Online Marketplaces: Market Outlook, Revenue Models and Recent Trends

The forecast is bullish. Experts predict that by 2008, 27% of all e-commerce sales will be generated by multi-merchant product aggregators. Shoppers are expected to use Comparison Shopping Engines to the tune of $54.3 billion in revenues by 2008.

There are primarily two types of prevalent revenue models among online marketplaces - pay per click (PPC) and percentage of sale (POS) or cost per order (CPO) as a means of paying the marketplace. There is also a third type: Froogle.com. Offered by Google, Froogle.com is free. The rest charge merchants based on visits or sales.

Pay per click is how it sounds. Each time a potential shopper clicks thru to your site, you pay a fee. While the fees can be very low per click, it is crucial to monitor your visits closely. If your conversion rates on certain products are low, that is if shoppers are looking but not buying, the clicks are costing money and you may want to discontinue listing those products. That can be a real headache. For instance, if you have 500 products and you're listed on three PPC shopping search engines, you could be monitoring 1500 products. That's a lot of man hours. And in many cases it is difficult to get that specific click information from the comparison search engines. In essence, you could be draining significant profits from your business while shoppers visit who have no intention of buying.

Cost Per Order (CPO) Revenue Model on the Rise

Shopping.com will begin testing a universal shopping cart feature over the next couple of months. The service allows shoppers to add products from multiple merchants to a single Shopping.com cart and purchase those products through Shopping.com. The payment system will be powered by PayPal. Merchants participating in the test will be charged on a revenue-share basis as opposed to the standard cost-per-click model. Shopping.com / Paypal will process the transaction and send the necessary information (name, shipping address, quantity ordered, etc.) to the merchant for order fulfillment. There are two ways merchants can receive this information: via FTP and via the Merchant Account Center. The merchant will then send Shopping.com a status update when the order is processed and Shopping.com will relay an order confirmation to the buyer. Buyers can find out about their order status from their cart account on Shopping.com. The buyer will receive one order number even if she buys from multiple retailers. The test isn't live just yet.

Positives from the Merchant Perspective

Shopping.com's universal shopping cart should increase conversion rate. Merchants only pay on a CPA basis thus removing all risk from the marketing channel (merchants should now feel comfortable listing entire product databases)

Negatives from the Merchant Perspective

Ceding customer ownership to Shopping.com (Shopping.com controls all communication with the customer. Merchants can't access a customer's e-mail address or phone number. Merchants lose ability to upsell/cross-sell other products during the buying/checkout process which lowers the average order size. ]

Concern about Ceding Customer Ownership in CPO Model

In a proprietary survey of more than 30 online retailers at the 15th Annual eTail Conference in Philadelphia, 81% of the online retailers indicated that they probably will not implement Google Checkout primarily due to the concern about ceding customer ownership to Google. Specifically, online retailers were concerned that Google limits online retailers' ability to market to customers directly. The online retailers also expressed concern about disintermediation, lack of system flexibility and the perception that Checkout provides Google too much visibility into their business, especially relating to Google search-driven conversion rates. Online retailers were concerned that Google stores all customer information, and Google Checkout limits an online retailer's ability to directly market to a customer via e-mail. Given the low cost of e-mail marketing once a customer has been acquired, the e-mail marketing limitations placed on online retailers who implement Google Checkout may slow the rate of adoption of Google Checkout.

Online retailers also expressed concern that Google undermines the ability of an online retailer to directly connect with a consumer by requiring Google Checkout users to go to Google Checkout to make changes to orders and transactions instead of to the online retailer's site. This requirement once again prevents an online retailer from marketing or cross-selling to a user when they return to the site to check order status or to make changes to an order. Similarly, some online retailers did not like how a Google Checkout transaction ends with a Google Checkout page instead of on the online retailer's web page.

M&A Activity in this Space is Very Vibrant

Shopzilla est. 2006 earnings = $50m
Shopzilla (acquired by Scripps) deal value = $560m or 11.2x est. 2006 earnings

PriceGrabber est. 2006 earnings = $35.25
PriceGrabber (acquired by Experian) deal value = $485m or 13.8x est. 2006 earnings

Shopping.com est. 2006 earnings = $22.8m
Shopping.com (acquired by eBay) deal value = $476m or 20.9x est. 2006 earnings

Internet Retail Marketplaces - The Landscape at Glance

Importance of Customer Tracking: The Fine Art of Website Analytics

Web analytics defined

Online dictionary Webopedia.com defines web analytics as "the study of the impact of a Web site on its users." For online store owners, this definition should be broadened to include a study of website's impact on overall return on investment (ROI). While the science of measuring trends in web traffic has been around for some time, the latest web analytic offerings have really evolved. You can now track not only who is coming to the site but also how they found you and whether your efforts to attract customers are paying off. In the fiercely competitive online marketplace, web analytics can help better inform decisions to improve customer service and attract new business.

Track traffic trends

Usage patterns that can be examined using Web analytic software include statistics about new vs. repeat visitors, how long visitors stayed on a given page or the entire site, what links were clicked (i.e., the "click-stream" used), exit pages (including shopping cart abandonment rates), most frequently used keywords entered into the site's search engine, and much more. Typically, reports can be customized to rank statistics on a quarterly, monthly, or even daily basis. Many programs also let you mine technical data to assist with site maintenance (e.g., broken links and performance) or to gage which the web browsers and platforms visitors are most frequently using to access your site.

Gage effectiveness of campaigns

Perhaps even more importantly, today's web analytic solutions can be used to gage the ROI of online advertising and promotion campaigns. Reports can be obtained about:

• Ratio of visitor click-throughs from pay-per-click vs. natural search results.
  
• Success rates of pay-per-click based campaigns vs. organic search engine listings
  
• Keywords used in major search engines
  
• Conversion rates of customers
  
• Most frequently clicked banner ads
  
• Search engine robot / spider visits

Analyze - then optimize

Once pertinent data is collected and analyzed, it is important to make adjustments as needed. For example, webmasters can use data from traffic usage patterns to determine which areas of the site are popular and then streamline a site's design to create a better user experience.

At minimum, site owners and administrators will want to review key marketing metrics regularly to optimize the success of fee-based online advertising campaigns. Monitoring pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns, such as Google AdWords, will help you determine which keywords are (or are not) driving traffic to your site so you can fine-tune as needed. Conversion ratios-or the percentage of users who visit your website and complete your primary objective (i.e. purchase a product)-should also be carefully tracked. Some online vendors are even finding web analytics as valuable way to combat fraud. For example, careful inspection of PPC reports could help you detect whether a competitor is falsely inflating your click rate (and thus driving up your advertising costs) for a particular service.

Tools of the trade

Many paid services, like Google AdWords and Yahoo Search (Overture), include basic tools that show advertising performance data. There are also many free or open source general-purpose solutions. Google Directory provides a list of such tools.

More advanced commercial Web analytics tools range widely in price and features. Programs such as Sane's NetTracker allow for deep mining of data on many levels.

Viral Marketing 101: Let Your Customers Promote Your Online Business!

A good virus

Everything that we've been taught online and off says that we should prevent rather than spread viruses...right? Well, when it comes to creating a buzz about your online business, spreading a virus-or more accurately-everaging the power of viral marketing, could be just what the doctor ordered. Like a sneeze transmits the common cold, viral marketing entices Web sites or users to pass along a marketing message, escalating the growth of the message's visibility and influence. This type of "stealth" marketing can be very cost effective in reaching a large number of people about your website, product, or service

Already an epidemic

Chances are you've already been exposed to one or more viral marketing methods. Countless organizations have already put a wide variety of innovative strategies to work. The ground-breaking example of a viral marketing success story is Hotmail, the Microsoft-owned company that promotes its popular email service by appending an advertising teaser to the end of its user's email messages. Amazon.com, another great purveyor of viral marketing, uses many tactics. For example, the site's order confirmation page let's you input the email addresses of your friends/family and invite them to save 10 percent on an item you just bought. If they go to the site and buy the item, not only do they get a discount, but you get an Amazon store credit for the dollar value of their 10% discount!

Common tactics

Thankfully, you don't need a Microsoft- or Amazon- sized bankroll to deploy viral marketing tactics in your e-commerce site. Many leading e-commerce vendors have begun bundling some of the more popular features into their online store offerings. (GoECart has offered these features for some time.)

• Email-a-friend (e.g., "Recommend it" links)
  
• Electronic gift certificates
  
• Gift wrap (i.e., encourages customers to present gifts to friends)
  
• Customer reviews (e.g., ability to provide recommendations right on the order page)
  
• Asking customers to enter the details like birth date or important events upon checkout can also aid in personalizing viral marketing messages and building customer relationships.

Credibility is key

Viral marketing is becoming increasingly popular because of its low-cost (especially when compared with traditional advertising methods), high response rate from targeted users, and ease of execution. The obvious advantage is its ability to obtain a large number of interested people at an affordable cost. Its main weakness is that some tactics and/or overuse can come across as "spam", risking damage to your brand. To avoid appearing as spam, companies should limit the number of techniques they use and choose the ones they do employ wisely.

Here to stay

With its proliferation on many popular e-commerce sites, online shoppers will use (and even come to expect) relevant viral marketing features. Online storefronts should be ready with the features that are most appropriate to their business.

7 Simple Marketing Tips

Here are 7 simple marketing tips to help you boost your sales and profits quickly. All are easy to use and work for any business.

Tip 1:

You can constantly improve the effectiveness of your advertising by allocating 80 percent of your advertising budget to proven promotions and 20 percent to testing new things. When something new works better than your proven promotions, move it to the 80 percent group and start testing something else in the 20 percent category.

Tip 2:

Customers are usually receptive to more offers from you immediately after they buy. Follow up every sale with another offer for a product or service related to the one they just bought. Many will accept your offer ...producing an easy sale for you.

Tip 3:

Make your sales presentation more believable (and more effective) by converting general statements into specific descriptions. Instead of "quick and easy", explain exactly how quick and how easy. Also, reduce round numbers like "15 pounds" into specific odd numbers like "13.7 pounds". It sounds more authentic.

Tip 4:

Most people are more interested in getting value for their money than in getting a bargain. Find some low-cost ways to enhance the perceived value of your product or service. Then test raising your price. Don't be surprised if both your sales and your profit margin go up.

Tip 5:

Search for and test some alternative marketing methods you may be overlooking. That's how one internet marketer discovered direct mail postcards. They proved to be a highly effective and very low-cost way to generate traffic to her web site. Plus they conceal her marketing efforts from competitors who can see (and copy) what she does online.

Tip 6:

You can make your sales message more effective by presenting everything in terms of the benefit it provides to customers. For example, don't just list testimonials from satisfied customers. Point out that those testimonials prove you have an established history of delivering what you promise.

Tip 7:

Include a Questions and Answers page on your web site with the answers to frequently asked questions. It enables prospective customers to get instant answers to their questions ...and reduces the number of questions you have to answer yourself.

One More ...A Bonus Tip:

Avoid making any sales claim that sounds exaggerated ...even if it is true. A bold claim creates doubt in your prospect's mind and jeopardizes the sale. Reduce any bold claims to a more believable level. Each of these marketing tips reveals a simple, proven tactic you can use to boost your sales and profits quickly. All 7 are easy to use ...and have proven highly effective for any type of business.

About the Author: Bob Leduc spent 20 years helping businesses like yours find new customers and increase sales. He just released a New Edition of his manual, How To Build Your Small Business Fast With Simple Postcards ...and launched *BizTips from Bob*, a newsletter to help small businesses grow and prosper. You'll find his low-cost marketing methods at: http://bobleduc.com/ or call: 702-658-1707 After 10 AM Pacific Time/Las Vegas, NV

Article Copyright 2005 Bob Leduc

Secure Your Online Store with SSL

The threat is real

These days, you can't turn on the television, pick up a newspaper, browse your favorite news website, or flip through a magazine without learning about the latest security threats plaguing online businesses and consumers. And last month's disclosure by major credit card companies that over 40 million cards may have been compromised is evidence that even the leading financial institutions are not immune to the threats. Clearly, it's more important than ever to secure your web storefront-to safeguard your customer's private information and ultimately protect your bottom line! As an online store owner, one of the easiest and most responsible things you can do to secure the data submitted via your site is to implement secure sockets layer or SSL.

SSL to the rescue

The SSL protocol allows client/server applications to communicate in a way designed to prevent eavesdropping, tampering, and data forgery. SSL protects network access, online communications, and digital transactions by enabling a secure channel between your servers and your users. With SSL in place, information transmitted from your online store (e.g., via web forms) is encrypted before it is sent over the Internet.

When you connect to a secure web server such as https://www.domain.com/, the server authenticates itself to the web browser by presenting a "digital certificate". A digital certificate is an electronic file that uniquely identifies individuals and servers. Digital certificates allow the client (i.e. web browser) to authenticate the server prior to establishing the encrypted SSL session. Typically, digital certificate requests are reviewed and approved by an independent and trusted third party to ensure their validity. This "signer" of the digital certificate is known as a certification authority (CA). Popular CAs include Geotrust(http://www.geotrust.com/) and VeriSign(http://www.verisign.com/). A valid, signed certificate gives consumers confidence that they are sending personal information securely and to the right place.

Instill confidence

SSL certificates provide non-forgeable proof of your website's identity, and they are a great way to instill customer confidence in the integrity and security of your online business.

Without SSL security in place, information is transmitted in "clear text". This is practically an open invitation for hackers, script kiddies, and other mischief makers to use commonly available "packet sniffing" software to snatch the information while in transit.

Customers are becoming increasingly aware of the advantages of SSL security and will often (and with good reason) not purchase online from stores that have not implemented digital certificates and SSL. All major web merchants now use SSL security to encourage customers to buy online.

Thankfully, all credible e-commerce offerings, including GoECart, provide an option to secure your site (e.g., secure checkout via https://) through digital certificates. In GoECart, there is a single setting that needs to be configured once the SSL has been set for your server/site.

For more information

Two additional resources to help you get better acquainted with SSL, digital certificates, and e-commerce security are provided below:

VeriSign's Secure Socket's Layer: How it Works

GeoTrust's 10 Best Practices for Securing Your Enterprise

Is Your Online Store Search Engine Friendly?

Listen To This Article

Vital statistics

Consider the following:

• IMT Strategies reports that prospective customers find websites 10 times more often through search engines versus magazine ads, 38 times more frequently than direct mail, and 40 times more often than banner ads.
  
• Over 85% of the respondents to a Georgia Tech study indicated that prospects most often find websites through search engines and have intent to buy.
  
• More than 200 million searches are performed each day using the Google alone!

With information like this, it's obvious that you can't run the risk of your store not being ranked higher by the major search properties. Now consider these statistics:

• 78% of users will abandon their query if the first three pages of results do not yield an answer to their query.
  
• Fully 33% of users believe companies whose websites are found in top results are a major brand in their specific product/service category.
  

But with literally billions of pages indexed how do you make your site get higher rankings in organic search listings? This article summarizes some effective tactics you can employ for search engine friendly ecommerce.

Keywords are key

Your first step is to identify the major keywords that your customers will use in looking for your products and/or services. Tools like Wordtracker® (http://www.wordtracker.com/) and Overture® (http://www.overture.com/) can help you identify top keywords. Once keywords are established, you need to integrate them into the content present on your webstore and underlying code of the web pages in your site. This includes optimization of:

Title Tags: A brief description, that includes keywords, should appear in the tag for each page. Since search engines look in this tag and compare it with the content of that web page, all pages in your webstore should have unique titles. Your title tags should contain one or more keywords that are a reflection of what the web page is all about. Never use long, irrelevant titles.

Meta Tags: Meta tags, especially meta keyword and description tags, should be optimized with keywords that are consistent with the content of the web page. Again, you should write page specific meta tags optimized with right keywords for all the pages of your store.

Page Content: Content of the page plays a important role for generating search engine friendly ecommerce store. Your keywords should also be included in the text of your web pages that is visible to site visitors. However, this should be done in an optimal manner-instead of overloading the text on the page with keywords or not using them at all.

Filenames and URLs: It can really boost your rankings if your filenames contain important keywords. Note that most search engines are not able to index dynamic pages with variables like "%", "&", "$", " =", "+", or "?" in their web address. Therefore, if you have dynamic pages in your site make sure that you have mechanism to that make the dynamic page URL's appear to search engines as static pages.

ALT tag: Search engines rely on alt tags to understand the contents of the images in your site. Always use alt tags wherever images are used.

Other tactics

There are a variety of additional tactics you can employ to make your website search engine friendly and get it ranked in organic listings of search engines. These include developing an effective site map and adding H tags to the breadcrumb trails that guide search engine "crawlers" through the key pages in your site. Getting quality links to your site from other sites such as online directories, link exchanges, and other websites can also boost the "popularity" score of your pages - in turn giving you better rankings. Search engines also assign greater value to sites that update content frequently, so be sure to keep your site fresh to help it get noticed by the engines.

Don't get penalized

A word of caution: there are some technical factors that can prevent your web pages from getting a good ranking and in some cases may even result in your entire site being banned from a particular search engine. Things to watch out for include:

• Overuse or misuse of "doorway" or "cloaking" pages
  
• Slow web page loading time
  
• Junk code (such as overuse of keywords)
  
• Improper web page coding structure (e.g., bad HTML, CSS)

Listen To This Article

12 Reasons to Market With Postcards

If your marketing activity doesn't include postcards, you're overlooking a highly effective and very low-cost sales tool. Here are 12 of the many reasons postcards should be part of your marketing program...

1.Postcards Work for Any Business
Postcards can produce all kinds of sales activity for all types of businesses. For example, they can produce web site traffic for online marketers, floor traffic for retail stores, sales leads for direct marketers ...and just about any other type of sales activity a business wants.

2.Designing Postcards is Simple and Uncomplicated
Designing an effective postcard is not complicated. It can be as simple as printing your best small ad on a 4 x 6 card and sending it to a list of potential prospects. Postcards usually work best when the message is brief and the postcard looks at first glance like a message from friend.

3.Printing Postcards is Easy and Inexpensive
You can print postcards with your own computer for about 1 or 2 cents each ...or have them printed professionally for about 4 to 8 cents each.

4.There's a Special Low Postage Rate for Postcards
You can send any quantity of postcards by First Class Mail in the US for only 23 cents each. The only requirement is that your postcards must be at least 3 1/2 x 5 inches but no larger than 4 1/4 x 6 inches.

5.Postcards Nearly Always Get Read
Because postcards are delivered "ready to read", almost everybody will read it - even people who usually throw out other types of direct mail without opening it.

6.Postcards Produce Fast Results
Because postcards are simple and easy to use - they produce results fast. You can mail postcards within a few days of deciding to use them ...and you'll start getting sales activity 2 or 3 days later.

7.Postcards are effective for Generating Web site Traffic
One of the most effective postcard formats simply lists a few benefits of a product or service on the card and tells the reader to where they can get more information. This makes them ideal for generating traffic to a web site.

8.Postcard Multiply Themselves
Postcards are like small billboards - and they are easy to handle. They often get saved by recipients or passed on to others ...providing additional exposure of your advertising message.

9.Markets Can Be Precisely Targeted With Postcards
You can accurately target your best markets by sending postcards only to mailing lists of prospects likely to be interested in what you're offering ...and who also have a history of acting on offers that interest them.

10.Postcard Marketing Results Are Easy To Measure
Postcards normally generate over 90 percent of their total response within 7 to 10 days. This enables you to quickly and accurately evaluate the results of a postcard campaign.

11.Postcards Put You in Control of Your Sales Activity
You can quickly boost (or reduce) your sales activity anytime you want by simply regulating the number of postcards you mail and how often you mail them.

12.Postcards Conceal Your Marketing from Competitors
Most advertising uses mass media where your competitors hear or see what you are doing - and copy it. Postcard marketing is personal. Only you and your prospects are aware of what you are doing.

Postcards may be one of the best kept secrets of modern marketing. They're highly effective, very low-cost, simple to use ...and they work for any business. You're overlooking a profitable marketing tool if don't use them.

About Author: Bob Leduc spent 20 years helping businesses like yours find new customers and increase sales. He just released a New Edition of his manual, How To Build Your Small Business Fast With Simple Postcards ...and launched *BizTips from Bob*, a newsletter to help small businesses grow and prosper. You'll find his low-cost marketing methods at: http://bobleduc.com/ or call: 702-658-1707 After 10 AM Pacific Time/Las Vegas, NV

Increase Your Profits With An Upselling Offer

Upselling is a procedure designed to get more money from customers at the point of sale. It's a simple approach any business can implement quickly and get immediate results.

Customers will never be more receptive to an attractive offer from you than when they're paying you money. Develop the habit of offering your customers or clients an upgraded product or a related item at the time they make their first purchase.

Some businesses avoid upselling because they're afraid the customer may get irritated and not buy at all. I found the opposite is true. Customers appreciate your thoughtfulness in offering them an added benefit they didn't know about.

What to Offer

Think about your business. What else can you offer customers or clients while they're making their first transaction with you? Can you offer them...

• A discount on a related product or service?
  
• A volume discount if they buy more now?
  
• A special priced combination package including the initial product or service?

How to Present An Upselling Offer
Upselling has none of the characteristics usually associated with selling. It's simply offering an already receptive buyer an opportunity to enhance the value of his or her purchase.

Present your upselling offer casually, as an afterthought. For example, someone selling web site hosting might say the following when speaking in person or by phone with new customers:

"Your website will be up in 48 hours. If you'd like, we can double your server space, include unlimited autoresponders and a shopping cart for secure online ordering. The regular price for all of this is an additional $40 per month. But I'll give it to you for just an additional $25 if you order it today."

Most businesses report acceptance rates between 40% and 60% for their upselling offers. This is a big increase for so little effort. Plus, the profit from the upselling portion often exceeds the profit from the initial product or service because there is no advertising expense.

If you're not making upselling offers to every new customer or client, start doing it now. It's an easy way to boost your profits fast with little effort and no expense.

About Author: Bob Leduc spent 20 years helping businesses like yours find new customers and increase sales. He just released a New Edition of his manual, How To Build Your Small Business Fast With Simple Postcards ...and launched *BizTips from Bob*, a newsletter to help small businesses grow and prosper. You'll find his low-cost marketing methods at: http://bobleduc.com/ or call: 702-658-1707 After 10 AM Pacific Time/Las Vegas, NV.

Improve Shipping Options to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment

Imagine the following scenario: you visit your local supermarket, only to find that more than half of the shopping carts in the store have been left there in the store aisles, abandoned by their owners. Sounds a bit eerie, doesn't it? Well, according to current industry research, this is the sad reality for many e-commerce sites.

Recent reports from trusted sources such as the Yankee Group and DoubleClick show that more than 50 percent of online shopping cart sessions are in fact deserted. Among the top reasons cited for shopping cart abandonment: shipping options that are either too confusing or too expensive. Online store owners can improve their chances of order completion and get their e-commerce sites in "ship shape" by following this simple advice.

Five tips to streamline shipping options

1. Present shipping calculations to customers before check out.
Show the calculated shipping charges on pages that list the amounts of products purchased or on pages that appear even earlier in check out process . The goal should be to inform customers about shipping costs as early as possible. You should also ensure that all relevant shipping rates and information are placed in a prominent location in your store so visitors can review the shipping information anytime.

2. Provide real-time shipping calculators.
Offer web-based calculators from shipping providers so your customers can calculate shipping rates. Ensure that the calculators are linked prominently from the appropriate areas in your site.

3. Provide a variety of choices from popular shipping vendors.
Offer shipping services from reliable and well-recognized shipping carriers, such as UPS, DHL, and Federal Express. Show the rates for each delivery option like two-day shipping, overnight delivery, etc., and allow customers to choose the option which best meets their needs. A brief description of the features of each option should also be provided.

4. Offer live order tracking from your website.
Provide functionality that will let customers track the status of their orders right from your website. Shopping carts integrated with tools like UPS Online Tools offer more than just convenience-they also make the store look impressive and encourage visitors to spend more time on your site.

5. Streamline back-end order processes.
Unfulfilled orders do not promote a respectable image for your business. Streamline your supply chain, inventory levels, and order fulfillment systems before you begin taking orders. Then, follow through with each sale by ensuring customers get their merchandise in accordance with selected shipping and handling methods.

If it's free....

InternetRetailer.com informs, "This holiday season, free shipping tops the list of marketing promotions retailers plan to use, with 63 percent saying they expect to offer them."

If you decide to offer free shipping, it's important to do the math before you roll out a free or reduced shipping offer. For example, free shipping for a limited time on minimum order quantities and within a specific geographical region may help to entice new customers and increase sales.

Regardless of the type of promotion however, a careful profit analysis should be done to ensure that free shipping and other promotions will not adversely impact your online store's bottom line.

Are You Prepared for the 2005 Holiday Season?

Early this year, it was widely reported in the media that 2004 online holiday sales were up dramatically from 2003. For example, e-commerce data from VeriSign, Inc. showed that the 2004 holiday shopping season (Thanksgiving Day through Monday, December 27) yielded a 24 percent increase compared to the same period in 2003 for its customers. The trend will likely continue: a recent study by market research firm Forrester Research, reported that online retail sales will grow by 22% to a whopping $172 billion in 2005.

If you were in business last year, did your holiday sales perform in a manner consistent with the reported increases? Is your site ready for the increased demand of the 2005 holiday season? This article provides insights to help you prepare your webstore for the 2005 holiday shopping rush and beyond.

Provide secure ordering

If you're not already offering a secure shopping experience for your customers, the 2005 busy holiday season is a great time to begin. More and more customers now understand that https:// protected order forms mean that a site is secure, and many will not order unless your site is protected. If you have not yet set up your online store for SSL, you can purchase an SSL certificate from providers such as GeoTrust and VeriSign. For more information about the features and benefits of SSL, see last month's article on SSL (August 2005) issue of this newsletter.

Offer gift certificates

Did you know that gift certificates were among the most purchased items online during 2004 holiday shopping season? Offer gift certificates from your online store to promote brand awareness and increase sales. (GoECart's Gift Certificate module makes this easy.)

Test key features, such as site search

The pre-holiday season is also a great time to double check key functionality of your webstore, especially the "Search" button. Since many customers will be doing their holiday browsing and buying with shopping list in hand, many will use your online store's search functionality to look for specific items in your website. Try doing a search for items using the same keywords that you would expect to be used by customers. If the product doesn't appear at or near the top of your search results, optimize keywords and make other adjustments as necessary.

Design your site for success

If you're offering specialized holiday promotions, you may wish to rework the site design to "guide" customers to specific items or more information about the promotions. Be sure content is written in clear and concise language and images are optimized for download speed and placement. Test your site design on multiple browsers and platforms-especially the most popular browsers such as Internet Explorer and newer browsers gaining popularity like Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari. Since increased foot traffic is practically a guarantee over the holidays, you may wish to seize the opportunity to get customer feedback on your site design by running a small survey.

Optimize email campaigns

Without a doubt, thousands of e-merchants will be conducting targeted email campaigns this holiday season. Combine these legitimate campaigns with "spam", and you've got a holiday email overload problem waiting to happen. Make your holiday email campaigns stand out with these simple tips:

• Run campaigns early to beat the holiday rush.
  
• Customize and personalize emails for existing customers.
  
• Offer discounts to existing customers.
  
• Inform customers about recent changes made to improve customer service.
  
• Generate excitement with free shipping and other specialized promotions.

The Happy holidays

This busy holiday season may very well generate the highest demand since the birth of e-commerce. If you're the last-minute-shopper type, don't delay in optimizing your online store!Start your planning now to give yourself the gift of e-commerce success this holiday season

How To Reverse A "Slump" In Business - Fast

Every business experiences cycles of heavy sales volume and light sales volume. Periods of light sales volume are called business "Slumps".

Some business slumps are predictable. Every landscaping service expects a slump in landscaping jobs during winter months. Their usual strategy to maintain a flow of business in the winter is to promote a different service such as snow removal. For most businesses, however, slumps occur without warning and for no apparent reason.

Some slumps occur when you're spending the most time, money and effort on promoting business. When that happens, it's easy to panic and start replacing proven methods of promoting business with speculative ideas.

This reaction is especially hazardous for a small business struggling to grow. I know a business owner who almost lost her business when she panicked and reacted to a slump in business by suddenly changing all of her proven advertising messages.

I've experienced many business slumps over the years. Eventually I developed a simple procedure I can implement quickly to replace the business lost during a slump. You can copy this same procedure to reverse your business slumps when they occur.

The first thing to do when a slump occurs is to accept it as part of a normal business pattern. It isn't signaling the end of your business. Don't panic. But don't be complacent either. Give the problem your immediate attention. Begin by taking the following steps.

Try To Identify A Cause For The Slump

Determine if you can identify something specific likely to be causing the slump. For example:

• A recent change in your advertising or promotional activity.
• A direct competitor recently rolled out a huge new advertising campaign.
• A major news event had a negative impact on your industry ...such as the announcement of a government investigation of business practices in your industry.

You can develop a strategy to reverse the effects of a slump when you can identify a specific cause for it. Usually you won't be able to identify a specific cause. That's because there is none.

Most slumps are temporary and will eventually reverse themselves. However, don't ignore the problem and wait for it to go away. It may take a long time and you can lose a lot of business while you're waiting.

When There Is No Obvious Cause For The Slump

When a slump doesn't have an obvious cause, it's what I call a "normal" business slump. I've found the best way to overcome a normal business slump is to take immediate action to develop additional business fast.

The additional business supplements the current light flow of business and eliminates the impact of the slump.

Here are 4 actions I take immediately when I realize I'm in a slump. You can implement these same 4 actions in your business to reverse the effects of a business slump.

• Develop a special offer for existing customers/clients. Use a short deadline so they must take immediate action or forfeit the special offer. Advise them of the special offer using a fast but inexpensive method of communication such as email, faxes, postcards or even phone calls.
• Advise your recent prospects who did not take buying action of the same special offer. Use the same fast, inexpensive methods of communication listed above.
• Call your best customers and ask for their help. Explain that business is slow and you want to use the time to approach some potential new customers/clients. Ask them for referrals.
• Temporarily increase advertising in media where it is seen immediately (or almost immediately). For example, website and ezine ads, newspaper ads, First Class direct mail or postcards, radio spots, etc.

Business slumps can be beneficial. Sometimes a temporary action you take to reverse a slump is so effective you decide to continue it after recovering from the slump. The result is a permanent increase in your volume of business.

Copyright 2005 Bob Leduc

Bob Leduc spent 20 years helping businesses like yours find new customers and increase sales. He just released a New Edition of his manual, How To Build Your Small Business Fast With Simple Postcards ...and launched *BizTips from Bob*, a newsletter to help small businesses grow and prosper. You'll find his low-cost marketing methods at: http://bobleduc.com/ or call: 702-658-1707 After 10 AM Pacific Time/Las Vegas, NV

Countdown to Holiday Shopping Season 2005: Four Things NOT To Do

With the 2005 holiday shopping season nearly upon us-and poised to be the biggest e-commerce success story of all time-the importance of ensuring your online store is ready for the anticipated surge in demand cannot be overstated.

Last month, we offered some practical advice to help you prepare your web storefront for the flurry of holiday shoppers. (See "Are You Prepared for the 2005 holiday season?,") This month, we provide some additional guidance with four things you should refrain from during this holiday season.

Don't...work with second-rate systems

The holiday shopping season provides a great opportunity for you to earn new customers who will return to your online store time and again. And if you act now, there is still time to conduct a proper assessment of key systems and services and make necessary adjustments. For example, you still have time to upgrade a shopping cart that is laden with bugs or hosting services that are lacking in performance. At minimum, you should ensure that:

• Your website and servers are equipped to handle foreseeable spikes in traffic. The amount of activity will, of course, depend on the overall level of demand for your products and services, but generally anything less than a Tier 1 ecommerce hosting environment could cause you to lose business. (Note: GoECart provides Tier 1 ecommerce hosting services.) For larger sites, load balancing and testing solutions can also be explored.
• Online ordering is safe and secure. (See Secure Your Online Store with SSL)
• All key functionality of your online store has been thoroughly tested and is working properly. Features should be tested from the customer's perspective. If you haven't yet gotten around to making a "purchase" from your web store, order something today!

Don't...fail to advertise your store

The days of "build it and they will come" are a thing of the past. The importance of properly marketing your website in the "organic" (e.g., Google, Excite) and paid (e.g., Google AdWords, Overture) search engines cannot be overstated. Beginning a search engine optimization and submission campaign now could have you seeing traffic gains just in time for the peak holiday rush. (For more information see,"Is Your Online Store Search Engine Friendly?")

Don't...take orders but not fulfill them

This should go without saying, but statistics about online orders that invariably go unfilled each holiday season are sobering. Analyze your ordering mechanisms and workflow before you start taking holidays orders, and ensure deliveries arrive on or before the dates promised. An analysis should be done not only of order processing systems, but of inventory management, shipping, and fulfillment systems as well.

Don't...avoid listening to your customers

Customers are your best source of feedback. The "quiet period" before the holiday rush is an excellent time to review feedback collected during the previous year and to implement any suggestions that could lead to improved customer service. Further, by deploying rating and review features, such as GoECart's "Product Reviews" functionality, you can ask customers to leave feedback about products on your site to generate "viral marketing" buzz about your products. (See "Viral Marketing 101: Let Your Customers Promote Your Online Business!") Contact forms and focused usability tests with key customers are two other great ways to collect feedback.

The gift that keeps on giving

In summary, your goal should be more than about simply "making a sale" this holiday season. Seek to win customers who will also shop with you all year long-and over the holidays in 2006, 2007, and beyond!

Offer Online Gift Certificates to Ring In Extra Holiday Sales

According to recent data from the National Retail Federation (NRF) and other sources, sales of gift certificates and gift cards have experienced explosive growth over the last few years. No longer thought of as a "lazy shopper's" gift the stigma once associated with offering a certificate or card instead of a traditional present is a thing of the past. A staggering 73 percent of shoppers surveyed by the NRF last year said they expected to purchase one or more gift cards during last year's holiday season.

Major online retailers have taken notice: Amazon.com, L.L Bean, BLOCKBUSTER, Eddie Bauer, Overstock.com, and hundreds of others now offer the ability to purchase some form of a online gift certificate through their website. To stay competitive, smaller e-tailers are advised to consider supplementing existing product offerings with gift certificates too. The benefits are numerous, and when implemented properly in the online storefront, gift certificates can help the online store owner ring up additional sales-directly impacting the bottom line.

Quick and convenient

For the gift giver with increasingly less time to shop and more people to shop for (i.e., just about everyone!), online gift certificates offer a quick and convenient solution to what can often be a stressful shopping task. With web-based options available for just about every product category imaginable, gift certificates take most of the guesswork out of finding a gift for just about anyone. They can also reduce the chances of embarrassment on the part of the gift giver and disappointment on the part of the recipient. This can be especially relevant for shoppers seeking specialty and personal items. For example, a shopper may know that the recipient enjoys red wine but doesn't know whether they drink Shiraz, Merlot, or Zinfandel. In this case, a gift certificate from an online wine store bestows a simple yet thoughtful present.

Many happy returns

Industry experts also believe that some consumers are choosing gift certificates as a result of stricter return policies, which often deter shoppers from taking chances with their purchases.

Advantages for ecommerce storeowners

So what advantages do online gift certificates carry for online retailers? For starters, they provide one more channel for the retailers to generate business.
Other benefits include:

• Zero inventory overhead.
  
• Easy to sell (i.e., no shipping required - can be distributed via web page or email).
  
• Perception of providing quality customer service through convenience.
  
• Opportunities for up selling and other promotions (with both certificate buyer and
  recipient)
  
• Additional profit associated with partially claimed certificates (unclaimed balances equals
  added profit for the store owner)

Features to look for in Gift Certificates Software

If you are considering adding gift certificate capability to your online store, look for a Gift Certificates Software that lets you:

• Fully automate the process of gift certificate issuance and redemption.
  
• Distribute online gift certificates securely (i.e., to deter fraud)
  
• Customize the design of the online gift certificate (e.g.., ability to incorporate your store's logo to extend your brand).
  
• Personalize online gift certificate with the recipients name, customer-selected amount,
  and possibly a custom message.
  
• Accept multiple forms of payment for gift certificate purchases, including all forms of
  payment currently accepted for other products in the storefront.

Note: GoECart's online Gift Certificate module offers all of the above features and more; for more information visit http://www.goecart.com/ or

How To Boost Sales During The Holidays?

You can maximize your sales during the Holidays ...even if you have to deal with more intense competition - or if you normally experience a drop in business because your products and services are not commonly used for "gift giving".

What's the best way to get the attention of prospective customers and clients during the Holiday Season - and to motivate them to buy from you?...

...Give Them an Irresistible Offer They Cannot Refuse

Everybody wants to get a "special deal". Most people don't expect to find one during the Holiday Season. Surprise them with a Special Holiday Offer.

Make your Special Offer as attractive as you can afford. The greater its value to customers the more sales it will generate.

Here are 5 different offers you can use for almost any product or service.

1.Special Holiday Discount:
People don't expect discounts during the Holidays. Surprise them with an unexpected Holiday Discount Offer. It gets attention - and motivates many prospects to buy.

2.Special Combination Price:
Combine several products or services for a price that's lower than the total cost of buying each item separately. A combination offer increases the number of orders you get and the size of your average sale.

It increases your number of sales by generating orders from prospects who were only "shopping around".

It increases the size of your average sale by motivating buyers to spend additional money to get the "good deal" of your Special Combination Package.

3.Complimentary Bonus
Offer to include a complimentary bonus with each purchase. It doesn't have to cost you very much so long as it has high perceived value to your customer.

For example, I recently visited a web site offering special interest travel books. They offered a map of any country as a complimentary bonus with each order. I'm sure the map cost the site owner much less than its perceived value to the customer.

4.Complimentary Fast Delivery:
People want to receive something immediately after buying it ...especially during the Holidays. You can motivate them to buy by offering complimentary fast delivery. For example, a company selling personalized desk accessories offers complimentary overnight shipping during the Holidays.

5.Bill Me Later or Bill My Credit Card Later Option
This offer generates many sales you normally wouldn't get during the Holiday Season. It removes the customer's concern about spending too much money right now.
Tip: Always include a deadline for your offer. Prospects are more likely to take immediate action when faced with the risk of missing your offer.

Advertise Your Special Holiday Offer

Your Holiday Offer is short-lived. So use advertising methods that produce fast results. For example, send a brief email or postcard announcement to your customer or prospect list. Place online and off line ads that will run immediately after you place them.

Tip for Internet Marketers: Announce your Special Holiday Offer prominently near the top of your home page. Something as simple as the words, "Special Holiday Discount", will grab your visitor's attention and draw them into your web site.

Everybody likes to get a "special deal". But they don't expect to find one during the Holiday Season. Surprising them with a Special Holiday Offer will motivate many hesitant prospects to buy.

About Author:
Bob Leduc spent 20 years helping businesses like yours find new customers and increase sales. He just released a New Edition of his manual, How To Build Your Small Business Fast With Simple Postcards ...and launched *BizTips from Bob*, a newsletter to help small businesses grow and prosper. You'll find his low-cost marketing methods at: http://bobleduc.com/ or call: 702-658-1707. After 10 AM Pacific Time/Las Vegas, NV

Practice Customer Segmentation for More Targeted Marketing Campaigns

Customer segmentation, also referred to as market segmentation, is the practice of segmenting customers into groups of individuals with common characteristics. By gaining a better overall understanding of customers, then grouping them into categories, companies are able to better optimize marketing programs and allocate marketing dollars more effectively. For example, you wouldn't want to advertise beach balls to customers living in the North Pole, but you might offer a specialized promotion to your "best" customers (e.g., those who spend over a certain amount per year).

For online store owners, a baseline segmentation analysis can be accomplished using data points that have already been collected from existing customer registrations, order checkout information, and other sources.

Their can be two approaches to segmentation. The first approach, traditional segmentation, organizes customers by key variables such as demographics. The second approach, value-based segmentation, looks at customer needs as well as the costs of establishing and maintaining customer relationships. A brief introduction to each approach is provided below.

Traditional segmentation

Traditional approaches to customer segmentation group customers based on a number of variables that include:

• geographic variables, such as region of the world or country, country size, or climate
  
• demographic variables, such as age, gender, sexual orientation, family size, income, occupation, education, socioeconomic status, religion, nationality/race, and others
  
• psychographic variables, such as personality life-style, values, and attitudes
  
• behavioral variables, such as benefit sought, product usage rates, brand loyalty, product end use, readiness-to-buy stage, decision making unit, and others

Value-based segmentation

Today, the most successful companies practicing segmentation carefully consider overall customer needs and segment customers based on those needs and overall business value. While this strategy is less scientific than the traditional approach, companies that have been successful at assessing groups of consumers both in terms of the revenue they generate and the costs of establishing and maintaining relationships have been reaping great rewards. See How to Do Customer Segmentation Right? from CIO Magazine.

Software and solutions

Tools used to assist with segmentation analysis can range from multi-million dollar customer relationship management (CRM) software implementations to smaller software packages that can be used to important and analyze data from spreadsheets.

For the online store owner, the practice of web analytics can be a useful resource for profiling and segmenting your customer base.

Note: Also that GoECart's "Advanced Customer Group Module" (available as an add-on module to GoECart) provides features that let the storeowner segment its customer base into different groups. (See the Know Your GoECart section of this month's newsletter for details.)

Seven Small Business Marketing Tips

Here are 7 low-cost but highly effective marketing tips to help any small business find customers and generate sales quickly.

1. Don't Advertise Like a Big Business

Big businesses advertise to create name recognition and future sales. A small business can't afford to do that. Instead, design your advertising to produce sales ...now. One way to accomplish this is to always include an offer in your advertising - and an easy way for prospective customers to respond to it.

2. Offer a Cheaper Version

Some prospective customers are not willing to pay the asking price for your product or service. Others are more interested in paying a low price than in getting the best quality. You can avoid losing sales to many of these customers by offering a smaller or stripped down version of your product or service at a lower price.

3. Offer a Premium Version

Not all customers are looking for a cheap price. Many are willing to pay a higher price to get a premium product or service. You can boost your average size sale and your total revenue by offering a more comprehensive product or service ...or by combining several products or services in a special premium package offer for a higher price.

4. Try Some Unusual Marketing Methods

Look for some unconventional marketing methods your competitors are overlooking. You may discover some highly profitable ways to generate sales and avoid competition. For example, print your best small ad on a postcard and mail it to prospects in your targeted market. A small ad on a postcard can drive a high volume of traffic to your website or generate a flood of sales leads for a very small cost.

5. Trim Your Ads

Reduce the size of your ads so you can run more ads for the same cost. You may even be surprised to find that some of your short ads generate a better response than their longer versions.

6. Set up Joint Promotions with Other Small Businesses

Contact some non-competing small businesses serving customers in your market. Offer to publicize their products or services to your customers in exchange for their publicizing your services to their customers. This usually produces a large number of sales for a very low cost.

7. Take Advantage of Your Customers

Your customers already know and trust you. It's easier to get more business from them than to get any business from somebody who never bought from you. Take advantage of this by creating some special deals just for your existing customers ...and announce new products and services to them before you announce them to the general market.

Also, convert your customers into publicity agents for your business (See "ViralMarketing 101: Let your Customers Promote your Online Business"). Develop an incentive for them to tell associates and friends about the value of your products or services. An endorsement from them is more effective than any amount of advertising - and it is much cheaper.

Each of these 7 marketing tips provides a simple, low-cost way for any small business to find customers and generate sales quickly.

About Bob Leduc
Bob Leduc spent 20 years helping businesses like yours find new customers and increase sales. He just released a New Edition of his manual, How To Build Your Small Business Fast With Simple Postcards ...and launched *BizTips from Bob*, a newsletter to help small businesses grow and prosper. You'll find his low-cost marketing methods at: http://bobleduc.com/ or call: 702-658-1707 After 10 AM Pacific Time/Las Vegas, NV

Comparison Shopping Engines: Five Success Tips for Merchants

This is the second article in our series about the wildly popular union of search engines and e-commerce: comparison shopping engines. Last month, we provided an analysis of the pricing policies of several major comparison engines (see "Comparison Shopping Engines Bring Customers Who Are Ready To Buy"). This month, we provide five tips to help your online store get the most from this new medium.

Tip #1 - Size up the competition

Comparison shopping engines allow visitors to compare the product listings of multiple online stores from a single screen. Since your products are being directly compared (often side-by-side) with the products of your competitors, it is imperative that you do your homework and price products competitively! One of the benefits of the grid format used by many of these engines is that it makes finding out what your competitors are charging easy.

Tip #2 -Write attractive product descriptions

The way you word the descriptions of your products is second only to price in your quest to get visitors to click through to your site. Be clear and concise in describing product features. For highly competitive product categories, review competitor descriptions carefully and determine how you might set yourself apart. If you have the resources, consider outsourcing the writing task to a professional copy writer.

Tip #3 - Link to the right place

Many online storeowners make the mistake of directing the comparison shopping engine user to a suboptimal page in their website. Be warned: repeating this mistake is a surefire way to discourage visitors from buying your products. Visitors rely on comparison shopping searches to lead them directly or very close to the "buy now" page for products. Make sure you bring them there! A visitor looking to buy a particular widget wants to be take to a page where they can buy that widget-not to the site's home page or "gateway" page in the site.

Tip #4 - Perform web analytics for ongoing improvement.

As with any properly executed online marketing strategy, you'll need to stay on your toes and monitor the return on investment (ROI) of your comparison engine advertising regularly. Always keep tabs on the expenses and the income you received from each click-through from these shopping search engines and make adjustments accordingly. (For more information about web analytics, see "Importance of Customer Tracking: The Fine Art of Website Analytics")

Tip #5 - Follow the rules.

Each shopping engine has its own rules and guidelines for submitting, processing and displaying your items in their catalog. Failure to adhere to these guidelines closely could result in you being penalized or wasting time performing manual submissions that could otherwise be automated. Pay special attention to guidelines for "product feeds;" properly configuration of the feeds will hasten the process of going live.

The bottom line of any search engine marketing strategy is to increase qualified leads so that you can reap a solid return on your investment. However, continuous involvement and ongoing improvement are both essential in order for you to be successful. If you are a new to search engine marketing or lack the time required to effectively monitor and manage a comparison shopping initiative, we encourage you to seek advice of professional firms.

Note: GoECart's sister division, MachInteractive, provides professional search engine consulting services.

Ring in 2006 with Extended Holiday Sales

As all good things must come to end, the 2005 holiday online shopping season will soon draw to a close. However, with some careful planning, the months of January and February can provide online store owners with a unique opportunity to extend holiday sales and prime your storefront for success in the new year as well. So put down that glass of egg nog and prepare to ring in a successful new year with the following e-commerce advice.

Plan a Clearance Sale

Like many brick-and-mortar retailers, online retailers can launch holiday clearance sales by selling products (e.g., overstocks or holiday underperformers) at reduced prices. Promoting a "Holiday Clearance Event" as a limited duration event can help to energize sales immediately after the holidays are over.

Conduct a Survey

The holiday season provides a great opportunity to analyze customer behaviors and the overall success of the website and marketing campaigns. How did customers find you? Which products did they buy most often? Which features of the web site did visitors like best? Were they able to check out quickly and easily? Are there any areas that need improvement? One way to get answers to these questions and others is to run a customer satisfaction survey. The survey could be sent via email or linked off your site's home page. You can offer a special discount or other promotion to increase participation levels.

Update Your Home Page

Updating your home page immediately after the holidays will impress shoppers who visited your site during the peak shopping season. A few simple updates to the site's home page content can go a long way to keep the site looking fresh and add credibility to your e-commerce venture. For example, you could include a "Thank you" note to customers for their patronage over the holidays, advertise a New Year's Sale, or the special clearance event mentioned previously. You may wish to advertise a successful holiday product to new customers-or create a new opportunity through "up selling." For example, if many customers purchased an electronic device from your site over the holidays, you might consider advertising related accessories for that device.

Continue Free Shipping

If you can afford to extend holiday offers like free shipping to help win over new customers, why not do it! This will help to set you apart from competitors as well as increase customer loyalty. Combining an extended free shipping offer with a clearance event could prove to be a boon for post holiday sales. Consider advertising any planned post holiday sales or including coupons in your holiday shipments to entice the customers to come back. (See: "Improve Shipping Options to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment")

Persevere with Online Marketing

Ongoing search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the best ways to bring continuous traffic to your site, so don't neglect to perform SEO after the holidays! If you haven't already started advertising in pay-per-click (PPC) search engines such as Google AdWords, you can set up campaigns in advance and time them to become active just as the holidays come to a close. This could really give you an edge over the competitors who have exhausted holiday marketing budgets. Similarly, continue email campaigns towards the end of the holiday shopping season to announce clearance sales and upcoming promotions.

Why Use Permission-Based Email Marketing?

The goal of all marketing is to attract interest in, build desire for, and generate sales of your products or services. Email marketing is a perfect medium to pick up where other marketing leaves off. Email marketing is still one of the most cost effective ways to contact prospects and customers. It's far cheaper than traditional bulk postage mail and in many cases can have a much larger impact on immediate sales and long-term relationship strength than traditional advertising.

When done correctly, email marketing can be an extremely powerful and effective marketing technique. It's a medium that allows a buyer and seller to freely communicate with one another and build a relationship based on value and trust. When done incorrectly, however, email marketing can be destructive, erode brand equity, and turn your happy clients into litigious flamers. It is for this reason that one must make sure they send only permission-based email communications to their subscribers.

Before we proceed any further, let's define exactly what permission-based email marketing is. It is important to note that there are two types of email marketing. One can either send unsolicited email promotions or send out emails only to persons who have requested to receive them. Unsolicited email is, of course, called spam. Sending spam will ruin any legitimate organization's reputation and brand value faster than mold grows on bread that is left outside in the middle of summer. Rule number one of becoming an intelligent email marketer is to not send unsolicited email

Permission-based email marketing, on the other hand, is used effectively everyday by hundreds of thousands of organizations to build the value of their brands, increase sales, and strengthen the relationships they have with their clients and subscribers. The key difference, of course, is that these senders are only sending messages to persons who have requested to receive them.

Let's take a second to understand the key difference between spam and permission-based emails.

The Axiom of Value

For the last 100 years, companies have relied on traditional advertising in the form of catchy jingles, TV commercials, billboards, print ads in newspapers and magazines, direct mail, hot air balloons, and waving mascots. The technique is to interrupt a radio listener, TV viewer, or magazine reader with an attention grabbing ad that compels the consumer to buy the company's product or at least have the product closer to the forefront of his or her mind next time the individual is making a buying decision.

In most instances, advertising is acceptable to the consumer. Most people don't mind seeing ads while watching television, listening to the radio, or reading magazines-or at least they understand that these ads are necessary in order to receive the content they are seeing, reading, or hearing. While technologies like TiVo, DVR, and satellite radio are challenging advertisers to come up with new methods of advertising, other technologies such as Internet television require users to watch a 30-second advertisement prior to the start of a show. The point is, as long as value is provided, consumers will be willing to be exposed to a few advertisements.

This same axiom holds true online. As long as your web site provides content that people value, visitors will continue returning to the site even if there are a few banner ads or Google AdWords boxes within the page layout. While some web sites, such as WSJ.com, have successfully switched to a subscription-based model, many more web sites rely on banner, box, skyscraper, and contextual advertisements to earn the bulk of their income.

The same axiom, that as long as value is provided, consumers will be willing to be exposed to a few advertisements, also holds true with email. As long as one provides value-whether by providing content on a topic a recipient is interested in or a discount off a product related to one purchased previously-people will allow you to continue to contact them. Each and every email you send of course contains your logo, information on your products and services, and links to your web sites. These items are the advertising and should be surrounded on all sides by the items which make the communication actually add value to the lives of your readers.

Spam however, by its very nature, breaks the axiom. Unsolicited bulk email very rarely has any value. Spam is usually irrelevant, always impersonal, and rarely helpful. Everyone with an email inbox knows how aggravating it is to sort through forty new emails to only find two that are from persons you know. While spam may make money for persons in Eastern Europe promoting fake drugs, I feel strongly that sending spam will always have a net negative impact on any legitimate organization.

For this reason, we strongly recommend only sending permission-based email, also known as opt-in email. Permission-based email marketing can be an extremely effective way to increase visitor-to-sale conversion rates, build strong relationships with your customers, and turn your one-time buyers into lifetime product evangelizers who recommend your organization to everyone they know. Permission-based email marketing allows companies to develop and sustain relationships with their prospects and consumers by creating value. Permission marketing is about "turning strangers into friends and friends into customers" as Seth Godin likes to say.

The nature of permission marketing-building a relationship with a prospect or expanding the relationship with an existing customer over time-allows you to concentrate on the prospects and customers who are really interested in what you have to sell and are more than willing to become repeat customers.

The Five-Step Process of Permission Email Marketing

There is a simple five-step process in putting a successful permission-based email marketing campaign in place. This process is reviewed below.

1. Start using a permission-based email marketing software that allows you to easily create newsletters, automatically manage subscribes, unsubscribes, bounces, and view reporting statistics like opens and clickthroughs.

2. Decide on the type and frequency of email communication you will be sending. We recommend sending at least a monthly newsletter. You can certainly send multiple newsletters if you sell different types of products. You can also send promotional messages offering a discount or coupon for a product or service.

3. Add a sign-up form to your web site so you can start collecting subscribers and import any existing lists of subscribers that have already requested your communications. It is generally also safe to import the names of anyone who has done business with you in the past year, provided you will be sending content relevant to what they purchased.

4. Create a good email template by using a template provided within the email software, having your in-house team create one, or using the custom design services of the email software company.

5. Develop quality relevant content for your newsletter or message and send it out to your list. Continue sending your newsletters, announcements, or promotions with consistent frequency. As your list grows, you will notice increased traffic (and if applicable, increased sales) on the day of and the days following an email send.

By providing quality relevant content you will succeed in keeping your brand mindshare at the front of the mind of your customers and cement strong relationships with your subscribers.

Guest Article by Ryan Allis

Web Writing 101: Write Content that Sells

Online store owners take note: writing for the web is different than writing for print. Let's review that again: writing for the web is different than writing for print. In order to determine how to best write for the web one must first understand how users read on the web. Recent studies conducted by web usability gurus John Morkes and Jakob Nielsen revealed that 79 percent of web users merely scan web pages for content, instead of reading them word-for-word. So what does this mean for web page authors? For starters, it means less is more.

Be concise and precise

Ecommerce site owners in particular must take special care that key selling points of products are not lost in long-winded and wordy web pages. In the Nielson-Morkes studies, an examination of five different writing styles found that a website scored:

• 58 percent higher in usability tests when it was written concisely
• 47 percent higher when text was able to be quickly scanned by users
• 27 percent higher when it was written in an objective instead of a promotional style

Combining these three changes into a single site that was concise, easily scanned, and objective resulted in a whopping 124 percent higher measured usability.To increase your chances of having your web content actually read by visitors to your site, make sure that text is:

• Short and to the point, with one main idea per bullet or paragraph
  
• 50 percent of the word count of its paper equivalent (Tip: You can provide external links to printable PDF files for more detailed information.)
  
• Free from typos, grammatical mistakes, and spelling errors so as not to lose credibility with the reader
  

A wise person once said, "A picture conveys a thousand words." Web authors will also do well to keep this in mind as they construct web content. Images, diagrams, and even multimedia can be more effective than text in many cases.

Know your audience

While the importance of brevity online cannot be overstated, you must also take into account the knowledge level of your target audience. For example, when writing for a highly technical audience, care should be taken so as to not insult the intelligence of your readers. When writing for the technology savvy, it would most likely be acceptable to include industry terminology, acronyms, or technical details in your content. By the same token, if you are selling a highly technical product to a non-technical audience, special care must be taken to avoid technical jargon, define acronyms, and offer additional explanation where needed. How do you know the level of detail that your customers expect? Ask them.

Write action-oriented content

Unlike print, TV, or radio, the web is by nature an interactive medium. Web surfers will move on very quickly if their interest isn't grabbed and held. If you want users to take a particular action, don't encourage them to move on by beating around the bush. Use action oriented words like "Order Now" or "Contact Us." If you can engage surfers with interactive website features-such as Flash animation technology, live help, or interactive chat-even better. Remember, your nearest competitor's website (the one with all the cool bells and whistles) is just a click away!

Don't oversell

While ecommerce merchants need to emphasize the key selling points of product offerings, "marketing-ease" and "sales-y" language is best saved for printed materials and brochures (if it is used at all). Web studies have shown that writing presented in an objective and factual style will convert web browsers into buyers more readily than flowery, over-hyped content. While you certainly may be able to say your widget is "one-of-a-kind" or "user friendly," advertising your products as "miraculous","mind-blowing", or "amazing" could really turn some readers off.

Highlight key points

Knowing that web readers will skim your pages quickly should dictate both the style of your writing and the overall presentation of your pages. Multiple paragraphs of text appearing one after the other on a screen are a turn off. Similarly, forcing users to scroll through long pages of text is also a no-no. Shorten your text as much as possible, and don't be afraid to use blank space, which will make pages less information dense. Typographical style and formatting conventions can be used to call attention to key points. Usability experts recommend that you:

• Keep web pages short.
  
• Create effective boldface headlines to separate paragraphs of text.
  
• Highlight important words in sentences using bold, color, and similar methods.
  
• Use bulleted points to explain key product features.
  

Back to Basics: Online Selling in 2006

Ahh, a new year! The start of a brand new year provides an excellent time to evaluate your ecommerce potential for the year ahead. Whether your new year's resolution includes migrating a traditional brick and mortar business to the web or revitalizing an existing ecommerce site, a review a key fundamentals can benefit ecommerce newcomers and veterans alike.

Get Found

Attracting visitors to your web site has always been-and is still-the vital pathway to online success. That said, you must make it simple for customers and prospects to find you. Is your website displayed prominently in the results of major search engines? (See Is Your Online Store Search Engine Friendly?) Are you leveraging new advertising options for ecommerce sites? (See Comparison Shopping Engines Bring Customers Who Are Ready To Buy). If you didn't get the results you wanted from last year's online marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, it may be time to get professional help. Take the first step by completing this simple SEO challenge

Content is Still King

Despite advances in virtual reality, your customers still can't try on that cashmere sweater, taste a chocolate truffle, or test the latest cologne through your website. This is, of course, because they simply cannot feel, smell, or taste your products online! The content on your site therefore becomes critical in communicating product value. The art of ecommerce is all about how savvy you become marketing and describing your products effectively. "Feelings" must be transformed into literary expressions using concise but descriptive language, high-quality images, and even multimedia, when necessary. Product descriptions should be clear and concise and should also communicate value over the competition. (See Writing for the Web, in this GoECart eNewsletter). Of course, please make sure that you do not go against the search engine rankings while doing so.

The Customer is Still King (Too)

Online store owners should seek to provide innovative methods to serve customers and keep them coming back to the site time and again. For example, customer segmentation can be used to reward repeat customers. (See Practice Customer Segmentation for More Targeted Marketing Campaigns). Opportunities should be provided for customers to leave feedback (e.g., through surveys and feedback forms), and the best ideas should be implemented in order to provide a better overall experience for all customers. Remember, your nearest competitor is only a click away!

Security is Still Paramount

Customers will likely remain skeptical about entering credit card and similar financial information on the web for a long time to come, especially for new sites they are not familiar with. Therefore, online store owners must continue to take steps to make customers feel as secure as possible. All forms requiring submission of confidential information should be secured. (See Secure Your Online Store with SSL) Offering trusted payment processing solutions such as those available from PayPal and PayFuse will also help. Still further action should be taken to ensure that backend systems (especially those which also contain customer data) are secure-both from physical and online threats. Online store owners must also be sure to promote the security methods they use on the website.

Remember the User Experience

You must also continue to make the shopping and buying experience as simple and as user friendly as possible. Otherwise you risk diverting viable business away from your store. Mistakes often made on ecommerce sites include poor navigation, lengthy check out processes, confusing shipping policies, unsecured order forms, and slow loading product pages and images.

Happy New Year!

While the start of the new year provides a good time for reflection and planning, those online stores that will achieve the greatest success are the ones that will practice fundamentals day in and day out. As we embark on the year ahead, we at GoECart wish you all the best in your ecommerce endeavors!

Dealing with Difficult Customers: How to Resolve Customer Complaints Effectively

It's an unavoidable fact of being a business owner: you will eventually encounter an unhappy customer, an impatient customer or someone who is just downright difficult to please. For the online store owner, handling the irate online customer "virtually" needs tact and timely execution. In this article, we'll provide sound advice for dealing with customers that be summarized by the golden rule of customer service: treat your customers-even difficult customers-as you expect to be treated yourself.

Is the Customer Really ALWAYS Right?

In a word, yes! Providing great service to your customers is an ongoing challenge. Providing great service to angry, unrealistic, or irate customers can be an exceptional challenge. When the time comes to address an irate online store customer, it's best to be prepared with a pro-active strategy so you're not caught off guard in the heat of the moment.

The Better Business Bureau Recommends...

The Better Business Bureau recommends the following tips for dealing with unhappy customers:

• When you receive your customer's complain, put yourself in their shoes and try to see the problem as though it were your own.
  
• Disregard outrageous claims or expressions of frustration and stick to the central issue(s).
  
• Acknowledge your customer's distress and apologize for it (even if it's not your fault).
  
• Respond quickly and as briefly as you can.
  
• Offer a settlement, a compromise, a goodwill gesture, or some options. Don't just dig in your heels, claiming that truth is on your side and that the other party deserves no consideration.

Do:

• Listen.
  
• Show empathy.
  
• Remain calm and respectful.
  
• Acknowledge the anger.
  
• Apologize without accepting blame.
  
• Agree with the person who is angry.

Don't:

• Debate the facts.
  
• Ask "why" questions.
  
• Jump to hasty conclusions.

Other Tips

Make complaining easy:
Provide customers with an easy method for venting their feelings. This can be done by placing contact form links at prominent locations on the storefront-and adding sentences like, "Are you satisfied? If not, please contact us or help us improve."

Respond Fast:
It's a good idea to respond to complaining customers more quickly than to those who are satisfied: criticism spreads quicker than appreciation, and with the current pervasiveness of online bulletin boards, newsgroups, blogs, wikis, etc. criticism on the web not only spreads fast, it sticks.

Test the Waters:
Do you generally know whether customers are satisfied with the ecommerce experience on your website? For many online storeowners the answer to this question is a resounding "No." A simple way to get feedback is to create an online survey and market it to customers who have purchased via your site.

Shopping Cart Abandonment: Controlling the Uncontrollable

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It happens all too often: a visitor adds products to the shopping cart in your online store but then leaves your site without completing the checkout process. In ecommerce circles, this peculiar phenomenon is referred to as "shopping cart abandonment," and it is a widely recognized problem throughout the industry. In fact, recent ecommerce studies have shown that between 25 and 75 percent of shoppers abandon their online shopping carts before completing the checkout process.

Here are some tips that will help you reduce shopping cart abandonment:

Make pricing clearly visible

The merchant should take special care to include pricing and any terms and conditions right on the product page. The idea is to provide a complete picture to customers so they can make well-informed choices before entering the checkout process.

Advertise the security features of your storefront

Apprehensive online shoppers will not enter their precious financial data on your site unless they are sure that it will not leak out or be inappropriately used. Early in the checkout process, emphasize to shoppers that your web storefront is secure. Be sure to include any relevant third-party security compliance; the VeriSign Secured Seal Program is a great example of how security features can be advertised to build trust.

Build a better check out page

You can increase the value of the page that summarizes your customers' online order by highlighting satisfied customer testimonials, special shipping options, and discounts. Having these "visual cues" on your checkout pages will go a long way to increase the overall legitimacy of your web storefront in the mind of your customers.

Provide competitive shipping options

Confusing shipping options and expensive shipping rates are two often-cited reasons that online shoppers abandon their shopping carts during the checkout process. (See Improve Shipping Options to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment.) For this reason, provide as many shipping options as possible, include various options for each shipping provider, and be sure to let customers compute shipping rates as early as possible in the check out process.

Streamline the checkout process

Make the checkout process simple and swift. Clearly label buttons for each step during checkout, and consider using a breadcrumb trail so that customers will know exactly where they are in the process. A lengthy checkout process will surely entice visitors to leave your store. Goal: Make it as easy as possible for customers to get to the final "buy" step!

Provide intuitive error messages

Customers and prospects will inevitably make mistakes when checking out of your web storefront. Help customers resolve errors via intuitive error messages that written in easy-to-understand language. Include a prominent telephone number for customer service in the event that customers are unable to help themselves. Prospects will surely leave your site if they are unable to figure out what to do next!

Track key shopping cart metrics

Track shopping cart metrics to determine at what stages the most common errors are occurring. Metrics that will help you combat shopping cart abandonment include the percentage of visitors that use the cart, the percentage of carts that become a purchase, the percentage of carts that start checkout, and the percentage of carts that start and complete checkout.

Listen to customer feedback

Soliciting and analyzing customer feedback will provide you with key insights pertaining to shopping cart abandonment from your online store. Some ways to get feedback include usability studies, focus groups, and surveys. You could also include a "Suggestion Box" that links to a web form on your site.

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Accept Telephone Orders to Increase Reach and Revenue

As an online store owner, assisting customer with additional ordering channels can help increase reach and sales. Allowing your customer to book order over the phone is a good first step in that direction. Phone orders provide your customer with an alternative choice to order, while giving them the flexibility to "shop online" even when they are not online.

In this article, we highlight process, benefits, and tips to promote phone orders on your website.

How Do Phone Orders Work?

The process is simple:

1. A customer, who has registered with your store previously, informs you about the product that he or she wants to purchase.

2. You, as the online store administrator, take the customer's orders over the telephone and then submit the orders through the administration panel of your online store.

3. The order invoice is created.

Please note: Many ecommerce solutions do NOT support placing orders by the store administrator. (GoECart provides robust support to accept & process phone and mail orders. See http://www.goecart.com/support/shopping-cart-comparison-PDGShoppingCart.aspx.)

Key Benefits

The greatest benefit of offering an option to order via Phone is the increased flexibility provided to online customer. Other benefits include those listed below:

• Customers can decide to buy at a later time
  Customers are not forced to decide and place the order in a single visit. A customer can copy down your phone number, ruminate and place the order at a later date. This allows you to target research-oriented customer who might want to consider things carefully before buying a product.
• Customer and Merchant can engage in a lively two-way dialog
  Ecommerce does not typically allow for "live" interaction, directly and in real time. Ordering via phone allows customer to interact with a representative of your store. Questions can be immediately resolved ensuring that the order gets placed faster. This level of interaction with customers also provide an excellent opportunity to cross-sell or up-sell the products -and increase order value.
• Customers can place orders without being on the Internet
  Customers often make impulse buying decision. Offering a phone number to place an order ensure that you're ready to take the order whenever customers are ready to buy -even from a location that may not be web-accessible.

Promoting Ordering through Phone/Mail at the Web Storefront

We suggest following ideas to promote this functionality at the storefront:

• Display the Telephone Number at a prominent location on your Website
  The telephone number should be displayed at a prominent location to generate the required attention-like the header of the website or the bottom navigation. Also, through basic web analytics, you can identify pages with high exit rates and place the phone number on such pages.
• Display the Telephone Number during marketing communications
  Mention this option in all communications send out to your customers like marketing collateral, promotional emails and response to the questions through emails.
• Advertise your phone number via search engines
  You can also market the functionality to book orders via telephone in search engines. Many search engines now offer a service working on the principle of "cost per call."

Ecommerce need not necessarily depend solely on online sources. You can develop your business effectively by utilizing offline mediums as well. Ordering via phone or email is one such example of how offline and online channels can co-exist harmoniously and in a way, is a win-win situation for both merchants and consumers.

Improve Site Search Functionality to Increase Customer Satisfaction

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Now that local or "on-site" search capability has become more pervasive, the ability for online shoppers to locate desired products and services has increased manifold. Instead of spending time and effort browsing through a website, online shoppers can simply type in a few keywords and -abracadabra- the product or service they are seeking appears right in front of them! As a result, online shoppers have become increasingly dependant on local site search functionalities.

Given both the popularity of on-site search and the short time most visitors spend on a website, it is imperative for online merchants to provide better site search capabilities. In this article, we provide you with tips to improve overall site search experience of your visitors.

Improving the Site Search Experience

Today's site search tools have moved much beyond a simple text box that search only through HTML Meta data. Site search functionalities have evolved to provide a visitor with accurate results and provide greater flexibility to define a search term.

Make Site Search Customizable

Online buyers have come to expect both simple (full text) and advanced search capabilities on ecommerce sites. An advanced search feature typically allows user to search based on specific criteria's like price, weight, and manufacturer.

A well-crafted and comprehensive advanced search can be used to guide customers more effectively. For example, a visitor looking to buy a Toyota costing $10,000, should be able to select Toyota on the advanced search page and define a price range of $8-12K. The result of such well defined search would save a customer the ordeal of scrolling through a list of non-related products.

Make Site Search Relevant

Similarly, if a customer searching an online gift website for "rose flowers" is returned results related to "Sunflower cosmetics," it's very likely that visitor would leave the store with a bad impression about that entire online business. Thus, it is mandatory to build a relevant search capability that does not return irrelevant results.

Make Site Search Fast

Many shoppers consider site search as the fastest way to reach to the desired product. The last thing they want is to have the search results being displayed at a slow pace. Make sure that the site search engine is fast enough to process and retrieve any search results quickly, even incase of websites with large number of products.

Make Site Search Informative

Search results should provide precise information about a product and allow visitors to make buying decision without visiting the individual product page. Important information that should be displayed in search results are product name and its price.

Site Search Functionality Paramount for Web Merchants

If you're currently looking for a ready-made ecommerce solution, make sure that you fully understand its search functionality, assuming it is available. Look for a shopping cart that provides powerful search settings, so that you can control the requirements for search results, as your business grows. (Note: GoECart's new site search capability is robust and comprehensive.)

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Make Your Online Store Memorable

Want to know the key to ecommerce success? Simply figure out a way to ensure that customers and prospects will remember your ecommerce site the next time they are in the market for your product or service. This article provide several tips to help you increase both brand awareness and recognition with the goal of making your site more memorable in the mind of your customer.

1) Create a compelling brand identity.

An important first step in setting up your web store is the selection of a compelling domain name. If you're just getting started, it may seem like all of the good domain names are taken. Don't settle for an ultra long domain or one that is sub par! Keep brainstorming-the next "Amazon" or "eBay" will come to you! We also recommend that you:

• Enlist the help of professional designer to help you create a logo and brand identity that fits the image of your business.
  
• Display the logo prominently on every page of website.
  
• Integrate your logo into all collateral (e.g., packing slips, marketing promotions) to create a consistent brand image of your business.

2) Develop an appealing web storefront.

Appealing does not mean using bright colors. Your web storefront should be designed to match the requirements and tastes of your target audience. Consider conducting usability tests to ensure that your store design is simple to navigate and easy to use for your customers. Visit http://www.useit.com/ for advice on usability and guidance on how to create an intuitive "user experience" for your customers.

3) Build trust.
It is highly unlikely that customers will enter their credit card number and other personal information on your site, unless they feel that they can trust you. One way to help build trust on the web is to ensure that you have all of the appropriate security mechanisms in place-then let your customers know about them! For example, the VeriSign Secure Site Program provides a simple way to let customers know that your site is using SSL security and that forms on your site are secure. Visit http://www.verisign.com/ for more information. You might also want to consider creating a privacy statement and linking to it from every page in your site. TRUSTe (http://www.truste.com/) provides information and advice on how to create a privacy statement.

4) Make shopping simple.

Do not complicate things to an already confused customer. Make product selection simple. This can be done by proper display of featured products, icons and products images where appropriate, and a simple well-defined navigation structure.

5) Increase customer interactivity.

A dull and boring shopping experience is the best way to make your site forgettable! A few ways to increase customer involvement in the shopping experience include: coupons, ratings, reviews, and letting customers to track their own shipments.

6) Test, test, and test some more!

Another great way to lose business is to have functionality on your site that does not work properly. Shopping cart error messages and slow performance are unacceptable in today's highly competitive ecommerce landscape. After all, your competitors' websites are just a click away. Ensure that you have tested all major functionality on your site. It's also a good idea to compare the functionality on your site with your competition. Are you losing customers because your competitors are providing better online service?

7) Partner with complementary businesses.

You can also promote your website at prominent locations on complimentary websites. For example: if you are selling stationery, than it might make sense to partner with websites selling online printing services, promotional printed materials, etc.

8) Have a web-wide presence.

Are your customers finding you when they perform a search, with relevant keywords, in major search engine. Search engine marketing and optimization is a great way to increase brand awareness, at low cost. If your web pages aren't properly optimized for the search engines, we suggest working with a services firm to help you get your pages listed more prominently in the search results. You may also wish to explore services such as Google Ad Words, which will let you by ads for keyword searches conducted through Google.

Five Myths About Hosted Ecommerce Applications

The benefits of application outsourcing are numerous-faster time to market, inexpensive access to best-in-class technology, and lower equipment overhead-to name a few. However, the idea of farming out an ecommerce venture can tend to make web merchants new to application outsourcing a bit jittery. Fear not! This article debunks some popular myths about outsourced ecommerce.

Myth #1 -- Hosted Applications Are Not Secure

Outsourced application solutions have an inherent responsibility to provide maximum security because of the size and scale of operations. Consequently, all respectable hosted solutions are offered via a highly secure environment. In addition, applications hosted in a tier 1 data center typically provide advanced network and physical security. Physical data center security features might include video surveillance cameras, motion sensors, and biometric identification systems dedicated security personnel. Network security typically integrates firewall protection, availability monitoring, and full support for secure sockets layer (SSL) and digital certificates. (Note: GoECart offers all of these security features and more.)

Myth #2 -- Hosted Applications Are Not Reliable

In fact, the opposite is often true. In most cases, hosted applications are even more reliable than traditional applications because of their shared best-in-class infrastructure. Hosted ecommerce software often provides a level of reliability that can support even advanced requirements. Since hosted applications are designed to serve a broad range of needs, you can frequently find well-managed service in a variety of key areas. And the most credible hosted solutions guarantee certain levels of uptime. (Note: GoECart provides a 99.9 percent or greater uptime guarantee.)

Myth #3 -- You Give Up Control Over Your Data

While it is true that your data will be stored at the data center and not at your home office, this is a good thing! The data center provides increased integrity and security, and ensures that data is backed up on a regular basis, among other things. Moreover, properly hosted ecommerce services provide you with the capability to securely access, retrieve or delete the data from anywhere via Internet, VPN or other methods. As far the privacy issues are concerned, ASP applications are governed by strict laws that help keep your data totally safe.

Myth #4 -- Hosted Applications Are Not Flexible

It may have been true a decade ago that some flexibility got lost through application outsourcing, but the same is no longer true today. The prevalence of high-speed Internet connections combined with the improvements in web software architecture have made web applications more modular, robust, and easy to customize. The hosted web applications of today are as flexible as their shrink wrapped counterparts.

Myth #5 -- Hosted Applications Save Costs, Nothing Else

Merchants who opt to outsource their Web ecommerce endeavors can expect to reap significant cost benefits. However, there is a common misconception that "cost savings" is what hosted applications are all about. There are significant tangential benefits as well. These include the speed to market and increased uptime mentioned earlier as well as increased focus on the business instead of technology, reduced impact from upgrades, and improved technical support. While these benefits are harder to quantity, they are significant, contribute to the cost savings formula, and ultimately translate into increased customer satisfaction.

Email Marketing: Is It Worth Doing?

With all of the mixed advice floating around regarding email marketing, merchants just want to know, what works and what doesn't? This article helps you sort through the hype to get straight to the facts, and it offers some practical tips to make your email marketing campaigns stand out from the crowd.

Statistics Abound

You don't have to look very far to find a variety of statistics supporting both the pros and cons of email marketing, and often the statistics can seem more negative than positive. For example:

• Email marketing for the retail industry: If you send an email to 100 recipients, it is expected that just 3.7% of them will actually visit the website (Source: http://bronto.com/stats/?industry=1).
  
• A full 34% of consumers do not trust advertisements mentioned in emails. (Source: emarketer.com)

So Is Email Marketing Worth the Effort?

The answer is yes. While fewer than 5 in one hundred recipients might actually arrive at your site as a result of your email marketing, email marketing to a large audience could pay significant benefits. That is, provided you put in that extra effort to make your emails stand out.

Following are five tips that can help your email communications pack more punch.

• Use the Subject Line Effectively
  You should use the subject line to communicate the central idea of your email messages. Most people delete emails right after reading the Subject. Try using simple but attractive words that provide the main attraction or the central idea of the email.
  
• Choose Your Recipients Wisely
  All types of emails might not be of interest for some receipts. Use opt in email methods, categorize your lists, and send customers only the emails that are of the most interest to them.
  
• Craft Content Carefully
  Content rules in email communications. Make sure that the content is as per the level of interest and of understanding of your target audiences.
  
• Offer Compelling Reasons to Buy
  Simply promoting or hard selling your products can make your email communications dull. Spice up the content and provide solid rationale that validates the message. You can use customer testimonials, client case studies etc. to help improve your conversions.
  
• Broadcast the Emails Via a Reliable Medium
  The last thing you want is for your email to get blocked by your recipients' email provider. Make sure you use reliable and well-recognized email management software such as Constant Contact. Also provide an opt-out option as per the CAN-SPAM Act-which also mandates mention of proper date and address. For more info about the Can-SPAM act, see http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/ecommerce/bus61.shtm
  

10 Misconceptions About Online Selling

In the seemingly never-ending battle to quell the ecommerce rumor mill and put the kibosh on misinformation -- for would be web merchants and online store veterans alike -- this article provides 10 common misconceptions about online selling.

1) Ecommerce Means Easy Money.

Merchants should never jump into online selling without a solid business model that answers key questions like: Why ecommerce? What is my target market? How do I target it? and Do I need funding for my venture? If you study classic "dot com" failures, the two major reasons cited for the collapse are lack of foresight and financial funds. A successful online business starts with a solid plan.

2) Hosted Applications Are Not Effective.

Market research firm Gartner predicts that by 2010, 30% of overall software revenue will be derived from software delivered via hosted, software-as-a-service applications. More and more people are realizing the potential of hosted applications, specifically when considering the advantages like lower overhead, faster time to market, distributed software management, and world-wide accessibility to data.

3) Online Customers Are Easily Sold.
Online consumers are savvier than ever. As online shopping offers customers easy access to thousands of online stores at a click of the mouse, the idea of "customer loyalty" online is questionable at best. Serve your customers with genuine information and let them decide as to what is best for them.

4) Build It and They Will Come.

Today, a comprehensive online marketing strategy is mandatory for any online store to be successful. Although the techniques are different, you have to work just about as hard marketing an online store as you do a brick and mortar one. Enlist the help of a internet marketing firm that specializes in online marketing if you need help with getting your online store to reach its target audience.

5) Order Fulfillment Is Simple

The systems required for online businesses to fulfill orders can be complex and involve varying degrees of interactivity depending on the merchant's business model. Try to keep fulfillment for your online store as simple as possible. While it may seem attractive to integrate third-party supply chain management solutions, be sure to review these options carefully and do what makes the most sense for your business.

6) Ecommerce Is All About Having a Cool Website.

While it is important that your website presents a credible and compelling image, online business is not driven by a snazzy website. The difference between world-leading retailer Amazon.com and other sites is brand recognition, but Amazon achieved that recognition by selling the right products at the right time to the right customers. The key lies in matching an intuitive online shopping experience with a solid business model.

7) The Security Threat Is Just a Bunch of Hype.

"Phishing schemes," online fraud, and other security challenges remain for online shoppers. Many consumers have taken note and will not shop on a site unless it is clear to them the site is secure. At minimum, help your customers feel safe by both implementing and advertising secure sockets layer (SSL) security features on your site.

8) Customer Service in Not Important.

Customers will often make the decision to return to your website based on your past behavior with them. Be prompt and responsive to your customers concerns and there is a good chance they will return time and again.

9) Search Engines - Who Needs Them!

If you want to attract new customers to your online business, effective search engine marketing is vital. Statistics show that 90% or greater of the total traffic referred to many sites is driven by search engines. Be sure to include search engine marketing as a primary component of your overall online marketing strategy.

10) Selling Online Costs a Fortune.

Compared to owning and operating many brick and mortar operations, ecommerce comes cheap!

While your success ultimately hinges on the demand for your products, competition, and other factors, overall operating costs of running a web storefront (especially via a hosted solution) can be highly cost effective especially when taking the visibility and reach of the web into consideration. For a few thousand dollars you can sell your product to anyone in the world.

Convert Site Visitors to Buyers

"What can we do to convert more of our site's visitors into buyers?" This is one of the most common questions our clients ask us. We have found that one of the best and most cost effective methods to convert your current visitors into buyers is to accept and display customer product reviews.

The most popular online shopping networks, Epinions.com(SM), BizRate.com, and Shopping.com, have been built from the core concept of allowing consumers to write reviews on products. More and more consumers are using the web to research products before making their purchase, and customer product reviews now play a major role in the sales process.

Marketing Experiments Journal tested product conversion with and without product ratings by customers. Conversion nearly doubled, going from 0.44% to 1.04% after the same product displayed its five-star rating.

There are a number of ways that integrating consumer reviews into your site can substantially increase your conversion rates. These include answering common questions to help skeptical or 'on-the-fence' visitors close a purchase decision, introducing additional uses for a product and helping to up sell additional products.

Not only do consumer product reviews have a long history of increasing sales, they can also make your site stand out from your competitors. If your site provides the consumer with the answers they need, this builds their confidence in your product and increases your credibility. If you combine this with a competitive price, the chance of the customer making the purchase from you has increased substantially.

Now that we have covered some of the positive effects of customer product reviews, let's touch on a potential darker side of the product review feature. Some smaller merchants who have a small client base might feel tempted to fabricate reviews. However this practice will ultimately hurt a merchant as most consumers can tell if a review is authentic. Your customers are trusting that your reviews are real, so be honest.

When assisting some clients with launching a customer product review program we have been asked the question "What should I do with negative reviews" We then remind the merchant that some negative reviews can actually help them and can bring validity to the program. A negative review can be beneficial to the merchant in identifying what product(s) consumers are not happy with, reducing returned orders by setting buyer expectations and answering their common questions. They can help consumers by possibly directing them to the correct product that meets all their needs, alerting them of additional items that may need to be purchased, or providing the 'truth' on a product without all the marketing hype.

One way we recommend dealing with a negative review is when you are notified of the issue and the product service was purchased from you, you can initiate contact with the client to see what needs to be done to rectify the issue. This feedback can then be sent to manufacturers and suppliers to improve their products and improve your relationship with them.

So how do you launch a customer reviews program? First, you need to start collecting consumer product reviews. We recommend emailing past clients with an incentive to write a review for the product(s) they purchased. The incentive can be a discount coupon, gift certificate, or similar token of appreciation. You can also start accepting reviews from the general public. Many ecommerce platforms such as GoECart require the reviewer to enter their email address to submit a review; this is a great way to increase your newsletter subscription list. Going forward you can send an email to customers a few weeks after they have received their purchase seeking feedback on the product and inviting satisfied customers to write a testimonial.

Customer reviews also provide some indirect benefits. For example, they supply your website with relevant original content that can be indexed by search engine crawlers. The reviews typically contain keywords and phrases that are unique from technical specifications and standard manufacturer descriptions. It also exposes customer-generated terms to the Search Engine Crawlers that other customers may be searching for to find that same product. This can help to increase your search engine rankings and help you better connect with customers.

All GoECart merchants have the Customer Product Review feature built into their standard platform. The GoECart site administrator can approve each of the reviews before they are taken live on the site, thus removing any irrelevant reviews. The GoECart platform treats consumer product reviews as normal page, because of this when a user performs a site search it scans the reviews to display them in the search results page.

Since people can easily to jump from one site to another, today's internet merchants must look at what they are going to do to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Product reviews not only have been shown to increase browsers into buyers, but they also contribute to your differentiation from your competitors. Over time this will cause customers to come back to your site when they are ready to make the purchase. There is definite value in that.

Is Your Web Store Attracting the Right Customers?

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Consider these two fictional ecommerce scenarios:

• The majority of visitors to a major online retailer selling motorcycle parts and accessories are elderly women who listen to jazz music.
  
• A full two-thirds of visitors to a high-end cosmetics site are athletic men in their forties.

Do these sound like optimal customer scenarios for an online business owner? Of course not! While the above scenarios are exaggerated, it's not an embellishment to say that many online store owners fail to attract customers that are appropriate for their business. Just because a site gets a lot of traffic doesn't necessarily mean it will be successful. This article provides some guidance to help you identify your current traffic and attract more qualified prospects.

Know Your Target Market

Who are your customers? If your answer to this is: "anyone who will buy my product," then it may be high time to do a bit of homework. Marketing experts recommend that you understand the following types of information about your customers:

• demographic information-such as age, sex, and nationality
  
• psychographic information-like hobbies, interests, and opinions
  
• geographic information-location and how it impacts spending habits
  
• behavioral information-how the subject will use your product
  
• benefit information-the perceived benefits the subject receives from your product or service
  
• Conducting a survey is one way to find out prospective customer needs, buying preferences, and spending habits.

Track Traffic

If you're not doing so already, tracking the existing traffic on your site is an absolute must in your efforts to better understand your online customers. However, simply knowing the number of "hits" on your home page is not enough. You should regularly monitor the following:

• Referring site (where visitors link to you from)
  
• Keywords used to find your site
  
• Pages in your site that were viewed
  
• Conversion statistics (did they browse or buy)

Special attention should be paid to the number of overall visitors and any conversion disparity. If the number of visitors is far greater than those actually getting converted (e.g., by a factor of 10, 20, or more), then you should conduct thorough tests to see if the visitors really encapsulate your target audience. Traffic analysis is typically accomplished using software that analyzes the log files on your web server. (Note that GoECart includes basic traffic reporting from the Administration Panel, and a more advanced option using NetTracker® software is available too.)

Optimize For Success

Below are three fundamentals of online marketing that you must practice if you want to attract targeted traffic to your online store:

• Targeted Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - The major web search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL Search, etc. are primary movers of traffic to your storefront. Any bad or incorrect search engine marketing practices will have unqualified visitors entering your store for certain. At minimum, do not target incorrect traffic by optimizing your web pages with too broad or too narrow keywords. Learn the basics of SEO and make sure your ecommerce solution is search engine friendly.
  


• Pay Per Click - Your online marketing program should incorporate a pay-per-click (PPC) strategy. When a prospective customer conducts a search using a keyword that you have selected as a part of a pay per click program, a small ad will appear near search results. When a site visitor clicks on your ad, you are charged a small fee. This is a great, inexpensive way to target customers who are already looking for your product or service.
  


• Listings on Relevant Content Sites - Whenever possible, make sure a link to your site appears on other sites that are already attracting your target audience. For instance, if you sell materials for making dolls, a generic listing on "Big Al's Free For All Link List" isn't going to land you the same type of visitor as a prominent link on a major crafter site. Try to get your site listed on as many major relevant sites as possible. The major sites not only get more traffic but search engines use link popularity as one criteria in ranking their pages so listing on big sites will also boost your rankings in the other engines.

Seek Help...Cautiously

The Latin phrase, caveat emptor (let the buyer beware), applies big time for those seeking web marketing solutions. While there are many options and services available to assist you with attracting qualified traffic to your web storefront, seek help cautiously. A sad fact is that peddlers of "snake oil" online marketing services abound-there are a lot of companies who make false or inflated claims about their search engine marketing capabilities. Do your homework. Check references to ensure the services is credible and can actually help you achieve your goals. (Note that GoECart's peer division, MachInteractive, is a firm that specializes exclusively in professional grade online marketing solutions.)

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Make Your Web Store Sticky and Win Loyal Customers

"Sticky" is a funny little word that can sometimes have negative connotations. It might conjure up a memory of gum stuck to the bottom of your favorite running shoe or maple syrup spilled on your kitchen table. But for the online store owner, being sticky is a desirable goal. With thousands of competing sites available at the click of the mouse, web stickiness is all about keeping visitors at your web store longer and ensuring they return again. This article provides tips to help you increase web stickiness and build a following of loyal web customers.

Provide Meaningful Interactivity

Simply offering the latest web chat room feature, snazzy Flash presentation, or similar "bell and whistle" is the wrong approach to making your site stick. This is especially true if these features don't work properly or require gobs of time to develop and support. Be sure to offer a level of interactivity that is relevant to your site.

Some examples of meaningful user interactivity include:

• An online shoe store that gives customers the option to view a pair of shoes in variety of styles and colors
  
• A real estate site that offers 360° virtual tours
  
• A finance site that offers dynamic loan calculators and repayment schedules
  
• Offering customers a way to rate their experience on your site is another great way to build trust and add credibility. Similarly, including real-time features like a shipping cost calculator and live order tracking will encourage customers to revisit your site-and potentially even make another purchase!

Extend the Experience

A great way to extend the stickiness of your web store to your customers' email In-box is to offer a free email newsletter. The newsletter could be used to inform customers about changes on your site, to advertise your products, or to promote upcoming events (e.g., a clearance sale). This provides the customer with relevant information about a topic of interest, and it also serves as an ongoing reminder for them to re-visit your site. In the same way, you can let your customers extend the shopping experience to their family and friends by offering "Tell-a-friend" functionality.

Offer a Personal Touch

In today's competitive ecommerce environment, online customers want and expect to be treated in a personalized manner. One way to achieve this is via an option that allows to customers to register on the site. After a customer registers, the site can be configured to "remember" the user the next time they log in. For example, "Welcome back, Mary!" could appear on the home page. Features like this help to make customers feel included and part of a larger experience.

Additional ways to offer a more personalized experience include:

• Offering advanced product catalog search options that let users search on criteria most relevant to their needs
  
• An express checkout option that remembers customer shipping and payment information so they don't need to re-enter it every time they visit your site
  
• Special promotions targeted to a subset of customers

Help Customers Feel Secure

More than ever, customers are concerned about online security. As a storeowner, it is vital for you to establish credibility from a security perspective. Assure your customers that their data is secure by participating in a secure sockets layer (SSL) secure logo program from a trusted security provider such as GeoTrust or VeriSign. Web store owners may also want to consider commissioning a third-party security threat assessment service. These services audit the overall security integrity of the storefront and also supply you with results that can be placed on the site.

Content that Matters

By all accounts, content is still king on the web. Therefore, you should provide information that helps customers research your products and services effectively. The content on your site provides a great opportunity to help establish yourself as the expert in your field. Providing links to relevant articles, product reviews, and even original content about your products and services helps to:

• Enhance your credibility
  
• Set you apart from your competitors
  
• Increase the likelihood of a purchase

The Bottom Line

Make an effort to get to know your customers and make their experience on your site relevant, valuable, and enjoyable-and you will win customers that stick with you for life!

Five Mistakes to Avoid When Launching an Ecommerce Site

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On the Internet, even the smallest online store can compete with giant brand names like eBay and Amazon.com. Unfortunately, many new web merchants often counteract the power of the web as an equalizer by making some common goofs, gaffes, and guffaws that can make them look, well...amateurish. This article lists a few of those mistakes to help online store owners avoid the typical pitfalls executed by many ecommerce sites.

Mistake #1 - Too Many Under Construction Pages

Don't launch your website until it is ready for prime time! Under construction pages can distract the online user and detract from the overall credibility of your site. It is a good idea to develop an action plan for introducing your web storefront to the world. Make sure that all key pages are included in your website launch and live up to your standards for design and content. It is equally important to ensure that all pages are ready for prime time before you market them with the major search engines. After all, would you enter your credit card and other personal information on a web site with lots of under construction pages? Once you lose first time visitors, it is hard to get them back.

Mistake #2 - Slow Loading Web Pages

If you are trying to make a good first impression, the last thing you want is a site that takes an eternity to load. Here are a few tips to ensure a zippy web experience for your customers:

• With today's web page coding and design standards, images can and should be used sparingly. For example, cascading style sheets can be used to implement many design elements on your site, such as colors, icons, and much more. For the images that you do use, ensure that they are optimized for fast download.
  
• Use Flash animation sparingly. If Flash must be used make sure you provide an HTML or low bandwidth option for those browsing at slower connection speeds.
  
• At a minimum, compare the load time of your web pages to the load time of your competitors' sites. If you site takes longer to load, make adjustments as needed.

Mistake #3 - Grammatical Errors and Lack of Compelling Content

On the web, content reigns supreme and can make or break your customer's purchase decision. If you have poor content in your site, that is not conveying the proper message to potential customers about your products, how can you expect visitors to buy? Grammatical errors and spelling mistakes only add to the displeasure of online customers. Worse still, grammatical mistakes might even change the intended meaning of your content. Some key things you can do to help establish credibility with your visitors, include:

• Provide well-written, content that is easy to understand-even for international customers.
  
• Be straightforward; don't try to oversell or hoodwink your visitors.
  
• Have an experienced copywriter write or edit the content for your website.
  
• Be sure to enlist the help of spell checker software to eradicate any spelling mistakes.

Mistake #4 - Confusing Shipping Options

Confusing shipping options and expensive shipping rates are two often-cited reasons that online shoppers abandon their shopping carts during the checkout process. (See Improve Shipping Options to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment.) Web merchants should take special care to be up front about shipping costs make the entire shipping process as simple possible for customers to understand. Try these tips:

• Provide shipping options from major carriers, such as UPS and FedEx.
  
• Display shipping policies and related information prominently on the storefront, especially in key pages during the checkout process.
  
• Allow customers to compute shipping rates as early as possible in the check out process.

Mistake #5 - Making Users Register Before They Shop

It is highly recommended that you do not ask visitors to register or provide other personal information before they can add items to the shopping cart. Making account creation or filling out a registration form mandatory-especially before your customers are ready to make a purchase-will turn many users off. Links like "Register Now," or "Logon" (e.g., to an existing account) should appear only when the buyer has clicked on the checkout process button. Even if you are likely to track these visitors, use cookies to get information about users.

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Three Fresh, New Ways to Market Your Web Storefront

With the widespread proliferation of interactive marketing, some innovative new web channels have emerged for marketing your online store. This article describes three increasingly popular web-based marketing mediums that have outstanding potential to get your storefront the attention it deserves-regardless of your budget.

Comparison Shopping Engines

Comparison shopping engines make it easy for consumers to compare prices for specific products from multiple websites. Most price comparison services do not sell products themselves. Rather, they source prices from retailers that are accessible via listings in a search-engine-like format. Popular comparison engines include Froogle, ShopZilla, and Shopping.com. (For a more comprehensive list, see Comparison Shopping Engines Bring Customers Who Are Ready To Buy.)

With most major search providers jumping into the comparison shopping fray, this new online selling medium has become a highly effective launch pad for web merchants to get products in front of potential customers. Web merchants new to comparison shopping services should note the following:

• Most price comparison sites make money from online retailers using the pay-per-click (PPC) model. The merchant pays the price comparison site a set fee every time a user clicks through to their site. However, Google's Froogle shopping search engine currently charges no fees. (Note: All GoECart merchants running GoECart 6 have a built-in Froogle data feed creator.)
  
• Comparison engines are ideal if you want to emphasize a specific product or product line in your catalog. Smaller merchants tend to focus their comparison shopping site advertising dollars on a few of their most popular products to increase potential customers, while larger merchants tend to upload their entire product database in order to maximize their market share using this developing medium.
  
• Web merchants can start small with a low budget program and then move on to more focused paid programs.

Blogs

Right now, blogs are all the rage. And over just a few years, they have made a colossal impact on the online world. Short for "weblog," a blog is typically made up of a series of diary-like entries on a website displayed in a reverse chronological order. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to related information. Blogs often provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news. There are also many blogs dedicated to consumer and product oriented information. As a result, savvy online shoppers often use Blogs to perform research before making purchases.

With the nature of the content posted on blogs, many sites dedicate space for advertisers to place ads right on the blog pages. Online store merchants would do well to sign up for advertising programs on sites that provide information about their products and services. For web merchants seeking to leverage blogs and blog services, popular blogging software providers are Blog.com, Blogger.com and Typad.com.

RSS Feeds

RSS, a Web content syndication format, stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS enables publishers to provide XML-based, news content "feeds" from Web sites. The feeds typically contain article or product headlines, summaries and links back to full articles on the Web. RSS provides a useful alternative to browsing the Web for content and is a fast and efficient way to help your customers stay up to date with the latest information about your site. To view RSS feeds, your customers need "reader" software that displays RSS content feeds that you publish. There are many different types of readers available, including both desktop software and Web-browser-based readers.

RSS feeds have tremendous potential to be a boon for web merchants. For example, your online store customers can subscribe to feeds about your products and be notified whenever a new product has been posted to a particular category on your storefront. Moreover, the extremely search engine friendly architecture of RSS- coupled with strong endorsement by most popular search engine providers-makes it easy to submit feeds to various RSS aggregators. Considering the simplicity of preparing the RSS file, the benefits can achievable for anyone.

For more information, see XML.com's Overview of RSS.

Migrating From One Ecommerce Storefront to Another

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According to a recent survey by Internet Retailer magazine: "51% of all organizations (surveyed) say that replacing their e-commerce platform is a top priority." The companies cited the need to deliver faster order processing, achieve higher sales conversions, and increase customer satisfaction as major reasons for moving to a new ecommerce solution. In general, online retailers are looking for a flexible and scalable solution that can help better maximize their marketing dollars.

However, when switching platforms, many merchants fail to take the steps needed to ensure that sales don't drop and marketing programs transition smoothly. The following is a list of best practices to follow when migrating to another ecommerce platform:

Back Up Your Data

When migrating to a new platform organizations should backup their entire current site either locally or onto a different server. You will always want to maintain a copy of all data in the event of a hardware failure or data corruption.

Cutover Only When Ready

Leave your old storefront up and running; you should not immediately take it down. Shutting down the old storefront should be done in a strategic manner-and only after your new site is ready and has been thoroughly tested.

Migrating the Data

All of your product and inventory data should be uploaded into your new system. You will also need to consider the best method of resolving and/or migrating customer service inquiries, product returns, chargebacks, and other tasks.

Marketing Channels

Most online retailers have a comprehensive marketing plan. The plan should be reviewed and each of your marketing channels, such as pay-per-click programs, must be prepared to be "paused." This way, after you have brought your new site live, you can quickly update landing page URLs as needed. The last thing you want to do is pay to send visitors to a 404 "page not found" error page.

Payment Considerations

This may be the right time to negotiate with your current merchant services account provider for better rates (or consider getting a new one). You might also want to consider additional payment methods, start accepting online checks or PayPal; alternative payment options have been known to boost sales.

Test, Test, and Test Some More!

You will need to thoroughly test all aspects of your new site. At minimum you should ensure that:

• you can successfully process orders using each of the payment methods
  
• you can receive all the shipping quotes in real-time
  
• there are no broken links, misspellings , typos, etc. on the new site
  
• It is also highly advisable that you test out your new site with real visitors in a controlled environment.

One way to do this is to change the URLs of your pay-per-click marketing campaigns and shopping network advertisements to point to the new storefront. This will result in a controllable flow of traffic to the new site that can provide you with valuable data. You can use your web analytics software to produce reports that show top visitor paths, error logs, visitor drop-off locations, and most viewed content, which you can use to further optimize your new storefront.

Announce Your New Site

Once the new site and ecommerce solution is up and running, you should use this opportunity to your advantage. Send an email to all your past customers letting them know about the site redesign and/or any new features that they may find useful.

For More Information

For more information about this topic-and a more in-depth look at how to retain your search engine positions while migrating from one storefront to another-please see the white paper "Retaining Search Engine Positions during the Migration Process" from MachInteractive.com

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Get on Board the Social Network Bandwagon

Over the past few years, "social network" websites have attained a rock-star level of popularity with companies like MySpace.com and Facebook now among the most visited U.S.-based destinations online.

Social networks provide a variety of web community portal features that let users create profiles, describe their interests, share their thoughts in blogs or postings, and connect with other people, among other things. The sites also provide an excellent opportunity for web merchants to market their products and conduct market research at a low cost. So hop on board the social network bandwagon and start reaping the benefits that social networks can bring!

Popular Social Network Websites

MySpace.com
MySpace.com is the largest and arguably the most popular social network web in the world. The company's slogan is "a place for friends." The site provides an interactive network of profiles, groups, photos, blogs, MP3s, videos, and e-mail services. According to web watchdog firm Alexa Internet, MySpace is the world's fourth most popular English website and the sixth most popular site in the world. MySpace has also become an influential part of popular culture with a whopping 105 million members and 230,000 new registrations per day.

Facebook.com
Facebook.com is a highly interactive web community that targets high school, college, university, military, and other organization-based membership. The name of the site is based on the paper "facebooks" that many colleges give to incoming students, faculty, and staff depicting members of the campus community. Facebook has the largest number of registered users among college-oriented sites with over 7.5 million U.S. college students and 20,000 new accounts being created daily. According to comScore Networks' MediaMetrix, Facebook is the seventh most trafficked site in the United States.

Yahoo! 360
Yahoo! 360, currently in beta release, is a "personal communication portal" similar to MySpace and Facebook. It integrates many popular features of social networking, blogging, and photo sharing sites. A user may create a personal profile and even a web site, share their photos from Yahoo! Photos, maintain a blog, and a list of local reviews. Members can also see which friends are currently online. The service is available to Yahoo! users over the age of 18 in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, and Japan.

orkut.com
Named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Buyukkokten, orkut is a social network service provided by Google that is "designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships." Orkut is similar to MySpace but goes a step further by permitting smaller subset communities of users. It is also invitation-only; new users must be invited to join by a member.

Opportunities for Web Merchants

Online social networks are similar to real-world communities in that they allow everyday people organized around specific interests to interact and share thoughts and ideas. This presents a number of marketing opportunities for the ecommerce merchant that include those listed below.

• Focused advertising: Social network sites provide a meeting ground for people with similar attitudes, preferences, and even buying patterns. As an online store owner, this makes those sites an ideal platform for advertising your store. Social networks exist in just about every demographic category. Online store owners would do well to find out the most popular networks frequented by your targeted demographic and advertise there.
  
• Targeted demographic marketing: Social network sites are wildly popular with the under 30 set. As a result, musicians, TV and movie producers, global corporations, and politicians have been successful at leveraging this new phenomenon to get their message out to the young adult community.
  
• Viral marketing: Because of the open, unbiased nature of these sites, product recommendations posted on them are generally considered more credible and have less chance of being discarded as marketing slant. Consequently, consumers often use these sites to research product information before they make a buying decision. Encourage your customers to weigh in about the products and services on these sites and watch your sales soar!
  
• Free market research: Organizations can gauge a lot about market trends by evaluating what customers are writing about over social networks. In the real world, a marketer might discover what fashions are hot attending cocktail parties and other social events. A similar understanding of trends in fashion, music, wine, and popular culture can now attained by frequenting social network sites.

For More Information

There are dozens of other social networking sites that cater to a wide variety of interests and needs. Among them are Flickr, a photo sharing site; Friendster which is a lot like MySpace; and LinkedIn, which targets business users. And new networks are popping up at a dizzying pace.

Optimizing Web Images- Frequently Asked Questions

Tick. Tick. Tick. We all have been to a web page that seems to take forever to load. The most likely reason for this is that the image files on the page have not been properly optimized for fast download. By optimizing the graphics in your online store, your site will have more bandwidth, visitors will have a more positive experience, and sales may even increase. Optimizing images for the web takes a delicate balance between file size and picture quality. This article examines five common questions about web image optimization to help you achieve just that.

In what format should I save my images?

The first thing web merchants should know when optimizing your images is that there are two-universal graphic file formats and that are recognized by all major web browsers. These are GIF, short for Graphics Interchange Format, and JPEG, short for Joint Photographic Experts Group (the original name of the committee that wrote the standard). Bitmap files are also supported, but they should be not be used because they generally produce large file sizes.

When should I use JPEG/JPG images?

JPG images support up to 16 million colors and are best suited for photographs and complex graphics. JPG uses a "lossy" compression technique designed to compress color and grayscale continuous-tone images. JPG files support varying degrees of compression, and image quality can be adjusted using your favorite image editing software. As a general rule of thumb, use JPGs for all photographs (including stock image photography), except for very small thumbnail or icon-sized photographs.

When I should I use GIF images?

Unlike JPG, the GIF format uses a "lossless" compression technique-it supports only 256 colors. GIF is better than JPG for images with a few distinct colors, such as line drawings, clip art, diagrams, and textual images, such as graphical headings. An important feature of the GIF format is that it supports transparency, where the background color can be set to transparent in order to let the color on the underlying Web page show through. GIF also supports animation; tools are available that let you combine multiple GIF images into a single file to make it look animated.

Which software tools should I use to optimize my images?

Web merchants often make the mistake of resizing their graphics in a website design program such as Microsoft FrontPage. Since this will reduce the appearance of the image size without reducing the file size, don't do this! Instead resize all graphics using a graphics editing program such as AdobeR PhotoShopR, CorelR Paint Shop ProR, or ACDseeT. Locate the settings for image size and adjust according to the advice in the next section.

What size should my images be?

The dots per inch (dpi) resolution of web images should never be anything other than 72dpi. Anything with a higher resolution should be reduced to minimize the file size. As for the dimensions of the image, the height and width should be adjusted so that the image looks good in the overall context of your web page. Keep in mind that many users still browse at 800x600 screen resolution so your images should never be larger than this. For a square product photo, a size of 200x200 pixels should suffice. You should also include both the height and width attributes html for your images (e.g., img src="myproductpic.jpg" height="200" width="200"). This tells the browser what size the graphic is going to be, so it can continue loading the rest of the webpage without having to worry about the graphic loading and suddenly distorting the page.

Why do web images load faster the second time around?

Web browsers have what is called a "cache." This is an area on the hard drive dedicated to the storage of recently used graphics. If you go to a new web page on the same site and your web browser notices that the same graphics are being called on, it will just place the graphic from the Cache, instead of having to re-download it. The end result is a much faster loading site.

Happy Image Optimizing

By following the advice above you will greatly enhance your site's performance and reduce the load time of your web pages. This will make your website visitors happy, and with the 2006 holiday season fast approaching, this could be a very good thing.

Holiday Season 2006 - Is Your Web Storefront Ready?

The 2006 holiday season is fast approaching and retailers everywhere are scrambling to maximize this season's impact on their bottom line. As an online store owner, there are a number of steps you can take to ensure that your site is ready to attract and convert its share off the flood of holiday traffic.

Get in the Holiday Spirit!

Your customers will appreciate you showing your festive side this holiday season, so don't be a Scrooge! Liven up with your website with holiday decorations. Many ecommerce sites place some decorations online for the holidays and you can do the same. Remember Yahoo's falling snow flakes? Very cool. (GoECart 6 merchants have functionality that allows them to upload site templates to their admin panel and save them for future use. You can save up to 50 designs for as long as you want and you can quickly and effortlessly turn them on and off.)

Do you offer a gift wrap service? For the holiday season, you should. Many buyers will be looking to drop ship gifts to their loved ones. If you can't wrap gifts, you may lose customers to a competitor who will.

Online gift certificates are another item you should consider offering as they can be a substantial boon to holiday sales. A staggering 73 percent of shoppers surveyed by the National Retail Federation last year said they expected to purchase one or more gift cards during holiday season. (Using GoECart's Gift Certificates Module you can offer your customers rich personalization for both paper and online gift certificates with complete automation for their issuing and tracking.)

Post Seasonal and New Products Early

New and seasonal products should be placed online far in advance of the peak holiday season. This way, you can test product pages in advance to ensure there are no issues and that they have sharp graphics and copy that sells. You also want them to get indexed by the search engines with high positions, which could take anywhere from one-three months, depending on the frequency of spider crawls and the optimization of your site. So get a move on and post those products now!

Scour Your Site for Errors

The most effective way to check your site for errors is by using web analytics software such as NetTracker. The NetTracker software lets you analyze web logs and run a variety of analysis reports for a specified date range. You can use the reports to identify broken links, slow loading pages, broken image paths, and many additional issues.

Web merchants can also do some basic testing manually. Start by deleting all cookies and temporary internet files from your browser. Then, review your web pages one at a time. Are all pictures appearing? Are they the right pictures? Are some pages loading slowly? Is the page copy effective? Is it free from false statements and grammatical errors? Consider using a professional copyrighter to proofread and correct your content.

One of the most important areas of your site to review is the checkout process. Make sure it is free of all errors, in order to keep shopping cart abandonment rates down. (Note: One of the biggest issues that we see clients make at GoECart is that they place a heavy amount of negative content in the check out process, keep it positive!)

Merchants should also remember that Internet Explorer is not the only web browser! FireFox, Opera, and Apple's Safari have been gaining market share, so make sure you thoroughly test your site with these browsers too.

Plan Holiday Inventory Carefully

Make sure you have a well-thought-out plan for the amount of inventory you will be stocking. It is common for merchants to underestimate the amount of stock they should have on hand so you may want to consider setting up a drop-ship plan as a backup strategy. By the same token, you don't want to have a warehouse full of extra stock come January 1.

Count on More Customer Inquiries

Chances are inquiries to your customer service department will sharply increase over the holiday season, so make sure your customer service department is able to quickly and accurately address customer questions. Some data such as shipping timelines change during the holiday season so make sure that information is updated as appropriate, and be very careful with shipping guarantees. You can reduce shipping inquires by having your ecommerce solution automatically send all tracking numbers to each customer when their order is shipped. Updating your online FAQ page with holiday related questions can also reduce the number of inquiries your customer service department receives.

During the holiday season you are given a chance to substantially increase your customer base. Take advantage of this once-a-year opportunity! If the customer has a great experience during the holidays, they will be more likely to shop with you all year long.

Continue Web Promotions

There are thousands of ecommerce sites -- what is your holiday strategy for gaining online visibility? Companies should consider stepping up efforts for the following online marketing activities during the holiday season:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is defined as a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings. This advertising method is known to be highly effective and produce a high return on investment.
  
• Pay-Per-Click Advertising is defined as advertisements that are displayed on websites or in a search engine results page when triggered by a keyword. Advertisers pay for people who click on these ads and enter their site. This advertising method is great for companies looking to quickly send targeted visitors to their site.
  
• Comparison Shopping Networks allow online retailers to list the products they sell in a shopping search engine. When shoppers search for the products they sell, their product listings appear in the search results. If a shopper clicks on their listing, the shopper is sent to the online retailer's store.
  

Happy Holidays

For all of us, the holidays are a very busy time of the year. However, with a little strategic planning and execution now, your ecommerce season could have even more jingle than Santa's sleigh.

Search Engine Optimization Basics

Since the mid 1990s, search engine optimization (SEO) has been a godsend for small businesses online, allowing merchants to attract large amounts of targeted traffic for little money. When you combine GoECart with search engine optimization best practices, your online visibility really begins to increase. GoECart is the most search engine friendly ecommerce solution available today. It provides web merchants with the foundation needed to get indexed by the search engines and begin ranking high. This article provides search engine optimization best practices for GoECart merchants that if followed can result in their search engine positions increasing.

Search Engine Friendly URLs

GoECart allows you to take dynamic URL queries and make them static URLs with keywords. By making your site's URLs static and placing keywords relevant to the page in the URL, your site can see a boost in search engine rankings.

Common mistakes: When you change a page URL, you are deleting the page and putting up a brand new page. The best thing to do when renaming a page URL is to place a 301 redirect on the old page URL pointing to the new page URL. This tells the search engines that you have renamed the old page's URL. For information on setting up 301 redirects, see http://www.machinteractive.com/WhitePapers/SE-Positions.pdf.

Unique Title Tags

GoECart offers the ability to assign every page a unique title tag. Title tags should be short (no more than 64 characters) and should contain keywords relevant to the page.

Common mistakes: If your domain name is keyword rich, end every title tag with ' - Your Sites Name' instead of 'YourSitesName.com.' This can also help boost your positions and help in branding efforts.

Link popularity

Link popularity is the total number of web sites that link to your site. Building link popularity is key to any search engine optimization program. If your site does not have enough quality sites linking to it, then your search engine positions will suffer. DMOZ.org, Yahoo.com, sbd.bcentral.com, BBB.org, HackerSafe.com, and your local Chamber of Commerce are good places to start for building quality back links to your site. I also recommend participating in forums and discussion groups within your vertical and including your link in your signature of each post. This will both help you in building link popularity and establishing your company in online communities. Request links to your site from manufacturers, wholesalers, and any large companies that are business partners.

Common mistakes: Not all links are good; think quality over quantity.

Unique Content

There is a saying in search engine optimization circles, and that is "content is king." This saying should not be taken lightly. Unique keyword-rich content is a critical piece of a successful search engine optimization campaign. In addition to content-rich product pages, you may also want to include the following on your site:

• Product Instruction Manuals
  
• Customer Product Reviews
  
• Press Releases
  
• Original Articles

Common mistakes: Try to place online unique and relevant content because if the content found on your site can also be found on hundreds of other sites, a "duplicate content penalty" may be triggered.

Freshness

Your site should always be kept fresh, especially your home page. Constantly adding content and new features to your site can help increase your search engine positions.

Common mistakes: Update only small sections of the homepage such as a current news box, monthly featured products, or new product releases. You do not want to be changing large quantities of your homepage constantly as that can negatively affect your rankings.

Sitemap

You want to have a sitemap that links to every single page on your site, so that when the search engine spiders crawl this page they can follow the sitemap to locate every page in your site.

Common mistakes: Webmasters tend to forget about this page, so when you add or delete pages make sure they update the sitemap.

Other Tips

Here are a few additional quick tips that can make a big difference

• Convert any text in image form to regular text.
  
• Limit the number of external links on your site to maximum of five per page and only link to high quality sites.
  
• Place your site on a dedicated server with a unique IP address.
  
• Continuously check your site for broken links and fix them as needed.

One of the most common misunderstandings is that top search engine positions can be achieved overnight. Search Engine Optimization takes time, thus if you implement the above suggestions and don't see any improvement in a week don't jump the gun and revise everything.

SEO has changed a great deal since the mid 1990s. Today, sites such as FoxNews.com now employ small armies of search engine optimizers to make sure their site's main pages appear at the top of search engine results. There are hundreds of factors that determine a site’s search engine positions, and the methods for achieving top rankings change often. With online competition heating up, many companies that begin optimizing their site have found that the SEO route is not as easy or clearly defined as it appears to be, yet it still offers one of the highest returns on investment of any marketing channel available.

MachInteractive, a peer division of GoECart, is a full-service interactive marketing firm that specializes in search engine marketing solutions. You can learn more about MachInteractive at http://www.machinteractive.com/.

A Product Page that Sells

Some believe they should be short, some believe they should be comprehensive. As an online merchant, your main goal regarding the product pages on your storefront should be to find out what your ideal customer wants and how best to reach them.

Review Customer Scenarios

Before developing your product pages, the first thing you should do is review the ways that your customers purchase products. Do they perform heavy online research before making a purchase? Do they go to an offline store to see the product, then go online to get a better price? Conversely, maybe your product is exclusive to your company (and therefore requires more detailed information). These scenarios and others should be taken into account when developing your product pages. So how do you develop a page that reaches various customer groups?

Web Page Format is Key

The format is one of the most important aspects of the product web page. The format should be consistent with both your product type and price point. After all, if someone is spending $1000 on a specific product should the page format and provided content be the same as a $2 product?

Compare the product page formats of Amazon.com to Buy.com. They are completely different. You will need to decide on how to structure (or present) the content, what content should be placed on the page, where to place the buy button (add to wish list etc...), how many images. and if you want to up-sell products on this page. The reason Buy.com product pages look so different than Amazon.com product pages is because Buy.com customers prefer it and have reacted kindly to it in tests. I recommend doing the same for your site. Create 3 - 10 product page variations and test them to see how your customers react to each. Use different formats, use various versions of the buy button, split up content offerings using popups, Javascript tabs, or a long page design, etc. This is really the best way you can find out what the optimal product page for you site truly is.

In the Details

The content should provide those who are performing research with enough material to allow them to make a purchase decision. Yet it should also not make the buyer question if they are purchasing the wrong product or model. Keep in mind that some people are easily convinced! Thus if you provide them with just enough information to confirm that it is indeed the correct product, they will purchase it. However, if you start sparking doubt in their mind then they may just leave the site altogether or the purchase may drag on for weeks.

Related Links

For more information, see these articles on creating a product page that sells:

http://www.marketingexperiments.com/improving-website-conversion/long-copy-short-copy.html

http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/solutions/building/article.php/3579196

Build Trust with Visitors and Watch Your Sales Soar

The word trust is a very powerful word. This is primarily because it conveys emotion. It is imperative that your customers have a positive emotional connection with your site in order for it to successful. To create trust, there are certain things that online merchants must do. This article highlights several trust building methods that MachInteractive's clients have successfully used and recommends to new clients.

A Trustworthy Web Design is Vital

The most important place to begin building trust is with your web design. When visitors come to your site do they get the impression that you are a serious online merchant? Too many people fall into the "I designed it myself!" trap and refuse to get out. Let a web design professional coupled with a site usability and optimization specialist work with you to create a site design that will both maximize your online/offline sales and comply with industry best practices. This alone can dramatically increase the number of conversions your web site receives.

Other Essentials

• Your site must have a physical address and phone number confidently displayed on every page. This is one of the first things online shoppers look for when dealing with small online businesses.
  
• Be sure to include links to your Privacy Policy, Return Policy and Shipping Policy. Many online shoppers want to review these before placing orders so it is highly recommended to create these and make sure visitors can easily locate them.
  
• An SSL certificate seal from VeriSign or GeoTrust will give customers reassurance that their online transactions are safe and secure. It is amazing how many sites still accept online orders without having a SSL certificate installed. This is that is both extremely reckless and very illegal.
  
• You should take special care to ensure that your pages are free of typos and spelling errors. After all, your site represents you to the world. It is highly recommended that you hire a professional copywriter to write or at least edit all site copy.
  
• Check out the BBBOnline Reliability and Privacy Seal programs. The Better Business Bureau is one of the most important trust building seals available today. We only recommend displaying this seal if you have a perfect record with them; otherwise, including the seal could have a negative impact on your sales.
  
• Your site should be completely free of broken links. A recent poll by emarketer.com reported that consumers find broken links to be highly annoying.

Highly Recommended

• Keep your site content up-to-date! If people arrive at your site and see "Affiliate program coming in 2003!" they are going to think the site is dormant and leave.
  
• Include genuine customer testimonials, third-party endorsements, achievement awards, and case studies
  
• Hacker Safe's slogan is "Build the trust that builds your business. Start boosting sales today by certifying your site HACKER SAFE". - Their sales pitch says it all.
  
• Offering alternative payment methods such as PayPal can help boost your online sales and displaying their verified by PayPal seal can also help boost consumer confidence.
  
• Include seals of industry associations to which you belong.

Optional

• Place professional photos of your staff and facilities on your About Us pages. People want to know who they are doing business with.
  
• The TRUSTe seal lets consumers know that you are committed to protecting their online privacy.

It is unfortunate to say that most of the above tactics are rarely used. Thus, many merchants never realize the full potential of their online store. By executing the above trust-building tactics, you are practically guaranteed to see an increase in online conversions.

What to Do When Your Site Won't Rank Well In the Search Engines

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You've optimized your site to ensure it receives top rankings in the search engines. Your site got indexed, but the best position it received was number 137 on Yahoo. So you wait; after all, good search engine positions takes time. However, another two months go by with no real movement. So what should you do now? Wait longer? Re-optimize your site?

Examine Your Site's Back Links

The first thing you want to do is closely examine your site's back links. Essentially, you need to make sure the search engines are recognizing a large quantity of one-way links from relevant, authoritative sites to your site. BBB.org, your Local Chamber of Commerce, and industry associations you belong to can be the best places to start. You can get a little more creative by purchasing links from BOTW.com, HackerSafe.com and W3C.org. Quality link building is key to any search engine optimization campaign so pay special attention to it.

Consider Strict Re-Optimization

You may also want to consider switching up your optimization tactics. For example, you can execute a full revision of the site's internal link structure, and remove any pop-ups, AJAX, and flash features. You should also make sure your code is W3C compliant and that all title and META tags are unique. This may seem like overkill but the results are usually well worth it.

Add More Unique Content

We have all heard the saying "Content is King." Well, that it as true today as it was 2 years ago. Your site must contain a large amount of unique and relevant content in order to get well positioned by the major search engines. MachInteractive clients often ask us how they can quickly add more content to their site without having to sit down and write. There are a number of things that you can do to develop your sites content, just be a little creative. For starters you can develop a tips section and/or upload a glossary of industry terms. You may also want to consider offering a newsletter and including that on your site as well. The goal is to introduce a substantial amount of unique relevant content to the search engines through your site.

Beware of 'Possible' Penalties

If you are having trouble getting good rankings, your site may need to be examined for possible penalties that may be preventing it from ranking well. It is highly recommended that you consult with an expert on this. Duplicate content penalties, backlinks from bad neighborhoods, links to low quality sites, hidden text, code errors, and search engine crawler traps are among the many possibilities. These are some of the first things we review when taking on new clients.

Go Above and Beyond Search Engine Optimization

If you are in a highly competitive product or service category, you may also want to employ some additional tactics. For example you could try introducing a blog for your vertical. Keep in mind that these days blogs are a dime a dozen so make sure you can bring value to your customers through the blog. You could also try creating and distribute an online video about your company or products. Participating in forums or online communities within your vertical can also help with building quality backlinks to your site and generating additional buzz. Your objective is to get people to speak about and link to your site from key communities that currently don't or normally wouldn't.

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Ten Essential Tips for Writing Effective Web Copy That Sells

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If your goal is to sell a product or service on the web, there is nothing more crucial than being able to communicate the benefits of that product or service effectively. Yet the number of poorly written, dull, drab and lifeless web pages found on lots of ecommerce websites is nothing short of mind boggling. This article provides 10 tips to help you write more effective copy for your web pages.

Tip #1: Master the Basics

First and foremost, your copy must be grammatically correct and free of all spelling errors and typos. All major word processors include tools to help you check spelling and grammar; use them! Other things to look for include overall readability, punctuation errors, capitalization errors, word choice, and consistency of style. If you know your writing skills aren't up to snuff, you may want to consider taking a class or hiring a professional copy writer to assist with the writing and or editing task.

Tip #2: Satisfy the Scanner

Writing for the web is different than writing for other mediums (See "Web Writing 101: Write Content that Sells"). Long flowery paragraphs and lengthy prose simply won't cut it online. The golden rule of the writing for the web can be summed up in three words: keep it simple! Web writers should keep in mind that there is very little reading that actually gets done online. The majority of web surfers quickly scan web pages for the information they seek. Knowing this, keep paragraphs short, and use type styling such as bold to emphasize key points.

Tip #3: Use Subheads Liberally

Another great way to help web surfers parse information quickly is through the use of subheads. Use them liberally. One paragraph per subhead will help visitors parse the information more readily and help you convert those browsers into buyers. Remember, however, that is imperative to keep the headlines as well as the text short and to the point. See also the tip about creating effective headlines below.

Tip #4: Get Personal

In any sales writing-but especially online-you've got to make sure to personalize your message in order to make it more attractive to your customers. The best way to do this is to speak directly to them in the first person. Use the word "you" often. And include personal examples rather than general. For example, "This month we have created a special deal just for you, our valued customer." Your customers will feel an affinity with copy that reaches out specifically to them.

Tip #5: Know Your Audience

The key to being able to communicate with your customers on a personal level is to know who they are! Of course, it is impossible to know every customer personally. However, it is likely that your customers fit into a certain demographic. For example, if you sell baby products, chances are you sell to mom and dads. The tone of the content on a baby product site would be far different from one that sells automotive parts, for example. Once you've identified who is shopping on your site, write using the language of your target audience. It's okay to use industry buzz words and technical jargon where appropriate. Just be careful not to overdo it.

Tip #6: Be Consistent

A common mistake that many websites make is the failure to be consistent. This includes consistency of language used and grammatical style, as well as the amount of copy on each page. If you offer three products, the web page for Product A should have about the same amount of copy as the pages for Product B and Product C. This will not only help set expectations but it will go a long way to helping you establish a more professional appearance.

Tip #7: Create Urgency

If you operate an ecommerce site, your goal is very likely to get your customers to click the "Buy" button and then follow through with a purchase. Consequently, the language on your site needs to support this. Try experimenting with call-to-action language that encourages your customers to buy now. Consider incorporating special offer language as well. Something like: "Buy within the next 24 hours and receive a free a gift". Place this copy on key pages during the checkout process to reduce shopping cart abandonment.

Tip #8: Demand Attention with Effective Headlines

Any journalist or newspaper editor will tell you that effective headlines sell newspapers. The same is true online. The headline or the heading at the top of your web pages provides you with an excellent opportunity to sell your product or service more effectively. Consider the following two headlines for the same product:

• Brand New Apple iPod Nano - New in Box with Free Shipping!


• Apple iPod Nano

Which of these headlines are you more likely to click?

Tip #9: Use Visual Aids

Remember the old adage, "a picture is worth a thousand words?" Heed this advice! If you are serious about selling online, you've got to supplement your web content with pictures, diagrams, drawings, etc. if you're going to land the sale. After all, if you were buying something-say a baseball card, antique, or some other collectible-wouldn't you rather see a photo of it, rather than relying on a description saying that it is in "mint" condition.

Tip #10: Be Search Engine Friendly

Writing top notch web pages for your website is pointless if no one can find them. Therefore, make sure that the content on your pages is friendly to the major search engines. At minimum, make sure you select keywords that describe the overall content of the page. Place them in page titles, headlines, and paragraph content. Including phrases in the body copy that you have used in your other tags (i.e. meta tags, alt tags, headings, title, etc.) will also help boost your rankings. Keep in mind, however, that search engine marketing is a delicate science. As such, you may want to enlist the help of a professional search engine marketing firm to employ these and other strategies to ensure your pages receive top billing. (Note that GoECart's peer division MachInteractive provides search engine optimization services.)

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The Future of Ecommerce Solutions

(Interview with GoECart CEO Manish Chowdhary)

Given the trends in the marketplace, what do you see on the horizon for ecommerce solutions?

This is such a dynamic field. Every day is a new day in the world of ecommerce. We see a lot of things, and looking in the near future, there are many different things that I think may happen.

One of the things I certainly see happening is the decline of the revenue-share business model. A lot of the packaged and hosted providers have revenue-share pricing models. I personally believe that, over time, we'll see a major decline. That is already happening because we see a lot of larger merchants, particularly, moving away from those providers because they are not happy and willing to share a percentage of the order value. A flat-fee pricing structure based on usage is likely to continue gaining prominence.

I also see a lot of multichannel integration happening. Right now, most of the ecommerce and shopping-cart providers are focused on a more pure-play, Internetbased solution.

However, as the market consolidates, I think there will be more multichannel integration offerings. Among ecommerce providers, you'll begin to see solutions that target specific verticals that we've probably already seen in the enterprise market. Along the same lines, because the customers and merchants are getting more sophisticated, and they are getting more comfortable with the online commerce world, they are beginning to demand those rich functionalities specific to their vertical and industry.

I see multilanguage rising into prominence because a lot of the growth in the ecommerce world is coming from abroad. U.S. merchants and North American, English-speaking merchants are looking to expand their market beyond their local country, and they are looking to tap into the world market. They will want to provide their store in a variety of different languages.

I see the emergence of mobile commerce. It's beginning to happen. People are getting more and more web savvy when it comes to cell phones. It's more popular in Japan and Europe, but I believe U.S. merchants are likely to incorporate that.

I see the integration with other technologies out there such as social networks, playing a role in the ecommerce world. Social networks can influence the popularity of a product, and the question will be how you can integrate that into your ecommerce offering and make that more engaging?

Read more at PracticaleCommerce.com

Postcard Marketing Success Tips

Copyright 2007 Bob Leduc
http://bobleduc.com/

Postcards may not be the most popular marketing tool in our modern high-tech business world. That's too bad because they can be a very cost-effective way to generate website traffic and sales leads ...if you do it right.

Tip #1: Make a Big First Impression

People like getting postcards from friends and relatives. They don't like getting advertising mail. Make your postcard look at first glance like a message from a friend instead of like an advertising announcement. It creates a warm friendly reception for your postcard.

For example, use the same typestyle and layout you would use to send a postcard to a friend. Use a date at the top ...even if it is something like "Monday, 11:15 AM". And include a real "from" name at the bottom ...even if it's not handwritten.

Tip #2: Get Right to the Point

Postcards get delivered in a format that's ready to read. Take advantage of this by making the biggest benefit you offer the first thing the reader sees. This will make them want to read the rest of your postcard.

For example, state your biggest benefit as a headline at the top of your postcard ...or make it the first item on a bulleted list of benefits ...or highlight it in bold type if it's in the body of your postcard.

Tip #3: Sell the Right Thing

Marketing postcards are most effective when they are used to generate website traffic or sales leads. They are less effective for closing sales because they don't provide enough space for a detailed sales message.

Design your message to sell the reader on seeking more information instead of trying to close sales.

For example, don't include much (if any) actual information about the product or service you are selling on your postcard. Instead, promote the major benefit (or benefits) they provide. Then persuade the reader to visit your website or to take some other action to get more information from a source where you can close sales.

Tip #4: Be Clear and Direct

You have only a few seconds to get the reader's attention and to persuade them to take the action you want. So keep your message brief and make sure the reader can clearly understand it with just a quick glance.

For example, limit your postcard to just a few short sentences with blank lines between them. Reduce several sentences to a short bulleted list to save space and reading time.

Always end your postcard by telling the reader exactly what to do to get more details - and include a reason to do it immediately.

Tip #5: Stimulate Fast Action

Just telling your reader how to get more information is not enough. You have to give them a reason to respond NOW or many will put your postcard aside to do later ...then get involved with other things and forget it.

For example, offer them a discounted price, a special bonus or some other benefit if they reply to your postcard by a deadline.

Postcards are not new or high-tech. But that's not a reason to ignore them. They can generate a lot of website traffic and sales leads for a very low-cost.

Follow these 5 proven tips and you will discover how to create powerful marketing postcards guaranteed to produce a big response.

Bob Leduc spent 20 years helping businesses like yours find new customers and increase sales. He just released a New Edition of his manual, How To Build Your Small Business Fast With Simple Postcards ...and launched *BizTips from Bob*, a newsletter to help small businesses grow and prosper. You'll find his low-cost marketing methods at: http://bobleduc.com/ or call: 702-658-1707 After 10 AM Pacific Time/Las Vegas, NV

Increasing Online Sales With Certified Security

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Website security can make or break you. Good security, independently certified through ScanAlert's HACKER SAFE service, will increase your bottom line.Conversely, poor security can cost you dearly and even put you out of business

By now, you've probably heard of The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), a mandatory program for all entities that collect, process or store credit card data. To be certified to the PCI DSS, you need to:

Complete an annual Self Assessment Questionnaire designed to improve credit card data handling processes

Pass a quarterly vulnerability scan (assuming you do more than 20,000 transactions annually)

If you are hacked when you are not PCI certified, your financial penalties can include fines starting at $50,000, as well as reimbursing banks for the costs of reissuing the stolen cards. Have three violations in a rolling 12-month period, and your ability to process credit cards will be terminated.

If PCI compliance is a stick, then ScanAlert's HACKER SAFE certification is a gigantic carrot and a proven way to build the trust that will build your online business. Think of it as a UL or Good Housekeeping seal of approval for website security. In fact, since ScanAlert introduced the HACKER SAFE service in 2002, it has become the Internet security benchmark for retailers around the world. That's why you see it on many big sites like GNC, Foot Locker, ShopNBC, American Red Cross, as well as small sites. Here is how it works:

ScanAlert conducts comprehensive daily security audits of ecommerce infrastructure. Sites are given all of the technical support and service they need to patch any holes discovered during the audits in order to meet the HACKER SAFE standard. ScanAlert certifies the ongoing application of patches. As long as the site meets the standard, ScanAlert continually serves a dynamic, date-stamped HACKER SAFE certification mark directly to it from ScanAlert's network.

You'll find the HACKER SAFE certification mark on more than 75,000 websites, including half of the Internet Retailer Top 500 list. The image is also seen daily by tens of millions of online consumers. In scientific A/B testing by more than 600 websites, including national brands and chain stores, HACKER SAFE certification increased sales conversions an average of 14% comparedto the control.

ScanAlert is offering GoECart customers the full featured HACKER SAFE service at a special deep discount. All set-up fees will be waived, and your subscription cost will discounted up to 70% off of ScanAlert's normal retail cost of $1,790 per year. The price depends on your configuration such as, amount of domains, traffic, and transaction volume.

If you're interested in selling more online, HACKER SAFE is definitely the way to go. If you need to validate your PCI DSS compliance, ScanAlert will get you there, too.

For more information or to signup, please contact 866-872-3011.

You can also signup online for your complimentary PCI account: https://www.scanalert.com/SignUp.sa?oc=6228

For more information on the HACKER SAFE discount: http://www.scanalert.com/content/webhost/?hostId=6229

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GoECart and HACKER SAFE Combine Best of Security and E-Commerce

Napa, California - April 10, 2007

GoECart.com has finalized a service and technology partnership with data security experts, ScanAlert, so that thousands of its GoECart-enabled retailing customers can validate compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard(PCI DSS); as well as address the security concerns of online consumers and maximize online sales.

Under the agreement, GoECart.com, a leading provider of on-demand e-commerce applications and services, will provide complementary services to validate PCI DSS compliance, and discounts on ScanAlert's more stringent HACKERSAFE® certification service.

"Protecting the infrastructure they need to prosper online -- particularly when budgets may be lacking -- is critical to the long-term success of the growth merchants we target," said GoECart.com CEO Manish Chowdhary. "Affordably priced, ScanAlert's security services will enable GoECart merchants to safeguard customer and corporate data, and then publicly market their certified security to increase sales conversion, average order value and organic search rankings."

"By emphasizing flexibility and pay-as-you-grow platform features, GoECart.com has really distinguished itself in the past year as a leading e-commerce solutions provider to high-growth merchants," added ScanAlert CEO Ken Leonard. "This partnership will deliver enterprise-grade technology to retailers who need the most trusted and flexible online retailing services available to maximize sales and profits."

ScanAlert's PCI DSS Validation Service
ScanAlert's PCI DSS Service provides everything GoECart merchants need to be validated to the PCI standard, including: unlimited security scans of up to 6 domain names or IP addresses, an interactive self-assessment questionnaire, and comprehensive telephone/email technical support from CISSP certified security specialists.

About HACKER SAFE
HACKER SAFE is the world's most recognized assurance of Internet security. Using its patent pending technology, ScanAlert conducts daily security audits to certify clients to the HACKERSAFE standard. Websites meeting the standard can then promote their certified security to site visitors by placing the HACKERSAFE certification trustmark on their sites. As long as the standard is met, ScanAlert continues to serve a date-stamped image from its network to the site.

Service Delivery and Availability
GoECart merchants interested in ScanAlert's PCI Compliance or discounted HACKER SAFE certification services should contact GoECart directly at 877-243-3612

About GoECart
GoECart.com is a leading provider of "Software as a Service"(SaaS) ecommerce solutions, serving a diverse customer base ranging from SMB enterprises to Fortune 500 companies. Its flagship product, GoECart, is a feature-packed, robust, scalable, and mature ecommerce solution that provides growth-focused merchants with all of the technology and infrastructure needed to rapidly and cost effectively set up, manage and grow an online store. For more information, visit the company's website or call (toll free) 877-243-3612.

About ScanAlert, Inc.
ScanAlert secures organizations of all sizes against threats to their network infrastructure and then certifies them to the HACKER SAFE standard -- the world's Internet security benchmark. Offered as a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, HACKER SAFE certification is used by more than 75,000 organizations, including well over half of the 500 largest online retailers in the USA. ScanAlert also operates HACKER SAFE Labs, the industry's only research group focused on ecommerce application security. More information is available at www.scanalert.com.

Supplement Your Ecommerce Site Traffic via the Image Search Engines

According to SearchEngineWatch.com, over 360 million image searches occur each month. And recent statistics from Hitwise® show the annual growth for the image search is over 90%, making it one of the fastest growing search verticals. This article explores how web merchants can augment their website traffic by getting listed in the image search engines.

The Big Five

All of the leading search engines now have a specific vertical for images. But when it comes to image searches online, nobody comes close to Google™. According to the Hitwise study, Google Image Search accounts for as much as 72% of all image searches conducted on the Net today! Apart from Google, Yahoo®, Ask®, MSN® and AOL® make up the remaining top-five positions for the most popular search engines for images.

Web merchants should concentrate on optimizing product photos and other site images for these popular engines, especially Google.

Social Image Sharing

In addition to this new breed of image search engines, image searches are also available via social network photo sharing sites such as Flickr™ and PhotoSite®, as well as more traditional social networks like MySpace®. These sites-whose audiences range from professional photographers to bloggers and photo enthusiasts0-also get a large number of hits, though not when compared to the top five image search engines. Merchants may want to consider checking with these social image sharing sites to determine if they provide additional options for getting their images listed.

Image Search Engine Optimization Tips

Since the major image engines automatically index images when they spider the web, merchants can grab their share of the traffic generated from the image search engines simply by ensuring that images on their site are properly optimized. Follow these guidelines:

• Ensure that images are unique. Most of the search engines look for original images. You can make your images "different" by retouching them with image editing software like Adobe® Photoshop®.
  
• Offer quality images on your site. The right kind of images (both full-size and thumbnail images) must have a certain standard of clarity and quality. Grainy, washed out, blurry, and/or oversized images are unacceptable. Text in images should be crisp and highly readable. By providing quality images, you improve your overall site and dramatically increase the changes of having them appear in an image search.
  
• Use relevant file names and naming conventions. The names should describe your image. Many of the engines use the files names to display the title of the image. Include product names, where applicable. '30 GB Apple iPod.JPG' is a far better choice than '111_5033.JPG'.
  
• Optimize the web page text that contains the image. This includes page titles, headings, image captions, and text. Since the image labels displayed in engines vary, using good web page content will increase the likelihood of your image getting properly labeled by the search engine and up the chances of someone clicking through to your site. Google, for example, builds the label that appears on its image search results from the content on the web page.
  
• Ensure that access to the image files on your site is not being blocked by your web server's configuration. Not long ago, it was a common practice for webmasters to block an images directory from crawled by the search engine spiders. If you suspect this is happening, check the robots.txt file to make sure there are no exclusions set up for your image directories.
  
• Refresh your images regularly. Since the major engines use a "freshness dating" element by which current images can carry a higher degree of relevance, you can try re-uploading the images to see if that helps with getting them re-indexed.

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Clicks

By following the guidelines above, you will significantly increase the chances of having your images featured in the top search engines and more viewers will click on them. If you provide attractive images that will get the attention of image seekers and follow the simple guidelines above, then you will likely see a boost in website traffic as a result of image searches.

Comparison Shopping Engines - Fresh Tactics for E-Tailers

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More than ever, today's web-savvy consumers use comparison shopping engines (CSEs) to research products before they make buying decisions. Since CSEs place the offerings of many merchants side by side, shoppers can compare prices and features at a glance. Are your products well represented in these search engines? This article reviews the major CSEs and provides some tactics to help web merchants get listed.

The Leading CSEs

The list of leading shopping engines in the United States includes Shopping.com, Yahoo Shopping, BizRate, DealTime, Shopzilla, NexTag, MSN Shopping, PriceGrabber, Froogle, AOL Shopping, and mySimon. Shopping.com is the most popular CSE, followed by Yahoo Shopping and Froogle.

Kelkoo is the leading comparison shopping search engine for the United Kingdom and Europe. According to the company, 16 out of the top 20 e-commerce sites in the UK currently advertise through the engine.

Brief descriptions of the major CSEs and other engines are available from SearchEngineWatch.com

Choosing the Right CSEs for Your Business

While it is recommended that you list your products in as many CSEs as possible, web merchants should weigh the options carefully to determine which CSEs are the most appropriate and most effective for your online business.

You can start by researching all of the popular engines to determine which are the most popular with your customer base. All CSEs are not created equal; and some engines are more popular for some products than others. You should also determine where your competition is listed and ensure that your most competitive products are listed in that engine as well. If you are represented well by a search engine that is frequently visited by customers looking for your products, your chances of making a sale will be better!

For many merchants, a key differentiator is user-friendliness. Your products and their specifications have to be uploaded into the CSE. How easy is it for you to update data about your products? Is the process automatic or does it require that you log in to the site each time you want to make updates? The ease with which you can update your data will be in an important factor in determining how often you will upload products to the CSE. The level of complexity of the CSE will be sure to have an impact the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Tactics for Success

• Set a budget - Some of the CSEs offer basic listings for free. For example, Yahoo Shopping, Froogle, and PriceGrabber all offer free basic membership. However, in order to really leverage the benefits of these engines (and more advanced selling tools and privileges), you'll want to participate in the paid listing programs. Note that some of the comparison engines require you to pay a commission when a sale is made. Others charge the merchant every time a user clicks through to one of your products. It is advisable that you find out which search engine offers the most ideal arrangement for you and then set a budget accordingly.
  


• Leverage product feeds - Most of the CSEs allow you to submit information about the products you want to sell via a "feed." The feed is typically provided to the shopping site in a text or CSV file and includes product specifications such as name, description, price, image location, and shipping charges. The feeds make it easier for you to keep your product listings current on the CSEs. (Note: GoECart has automated product data feeds for Yahoo® Shopping, Froogleâ„¢, Shopping.comâ„¢, Shopzilla, and Shop.com.).
  


• Carefully monitor and manage campaigns - All of the CSEs provide a web interface that lets you manage your listings and typically the cost-per-click (CPC) bidding process. It is recommended that merchants monitor their campaigns on a weekly or even daily basis and make adjustments as needed. The goal is to ensure products receive competitive listings on an ongoing basis.
  


• Differentiate - Since you'll be going head-to-head with the competition on CSE sites, you need to do everything you can to make your products stand out. Advertising free shipping or a free gift with purchase could be the deciding factor that makes a shopper click through to your site instead of another merchant's. Another way to differentiate is to use the ratings features on these sites to achieve high ratings. These rating systems can go a long way toward building trust with potential buyers.
  


• Stay current - The ever-widening world of CSEs changes often-and fast. You can stay current on the latest CSE news and strategies by reviewing sites like http://comparisonengines.com/ and http://searchenginewatch.com/

Get going now!

It today's highly competitive world of web marketing and ecommerce, comparison shopping engines are a must if you want to compete effectively. If you are not already listed with these engines, it's time to get going! This way, you can reap the benefits of increased traffic and sales these hugely popular sites can bring your online business.

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How to Optimize Your Podcasts And Be Found High on Audio Search

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Since your ecommerce site visitors are using their eyes and ears as they arrive on your storefront, podcasting offers some fresh opportunities to deliver your message. From articulating a message with audio, to enhancing an article with the addition of sound, podcasting can offer some extra benefits for the average site visitor.

Consider Podcasting for Increased Profit, Credibility, and Reach

On-demand broadcasting on the web has grown steadily over the past five years, bringing forward a unique presentation of today's most valuable content. According to 2006 Forrester® Research studies, podcast uptakes are expected to reach almost 12 million US households by 2010. This increase in multimedia downloads will make even more content readily available on the web; so, the challenge for podcast broadcasters is having files and content easily searchable and found.

After creating and implementing your latest podcast, an essential step is optimization. You're probably already aware of strategies and initiatives for optimizing your web content; using appropriate keywords, tagging, and setting up your articles and layout to be search-engine friendly are parts of successful online marketing.

In order for your podcasts to gain the same recognition, you'll want to create an effective optimization strategy. This will help your podcast reach the high ranks of audio search engines, making it easy and simple for potential visitors to find your essential material. Besides submitting your piece to various podcast directories and feeds, you'll want to take advantage of the additional optimization tactics below.

Podcast Optimization Strategy #1: Make the file attractive

Optimize your audio files. You'll need to make sure all the tracks are accurate and working; search engines cannot locate broken files, and you'll have a hard time tracking it down yourself. Remember that most people are going to download the file to an MP3 player or other media playing device, and you want this process to be straightforward and the file to easily downloadable. You'll find quality tools available for download online; Audacity is free, and can help with encoding and compressing your files. Other programs can help you streamline your file to make it easy to download and share.

Podcast Optimization Strategy #2: Less is more

You'll need to make your podcast easy to find. Many podcast publishers make the mistake of creating excessive feeds in hopes of reaching higher search engine placement. This strategy can backfire, since search engines like Googleâ„¢ are now being programmed to find relevant and appropriate content. If your podcast is being distributed through too many articles, networks, or websites, it may have a lower chance of being recognized.

Podcast Optimization Strategy #3: The power of tags

Keep in mind that podcast search engines work in a very similar style as traditional search engines. Web crawlers are designed to trace all rich media content files with specific features; tagging can help tremendously, and will give you the added leverage you need for higher search engine rankings.

Podcast Optimization Strategy #4: Build value through appropriate feeds

Each type of feed you select to share your file can be distributed in a unique way. Remember that you need to create a new one for each mode of distribution; iTunes will require it's own unique channel, and you might need to do some research on creating appropriate RSS-friendly content.

Podcast Optimization Strategy #5: Build a landing page for each submission

If you can create an individual landing page for each file, you can increase your search engine rankings in two ways: through both the audio search, and regular text search. Adding the title of your podcast file into the landing page URL will also help you reach the higher rankings on most standard search engines. Including a player on this landing page, or link to download one, can improve visitor interest and site visibility as well.

Podcast Optimization Strategy #6: Embed content with metadata

This is especially significant if you are creating a landing page for the file; metadata can help increase your chances of pickup from major search engines, and a simple list of keywords and phrases inserted into the file is all it takes. iTunes® has its own format for publishing this information, and most platforms will require that you include a descriptive title, notes, and other keywords.

Podcast Optimization Strategy #7: Transcribe your podcast

If possible, script out the podcast itself and include this on your landing page. Not only will the keyword counts be increased dramatically, but you'll have a dual opportunity for search engine crawlers: content-related searches, and audio search. A summary works well also, if you'd rather not include the entire piece.

Get Found!

The ever-changing web offers more dynamic content, day after day. Podcasting has created a new segment in website publishing, incorporating the power of audio. Now that MP3 owners and other media outlets give us new opportunities to publish and share, quality content, distribution is a high priority. Making podcast files findable on the web is possible with the right tools and optimization strategy in place.

For more information about audio podcasting, along with links to podcasts of articles in this newsletter, see http://goecart.com/support/Free-Ecommerce-Podcasts-Downloads.aspx

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Generate Website Traffic with Postcards

Promoting your website is getting more difficult these days. New marketing tactics come and go fast. They work for a while then quickly fade away. Just keeping up with the changes can be a full time job. Here's a proven way you can generate lots of traffic to your website ...one that hasn't faded away. In fact, it actually works better now than ever before - and you probably haven't even tried it. What is it? Go offline and promote your website with postcards.

But, you say, "I'm an internet marketer, not a direct mail marketer." Right, and so are most of your competitors.

That's why they don't market with postcards ...and why most of them are not likely to try postcards anytime soon.

You won't have much competition. Maybe that's one of the reasons why postcards work so well for internet marketers.

It Costs Less than You Think

The cost for printing postcards starts at just a few cents each, depending on how you print them. And you can send postcards by First Class Mail in the US for just 26 cents each if you keep them between 3 1/2 to 4 1/4 inches high and between 5 to 6 inches wide.

OK. So you're ready to give postcards a try. But where do you begin?

1. Start with the Mailing List

You'll get a good response to your postcards if you send them to prospects already interested in what you offer.

You'll get an even better response if those prospects also have a proven history of acting on offers they receive.

For example, get a list of prospects who previously requested information (or actually bought) something similar to what you sell - or a list of paid subscribers to a publication targeting the same interests that make them good prospects for what you sell.

You can get these and other similar lists from most mailing list brokers.

2. Don't Forget Why You're Mailing Postcards

The purpose of your postcards is to get the readers to visit your website (take an action). It's not to close a sale for money (make a purchase). Postcards are too small to be effective at closing sales. Closing sales is what your website is designed to do.

3. Decide What to Say on Your Postcard

You don't need to come up with a strategy to persuade people to read your postcard. It will be delivered with the message exposed and ready to read. So get right to the point.
Don't focus on your product or service. Instead, spotlight the major benefits your product or service provides. That will arouse the reader's interest and motivate them to find out more about those benefits ...by going to your website.

Tip: Offer a bonus to those who visit your site before a specific deadline. It will boost the response.

That's it. Just 3 simple steps. Try it. You'll discover a profitable way to generate lots of website traffic - one you can use for many years to come.

Bob Leduc spent 20 years helping businesses like yours find new customers and increase sales. He just released a New Edition of his manual, How To Build Your Small Business Fast With Simple Postcards ...and launched *BizTips from Bob*, a newsletter to help small businesses grow and prosper. You'll find his low-cost marketing methods at: http://bobleduc.com/ or call: 702-658-1707 After 10 AM Pacific Time/Las Vegas, NV

Copyright 2007 Bob Leduc http://bobleduc.com/

E-mail Marketing: Being Persuasive, Not Offensive

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Reach customers with personalization for increased responses

Online retailers and ecommerce executives have used countless tactics to increase sales through e-mail marketing campaigns. As an alternative to direct mail and other offline methods, e-mail is a simple and efficient way to reach prospects and deliver a core message. Still, the ever-expanding communications system on the web has materialized into offensive spam and overwhelming advertisements as well. When customers stop opening e-mails in fear of being targeted with spam, or even viruses, any campaign can quickly lose its value. Over time, this can also lead to the click of the unsubscribe button where the business loses contact of their prospect completely.

A New Approach

Persuasive e-mail marketing offers a new approach. Instead of sending out mass e-mails that can potentially upset potential buyers and site visitors, the art of delivering a centralized message becomes paramount. Persuasive e-mail marketing can help to increase response rates in multiple ways; the effort can encourage opening and clicking through to various parts of your site or product showcase and develop customer loyalty in the process.

E-mail Lists Are Key

Creating and growing a valuable e-mail list is an important part of this process. You can spend thousands of dollars collecting names and creating a database that has little impact; if you are not taking the steps to segment your customer list and organize it in a way to target specific groups, your efforts for sending out that e-mail blast may be fruitless. It's important to remember that a targeted group, or niche audience, is much more likely to respond and appreciate your contact. When you tailor your message to focus on their specific needs, you are personalizing the message. This will reach them faster and with impact; over time, this can lead to customer loyalty and help build credibility for your company, brand, or products as well.

When you are staging an e-mail marketing campaign that is event-driven, it is essential that the list is compiled effectively well in advance, and uses a trickling effect to deliver the message. This may involve a set of auto responders, or simply a series of consistent messages with the brand, logo, and underlying message pulled together in perfect balance. Staging an e-mail marketing campaign can help create 'buzz' for your idea, and sending this out to the right customer segment will further help generate interest.

Be Persuasive

Keeping the e-mail list growing may be as simple as offering a newsletter sign-up form immediately on the site visit, or including an area of each e-mail where the recipient can 'forward to a friend.' By increasing circulation and viewership of each of your communications pieces, you can begin to grow a strong customer base with very little effort. The power of community-building and developing a network is an essential part of your marketing campaign, and is even more important during the launch stages. These are almost automatic buzz generators and can help send out your message in more ways than a traditional method. Not only does this prevent alienation of specific groups, but you will have a larger set of customers waiting for news on a regular basis.

Track Your Results

Finally, be sure to integrate a comprehensives web site analytics program to best judge the effectiveness of each campaign. These statistics will help you see when and how your prospects are responding, and where the results are leading them. Are they going directly to the website? Are they clicking on specific product links? The only way you will be able to track this is by reviewing your analysis program week after week.

Be Persuasive!

E-mail marketing has evolved from a simple newsletter message to staged events and creative advertising. Online retailers can take advantage of many opportunities to reach prospects and customers with a carefully planned strategy; developing and retaining online customers involves personalization and understanding the customer's core needs. While many people have become apprehensive over the value of e-mail as a way to reach prospects, persuasive e-mail marketing can be used effectively to build credibility for the company and increase response rates in the process.

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Top 5 Reasons Why Your Website Needs Fast & Intelligent Ecommerce Site Search

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Since turning to the Internet for shopping and retail has set a new standard for ecommerce, the need to find relevant products in the most efficient manner is quickly becoming a competitive industry in itself. While e-commerce websites become increasingly dynamic and user-friendly, the need to search for and find a specific product can be overwhelming for the average consumer.

The customer's dilemma of finding the right match amongst the vast catalogs of goods online is the basis of most ecommerce transactions. The savvy marketer's top priority is not only overcoming this dilemma, but also implementing the right tools, and tracking and monitoring data effectively. Implementing a site search solution for an ecommerce-based website is the fastest and most intelligent way of selling on the web today.

#1: Site Search enables your customers to find relevant information, fast
Consumers are looking for ways to find relevant information, fast.

According to Internet Retailer Magazine, the conversion rate of visitors accessing site search is higher than those who use a standard search toolbar. Retailers that tag all items and products as they are uploaded onto the site are setting the stage for marked improvements in marketing and sales initiatives. Not only can the data retrieved be stored and sorted for market research, but consumers can access a variety of product categories and find relevant information with ease. GoECart's ecommerce solution provides features comparable to the current market leaders of site search technologies.

#2: Site Search allows your website to remain competitive
Website owners need to deploy cost-effective retail search solutions to remain competitive.

According to the Aberdeen Group, 46% of merchandising enterprises are struggling with implementing the right method of ecommerce search applications to suit their customers. And Jupiter Research reports that the key inhibitor for companies looking for search deployment strategies is cost; customer-facing search vendors such as Atomz Commerce (recently rebranded as WebSideStory Search), Endeca Technologies, EasyAsk, Fast Search & Transfer and Mercado can easily charge from $100,000 to $500,000 per package. GoECart can offer a sensible and inexpensive alternative to implement a profitable retail search solution.

Marketers have applied various search engine techniques to retailer websites, and the results show how valuable the concept of Site Search truly is. With the launch of Web 2.0 technologies, companies such as Mercado and Celebros.com are providing site search solutions to offer a new dimension of search functionality. Tools that can track customer data, extract and categorize specific browsing habits, organize clicked results, and in turn, deliver relevant web pages and results are setting the standard in search merchandising, coined 'Searchandising' (Aberdeen Group Feb. 2007).

A 37Signals Research Report evaluated 25 top search sites in January 2005. Results and key findings of the ratings showed that leading online retailers such as Lands' End, Drugstore.com, Amazon.com, and Wal-Mart were able to achieve high ratings because of their focus on accuracy and relevance sorting, and filtering results. Integrating site search and active ranking can help an online business reach specific targets and objectives. Brooks Brothers reported a 25% increase in sales after implementing a new analytics and site search solution. The automated shopping engine makes use of a Google sitemap feed. 4inkjets.com, an online retailer for printer ink and supplies, reported a conversion rate increase of almost 3.5% in sales after redesigning the website and implementing an innovative site search module.

#3: Site Search can provide your website a distinct competitive advantage
Learning how to cultivate and extract marketing data can give your e-commerce website a competitive advantage.

Consumers are looking for easier ways to find products and services they need, and Web 2.0-based search engines make use of tags and category rankings for a simple and efficient approach. Not only is it necessary for ecommerce marketers and online retail store operators to develop a systematic process for capturing consumer data, but understanding how to interpret and initiate the appropriate search tools is also becoming a competitive requirement. Staying ahead of site search trends can help differentiate a business from the competition in more ways than one. Key differences between a best-in-class site search and just a standard search engine include innovative web analytics applications, customized search results templates, and making use of custom dictionaries. Synonym mapping takes this one step further; by utilizing an effective module for mapping multiple languages, a comprehensive site search program can help provide exceptionally accurate results.

Cultivating this data involves streamlining the collection and interpretation process. GoECart offers many of these services to help online retailers, researchers, and marketers obtain the information they need. Since understanding consumer behavior and conversions is such an essential part of tracking trends, GoECart is also equipped with features that help make sense of the conversion rates and data received.

#4: With Site Search, it’s easy to generate value for the end user

Generating value for the end user is a high priority for any ecommerce website, and an efficient Product Catalog Site Search system can help develop attractiveness of the website, while increasing the value of the search experience with a few simple steps.

Have you ever wondered what consumers do when they first arrive at an ecommerce site? A staggering 43% go to the site's internal search box and look for a product or a category (Source: MarketingSherpa and Guidester, Online Shopping Research Survey, Jan 2007). Note that GoECart bundles best-in-class e-commerce site search technology that fosters a customer- centric online experience such as tolerance for misspelled words, thesaurus/synonyms and natural language processing. These search tool capabilities provide better quality results and increase satisfaction for consumers because they are by- design and, user- friendly.

Customers can quickly and easily search through the merchant product catalog to find results that match their criteria. Search results are displayed in an intuitive fashion to maximize click-through rates and conversions.

Strategic sales and marketing tools are the keys to success for ecommerce transactions on your website. GoECart solutions can set the stage for improved customer service processes in the long-term, allowing you to stay competitive with the merchandising solutions available on the web today, and offering a competitive advantage.

#5: Site Search integrated with product recommendations means increased sales for your website
Integration of product recommendations into Site Search is an attractive benefit to the consumer.

Product recommendations are a valuable tool for companies looking for increased sales, but without relevant data available, the process itself may lead to low customer interaction. When Amazon.com first introduced its product recommendations service to the shopping portal, thousands of online shoppers took part in this new stepping stone for shopping and customer service. Online retailers who simply upload catalogs or product lists are actually doing the customers a disservice; it can become tedious to flip through each page of a product list or catalog site, and this process itself can quickly lose the customer’s interest. However, effective product recommendations and related search results can only be possible with the appropriate software and programming in place.

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Leverage the Power of Customer Loyalty by Offering Product Reviews on Your Website

The customer is king in the retail world, and this is proving to be even truer online. In today's competitive web landscape, growing online businesses are reaping the benefits of consumer feedback about their products and services, using customer loyalty to their advantage. Customer feedback, suggestions, and commentary offer insights and high-quality information on a variety of goods. Savvy web merchants are using this information to help increase sales.

Moreover, many companies are making use of online product recommendation portals to help them gain significant advantages over their competitors. By finding out exactly how a customer feels about an experience, marketers and online retailers can capture the information and develop key strategies to fine-tune their brand.

The High Impact of Customer Loyalty

Customer loyalty is an important part of business in any industry-from retail to service industries, developing a strong customer base is an important key to growth. Loyal customers can become involved with a company through participation. They may provide opinions, give advice, or highlight recommendations for other buyers. By doing so, they are shaping a new network that offers businesses an insider's look at their own products. Online retailers such as Amazon.com® and Shopzilla™ are leading the way for this trend; in the online world, it's become imperative to find out what the customer is thinking before, during, and after the purchase. From the customer's perspective, this service is even more important.

According to a Jupiter Research study in 2006, 43% of consumers give feedback after a good experience, while 31% tell friends about a good experience. By transferring this word-of-mouth communication to an online platform, retailers allow consumers to interact with not only their friends and immediate family members, but consumers in the far reaches of the world.

Product Recommendations with a Purpose

Product recommendation sites such as Amazon.com give the power of decision-making back to the consumer; peers rely on them, marketers can learn about what products are faring well in the market-and which ones aren't, and the customer feels both connected and engaged with the company they are buying from. The critical elements of feedback and suggestions play a leading role in how e-retailers make website construction decisions. Amazon's website allows customers to not only complete their purchase, but also learn about add-ons and additional products they may be interested in. This is a simple way to increase sales, and it's become a key reason why shoppers continue to make their purchases from just one site, even when the products are offered from various retailers.

Customers Connect with Social Shopping Networks

Social shopping networks offer a great opportunity to engage the customer. (For more information about today's leading networks, see this month's article on Online Marketplaces.) Some of the newer, cutting edge, social shopping sites such as ThisNext, StyleHive, and Kaboodle (currently in Beta) allow users to create profiles, and identify themselves with keyword tags. These tags highlight their favorite brands, products, and general personality. By publicly sharing this information with other shoppers, as well as marketers and casual observers, these sites create a solid foundation of brand preferences. From designer shoes to the latest electronic devices, customers are willingly sharing their experiences and encouraging others to follow suit.

The Limitless Value of Customer Participation

Offline versions of customer reviews take much simpler forms; a survey, a comment card, or a physical suggestion box is all but commonplace in stores and restaurants. However, these are ultimately independent of learning what other consumers feel or think; results are sent straight to company headquarters, and are seldom shared with the masses.

The online version of this idea presents new opportunities. Star rating systems can gauge a particular product on a scale. Blogs and commentary about a particular brand launch can be tracked and monitored using basic web statistic tools. Companies can engage in online discussion forums and blogs themselves, creating a profile and encouraging their customers to maintain contact. By developing this ongoing contact with customers beyond e-mail newsletters or alerts, e-retailers are developing a strong and loyal customer base. By publishing these results helps consumers interact with each other in new ways, creating an opportunity to learn about 'true' experiences beyond a product description or press release.

In another study conducted by Jupiter Research in 2006, 48% of online shoppers find reviews or ratings useful. This means hat almost half the online shopping market takes a look at star ratings, opinion polls, and other rating systems before making their final purchasing decision. When an e-tailer makes the online purchasing process an interactive one, by providing rating systems and other tools that help provide feedback on particular products, they are effectually creating a stronger bond with the consumer by providing relevant information during the decision-making process.

Building Customer Loyalty with Product Review Options

While finding out what a customer feels about their shopping experience after the process is over provides valuable insight, the act of searching and finding based on other people's reviews is becoming more important for customers during their decision-making process. Retailers who adopt technology or software that makes this possible can benefit in multiple ways. Customers are more likely to be attracted to shopping on the website, and will naturally develop a sense of community and trust with other shoppers. Enabling customers to provide unbiased feedback, reviews, and suggestions also helps marketers and business developers learn about the true needs and wants of their customers. Developing loyalty is an ongoing process, but developing a system that allows customer engagement at the social level offers a significant opportunity for e-tailers in today's competitive marketplace.

Google Checkout is Now Available to GoECart Merchants

GoECart the most Search Engine Friendly ecommerce solution available in market today is pleased to announce their partnership with Google, the industry leading search engine. Which means Google Checkout is now available for the latest version of GoECart. GoECart merchants can sign up for their free account by visiting the following special GoECart URL on Google's site: http://checkout.google.com/sell?promo=segoecart.

When you sign up through GoECart for Google Checkout you also get a $50 Adwords coupon from Google!*

Why Google Checkout?

Google Checkout is a fast, convenient checkout option that harmonizes the existing checkout process and facilitates customers to buy from you quickly and securely, using a single username and password.

Attract New Customers:

Buyers that use Google Checkout actively look to buy from merchants that offer it on their websites. Through Google search advertising program consumer will see the Google Checkout badge on your AdWords ads and quickly identify you as a participating merchant.

Convert More Visitors Into Customers:

Having a lengthy checkout process of 3-5 pages just frustrate online shoppers and will lead to shopping cart abandonment. The merchant store accepting fast and secure Google checkout process helps persuade shoppers to buy on your site and buy more often.

Protect yourself from fraud:

Google Checkout fraud prevention tool proactively identifies and filters out deceptive transactions, And Checkout's Payment Guarantee policy helps protect you from chargeback's. For more information on this and other Google Checkout features, please refer FAQ page on the Google Web site.

Lower sales processing costs:

For every $1 you spend on Google Adwords, you can process $10 in sales for free. If you don't use Google search advertising or you go beyond your free transaction processing, you can process additional sales at a low 2% and $0.20 per transaction. Learn more about processing orders with Google Checkout and supporting customers.

Still have some doubts in your mind!! Don't be worried; go to the new Google Checkout blog which helps you get the most out of Google Checkout. You can find and share information on feature enhancements, product updates, Q&A from the customer support team, and useful tips.


Note: From now through the end of 2007, you can process your Google Checkout sales for free

Power Up Your Ecommerce Sales With Website Analytics

Understanding customer behavior is no longer reserved for market research teams and analysts. With the advances in ecommerce technologies that allow website owners to monitor crucial data, the integration of buying behavior, search results, and the final purchase is become a necessity in developing revenue-generating marketing initiatives. Retailers who can measure and decipher their customers' behavior have a stronger chance of reaching them at the opportune moment.

Understanding Web Analytics

Web analytics is a key element of studying and understanding the online customer's behavior and buying patterns. Online consumer behavior is driven by many factors that include website architecture and design, value of content, quality of pictures and other media, as well as the overall ease of the shopping experience. An efficient online checkout system and high levels of customer service play a strong role in retaining customers, and increasing sales and revenues become much easier when e-tailers can provide a shopping experience based on hard data.

A survey conducted by the Aberdeen Group reports that the primary goal for e-tailers is to attract, convert, and retain customers. Of all the companies surveyed, 75% used analytics data to increase visitors (attract) , 78% used this data to improve the duration of the visit (convert), and 89% used the data to better understand (retain) visitors on the site.

ShopLocal.com is just one example of a company that has achieved success with promotions data, and an increased understanding of customer behavior as a result. By using real-time metrics and custom reporting, the company reported a 30%increase in page views and visits during a holiday promotional period. Not only did the site receive more potential customers, but visitors stayed on the e-tailers website for longer periods of time. Why? They were continuously provided with relevant information and links. Web analytics systems have the potential to generate statistics and reports to:

• Track behavior and responses to specific ads


• Analyze site search results


• Highlight the most searched-for keywords
  
• Identify which parts of a site receive the most activity,and therefore, attention
  
• Deliver reports on click-throughs for various links (e.g. those embedded in e-mail marketing campaigns)

Web analytics makes all of this possible! By adjusting the results of each and every action, implementing the right tools can help create a unique and customized shopping experience for every single website visitor. There are a number of web analytics packages that offer complete analysis, statistics, and metrics for simple reporting. These can help optimize the website for efficiency week after week.

GoECart recommends NetTracker; NetTracker is now known as Affinium NetInsight from Unica Corp. (Nasdaq: UNCA) and is an advanced web site analytics solution for many e-tailers. The package offers key features including campaign tracking, custom reporting, and efficient visitor tracking to provide extensive clickstream analysis. Other valuable web analytics packages include:

• Google Analytics - a popular free option
  
• WebTrends
  
• Omniture (Nasdaq: OMTR)
  
• WebsideStory
  
• CoreMetrics

The Web Analytics Association provides additional articles and resources for implementing a web analytics package. From calculating web metrics to developing a custom traffic analysis report, the association offers a variety of tools and services.

Affiliate Marketing: Managing the Relationship

Affiliate marketing and incentive-based selling are becoming valuable resources for a variety of e-tailers, and generating revenue through residual income streams is becoming more necessary than ever for web merchants to stay competitive. While the average affiliate network can bring any business a fresh batch of customers immediately, expanding this network to the e-tailer's advantage in the long term can present some challenges.

Growing a sales team in one location involves regular training, feedback, market research, and strategy. Since affiliates are often scattered throughout the country, or even the world, it can become more difficult to control the quality of the transaction. As a result, sales may not be reaching an optimal level.

Furthermore, developing a profitable affiliate marketing program often requires training affiliate sales members and nurturing business relationships. Even though many affiliate networks can be a result of an organic growth process, a self-sustaining system often requires direct intervention. Bonuses, performance prizes, and raising commissions can all be effective ways to encourage growth. An e-tailer that develops a strategy to learn and grow with its affiliate team can maximize its chances of success for the long term.

Affiliate Marketing: The Basics

Affiliate marketing begins with the simple concept of a commission-based, independently run network. In addition to distributing products directly to customers, an e-tailer sets up a system with specific sales people to establish a network of sellers. These sales team members are responsible for recruiting additional members who distribute the e-tailer's products. Each member is designated a commission amount, and they may move up to various levels of their company depending on performance. The business grows in multiple ways: both from increased revenue from product sales, and with an established network of sellers. Most affiliate programs fit into one or more of the following categories:

• Internet Affiliate Marketing


• Performance Marketing


• Referral Programs


• Pay-for-Performance Programs


• Direct Marketing


• Associate Programs

Internet affiliate marketing is quickly becoming a valuable way for businesses of any size to bring in multiple streams of revenue. A popular program on the web today is Commission Junction, one of the internet's fastest growing networks that offers a streamlined payment and reporting system. ClickBank is another popular place where merchants can buy and sell digital products such as ebooks, software, and bulk batches of web articles. If your company is looking for a wide distribution of books or software packages, ClickBank can help you develop a quick and efficient process to make this possible.

Linkshare is another popular affiliate marketing network that helps merchants join similar businesses in a given industry. Commissions are earned through every product available on the network, offering companies a chance to maximize revenue generated on their website. Each time a visitor follows a specific link for a purchase, a commission is granted or the sale. Linkshare affiliates can enjoy the benefits of having well-recognized brands on their site, and it can be a valuable venture for generating interest for a new startup or smaller online merchants.

Performance marketing is another version of affiliate marketing programs, based on a pay-per-performance revenue structure. FatWallet is one example of a company that has built customer loyalty through an effective performance marketing campaign, and continues to grow alongside sites such as ClickBank.

Referral programs are used by sites such as Amazon.com, where independent e-marketers can list products directly from Amazon.com's site and earn a commission per sale. This is a valuable strategy for companies that may not be interested in selling goods directly out of inventory. Associate programs work in a similar way; these are another option through Amazon.com, as well as GoExact.com. Both of these programs have developed a strong affiliate link structure, along with sign-up incentives as part of their recruitment campaign.

Depending on the tier structure and number of affiliates involved within a chain, the opportunity for exponential revenue becomes a strong motivator for all referrals. Since the process can be repeated to infinity, the risk of losing value and power of the network becomes apparent. It's here that it becomes important for an e-tailer to manage the relationship. An effective approach to managing the affiliate relationship is to develop a strategic plan for growth.

Managing Affiliate Partners

Many e-tailers simply choose a strategy of high recruitment levels; this means that they will continue to hire and develop affiliates throughout the network, regardless of how each individual member may be performing. While this may offer a wider reach in the short term, the risk of poor performance becomes higher when there is limited control.

E-tailers that choose to refine their team may have a better opportunity for long-term success. The key ways to nurture and advance a novice sales team member include:

• Conducting regular sales conferences


• Offering ongoing training


• Providing opportunities for advancement based on performance


• Extending incentives with contests and bonuses


• Creating an opportunity for the affiliate to become a leader of a given area or region

The Importance of Identifying Top Affiliates

Affiliate programs can only be attractive to independent sellers when they present a competitive commission structure. Not only is it important to offer a lucrative rate plan, but identifying and rewarding high achievers will help build a more responsive network. Learning how to manage top performers will help build a strong chain.

Tracking an affiliate sales team, their efforts, and their performance is an essential part of managing an affiliate team. E-tailers need to regularly monitor sales cycles and trends. After reviewing performance, it becomes easy to see the top 100 performers within a given time frame. But why is this important?

Every affiliate team member will be working on a different commission level and compensation structure. Since the primary motivation is often to jump up to the next tier, some affiliates work exceptionally hard at reaching the next level, while others might just perform to the bare minimum. Structuring a competitive and incentive-based compensation plan will help.

How to Determine the Top Affiliates

Affiliate networks that spotlight and promote top performers offer the benefit of increased exposure. The incentive to reach the top ranks becomes even more attractive to newcomers, and will set the standards for earning a reputable position. Determining the top affiliates will require regular monitoring and the collection of sales report data. Allocating commissions, promotions, and bonuses on a regular basis will help give affiliates goals and incentives to grow their business. When this is done on a quarterly or monthly basis, the regular contributors are easily identifiable.

Although reaching the top stages takes time, it offers an opportunity for the diligent and persistent workers. Getting to the top then becomes a responsibility that rests on the shoulders of each and every individual involved. E-tailers that offer resources and tools to allow top performers reach their full potential will filter out the poor performers who simply do not put in the extra effort required to grow.

The Bottom Line

Affiliate marketing and sales programs provide profitable ventures for many e-tailers, but learning how to manage the sales team requires its own strategy. A lucrative commission structure and opportunities for growth are often not enough. Identifying the top performers and filtering out poor performance is necessary for keeping motivation and rewards level high-steps that can lead to increased sales and a well-established, valuable brand.