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E-mail marketing is underrated by its practitioners, despite its promise. Internet Retailer reports that nearly half of online retailers rate e-mail as the most effective marketing. But that means more than half of online retailers don’t think e-mail marketing works. It does.

Real or Spam?

Jacob Nielsen, the guru of usability, said “E-mail newsletters are the best customer relationship mechanism the internet offers, and every single mailing must strengthen the relationship between the company and its customers.” But he warns that more e-mail is not necessarily better e-mail. “Having your low-quality messages deleted is certainly an unfortunate fate. But the long-term impact of such clueless internet marketing is: your future messages may not even be opened. Once users are trained to expect such uselessness, they stop paying attention to your e-mail.”

Be Believable

You must convince your customers that you are a viable provider of information and savings. Only then can you pursue growth of orders and sales.

Among many factors to
the success of e-mail marketing:

• Choosing a marketing company who has established relationships with
most (if not all) e-mail providers and hosting companies

• Design effective e-mail messages

• The method of collecting an e-mail address

• Deciding how often to use e-mails

• The offers and benefits to the customer receiving e-mail

Many e-mail marketing companies provide do-it-yourself services to quickly and easily establish a marketing program. Some tie directly into your shopping cart, making it easier to capture e-mail addresses. Establish your list then decide how to best communicate with your customers.

Be Patient

Don’t get frustrated if your first few e-mails don’t have a high open rate or click through rate. Marketing is tweaking, so try different combinations of elements.

Testing, One, Two

Top e-mail marketing company Silverpop tested the following e-mail elements:

• Content of the “From” line

• Subject line content

• Location of logo

• Ratio of text to images

• Various design layouts

• Number of links

• Type of links (text vs. image)

• Presence and location of navigation

• Inclusion of lifestyle photography

• Feature offers

• Location of call-to-action

Each of these elements had a significant impact on the e-mail open rate, which hovers around 20-30%. Test these elements in different combinations to learn what your customers want to hear and which format works best.

Inside the Numbers

Surprisingly, Silverpop’s study concluded that putting your company name clearly in the “From” line did not have the impact on open rates that has long been considered best practice. Instead, they found that using a person’s name improved open rates 3 percentage points more than a business name.

The data suggests using a person’s name in the e-mail address, but beware. If they’re expecting a personal message and instead they see a sales pitch, this could be perceived as a bait-and-switch. If you use a person’s name in the “From” line, use some type of personalization in the content.

The study also found that including the company name & product name in your subject line improves open rates by 32% to 60% over a subject line without the company or product name. It was also higher when it contained either the product or company name only. Like an ad headline or the title in the search engine results, the subject line must be clear, concise and give the customer an idea of what’s inside the e-mail.

Most e-mail marketing efforts use a “postcard” format containing an image with an offer. But Silverpop found that the “newsletter” format had a higher click rate than the “postcard” format. The newsletter format included text and images to clearly communicate the message and brand.

Click through rates increase when there were more links in the e-mail, but start to decrease once there were more than ten links. Image-only and mixed format (images and text) also increased click through rates. Images drive more attention to your offer and the call-to-action even though most e-mail providers block images initially.

Successful e-mail marketing involves finding the right format and wrapping your arms around it and making a commitment to it. Now, put these things into practice and make your company some money!

It is easy for e-commerce merchants to monitor pay-per-click advertising to see if people are clicking on your ads. It is easy to see if your website is listed in the first ten results of a search engine. What’s not easy is figuring out how to make the most of your pay-per-click advertising or your organic listing. Below are some methods small businesses can use to drive traffic.

The landing page is crucial to the equation. It’s where you drive people, answer their questions and hopefully help them fulfill their shopping mission.

MarketingExperiments has done extensive testing with landing page optimization by focusing on how to improve conversions. Their tests conclude the number one threat to conversion is site flow disruption. Simply put, when the message you use to drive people to your website doesn’t match the message on the landing page people get disrupted and conversions drop.

Give the landing page the attention it requires. Typically, a landing page requires design and programming work just like a section page or item page, but the results can be well worth the extra effort.

Let’s say I’m a lawn and garden supply company and one of my pay-per-click ads says “Get ready for Spring” sending them to the following landing page:

What’s the first category that people see? “Winter and Seasonal.” Because my general home page has not been updated to match my ad, I have caused a disruption in my intended message. After people saw the Spring ad, they thought they were going to get supplies for spring time gardening. But I didn’t deliver. Some people will click the ad and hunt for spring-time supplies, but many won’t. MarketingExperiments saw an increase in conversion by over 100% with one controlled experiment!

Do this with your OWN site.

THE AD

Your ad should create the value and give people a reason to click on it and visit your website. Headlines should be compelling but not misleading. Misleading copy can generate lots of clicks and cost lots of money, but the goal is to drive qualified traffic to your website.

THE LANDING PAGE

Spend the time to make your landing page more effective. First, remove as much “clutter” as possible from the page. This includes things like left hand navigation or newsletter sign-up. You want people to focus on one goal and not be so distracted that they lose interest in your page.

Second, examine the heading at the top of the page. This headline should be compelling and support the value. It should use language that is similar to your ad copy.

Third, consider how much information you should put on the page. Should you simply put an “Add to Cart” button or an email form? MarketingExperiments found that there are four factors when determining how much information to put on a landing page:

- Cost

- Perceived risk—anxiety

- Level of commitment (high/low; long/short)

- Motivation Type (rational/emotional; analytical/impulse; want/need)

They found that short copy performs better when the cost to the visitor is low (or none at all), the risk is low (or none at all), the commitment level is low (or short) and the visitor is motivated by emotions, impulse or by a feeling of “want.”

Long copy performs better when the cost is high, risk is high, commitment level is high (or long) and they are motivated by rational, analytical or the feeling of “need.”

Then, consider the placement of elements like images and the call-to-action area (add to cart or sign up).

THE ACTION

The call-to-action is important, but so is the process when shoppers complete the action–the checkout process. It should be similar to the landing page with as little information as possible. Any information should be supporting, not distracting and should limit any site flow disruption.

Finally, do a test to determine which elements works best with the offer and the different elements on a page. For more information and test results, visit http://www.marketingexperiments.com.

In the past I have written about how customer reviews can play a large part in your customer’s shopping experience, but have you considered how they can also play a part in the design and development of your website? In this day of social networks and social interaction, people are more willing to share their thoughts and ideas on a product, offering, website or company as a whole. As a website owner it’s very easy to shy away from collecting that kind of information for fear that people will say negative things about your website and your prHow oducts. Let them! It can be very valuable to you and your business.

Feedback Helps
As a business owner you are constantly looking at your shelves and watching the boxes as they leave the warehouse to see which products are selling and which ones aren’t. This type of analysis tells you which products you need to order and which items you need to clear out. This is a critical part of managing your warehouse and keeping your business growing.

These same analytics are important for your online storefront as well. Using an analytics program can be very valuable to your business and give you insight on how shoppers are browsing your store. With online analytics you can get a good sense of which categories are the most popular, which search engines drive the most visitors along with which keywords generate the most sales.

All of this information is valuable to your business, but does it tell you how your customers really feel about your website? Do you know what gets them to click the order button or what keeps them from clicking that button? You can get this information from your analytics program, but it’ll take forever to find.

Ask the Tough Questions
Take your efforts up a notch by soliciting direct feedback from your customers. Don’t be afraid to put yourself out on a limb by asking for this feedback, chances are you’ll learn a lot of valuable information that you probably didn’t know before. To do this, make the process as easy and attractive as possible for your customers. A simple e-mail link will not work. Instead, be obvious. Create a link that says “Leave feedback.” Even better, give your customers 10% on the “Thank You” page for leaving a product review or feedback. The “feedback” link could then open in a pop-up or pop-in window with some basic information. Name, E-mail and Comments could be enough, but ask for more from the customer that will better help you make a decision. You know which questions to ask. Hey, if you want your back scratched you know what needs to happen.

You can also collect indirect solicitation, also called A/B split testing, to get an idea of what works and what doesn’t work. The idea here is that you have two different versions of a promotion, version A and version B, each with a distinct message and/or discount. Once you have the test set up, a program will randomly display one of the promotions and you will get to see which test resulted in the most sales. This small sampling allows you to see which changes will result in the most sales, so after your results are in place you can roll out the most popular promo to every visitor. Google AdWords offers a great tool called Website Optimizer that does exactly this, and of course it’s FREE!

Keep up with your Customers
These are just two methods that you could explore in an effort to understand your consumers a little bit more. And don’t fall into the trap that, “Well, I’ve been doing this X amount of years and I know my customers,” or “I have a lot of experience in retail and I know what the customer wants.” Internet users are adapting to new technology on a continual basis. Never forget, an internet shopper is not the same as a retail shopper.

Customer’s have a powerful voice, don’t be afraid to listen to it and change your website to suit their needs more effectively and efficiently—and profitably!

Simply put, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) attempts to increase the visibility of a given website in search engines and enhance its value to visitors through page design, consistent tagging and focusing content on core keywords. According to Wikipedia, “In 2007 Search Engine Marketing is stronger than ever with SEM Budgets up 750% as shown with stats dating back to 2002 vs 2006.”

There’s been a lot of talk about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) throughout the years. The term “Search Engine Marketing” was only coined in 2001, but already SEO has become a major component of any successful e-commerce operator. There have been many different techniques that have been used over the years, some have held fast while others have fallen far from grace (remember keywords the same color as the background?). One technique that has stood the test of time: an SEO plan.

One Page at a Time - To help with your SEO plan, here are a few things that you should consider. First, focus in on one page at a time. I’ve found many store owners who will spend the majority of their time concentrating on getting their item pages ranked for general terms. That’s not a terrible strategy and will work for some keywords and products, but it’s not a strategy that you want to use for every product on your store.

General terms are actually more effective for section pages than item pages. For instance, if you were looking for an office chair, a general term (e.g. “office chair”) would get you to the section page with office furniture. Once the shopper is on the section page, then you can be more specific to lead them to item pages. At this point the key word changes from the general “office chair” to something more specific, like “Office Max Leather Office Chair.”

Choose Your Words Carefully - After choosing which page you want to start with, spend some time trying to figure out which keyword or keyword phrase you want to optimize for. This is your landing page. It’s important that you focus in on one keyword to maximize the effectiveness of this page. When I mention effective keywords, I’m talking about keywords that convert.

Get in the habit now in using conversion rates to determine the effectiveness of your marketing, whether it’s SEO, PPC, E-Mail or other.

Let’s look at your website now. When adding your keyword to your page, you want to optimize your Title Tag, Meta Description, H1 Tag (Page Name), Links and of course the Content. You want to provide relevant, focused, and detailed information about the specific product or category, working in your keyword here or there. Don’t over-do it. Instead, use it sparingly, or more importantly, naturally.

Content is King. The phrase might seem over-used in blogs, books and seminars, and for good reason. It’s true! Content doesn’t just improve your SEO rankings; it also helps improve your conversions as well.

Once your text has been optimized with your keywords, you’ll want to determine the best call to action. If you’re driving people directly to an item page, you’ll want your content to drive people towards the call to action, or in this instance the Add to Cart button. If your driving people to a section page, then you’ll want to drive people towards your most profitable product(s) in the category.

And this is the point in which you sit back and watch the orders come streaming in. Ok, that’s enough sitting! It’s time to start working on the next page. In reality, SEO is a lot of work. But done right, you can reap some healthy rewards.

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By: Kurt Illian kurti@ebizinsider.com