I suppose I can title this post “25 Email Marketing Mistakes I’ve Made.” But rather than focus on the negative, below I’ve outlined the best practices I’ve come to adopt over the years. Hope you find something here useful.

1. Diversify your Content: If your entire email focuses on one product, service, or topic, you risk alienating all but the few people who will be interested. Unless you have segmented your database based on previous behavior, do not send an email on only 1 topic. I consistently find that the click through rate increases in proportion with varied content.
2. Don’t Stress about Spam Words: Many experts will tell you to avoid words like “free” or “sale”. In my opinion, ISPs tend to be moving away from content based spam filtering in favor of reputation based filtering. In other words, your sending IP address and from email are more important than whether or not your email contains certain words. Personally, I’ve used words like “free” in the subject line without any affect on delivery rates.
3. Make it Readable with Images Disabled: Always take into account the appearance of your email with images disabled. For email clients such as Outlook, this is now the default feature. Even popular web mails like Hotmail now disable images unless the sender is in the address book of the recipient. The best tactic to create readable emails with images block is use an alt description.
4. Create an Online Version: Always provide an online version of your email for users having trouble viewing images. I’ve calculated from emails I’ve sent in the past that around 5% of users will use this feature.

(more…)

Tags: 25 Ways Series best practices E commerce e mail marketing ecommerce email marketing Internet Marketing Transactional Email Marketing Web Marketing

We’ve all heard it said “you don’t lose wait by weighing yourself.”  However, I beg to differ. Not in regards to weight loss, but rather in reference to monitoring web analytics. Everytime I check my site stats and see improvement, I’m motivated to create even better results.

Below I’ve compiled a list of what I consider to be the most important metrics to monitor for eCommerce sites.

1. New Visitor Conversion Rate: Most etailers rarely differentiate between their new and return visitor conversion rates. By isolating the new visitor conversion rate, you’ll be able to see a clearer picture of what’s happening when first time visitors land on your site from search engines or other ad campaigns.
2. Return Visitor Conversion Rate: Unfortunately, not everyone buys on the first visit. The next best thing, however, is getting them back to your site. By analyzing your return visitor conversion rate, you’ll see how likely you are to convert your return traffic. Most likely, you’ll find that your return visitor conversion rate is the higher of the two.
3. Pageviews / Visit: Pageviews per visit can reflect how well your site engages your audience. An increasing number of pageviews per visit can indicate that your content is interesting, therefore visitors are spending more time browsing it. However, a high pageviews per visit metric can also indicate unecessarily complication processes such as checkout or product browsing.
4. Items / Order: If your site has a suggested product feature to encourage add-ons, you would benefit by tracking how many items you sell per order.
5. Average Order Value: While your target average order value will vary greatly based on your industry, it would be wise to monitor this metric over time. Ideally, you’d like to see a year over year increase.
6. Landing Page Bounce Rates: A bounce occurs when a visitor visits a page on your site, and immediately clicks away and goes no further. High bounce rates can be caused by a number of factors including excessive loading times, irrelevant content, unnactractive site design, etc. Be sure to monitor your bounce rates on all your important entry pages including your home page and any SEO or PPC landing pages.
7. Landing Page Load Times: As mentioned above, excessive page load time can wreak havoc on your bounce rates. Monitor your page load times on different connection speeds with this free tool from WebSiteOptimization.com
8. Traffic Sources: Google analytics breaks visit sources into 3 categories: Direct visits (from typing your URL directly), Search engines visits (both SEO and PPC), and refferring sites (any other sites linking to yours). Obviously, the percentage of visits from each of these sources will vary for every site. However, as your brand grows, you’d like to see more visits coming from direct URL entry. These tend to convert better.
9. Orders Per Customer Per Year: Come up with a calculation of how many times a customer order per given time period. This serves as a good tool for determining how much you can afford to spend on marketing or re-marketing.
10. Shopping Cart/Checkout Abandonment Rate: Measure what percentage of visitors abandon the shopping process at each step in your checkout. For example, how many abandon after adding an item to the cart? After entering shipping & billing info? After entering credit card info? Too high of an abandonment rate could signal a serious checkout problem.

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.

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.

 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.

I’ll admit it, I’m not a big fan of affiliate marketing. Yes, it can be done right, but overall my experience with it has been negative. Let me share 3 warnings if you are considering venturing into this type of Internet marketing.

1)  Coupon code harvesting: If you have an e-commerce store, and your shopping cart accepts coupon or promotional codes, be very careful with affiliate programs. Many of the affiliates who join your program may be coupon code harvesting sites. These sites exploit the many people who will be searching for coupon codes when they see that your site accepts them. For example, say a customer is already on your site checking out. They see there is a box for a coupon code. They then run a Google search for ” [your website name here] coupon codes”. Then, your affiliate’s site comes up, which the user clicks on. They then see something like “click here to get your coupon code”. Then user is then redirected to the affiliate link, which gives your affiliate credit for a sale that was already happening. (some of the more honest coupon sites will actually give you a coupon code, but many won’t and are simply ploys to get credit for the sale)

2) Trademark PPC Bidding: Several years ago I setup an affiliate program for a client through an affiliate network that will remain nameless. Shortly after setting up the account, I noticed we were already receiving sales from affiliates. “Great.” I thought, “It must be working!” Later that week, I was surprised to find out that many of these new affiliates were simply running Pay per click ads for our trademark terms. So in other words, they were capitalizing off of people already search for our brand, which was of no value. (especially since we already bid on them and ranked naturally.) 

3) SPAM: Affiliate marketers are not always too concerned about the brand reputation of the companies they partner with. For this reason, many affiliates will use less than scrupulous means of distributing their affiliate ads, such as through Email SPAM, pop-ups, or junk spam sites.

 Again, I’m not bashing affiliate marketing as a whole. I just wanted throw out a few warnings to anyone considering using the medium. Keep in mind the 80/20 rule applies with affiliate marketing. 80% of your sales will come from your the top 20% of your affiliates. Unfortunately though, the 80% that are not performing can waste a lot of time and resources to manage.

Let me know your thoughts, and whether or not you agree or disagree.

Unfortunately, yes it can. Let me explain.

Suppose your website is relatively new, and you currently only rank for a few terms, namely your brand name. After a year or so of optimizing your site for search engines, you notice that despite a huge increase in search traffic, your conversion rate is significantly lower than it used to be. What happened?

Unfortunately, the SE’s are not as smart as we think they are. Occasionally, they will rank your website for keywords that are completely irrelevant or too broad for your business. For example, I have a client who retails a highly niche clothing type. After about 2 years of SEO, they currently rank first page on Google for the broad search term “clothing stores”. However, looking at the web analytics, I found that not a single visitor from this keyword has converted  to a sale.

I would venture to guess that most sites rank for several major keywords and many long tail keywords that are either too broad or have nothing to do with their website. So what’s the big deal? Nothing really, express your conversion rate will suffer.

From a birds eye view, it would be very disconcerting for an executive to see the conversion rate fall after beginning an SEO campaign. However, this is completely normal. It’s important to delve deeper into the analytics and monitor not just the overall conversion rate, but the individual conversion rates from SE’s, direct traffic, and referring sites.

It’s important not to obsess too much over conversion rates. If overall conversions (sales) are up, yet the conversion rate is down due to some external factor, there is absolutely no cause for alarm.

Years ago, when email marketing was still in it’s infancy, it was quickly and thoughtlessly adopted by many companies seeking an inexpensive alternative to traditional print media. “Why not email our customers and save thousands in mailing costs?” many executives thought. “Email marketing is cheap, effective, and easy.” Or so they thought.

 I’m going to venture to say that email marketing is as expensive, if not more expensive, than traditional print mailings. Why? Consider these hidden costs of mass email blasts:

1) Unsubscribes: It’s extremely easy for someone to opt-out of your email list. If you overmail, you give your customers no other choice. A once interested subscriber can quickly become jaded by irrelevant or frequent emails.

2) Spam reports: If your emails get reported as spam frequently, it can severely damage your reputation. Depending on the size of your list, spam reports from as little as .5% of your list can affect the deliverability to the other 99.5%. Considering that the “Junk” button in Hotmail is now easier to find than the delete button, it’s not very hard to quickly reach a dangerous spam complaint threshold.

3) Reputation Affecting other Business Areas: One customer I worked with had so damaged their sender reputation the even the customer service department ability to get an email to a customer was compromise. Once a domain or IP address has acquired a bad rep, it can takes months to clean things up.

4) The Crying Wolf Effect: Email marketers can learn an important lesson from the Boy Who Cried Wolf. Suppose you send an email to your customers twice a week. These emails don’t necessarily contain important or relevant content, they’re simply sent as a matter habit. Eventually, your email list will languish due to overmailing, and your unsubscribes will go up as your open and click-through rates go down. Now, what happens when you actually have something important to announce like a new product or a huge sale event? Your customers think you’re just crying “wolf!”

What’s the moral of this post? Don’t overmail and be relevant! Effective email marketing now requires a conversation rather than simply shouting generalized messages at customers.

Create a Discount Pop-Up Window

Another creative way to decrease your abandonment rate is to launch a popup window anytime a customer exits your website while the shopping cart is still full. The popup window can say something like, “Complete your order now, and receive an additional 10% discount.” Hopefully, the customer will re-consider their action and stay to finish their purchase.

 Typically, I’m not a big fan of pop-up windows in general. In order for this to work, it must be executed correctly. If done wrong, the pop-up may be blocked or immediately closed by the user. The pop-up must not look like an add, and must load fast enough before they close the window.

As always, test a system like this thoroughly before implementing.

Add a “email me when in-stock” feature

This feature is a no-brainer for sites that frequently sell out of their inventory. However, it’s amazing how few websites actually do it. Here’s how it works: Anytime a customer visits a product detail page that displays an “out of stock” notice, give them the option to be emailed if the item becomes available again. This serves two purposes.  

First, it gives you an opportunity to capture their email address (opt in, of course). And second, it gives you the opportunity to save the sale if you re-stock the item. Now wait a minute, you think, most websites don’t allow people to visit pages of items that are out of stock. That’s true, but keep in mind that search engines will keep these pages indexed for some time. In addition, people frequently bookmark pages of products they would like to purchase in the future. This feature is even more useful if you sell a product that comes in multiple sizes or colors. For example, if you sell widgets that are available in both green and blue, and the green widgets are out of stock, your customer’s can be emailed when that color is re-stocked. Just like that, another lost sale is captured! We implemented this program at C28 (checkout the “Email Me When My Size Is Re-Stocked” link under the options section), and it was very successful at bringing back customers who otherwise would have not ordered.