close to 36 million views of these videos, and Dickson shared exactly how this viral campaign has helped his brand.

In addition to incredible media opportunities (including the Today Show and Jay Leno), online sales of the home blender have jumped by a factor of five times, and in-store sales have increased as well. Not bad results from a $50 investment…

It is very clear to me that the biggest innovation in e-tailing in the next year will be in improving the customer experience. The Exhibit Hall here is full of companies that sell solutions to help customers navigate e-commerce sites more effectively. Software such as AJAX is driving this innovation.

The good news is that many of these concepts are very slick and change the shopping experience in a dramatic way. The bad news is that these solutions are expensive–often out of reach for small and medium sized businesses.

Here are some specific things you can expect to see on more retail websites over the next year:

Email continues to be a great source of revenue for Internet retailers, but deliverability is still a challenge. Many retailers avoid certain words in emails in a hope of getting them past spam filters. However, according to a recent study from Lyris, tweaking the content of your emails will likely make little impact on your deliverability rate.

On the other hand, making two simple changes can greatly improve your chance of getting your email in front of your customer.
1) Avoid excessive images. Not only do images trigger spam filters, but more and more email clients are blocking images anyway.
2) Avoid using a “From Name” that contains letters and symbols rather than an actual name.

In a conversation with Internet Retailer, CEO Mark Vadon claims that Blue Nile could hit $1 billion in annual internet sales within seven years. Blue Nile had just over $250 million in sales during 2006.

The secret to Blue Nile’s success is pretty simple. They have a very specific niche and they do what they do very, very well.

Blue Nile’s niche is men looking for expensive jewelry–especially engagement rings. The average shopper on Blue Nile spends over $1,500, and the average spent on an engagement ring is $5,500–close to double the industry average.