I’m constantly astonished at how many large e-commerce sites have seriously deficient product pages. Many large companies, especially click-and-mortar retailers, seem to forget that products cannot be touched, tasted, or tested over the internet. While the internet will never perfectly mimic the in-store experience, there are dozens of tactics that can be implemented on the product page to increase customer engagement and convert visitors into buyers. Below I’ll describe 25 methods I’ve either used or seen used by other online retailers.

1. More / Better Product Photos: It’s important to remember that unlike you, your customers may have never seen nor handled your products before. Therefore, take pictures of every possible angle a customer would want to see. Also, make sure the quality is acceptable. If you’re still using a 1 megapixel camera you got for Christmas 10 years ago, it’s about time to upgrade.
2. Flash Zoom with Different Angles: Many advanced e-commerce customers have implemented flash technology to allow zooming and changing angles. If you have the expertise and the resources, this is a killer add on feature for any product page.
3. Include Info about Where the Product was made: People care immensely about this. Whether they are concerned about ethical working conditions, or just for quality reasons, be sure to tell them where your products are made. If they are made somewhere besides the US, be sure to put a link to your fair labor policy, so your customers don’t think you’re using sweatshops.
4. List benefits, not just features: Don’t rattle of an endless bullet list of technical specifications. Tell customers specifically how this product will improve their life.
5. Show product measurements or weight: Remember, they can’t actually touch and hold your product over the internet. Give them the next best thing with the measurements and weight.
6. Make “Add to Cart” Impossible to miss: The “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” button should reach out and grab your attention. Avoid tiny, vague “Add to Bag” buttons such as the one on Gap’s product page.
7. Allow customer generated product reviews: This will both increase the amount of trust your website receives and add valuable content for the search engines. Worried about negative product reviews? Don’t, the experts say it can be one of the greatest tools to show your customers you are transparent and trustworthy.
8. Ask a Question Link: Don’t leave your customers hanging with nagging questions about a products. Add a link that emails your customer service department so customers can ask a specific question about the product. This also serves as a great feedback tool so you know what information needs to be put on the product page to prevent questions. For an example of this, checkout C28’s product page.
9. Show Related (cross sell items): Having a “customer who bought this also liked…” section is a great way to cross sell. Remember, a product page can be a dead end if the customer is not interested in what they are viewing. Always give them somewhere else to go.
10. Show Related upsell items: Add to your average order by suggesting an upgrade to what they are currently viewing.
11. Show add on items: Selling shoes? Don’t let your customers checkout without socks! Customers will appreciate the suggestion, and you will increase your average order.
12. Include possible search query terms in the title and meta tags: If you sell moisturizer cream, don’t just put the product name in the title tag. Create an extra field in your product database that people will likely search for such as “Cure for Dry skin.”
13. Foreign Currency converter: Have you ever been to a site that showed currency in something other than US dollars? I have, and I usually leave because I am too lazy to convert it. Including a currency converter link near the price will help encourage your international business. If you don’t want to clutter up your product page, you can even program the link to only show if the user has a non-US IP address.



14. Add a Wishlist: Wishlist’s are a great way to create stickiness and possibly even reduce shopping cart abandonment. People tend to use shopping carts as wishlists, so giving them to real thing will allow you to more accurately track your true shopping cart abandonment.
15. Email Me When It’s Re-stocked Button: Many sites, especially apparel retailers, may sell out of a certain size or variety of a product. Rather than throwing up a “Out of Stock” notice on the product page, why not allow people to be emailed when the item is re-stocked? In my experience, this is one of those features that really surprises and delights customers who are otherwised already frustrated. Checkout an example of this on C28’s product page.
16. Email Me Before It Sells Out Button: People tend to wait to the last minute. But what if you warned them before the item sells out? There’s no greater way to create a sense of urgency then by sending an email saying “Hurry, it’s about to sell out!”
17. Email Me When Products Like this are Added: Customers are tired of generic, one size fits all email newsletters. Give them something they really care about by creating a system where they can request to be notified when product within certain categories are added to the site.
18. Social Bookmarking Links: Although its not typical to see a Digg or Delicious button on an e-commerce site, it may work well for certain buzzworthy products, such as t-shirts from Threadless.
19. Bread crumb navigation: It’s easy to get lost in a myriad of product categories, so always keep visitors informed about where they are with Bread (aka Cookie) crumb navigation. Bread crumb navs typically are located in the upper left hand of the page and look something like this: Home > Top Category > Lower Category > Product Name
20. Customer Generated Photos: Allow your customers to upload pictures of them using your products. This works great for apparel retailers, or anything where people take pride in using a product.
21. Audio Testimonials: This is becomming common as sales pages for ebooks or other informational products. A testimonial that can be listened to will probably hold more weight than simple text on a page.
22. Video Testimonials: Even better than just audio, allow for full video testimonials. If you have the videos hosted by You Tube, you can also spur a viral marketing campaign.
23. Back Button to Product Category Page: This allows customers to navigate more efficiently and return to where they just were.
24. Browser Bookmark Button: Don’t let them forget your site. With a simple javascript command, you can trigger their browser to bookmark your product.
25. RSS Product Feeds: With the integration of a feed reader into Microsoft’s IE 7, Rss feeds will likely move out of the early adopter stage and become more mainstream. With the abundance of SPAM in the inbox, receiving product updates through an RSS feed is a great alternative for keeping your customers informed. Checkout how Threadless displays the RSS icon at the bottom of their product page.

I hope some of the ideas above have given you some inspiration for your site. Be sure to leave a comment if you’ve successfully used any of these tactics. Also, you migh want to checkout my post on 25 Ways to Improve Your Shopping Cart.

If left to itself, pay per click ROI tends to go down the drain. Why? Competition thickens, bid prices skyrocket, and click fraud runs rampant. So what can you do to stop the bleeding? Below are some advanced Pay per clicks tips to give your campaign a much needed boost.

1. Include Keywords in the Display URL: For example, if you were targeting the keywords “seo tips”, create a display url of www.yoursite.com/SEO-Tips. Google, Yahoo, and Live search all allow you to create a display url that differs from the destination one. By using the exact keywords the user types in, you’ll embolden the keyword in the ad, thereby creating an enticing eye magnet.
2. Separate Out Your Keywords: Don’t group dissimilar keywords together under one ad group. When you do this, it makes it harder to tell which keywords are performing best. Separate them out as much as feasibly possible, then adjust your bids accordingly.
3. Watch Your Positions: If you rank in the top 3 organic positions for a keyword, you’re probably better off bidding for the 4 or 5 spot with PPC. This is much easier with Adwords then it is with Yahoo or Live search because Google allows you to bid for a certain position. It’s not always perfectly accurate, but it’s better than nothing.
4. Test different Ad Styles: You’ll never know which writing style will trigger the most clicks unless you test them. Pit an informative style versus intriguing ad copy, or soft sell versus a hard sell. Give them some time, then analyze the results. Don’t simply look at which one received the most clicks. Most likely, you’re better off basing your decision on which converted the best.
5. Follow through with your Landing Pages: Always display the same keyword on the landing page that the user typed in. Think about it. Why did the user click on your ad? Because it contained their keywords! Ensure that they stay on your site by following through with a consistent message.

For more PPC advice, checkout these 25 Pay per click tips.

About Palmer Web Marketing

PWM offers a range of web marketing services including Adwords consulting for small businesses, eCommerce SEO consulting, and local SEO services.

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.