Below I’ve gathered some Cyber Monday marketing ideas for eCommerce sites.

1. Bounce Back Discounts: Capitalize off the huge amount of traffic you’ll be receiving by offering an incentive for the next purchase. While Cyber Monday sales are great, you really want consistent customers who will order all year long, even when there are no special offers. Try sending out a follow up email with a gift certificate or coupon code to everyone who makes a purchase.
2. Make It Viral: Take to the opportunity to capitalize on this huge traffic surge to encourage customer viral marketing. On your emails and landing pages for whatever promotion you run, include a link to a tell a friend form where shoppers can email your special to friends and family.
3. Clearance Loss leaders: A classic strategy, but I’ve found it works well online. Most of the time, customers will buy additional full-price merchandise, especially when they realize they have to pay shipping anyway. 
4. Free Gift at Threshold above Average Order: Give away some sort of gift item once customers reach a certain threshold. In order to determine the threshold, take a look at your average order on last year’s Cyber Monday and increase it bit. However, make sure the gift warrants spending that much.
5. Offer Deal on CyberMonday.com: If you doing something really noteworthy, you may want to highlight it on CyberMonday.com, a deal site run by Shop.org. Many prominent brands feature promotion there all year round, not just Cyber Monday.
6. Random “Blue Light” Specials: Randomly highlight items throughout the day on your site. Better yet, highlight different items everyday through the holiday season to keep people coming back.
7. Send 2 Reminder Emails For whatever promotion you run, make sure you keep your company top of mind after the Thanksgiving holiday. There will be a ton of marketing emails floating around, so you may want to send an initial email right before or after Thanksgiving. Then follow up with another right as the sale begins.
8. Give Store Credit, Not Discounts: Don’t give away the farm by offering outrageous discounts on your products if you don’t have to. Consider offering store credit in the form an online gift certificate that can be used towards a future purchase. For example, rather than offering a $25 discount, offer a $50 store credit. Incentives like these tend to cost less, and they may actually be more attractive to your repeat buyers.
9. Spread it Out: 1 day sales are great for everyone, except your fulfillment staff. In order to prevent hysteria for your warehouse and customer service staff, run the sale over a few days rather than 1 day only. This also will allow time for customer viral marketing to kick in.
10. Create Product Bundles: The value of a product bundle can be perceived as greater than the sum of its part because you are conveniently creating a one stop gift.

For more ideas, you might considering using the Wayback machine to view your competitor’s site last year at the time. I hope some of these ideas have been useful for you. Happy holiday selling!

Any at given moment, we’re bombarded with internet marketing and website optimization advice. We’re told to simultaneously be marketing on Facebook, Twitter, email and more. We know we need to be testing and optimizing our sites to the max.

These are all worthy endeavors. But I’m going to suggest that they aren’t always the most fruitful pursuits. I think we often bypass more obvious quick-wins in favor of sexier projects that we get excited about.

I was recently reminded of this at C28. For years, customers have been telling us to show the pictures of clothing on real people, rather than mannequins. For years we ignored the advice due to the impractical task of always having models on standby when new products arrived. So instead we optimized the heck out of everything we knew how. We overhauled the design of the site. We built a new and improved shopping cart. We ran incessant split tests on our marketing emails. But we started hitting a point of diminishing returns. All those a/b tests weren’t as effective as they used to be.

Then we decided to do the obvious. We actually listened to our customers and starting photographing all products on models. And the results? Let’s just say it was the single most effective optimization project we have ever done to the website. It wasn’t technical. It didn’t take an online marketing specialist, just a bit of old-fashioned listening to the customer.

You and me are online marketing junkies. We eat, sleep, and breathe conversion rates, CTRs, SEO, and SMO. Yet are we missing the obvious? What are the roadblocks preventing you from growing your business? You can have a flawless checkout process and fastest loading pages in the world, but if your basic product information is lacking, what’s the point?

Before you begin that next optimization project, take some time and revsit the fundamentals of your business.

Such is the problem for many online business’ when gazing into the vast array of tools available in internet marketing. As with any tool, the internet marketing tactics are best when used for their intended purpose. Despite what any consultant says, there is no one web marketing tactic that works for everyone, in all situations. Below is a guide to help you choose the proper tools for your unique marketing needs.

Search Engine Optimization

When to use it:

• When you have time, and can patiently wait for results
• When people are already searching for your product/service
• When you serve a local market (competition is much less)

When not to use it:

• When you need results fast
• When people don’t know they need your product (more often than not, extremely innovate products with little competition fair poorly with SEO, because no one is searching for them)

Pay Per Click

When to use it:

• When you need a quick burst in traffic
• When testing what keywords to do natural search engine optimization for
• In combination with search engine optimization (studies show both used together are synergistic)

When not to use it:

• In an extremely competitive market. Bid prices are high and click fraud is rampant
• When targeting customer early in the buying cycle. Search users are less likely to click on a paid ad when they are still just looking for information

Social Media Marketing

When to use it:

• When you are genuinely interested in contributing value to your customers, not just pushing out messages
• When customers are already talking about your product/service on social media
• When your product/service is truly buzzworthy (let’s face it, some products, while valuable, aren’t worth talking about)

When not to use it:

• When your products are, well…. boring. There’s nothing wrong with having a boring product, we all need them. We just rarely talk about them on Twitter and Facebook.
• If you’re a brand control freak. A certain openness is required for social media to work. If you can’t open up a discussion about your brand, SMM isn’t for you.

Email Marketing

When to use it:

• When customer retention is your goal. Email is permission marketing at its core, therefore its best used with a list of existing customers.
• As a lower cost substitute for direct mail. Most businesses find email marketing to provide much better ROI traditional mailings

When not to use it:

• When attempting to acquire new customers. Email is a terrible customer acquisition mechanism because you typically have to buy or rent a list of emails, which is bad news all around.

A/B Testing and Conversion Optimization

When to use it:

• When managers or designers disagree about which version of a page is best. A/b testing is the ultimate equalizer.
• When you have the resources: Creating multiple version of pages or emails can double a designers work load. Remember to count this cost as well.

When not to use it:

• If your site is barely getting any traffic. You’ll be spinning your wheels trying to a/b test a page that gets 5 visitors a month. Focus on getting critical mass first.
• When you’re focused on the small stuff. You may have heard stories of Amazon testing the colors of their buttons, but unless you have millions of visitors a day, don’t test the small stuff. There is much lower hanging fruit.

The tactics above are by no means exaustive, but are probably the most widely used (and abused) methods in internet marketing today.

What has been your experience? When have the tools above worked and not worked for you?

Will it work? Yes. Will it work next month? Maybe. Will it still work after this tactic of desperation has been used for months? Absolutely not.

When the cost of an additional marketing endeavor is virtually nothing, the directive from management will always be the same. “Do it more!”

But more is a paradox. It works well in the short term, but fails miserably in the long run.

The alternative to more is better. Better requires thought, planning, and relevance. More simply requires more of the same. More is easier than better, so its often the weapon of choice.

Permission marketing is all about trust. Every time you send a campaign that is irrelevant, you lose a bit of trust. Every time you over mail your list, you lose trust. Slowly but surely, you’re crying wolf. And like the boy in the fable, one day you’ll really have something important to say, and no one will care to hear it.

Social media can no longer be ignored, even by traditional marketing agencies and old-school business. But before you make the plunge into this powerful, but often misunderstood marketing tactic, ask yourself these 7 important questions.

1. Can you have a conversation? I recently saw a wall comment posted to a major clothing retail chain’s Facebook page, questioning whether the company was going out of business. As of today, the comment still has not been responded to. Obviously, they are not interested in having a conversation, or managing their brand reputation for that matter. If you want to do social media, make sure you have the time to listen and respond, not just push out content.
2. Do you have the time? Managing a Twitter or Facebook account can easily suck hours of productivity from an aimless employee charged with the task of managing it. Are you willing to invest the necessary time, but able to limit fruitless, unproductive chatter? Are you able to commit to the long-haul? Social media is more of a commitment than a campaign, if you start, expect to finish and stick with it for the long run.
3. Are you saying anything worth listening to? If you’re thinking of using Facebook updates as another channel for press releases or pure advertising, think again. Your friends and followers will quickly see through this sham. The key is to strive for interactions. If your updates contain only push content (e.g. “Come buy our new widgets!”) your followers will quickly tire. Much can be accomplished by transforming push into pull content (e.g. “please comment with your opinion on our new widget!”)
4. Can you stomach the negative? A certain openness is required for social media marketing to work. If the thought of an irate customer posting a negative comment on your Facebook wall scares you to tears, SMM might not be for you. In my experience though, nearly every time I’ve witnessed negative comments on a company profile page, the true fans jump in and defend the organization, sometimes before even the company does.
5. What role will customer service play? Once customers know they can reach you through social media, you will undoubtedly need to get customer service involved. How will you handle the inevitable customer service issues that surface? In my experience, giving at least a few senior customer service representatives the ability to interact instills a sense of ownership, ensuring that customer service will view social media with the same importance as they view a phone call or email.
6. Are you joining the right conversations? You don’t have to be everywhere. Consider first polling your customers and finding out what social media sites they use. Only join those that have a critical mass, there’s no point in talking to no one.
7. Can you accept a fuzzy ROI? Social media ROI can’t and shouldn’t be tracked in the same way as other online marketing venues. Say goodbye to the CPMs and CPCs from typical online marketing channels. Tangible revenue can be tracked in some ways, but much like traditional offline advertising, you’ll never really see the full picture of brand awareness benefits. Make sure your company management sees some of the more subjective ROI indicators, such as positive comments and the extent of conversations.

Social media is surely worth the time and effort, as long as you understand the cost. SMM isn’t free, it takes a serious investment. Before you get into social media, make sure you truly get it.

1. It’s biased: If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In other words, the SEO consultant believes that natural search is the key to your growth, while the social media guru says Facebook is the goose that lays the golden eggs.
2. It’s unprioritized: It’s easy to be overwhelmed by a mega-list of recommendations. I’m a fan of top 10 (or top whatever) lists, but they do have a tendency to produce unprioritzed advice that can easily swamp the small business owner.

With plethora of marketing options (e.g. email, SEO, PPC, social media)  competing for your attention, how do you decide how to allocate resources? Here’s some guiding principles: (that are prioritized, of course)

1. Strategy before Tactics: You need to know where you’re going before you choose the vehicle to get there. Some marketing vehicles are better than others depending on what you’re doing, and who you’re trying to reach. If you’re shooting for a 55+ audience, twitter probably isn’t the best place to start. If a consultant says you should be doing such and such, first stop to consider whether their recommendations gel with your strategy.
2. Leverage what’s already working: Is 50% of your business coming from natural search? There’s a good chance there’s still some low-hanging fruit ripe for the picking. A 10% improvement on your top performing marketing tactic is more effective than a 50% improvement on your worst performing one. Study and live by the 80/20 rule.
3. Budget for the future: While the point above may imply only sticking with what’s safe, such would be a short-sighted plan. It’s easy to get too comfortable with what you already know, and ignore what’s up and coming. It’s the classic innovator’s dilemma: why seek something new and improved when what you already have is working fine? Because you never know how long it’s going to work. Plan for obsolescence.
4. Imitate the Innovators: If the competition is already engaging in a certain tactic, there’s a good chance you could be missing the boat. You don’t always have to be the first in order to be the best. Stay on top of what your competitors are doing.
5. Fail Quickly, Fail Inexpensively: There’s no harm in trying something new that doesn’t work, just cut your losses early. Don’t invest too heavily, despite what any of your peers say, until you see promising results.
6. Demand Tangible Results: While the benefit of every marketing activity is not as easily quantified, you should be seeing results in some way. Don’t accept “branding” as an excuse for poorly performing banner ads, or “higher link-popularity” for ineffective search engine optimization. Insist on bottom line results.

The good news for internet business owners is there’s 1,000 things they can be doing right now to improve their business, the bad news is that not all 1,000 are equally important. Choose wisely, because the order in which you execute is critical for success.

1. SEO Digger: My top fav right now, this innovative tool allows you to see which search queries you are ranking in the top 20 Google results for. According to the SEO Digger site, here’s how it works: “Seodigger works by building a reverse index. The first 20 SERP results are saved from 60 million search requests. Then, a “backward index” of the search engine is built, linking sites with keywords these sites can be found by.” For me, the tool is useful because it shows me keyword phrases that I haven’t intentionally optimized for, but present a great opportunity for capturing good traffic with a little work.
2. Google AdPreview: A godsend for PPC marketers, this tool allows you to see ads as they appear to the normal Google visitor performing a search. (typically your Adwords ads don’t appear for your own searches when you are logged in). You can also change your geographic location in order to preview local ads as someone would in other part of the world. Thanks to Jeff Novak from 10 Golden Rules for alerting me to this one.
3. SEO Book’s Firefox Plugin: This is the one Firefox plugin I can’t live without. The plugin shows 22 SEO metrics directly on the Google SERP, including incoming links, PageRank, Technorati Rank, Domain age, and more. You can also right click on any webpage and look at these same metrics at a glance.
4. Google Sets: This Google labs tool is a great way of generating related keyword ideas. Basically, you enter a few keywords, and Google generates a list of related search terms. While the regular Google Keyword tool also generates keyword suggestions, Google Sets takes into account more than just one keyword phrase at a time.
5. AdCenter Keyword Mutation Tool: Microsoft AdCenter’s keyword mutation tool is great for finding misspellings. Thanks to Linda Bustos for pointing out this tool as a great way to optimize internal site search.

Have you found any other SEO or SEM tools that are making your job easier? Please drop a comment.

1. Hubpages: Hubpages is a community of articles, or “hubs” on various topics. Their unique system discourages spammers by slapping no-follow tags on outgoing links if your “hubscore” falls below 75. You can increase your hubscore by participating in forums, commenting on hubs, and most importantly, submitting high quality, completely original articles. It takes some work to maintain your hubscore, but the high quality links are worth the effort. I’ve seen some of my hubs picked up by Google in less than 2 hours.
2. Work.com: Work.com specializes in business related guides and tutorials. As long your guides are high quality and pass the approval process, they can contain as many followed links as you’d like. In addition, I’ve received decent traffic from the guides I’ve submitted so far.
3. Ebay Blogs: Who doesn’t want a link from ebay.com? Ebay blogs are a great way to showcase your ebay products, or just provide useful content to the ebay community. Links posted within your blog are followed, so the potential SEO benefit is huge. My first ebay post was indexed in less than a day.

Discovered any good link building methods lately? If you don’t mind sharing them, leave a comment.

I hope everyone has a happy new year.

1. Compound Topics: I’ve seen this used regularly by Karmaloop. They cram about as many topics, brands, or product names into the subject line as possible, in hopes that something will grab the users attention. In order for this strategy to work, it’s important to still keep the subject line scan able by breaking up the topics. I personally like using the “+” symbol. (“New Nike + Reebok + Addidas Shoes!” vs. “New Nike, Reebok, and Addidas Shoes”)
2. Short and Simple: If you can communicate the topic email in 2 words rather than 6, you’ll stand apart from the rest of the inbox clutter.
3. Use Special Characters: I like using special characters in order to communicate ideas and create eye magnets. Below are a couple of suggestions:
   • New Widgets = Great Gifts
   • Huge $avings on Widgets
   • { New Widgets, In-Stock Now }
   • New Widgets @ YourURL.com!
4. Question Marks and Exclamation Points: Creative use of Question marks and exclamation points within subject lines can stress urgency or create curiosity in the mind of the subscriber. I like combining the 2 and creating something like “50% Off All Widgets?!”
5. Top 10 Lists: There’s something so attention grabbing about top 10 lists (or top 7, 13, or whatever). People want valuable information in bite-size, scan-able chunks. A list delivers value that can’t be achieve by endless paragraphs, even if they contained the same information.
6. All Caps: Once considered a spam trigger, I believe all caps is back on the table. I frequently see it used by large companies that would probably not be doing it if it was harmful to the delivery rate. However, I would suggest only using all caps on special occasions. In addition, I think it’s much more effective to capitalize only 1 word in the subject rather than the whole thing. ( “HUGE Sale this Friday Only” vs. “HUGE SALE THIS FRIDAY ONLY” )
7. Use Magical Word “Free”: It sounds trite, but “free” still works. With less ISPs nitpicking on words like this in the subject line, it shouldn’t hurt your delivery rate.
8. Use the Recipient’s Name: Let’s face it, we love to hear our name. Adding the recipient’s name to the subject line will make them believe the message is personalized for them. I would strongly caution, however, not to use this tactic unless something in the email is personalized for this individual. Simply appending the name to the beginning of a subject line, and not delivering personalized content, is gimmicky.
9. Leave them hanging: Subject lines that end with an … (an ellipsis) suggest there is a continuation of the topic within the body of the email. An example of this might be “Checkout these new widgets…” or something similar.
10. Make them Witty: If appropriate with your demographic, use witty subject lines that make your readers smile. Threadless is a master of witty subject lines.
11. Solution Oriented Subject: Rather than using product or brand names in the subject, consider writing from a solution oriented perspective. For example, a site selling anti-Spyware software might consider using a subject line like “How to get rid of Spyware Forever” rather than a product oriented subject such as “Brand New Spyware Software Released.”
12. Don’t Be Gimmicky: If your subject line is “How to Live Forever” and the content of your email is offering a new alternative health supplement, your readers will eventually see through your gimmicks. The subject should be intriguing, but not over-promising.

The key to successful subject lines is a/b testing. Without solid data, there’s no guarantee any of these tips will necessarily improve your
open rates. Every subscriber list is different, so it’s essential that you understand what works for your list.

As always, be sure to leave comments with any other successful subject line tactics you’ve seen.

Before making any changes, I would recommend benchmarking your download time with WebSite Optimization’s webpage optimization tool.

Image Optimizing Tips:

1. Compress .jpg and .gif images: If you use photoshop, always use the “Save for Web” feature. If you don’t have access to PS, there’s a ton of free image compressing freeware out there.
2. Compress or eliminate unnecessary Flash elements: In my opinion, flash is over-rated, slow, and buggy. It has it’s benefits, but make sure you don’t rely on it for navigation or other necessary site elements.
3. Don’t Resize Images within HTML: Don’t use the width or height attribute in the IMG tag to resize larger options. For example, if you resize an image that was originally 300 x 300 to 100 x 100, the user still has to download the full size one. Instead, use thumbnails.
4. Specify Image Dimensions: Don’t leave the width or height attributes blank. By doing so, you’ll slow down the browser rendering of the page, since it doesn’t know how much space to give for each image.
5. Slice Your Images: Slicing doesn’t actually reduce image size (in fact, it increases the overall size). However, it does increase the apparent load time by making each slice appear one at a time rather than one big image popping up after it downloads.
6. Avoid Too Many Slices: Don’t use too much of a good thing. As mentioned above, each slice actually increases the total size. I would recommend using no more than 4 slices, unless you are dealing with a huge image.

Coding Tips

7. Use CSS instead of Images: Cascading style sheets can do more than you think. Many sites make effective use of CSS formatting and eliminate the need for excessive images. Even effective brand logos can be created with CSS. CSS Zen Garden has some examples of creative use of CSS.
8. Convert from Table to CSS based layout: Tables are ok for displaying data in columns and rows, but is grossly inefficient for designing web page layouts. By using DIV tags with CSS, you can cleanup your code extensively, which will reduce page load time and also offer SEO benefits.
9. Use External Style Sheets: Rather than formatting through embedded inline styles in pages or html elements, reference an external css files that the entire site can reference. The browser will cache this page on the first visit, so it won’t need to download it repeatedly.
10. Use External Javascript: Simliar to above, put all of your JavaScript functions in an external file for caching benefits.
11. Remove Unnecessary White Space in HTML: Surprisingly, white space hogs
    a lot of disk space. Remove unnecessary space and other code clutter with this handy tool called HTML Tidy.
12. Use Shorthand CSS: Instead of putting each CSS attribute on its own line, use shorthand CSS to prevent extra line breaks in your external CSS file.
13. Use CSS Images instead of IMG tag: An easy way to speed up the rendering of an image is to simply call as a background of a div tag.
14. Use Relative Links: Removing the ” http://www.yoursite.com ” from the beginning of every link will shed some weight. Just be careful not to allow people to jump back and forth between secure and insecure pages, which will generate one of those annoying “insecure items” errors in the
    browser.
15. Specify the DocType: Pages that have the DocType specified tend to load faster than those that don’t.

Server & Database Tips

16. Reduce Http requests from other sites: Try to eliminate connecting to other servers to retrive images, audio, or video. Each http:// connection only slows things down.
17. Don’t Use Https://: Don’t use secure pages if you don’t have to. Connecting through secure http is about 3 times slower than regular http. Obviously, your checkout process needs to be secure, but your product pages most likely do not. In addition, make sure your navigation doesn’t use relative links which forces users to flip flop between secure and non-secure pages.
18. Upgrade your Web Server: Just like that old PC you bought 5 years ago, web servers can go down hill and become outdated.
19. Use Gzip Compression to Reduce HTML Size: Gzip is great for compressing html code, however it does nothing for images, flash, or other embedded files. Many open source programs such as WordPress and Joomla already support it.
20. Upgrade Server Memory: A boost in memory resources on your server can reduce processing time and greatly increase performance.
21. Upgrade your Database Server Hard Drive: The faster your server’s hard drive is able to access data, the faster it can serve up files. A fast hard drive is especially important for your database server.
22. Separate Content and Database Servers: If you have a high traffic, database driven website, you can benefit by placing your content on one server and your database on another. In addition to the speed benefits, it is more secure.

Other Tips

23. Loading Progress Indicators: By letting users know that you are processing their request, you can assuage their impatient fears. This won’t necessarily speed things up, but it will update them on the progress.
24. Use AJAX instead of Page Refreshes: Interacting with a web page is far different than interacting with your computer OS. Imagine if Windows XP had to refresh the whole screen ever time you perform an action like websites do? In the next few years, we will probably see more adoption of AJAX technology, which will make page refreshing uncessary.
25. Reduce Size & Number of Cookies: Each time a browser makes a request, cookies must be transmitted. Keep an eye on the total number and size of the cookies your site uses.

I hope you found these tips helpful. Be sure to drop a comment if you have any more ideas. Like these 25 tips? Here’s 192 more.

About Palmer Web Marketing

Justin Palmer offers eCommerce usability consulting and SEO services in Orange County. Justin has also written an eCommere ebook entitled the eCommerce Roadmap.

I was surprised by how much I learned from this simple situation. As I thought about it, I realized that my Google Analytics are not telling me the whole story.

In my opinion, traditional web analytics fail in the following areas:

1. They do not record micro actions (movement of the mouse, interaction with forms, etc)
2. They do not show where the user is looking (eye movement)
3. Most do not record users clicking on non-linked elements
4. They only show where the user has gone, not where they intended to go

When you begin to watch a user actually engage a website, you pick up on clues that you would never have learned from your analytics. You notice when they are lost. You notice when they are frustrated. You notice when they want to click on something that wasn’t intended to be clicked on.

With these weaknesses in mind, I started researching alternative web analytics solutions. Below are some great solutions I’ve found:

1. Crazy Egg: Crazy Egg offers heatmap visibility, a unique confetti map, and extremely easy setup. The confetti layout allows you to see everything a user clicks on, including non-hyperlink elements. Their pricing is pretty decent, and they offer a free account for up to 5,000 monthly visits.



2. ClickHeat: ClickHeat is an open source web analytics based on PHP and MySQL. Like CrazyEgg, it offers a heatmaps, allowing you to see the click hotspots on a page. I haven’t installed it yet, but it looks promising.



3. CamStudio: Not exactly intended solely for web analytics, CamStudio is an open source Screen recording software that’s perfect for in-house usability testing. For one of my clients, I’m planning on bringing in a dozen or so web users, and record them performing common tasks on the clients website.

Be sure to leave comment if you’ve used any of these solutions or any others.

1. Join Feedback Loops: Feedback loops allow you to see who is marking your email as spam (so you can remove them). Some ISPs, like AOL, provide an easy way to join the feedback loop. For other ISPs, you may need to contact your email service provider to see if they can provide you with this information.
2. Remove Inactive Subscribers: Inactive subscribers are most likely to mark your email as junk. Sure, nobody wants to willfully shrink the size of their opt in list, but you have to think long term.
3. Consistent Timing: ISPs love it when you consistently send email on the same day at near the same time. Since spammers don’t care, consistency is the mark of a responsible email marketer.
4. Use Consistent From Information: Be sure to always use the same from name and address. Changing the from email will require your subscribers to add each address to their address book in order to ensure deliverability. In addition, a consistent from name helps readers recognize your brand.
5. Use Double Opt In: Double opt in is a best practice required by many ISPs in order to be considered for
   white listing. In addition, it protects your database from misspelled email addresses.
6. Unsubscribe Link at Top: Why at the top? Because if unhappy subscribers can’t find it within a few seconds, they may hit the junk button instead, which damages your rep. Better to lose a subscriber than get a spam complaint.
7. Static IP Address: If you send marketing emails from your own server, always send from the same IP address. If you use an email service provider, find out if they offer a dedicated IP for an additional charge. If they do, it’s worth it. Like shared webhosts, many ESP’s group many clients under one IP address. In other words, what another company does with their email marketing can affect your deliverability. It’s much easier to manage the reputation of one IP address rather than many.
8. Reverse DNS: Many ISPs perform a reverse DNS lookup, which checks to make sure the IP you are sending from is authorized to send from your domain.
9. White List Reminder: Encourage subscribers to add your email address to their address book or white list. Some ISPs look at the number of times you are added to an address book as a sign of trust.
10. Get Authenticated: Email authentication is confusing as heck. There are a few standards out there that are not necessary competing. The Sender ID Framework uses a simple SPF record with your DNS Zone. Microsoft has a handy Sender ID wizard to help you create this text record for your DNS. In addition to Sender ID, DomainKeys is another popular authentication method. Both methods help to both ensure deliverability and prevent spammers from spoofing with your domain.
11. Don’t Worry about SPAM Words: Don’t stress about using the word “free” or occasionally putting all caps in the subject. I find these tactics to be successful and have no affect on delivery.
12. Remove Bounces: Be sure to remove all hard bounces that come back as undeliverable. Repeatedly sending to an invalid email will send off red flags with most internet service providers.
13. Reply to Challenge Responses: Occasionally, SPAM filtering software will send back a reply to your email asking you to confirm that you are a real person. Invest the 30 seconds or so it takes to do this for each challenge response you receive. Not only will it ensure that this particular recipient receives your message, but it can improve your sender reputation as well.
14. Be Relevant: Nothing encourages spam complaints more than sending people stuff they didn’t sign up for. If they signed up for a ezine newsletter, and you send them nothing but sales pitches, you’re likely to get complaints.
15. Send In Spurts: Some ISPs have limits as to how many emails you can send to in a given period of time. If you’re having trouble sending email to a particular ISP such as Yahoo, Gmail, or Hotmail, see if your email service provider gives you the ability to stage the email over a longer period of time.
16. Get Off Black Lists: MxToolBox offers a great tool to check if your email server is blacklisted. If it is, begin the process of contacting each of the the black list service and find out the process for getting your IP removed.
17. Get On White Lists: Achieving white list status with the major ISPs is no small feat. If you’re not up for the challenge, consider uses an email deliverability consulting firm such as Return Path that specializes in this area.

As with any improvement program, it’s important to track your progress as you attempt to improve your delivery rates. Email Delivery monitoring services such as DeliverMonitor.com offer ways to track your delivery rates across most of the major ISP’s.

Be sure to checkout my previous post 25 e-mail marketing tips. As always, I’d love to hear everyone’s experiences with email deliverability.  Like the ideas listed above? Find out 3 Things you need here.

About the Author

Justin Palmer is the owner of Palmer Web Marketing, an e-commerce and internet marketing consultancy. Justin also manages the e-commerce website for C28, a Christian t-Shirts company.

1. Spend tons of money on advertising and PR campaigns
2. Let your customers do the marketing for you

With the rising cost of most traditional forms of marketing, who wouldn’t prefer the second option? Unfortunately, very few customers ever become true fans. After all, many businesses focus entirely too much on customer acquisition and neglect customer retention. But in order for customers to become fans, not even traditional retention strategies will suffice. Companies must go out of their way and transform their customers into friends, advisors, and partners. Below I’ve listed some ideas I’ve either used or seen used to accomplish this purpose.

1. Street Teams, Brand Reps or Brand Ambassadors: Street Team marketing is a fascinating concept that developed from the underground music industry. It centers around a grass root strategy where your fans do the marketing for you. Using this strategy, an online retailer might give customers access to branded wallpapers, screensavers, or avatars. Customers are encouraged to copy and paste banners ads into their personal Myspace profiles, blogs, or email signatures. Customers can easily email friends through easy to use tell-a-friend forms. Some online Street Teams, such as C28 or Threadless, combine these tactics with a customer referral program, allowing users to earn store credit for sales referred to the site. Street Team marketing will not work for everyone, but it can be powerful if this style of marketing fits your target audience and brand.
2. Create a Community: Whether its through forums, Myspace, Facebook, or your own sub community site, allow your customers to interact with others of similar interests. Circuit City recently launched a social networking site complete with forums, blogs, photo galleries, and user profiles. Hot Topic has a robust Myspace profile with over 35,000 members. Only time will tell if social networking continues to grow, but for now it’s inexpensive and effective brand exposure.
3. Rewards Programs: Rewards programs are nothing new, but they work well for creating brand loyalty. Maybe your online store doesn’t offer the cheapest prices, but if you let customers earn points redeemable for merchandise, they just might overlook that.
4. Recognize your Brand Warriors: Be sure to recognize top spenders by displaying their stats for all to see. Recognizing your top customers will only encourage them to spend more. One company I worked for decided to send hand-written thank you notes to their top customers along with a gift card.
5. Share and Listen: How well does your business interact with your audience? Corporate blogs, forums, customer generated product reviews and surveys can be great two way communication channels. Run your business like a democracy. Let your customers vote with their opinions and preferences. Policies and procedures should from the bottom up, not the other way around.

Be sure to leave your comments with examples of anyone successfully using these or other brand building tactics.  

1. Spend tons of money on advertising and PR campaigns
2. Let your customers do the marketing for you

With the rising cost of most traditional forms of marketing, who wouldn’t prefer the second option? Unfortunately, very few customers ever become true fans. After all, many businesses focus entirely too much on customer acquisition and neglect customer retention. But in order for customers to become fans, not even traditional retention strategies will suffice. Companies must go out of their way and transform their customers into friends, advisors, and partners. Below I’ve listed some ideas I’ve either used or seen used to accomplish this purpose.

1. Street Teams, Brand Reps or Brand Ambassadors: Street Team marketing is a fascinating concept that developed from the underground music industry. It centers around a grass root strategy where your fans do the marketing for you. Using this strategy, an online retailer might give customers access to branded wallpapers, screensavers, or avatars. Customers are encouraged to copy and paste banners ads into their personal Myspace profiles, blogs, or email signatures. Customers can easily email friends through easy to use tell-a-friend forms. Some online Street Teams, such as C28 or Threadless, combine these tactics with a customer referral program, allowing users to earn store credit for sales referred to the site. Street Team marketing will not work for everyone, but it can be powerful if this style of marketing fits your target audience and brand.
2. Create a Community: Whether its through forums, Myspace, Facebook, or your own sub community site, allow your customers to interact with others of similar interests. Circuit City recently launched a social networking site complete with forums, blogs, photo galleries, and user profiles. Hot Topic has a robust Myspace profile with over 35,000 members. Only time will tell if social networking continues to grow, but for now it’s inexpensive and effective brand exposure.
3. Rewards Programs: Rewards programs are nothing new, but they work well for creating brand loyalty. Maybe your online store doesn’t offer the cheapest prices, but if you let customers earn points redeemable for merchandise, they just might overlook that.
4. Recognize your Brand Warriors: Be sure to recognize top spenders by displaying their stats for all to see. Recognizing your top customers will only encourage them to spend more. One company I worked for decided to send hand-written thank you notes to their top customers along with a gift card.
5. Share and Listen: How well does your business interact with your audience? Corporate blogs, forums, customer generated product reviews and surveys can be great two way communication channels. Run your business like a democracy. Let your customers vote with their opinions and preferences. Policies and procedures should from the bottom up, not the other way around.

Be sure to leave your comments with examples of anyone successfully using these or other brand building tactics.

1. Avoid Manufacturer Product Descriptions: It’s tempting to just copy and paste from the manufacturer’s website, but resist the urge. At the very least, re-write the description in some way to make it unique.
2. Create a SEO Keyword Field in Product Database: Just as every product record in your catalog has a name, price, and other attributes, you should also create a SEO keyword field that is displayed in the title tags, meta tags, and preferably the body as well. As you add products to the site, enter commonly search for keywords in this field. Not everyone will search by the brand name or item number, so this will greatly help your product pages rank for long tail searches.
3. Focus on Singular Keywords on Product Page: As a general rule, I try to optimize for plural keywords on the home page or other SEO landing pages. Focus on singular terms on the product pages by using the SEO keyword field mentioned in step 2.
4. Simple Product & Category URLs: Ideally, URLs should consist of keywords, not useless ID’s or other parameters. If you don’t have the option of using URL re-writing software, at least limit the number of variables passed in the URL.
5. All Products 2 or 3 Clicks from the Home Page: Keep your product pages as close as possible to your greatest source of PageRank. Many sites bury part of their product catalog deep within dozens of pages of categories and subcategories. This can be accomplished by using SEO friendly rollovers or increasing the number of products per page.
6. Unique Title Tags: While it’s debatable whether the company name belongs in the beginning of the title tag, most agree you should not include extra keywords that are repeated in every tag. For example, if you company name was XYZ Travel, include only the company name in title tag, not “XYZ Travel Agency and Vacations.” Use as little duplicate content as possible in order to prevent diluting the value of the rest of the text in the title tag.
7. Unique Keyword Meta Tags: Meta tags, including keywords and description, should be entirely unique on every product page. Though meta content likely doesn’t directly affect your ranking, unique tags will prevent duplicate content penalties. In addition, don’t stuff keywords into your meta tags that aren’t relevant to the specific page they are on.
8. Unique Description Meta Tags: Personally, I like putting the same product description that appears on the product page in meta description tag. This will ensure unique content on each product page.
9. Product Reviews: A great strategy for guaranteeing unique content is displaying user generated content from your customers. Allow customers to review products they’ve purchased or comment on one’s they haven’t.
10. Pass PR Wisely: Obviously, not every page on your site deserves the same link juice. While your Return policy page is important, it likely won’t bring in loads of revenue driving traffic from organic search. Make sure your primary SEO pages, (category and products pages) receive most of the PR flow by capping PR flow on less important links. You can accomplish this via Javascript links, form submit links, the no-follow tag, or the robots.txt file.
11. Internal Contextual Links: Site navigation links don’t tell search engines very much information about the page. Within a paragraph of text, link to a relevant page using keyword rich anchor text.
12. Avoid Session IDs in URLs: Many ecommerce software platforms use cookie-less unique session IDs in the site URLs. Unfortunately, this creates an infinite amount of duplicate content for the SE’s to crawl. There are ways to prevent this using an ethical type of cloaking which serves URLs to spiders without the session ID.
13. Create a Product RSS Feed: Create a product feed and submit it to relevant content aggregators. Google Base accepts an XML like product feed and displays your results for Google Base searches. Product feeds can be a great way of picking up free backlinks directly to your product pages.
14. Product Tagging: With the advent of social media, customers have become accustomed with the concept of tagging. Allow your customers to tag products with their own keywords. When you allow users to tag your products, you’ll likely start ranking for slang keywords that you would have never thought of on your own.
15. Page File Names: If possible, use keyword rich page file names. A page files name such as www.yoursite.com/keyword-phrase-here.html tells Googlebot a lot more than a URL such as www.yoursite.com/?ID=1234.



16. Use iframes for Duplicate Content: If you have repetitive content that must appear on every page, or your product descriptions are not unique, consider placing them inside an iframe with an invisible border. Users will not know that they data technically resides on another page search engines will not penalize you for duplicate content.
17. Links in Product Descriptions: Create keyword rich links from within the product descriptions of one product linking to another. I’ve found this is a very effective strategy for targeting long-tail keywords. Here’s 25 more e-commerce link-building tips.
18. Crawl-able Navigation: Avoid JavaScript or css based navigation structures that don’t allow spiders through. If you’re stuck with one, at least duplicate your navigation in the footer of every page with normal hyperlinks. In additional, don’t rely on form based navigation such as drop down lists since the SEs can’t follow them.
19. Don’t Stuff Keywords in your Nav: This is useless and very tacky. Keywords that show up universally in the navigation on every page are not as important as they used to be. Instead, use keyword rich anchor text pointing to your important pages within a paragraph of relevant text.
20. Don’t Use “View” or “More”: On your product category pages, make sure you link to the individual product pages with anchor text that contains more than just words like “View” or “See more”. Vague terms such as these tell spiders nothing about your products.
21. Optimize your Images: With images now popping up in the regular SERPs, every image on your site should be optimized. Make sure all your product images contain unique alt text attributes. By simply populating the alt text with the product and brand name, I’ve seen a huge increase in traffic from Google Image search. In addition, you’re making your site more useable for the vision impaired.
22. Optimize your Internal Site Search: This is more of a usability tip, but it applies perfectly within the context of eCommerce SEO. Because your visitor found your site via a search engine, they will likely expect your internal site search to work as well. I’ve found that many first time visitors landing your site from a SERP will search for the exact same term they typed into Google.
23. Create Brand Landing Pages: If your site sells branded products that customers may be searching for, setup a optimized landing page for every brand.
24. Use Title Attributes in Links: For all anchor text on your site, be sure to use appropriate title attributes (e.g. <a href=”page.html” title=”keywords here”>) in order to provide search engines more information about what the page contains. Although not nearly as important as the actual anchor text, title attributes are factored into the ranking algorithm in some way.
25. Track Page Yield: In order to determine the effectiveness of your site as a whole, take the number of unique keywords you are found for during a given time period. Then, divide that by the number pages indexed by Google. This will give you your page yield, a good metric for measuring the length of your “long tail.”

Like these 25 tips? Here’s 192 more.

About Palmer Web Marketing

Palmer Web Marketing offers Ethical SEO services and Expert eCommerce consulting for small to medium size businesses. Justin also owns several other websites, including MedSaverCard.com, a Rx city drug card program for uninsured Americans.