Holiday E-Commerce Marketing Roundup
Tips, Steps, and Best Practices to Improve Your E-Commerce Holiday Sales
In September, Taming the Beast covered what it takes to have your customer service ready for the holiday season.
Offer discounts, increase server capacity, learn from your competitors, and bundle products are just some of the 25 E-Commerce Holiday Tips for Your Website.
Check out the step-by-step synopsis and critique of Network Solution’s 7 Steps to Improve Your Online Holiday Sales Whitepaper in Improving eCommerce Holiday Sales Whitepaper Is Really A Best Practices List.
Search Engine Optimization for the Holidays
Make sure you’re getting the basics of SEO right with 25 eCommerce SEO Tips.
Don’t forget that the keywords that drive traffic to your site on a regular basis may not be the same keywords that can drive traffic around the holidays and that you can find out when keywords are searched during the year, with Rebecca’s Plan for the Holidays Nice and Early By Analyzing Search Trends.
And in the event your on-page SEO is top-notch already, you should definitely work on these 9 Linkbuilding Tips for Ecommerce Websites.
How E-Commerce Sites Can Embrace Social Media
There are answers to questions about how e-commerce sites can reach social media users, and which social media sites to target in the Practical eCommerce Interview: Ecommerce Implications From Social Media.
And whether you’ve started blogging for your e-commerce site or not, you’re sure to find tips and tricks in this monster list of ECOMMERCE BLOGS: 75+ Community Sites of the Top Online Retailers.
Pay-Per-Click Preparation for the Holidays
Just like this post probably comes too late in the holiday season to implement everything, regarding your ppc campaigns, you should have fleshed out your keywords, developed holiday ad copy, and focused on the buying cycle. Check out Holiday PPC Preparation: You should have started yesterday for suggestions on writing ad copy for holiday shoppers.
Mistakes can effect the performance of your PPC campaigns. Just check out this post on E-Commerce PPC Campaign Metrics with stats to prove the point!
Google Analytics Tracking E-Commerce Sales
Google Analytics can do a whole lot of things, and sometimes, a nice soul will go step-by-step to help you get your reports to Match Specific Transactions to Specific Keywords.
Shopping Cart Usability
I’ve argued that SEO is more than just on-page and off-page optimization, but includes driving visitors through a funnel. Usability and conversion really needs to be considered a part of SEO. Until it is, you might enjoy the eMarketer graphs on conversion rates and this post that says, “Your Ecommerce site ranks, but boy does it suck.”
And when you’ve been shocked into realizing your site can convert at a higher rate, you’ll be well served to check out eCommerce & Shopping Cart Usability: 21 Best Practices
7 Must-Do Opt-in Email Marketing Techniques.
1. Don’t be verbose. If it takes you 8 kilobytes of email text to try and sell me something, you’ve taken too long. If your autoresponder emails are regularly this long, you’ve likely lost my attention. Enhance your emails by taking some copywriting courses, or just reading what feels influential to you, and then shorten your emails. Let your sales letter be long, but keep your emails short.
2. Repeat yourself. It’s okay to hit me over the head with one offer, especially if it’s good, and you can discuss the benefits in a clear, concise fashion. The CMSInfusion content management system offered as part of the MarketingMainEvent3 had a great “Advanced Notice Subscribers” email list. They hit me over the head with the MME3 event and CMSInfusion for about three weeks, every single day! But those emails drilled into me the benefits, and the original video was quite fantastic, in my opinion. While I didn’t buy, it’s one of the only times in over two years of receiving autoresponder messages, that I recognized why you, me, and everyone should have bought CMSInfusion at the introductory price.
3. Put the unsubscribe options at the bottom. Don’t tell me upfront that I “can easily unsubscribe from a link at the bottom of this email!” I know it’s easy to unsubscribe, don’t make it too easy. I don’t even know what you’re about to say, and my time is limited, so don’t give me a reason to unsubscribe by inadvertently telling me that you don’t think your content is worthy of my staying on your list.
4. Give me free information that I may not have thought of. You can still promote products and services, especially if you tie them into the free information. Just remember, the free information should be able to stand on its own. A recent email I received said, “8 Ways to Increase the Perceived Value of your Freebies.” It was a great read because it took just a minute, and mentioned things I hadn’t already written down in my internet marketing notes. Brian Simpson regularly emails “feature articles” that are worth far more than a million internet marketing products out there.
5. Update your autoresponder emails. It’s easy to get caught up selling new products, writing up new autoresponder messages for them, and broadcasting messages to old list members who have exhausted the autoresponder, but don’t tell me 2006 is the year of video when we’re halfway through 2007!
6. Cloak your affiliate links. Aweber, and many other autoresponder systems automatically cloak your affiliate links and give you statistics to how many people clicked through. But just because aweber creates links for you doesn’t mean they’re the best links to get clicks. Which looks better to you? clicks.aweber.com/z/ct/54378q5433fd3 or hopurl.com/45332 or http://www.wolftrust.com/recommends/adwordsmiracle/?
7. Know what you’re talking about, and clarify. If you’re not sure how to set up an AdWords campaign, or what can be set in the process, but you’re going to tell potential customers to set up a campaign, do everyone a favor and triple check the setup process so you give accurate information. A recent email told me to set up an AdWords campaign with my budget and click rates. If you could set click rates, don’t you think I’d set it to 100%? So they probably meant setting max CPCs on keywords. Don’t make your potential customer’s guess.
Check out 4 more opt-in email list marketing tips.
Opt In Email List Marketing Tips for Internet Marketers
Opt in email list marketing is big business. All businesses should be engaged in the legitimate, opt-in collection of email addresses so they can later market to that list. Tip 1: Each business should likely use a variety of different opt in email lists. When used appropriately, these lists are made up of targeted prospects and/or consumers of products or services who can be gently persuaded into purchasing and upgrading those products and services.
Internet Marketing List Building is big business because of its generally inexpensive nature. One person loads up an autoresponder with messages, pushes people to sign up to their list with various (usually) free enticements, and then encourages a user to purchase a product once they’ve signed up.
I frequently sign up for internet marketer’s email lists. It is important to an online marketer to do so to understand trends, read about new methods of customer retention, and analyze compelling copy. As a result of my willingness to sign up for these email courses and autoresponders, I amass large amounts of opt in email. Tip 2: The one thing that all list builders should work on before marketing their list, is passing spam filters. I don’t actively look to my spam folders for your message because I have dozens of other internet marketers who promise all sorts of insider secrets on very similar topics to that already pass my spam filters. So once they pass, I often end up with large amounts of unread email because I just can’t keep up.
One inbox I currently use for opt in email lists has 686 unread messages. I decided to collect the names in the “From:” line, to see how many people regularly send me email that I haven’t deleted lately. The idea is to determine whether I even know what they typically sell, and whether their email list is worth staying on. Tip 3: Just as easily as I opt-in, I can usually opt-out of internet marketers email lists because of compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act. Comply with the law.
686 messages came from 109 different “From:” lines. Though some were one person with several lists, it amounts to more than 6 messages per “From:” address that I haven’t read. Of the 109, I could only definitely describe what 5 of them are known for, and could probably guess what another 5-10 are talking about inside their email without looking at their subject line. For the other 90+ of them, they might as well take me off their list because I’m not likely to read their email at this point. I’m so backed up that I’m looking for email from people I trust, and I’m not really looking at the subject lines at all. The subject lines are a bit secondary when I’m this backed up. Tip 4: So any internet marketer wishing to catch my attention should do a good job of branding their name and/or business before I ever opt-in to their email list. It’s a tough job, but it can be done.
