First off, this is not a sponsored post.

However, it will speak very favorably about Scan Alert’s HackerSafe service based on an experience I had with one of my clients.Basically, there are 3 purported benefits for using the Scan Alert logo and scanning service.

1. Customer’s who see logo feel more secure when checking out, which will increase conversions
2. Scanning exposes loopholes in site where hackers can penetrate
3. As a deterrent to future hackers who see the logo

In my experience with one particular business, I didn’t necessarily see a noticeable improvement in conversion (although we didn’t a/b test, so maybe there was). The biggest benefit to us came from the vulnerability scanning they do.

Back in August of 2007, this company had an serious database breach from their website. They weren’t sure exactly how it happened, but the hackers were able to see customer contact information. Fortunately, the company did not store credit card info. Regardless, having to email hundreds of customers telling them their information was compromised was a PR disaster.

Unfortunately, this small company did not have the internal resources to implement a full security audit on the website. They signed up for the Hacker Safe service, and the vulnerability scanning exposed several serious problem areas where information could be hacked in to.Basically it comes down to this.

For the small to medium size e-commerce site, Scan Alert’s service is a great low cost security initiative. (I believe the annual fee is somewhere around $2000). While it won’t necessarily catch everything, most of the major issues will be found out.

Be sure to leave a comment about your experience with HackerSafe or any online security issues in general. 

As marketers, we all like to think we know all the answers for our clients. Unfortunately we don’t, which is why we need testing. Especially in regards to email marketing, testing campaigns can be the difference between a moderately successful program and a breakout success. Let me share some variables I’ve tested with my clients in order to determine the best paths to success.

Text vs. Image: Should emails be text or image heavy? In my experience with one particular client, a text heavy email received a slightly better delivery rate than an image heavy email. However, both received an almost equal amount of clicks and conversions.

Subject Lines: Should they be short or long? Is ALL CAPS ok? What about using words like “Free?” In my experience, the subject line doesn’t matter as much as it used to since ISPs seems to be leaning towards reputation based spam filtering. While I still avoid using all caps, I have been able to use the word free and acheive good delivery rates.

Calls to Action: What works better, “click here” or “learn more?” Depending on your type of business, and what point of the buying process your customer is at, the answer to this will vary greatly. The best you can do is try different CTA’s and measure the results.

Time Sent: Every email list has a sweet spot in the week when subscribers are most apt to open and engage your email. The only way you can find this sweet spot is to test different timeframes. Traditionally, Tuesday seems to be the favorite day to send emails.

There are an endless number of variables you can test. While many of the lower cost email service provider do not provide a built in a/b test functionality, I’ve found that you can simply split your list in two and create two different versions of an email. As long as your provider offers basic analytics, you can then track open rates, clickthroughs, and conversions.

In my experience, you can’t trust the delivery rates shown by your ESP’s report admin. Recently I tested an email delivery monitoring service by Delivery Monitor for one of my clients.  The service allows you to see which ISP’s (most of the major one’s except gmail) are sending your emails to junk or not delivering them at all. I’ve this service is extremely helpful with a/b testing content.
Happy testing…

Viral marketing may be one of the most elusive, yet most potentially lucrative forms of online marketing. Many online marketers spin their wheels hopelessly in an effort to create a buzz around their products and services. While many attempts fail, many succeed and bring tremendous benefits. In this post, I’ll share a very successful tactic that I implemented for Christian retailer C28 using an online viral contest.

It’s not uncommon to see retailers offering incentives to get customers on their email list. We wanted to take this one step further. Rather than capturing the email and then showing a “thank you for entering” page, we created an incentive for customers to pass along the information about the drawing they just entered. Basically, the program works like this:

1. Existing customer enters drawing for product/gift certificate on website
2. Customer is asked to “Tell-A-Friend” about the contest/drawing
3. For each friend who enters contest, the original customer receives 2 more entries
4. Friend of original customer passes the contest on to their friends, who tell their friends, and so on…

As you can see, the contest has the potential to spread virally very quickly. Of course, the contest or drawing has to have enough of an incentive to create this buzz. With C28, we use products or giveaway items that are targeted to the customer demographic.

The results of the viral contest were very impressive. Not only were new people being introduced to the brand, but we were able to track orders coming from people who were referred by the contest.

Leave a comment if you’ve every used anything like this before, and how it worked for you.

It’s not often that you are blown away by the customer service of an online retailer. After all, how much of an impression can a company make when the only contact points are usually email or a help page?

Recently, I purchased a cream for the Eczema problem I have on my skin from DermaTechRX. Immediately following the purchase, I received the typical order confirmation receipt. Not long later, I received another email from a name I didn’t recognize, in the form of a reply. The subject line however, made it clear it was regarding my order from DermaTechRX.

Opening the email, I found personalized letter. Below is an excerpt from this impressive piece of correspondence.

“I have been assigned as your “Personal” Customer Service Representative and my primary role is to help guide you through the process of getting rid of your Eczema symptoms quickly, so If you have any questions or need further assistance, please do not hesitate to call me.”

The Letter went on to discuss several of the products they offer for treating Eczema. The letter concluded with…

“PS - Please let me know how our products are working for you. We try very hard to give support and advice to our customers.”

As I said, I was blown away. I had been contacted by someone in the company who actually cares about helping my skin problem. Sure, it was probably automatically generated. And sure, they probably send out hundreds of these a day. Regardless, how many companies assign you a “personal Customer service representative?” Most likely, I will not need to use the help of this person, however it’s nice to know where to go if I need assistance.

It’s nice to see how smaller e-commerce companies continue to innovate by creating programs such as this. I am definately going to recommend doing something similiar to this to all my e-commerce clients.

I’ve spent hours scouring the web for the best article directory sites. After finding more than I knew what to do with, I wasted time submitting to most of them. As time wore on, I’ve come to realize there are really only a few that matter and that Google still likes. I’ve listed them below, along with my thoughts on each.

1. Buzzle: My personal favorite, Buzzle is the most SPAM free article directory, in my opinion. However, they are also the most difficult to get your articles into. They require you to submit previous work in order to be approved as an author.
2. EzineArticles: A very popular directory, EzineArticles is another great site. They allow you to initially submit 10 articles, and then you must be reviewed again in order to continue submitting (which seems odd to me, but what heck)
3. IdeaMarketers: Offers instant article approval, as well as a generous number of backlinks allowed in the article text and author bio.
4. GoArticles: Not bad, articles are instantly approved. While the author bio only allows one link, you can put several in the body of the article.

Besides the sites listed above, I haven’t found any other worthy directories. Be sure to leave a comment if I’ve missed a good one.

In Street Team marketing part 1, I discussed some strategies used to create an online street team as a way of brand marketing. Below are some ideas for providing useful content for your street team. Obvisously, each of these suggestions will not apply equally to all business types as it will depend greatly on your brand identity and your customer demographic.

1. Free PC Wallpapers
2. Screensavers
3. Printable flyers
4. Avatars
5. AOL Buddy icons
6. Myspace backgrounds
7. Mysapce layouts
8. Copy and paste HTML banners

In the next post, I’ll talk about how to integrate a customer referral program into this free content. For now, checkout 2 great examples of online street team.

• Threadless street team
• C28 Street team

Google’s love affair with links has forced many search marketers to focus most of their efforts on link building. However, many significant gains can still be made by properly executing on page SEO. Of course, gone are the days of meta tag stuffing or endless keyword repetition. But there still exist a few tactics that are extremely effective.

1. Title Tag: Still the single most important on page SEO variable. I’ve seen a single change to the title tag bring in thousands in monthly sales for clients. The key is to use relevant, rankable keywords.
2. H1 Tags: Second to the title tag, an H1 tag is the second most influential onsite variable. In the past, some web designers have disliked using it because it makes the font extremely large. However, with an external style sheet, you can use an H1 tag at with any font size you wish.
3. Contextual Linking: Linking to another page on your site from within the body of text is extremely powerful. Basically, you should create links on your site as if it were an external site. Create a network of pages all linking to each other by different means. Vary the anchor text to create diversity. Avoid keyword stuff links within navigation, as site wide links are very ineffective.
4. Original Content: Don’t expect your pages to rank if you are copying and pasting content from another site or syndicating content. The SE’s love original content.

On page SEO can still be very effective. Leave a comment if you have know any additional strategies that have worked for you.

About Palmer Web Marketing

Justin Palmer is an eCommerce, SEO, and Web Usability consultant that offers Christian Internet Marketing and specializes in SEO for Church websites.

Transactional and trigger based emails are becoming more effective as generic, mass email blasts are becoming more irrelevant. Why? For one, an transactional email is usually in response to a request or an action a customer takes, therefore it is more inline with a pull marketing strategy rather than push. Below I’ve listed 4 ways I’ve successfully used transactional emails with my clients. Keep in mind many of these strategies won’t work for all business types, and most of them are geared towards an e-commerce, physical product site. 

1. Low-stock Emails: Allow your customers to be notified when a product they are interested in is almost sold out. Many people have a tendency to wait until the last minute before they act, so this serves as a great last minute reminder. Out of all the transactional emails I’ve ever used, this type seems to get the best conversion rate since there is a strong focus on urgency.
2. In-Stock Emails: Many times customers end up on the product detail page for an item that is out of stock. Rather than simply tell them, “Sorry, too late!” why not allow them to be emailed when the product becomes available again? In my experience, people are blown away by this, and often times purchase the item immediately.
3. New Product Alerts: Most businesses have trained their customers to know that their product newsletters are one size fits all. For this reason, the industry as a whole is seeing a decrease in open, click-through, and conversation rates. Rather than taking this approach, why not allow your customers to be emailed every time a product from their favorite categories is added to the site? Implementing a system such as this, you can expect to at least double your open rate due to the increased relevance.
4. Abandoned Shopping Cart Emails: These are becoming more common. When you visitor starts an order but doesn’t finish it, it’s a good idea to check up on them. Customers are usually shocked at this level of customer service, and many respond by completing the order. This sytem will also allow you to determine what barriers exist in your current checkout process.

Leave a comment if you experience success with any of the ideas above or have any ideas of your own.

When I was in college, I worked part time at an electronics retailer, where I was paid on commission. For the first year or so that I worked there, my sales performance was decent, but nothing spectacular. Many times I would spend hours telling customers the benefits of a product, only to hear them say, “Thanks for the info, maybe I’ll be back.” Then one day I learned an amazing trick to closing more sales, I simply needed to ask for the order. “Would you like to purchase this today?”  

Surprising, this revolutionized my sales. I was shocked that simply asking someone to make a purchase would actually convince them to do so. I always figured that if they wanted it, they would tell me. Man, was I wrong.

The same principle applies to website conversion strategy. If you want somebody to do something, you have to tell them so. From a webmaster’s point of view, when I put a hyperlink in a webpage, I expect people to click on it. After all, I know it’s there, and if the user rolls there mouse over it, they will know it’s there too right?

This is seriously flawed thinking. Recently, I fell in love with the CrazyEgg analytics software. One tool they offer allows you to see a “heatmap” of clicks. In other words, highly clicked areas a different color than rarely clicked areas. You can even see what non-hyperlink elements people are clicking on.

Using this software, I ran a test on a client’s homepage. The splash image for this homepage was full of products displayed in an attractive way. Each product had an image map link going to the product page. Surprisingly though, no one was clicking the products. When we added a simple call to action button, such as “View more” or “See All”, the situation changed dramatically. People began doing that we asked them to.

Studies have shown time and time again that a strong CTA is more effective than a subtle or vague one. For example, “Buy Now” usually works better than “Add to Bag”. “Learn more” is probably more effective than “click here.”

As internet marketers, we can sometimes lose touch with our customers because we don’t see them face to face. For this reason, it’s important to fall back on the basics of salesmanship. Always create a strong, persuasive call to action!

 5 years ago, I would have told you the most important tactic for email marketing was building your list. Today, that would probably be the last tactic I would recommend. Email marketing has evolved from a shot-gun approach to highly targeted sharp shooting. In this post, I’ll list some of the best ways to derail the effectiveness of your email marketing machine. Remember, these are ways to ruin your program, not improve it.

 1) Not Removing In-Active Subscribers: Inactive subscribers are the most likely to mark your email as spam, which can severely damage your reputation. Remember, if as little as 1% of your list flags you as junk, this can prevent the other 99% from getting your mail. Play it safe and automatically remove people who haven’t opened or click after a certain timeframe.

2) Not Using Double Opt-in: Double opt-in is a great way to (a) reduce the amount of invalid emails on your list and (b) ensure that those signing up really do want to be subscribers. Many ISPs, such as Hotmail, require double opt-in order to obtain whitelist status.

3) Increase the Frequency of Your Emails: Recently, I took a survey of customers receiving one of my clients email newsletters. We found that the average subscriber preferred receiving 3.1 emails per month. Unfortunately, my client was sending around 6 per month. Most email marketers send too many emails rather than too few. Don’t send an email unless you have something good to say, otherwise you will be like the boy who cried wolf.

4) Offer Incentives to Get Emails: Many websites offer incentives such as freebies or a sweepstakes entry in exchange for an email address. This might be a bad idea. Users who signup with incentives like this likely just wanted the freebie, and they won’t necessarily become an active subscriber. They might not even remember you, and mark your email as spam.

5) Automatically Enroll Subscribers: At checkout, many e-commerce sites don’t give customers the ability to opt-out of their emails. Always, always, always let people opt-out any time you collect contact information. An opt-out is much better than having them later click the “junk” button to complain.

Many of these suggestions may be very counter intuitive or even controversial. Please leave a comment if you agree, disagree, or have anything to add.