What word expresses an action, state, or occurrence, and forms the main part of the predicate of a sentence?

It’s a verb and it’s about to change the way you market your products on Facebook.

Facebook’s annual f8 developer conference included the announcement of what Facebook calls the Open Graph.

The Open Graph allows third-party developers to create expressive buttons, very similar to the famous “Like Button”, and place these interactive buttons on your product description pages.

For example, in the very near future you may see Facebook buttons with the following verbs on some of your favorite websites: want, buy, own, listen to, read, eat, watch and work out.

You may be wondering what happens once a customer clicks one of these new action buttons?

Facebook plans for these actions to appear in the newly released “Ticker” portion of your Facebook page. This is the area of Facebook where you may serendipitously discover what your friends are doing while you’re browsing Facebook.

The eCommerce platform Magento is the first eCommerce company to offer integration for the “Want” and “Own” buttons with Facebook’s new Open Graph.

These new, more expressive actions may prove to be a great tool for generating more traffic from Facebook to your product pages. eCommerce companies should now begin testing these buttons on select products to determine their interaction rates.

Have you ever subscribed to an e-mail newsletter and instantly received an e-mail asking you to confirm your subscription?

This is called double opt-in and it’s designed to prevent subscribers from receiving unsolicited e-mails. It also helps e-mail marketers keep their lists full of working e-mail accounts.

It’s imperative for e-mail marketers that you click the “confirm your subscription” link in the confirmation e-mail. This is the final action that adds you to their subscription list.

Smart e-mail marketers perform A/B tests on their confirmation e-mail subject lines to determine which subject gets subscribers to confirm their address.

Here are a few confirmation e-mail subject lines e-mail marketers test:

• Please confirm your e-mail address
• Confirm your e-mail address
• E-mail confirmation
• Confirm subscription to [company name]
• Response required, confirm your subscription

Recently Alex Pankratov of Bvckup performed a small A/B test for his e-mail subscribers that increased the number of completed subscriptions from 51% to 82%.

He simply changed his subject line from the generic “E-mail confirmation” to “Please confirm your e-mail address”. By making his call-to-action clearer he was able to increase his subscriber rate.

Testing your confirmation e-mail headlines is just another example of how a simple hypothesis followed up by measuring and testing can yield more conversions for your marketing campaigns.

Creating ads that are highly relevant to your target audience is one of the fundamental keys to a successful online advertising campaign.

Facebook’s new zip code targeting and interest-based suggestions are the tools you need to be more relevant to your audiences.

Zip Code Targeting

Gone are the days when advertisers could only target Facebook users by states, provinces and cities. Advertisers can now target up to 2,500 zip codes per advertisement and sponsored story.

This is great for small businesses and franchises, especially those in larger cities, because they can now target the specific neighborhoods they serve.

Though it’s not as effective as Google’s map and radius targeting, it’s a huge leap forward for Facebook’s advertising platform.

Interest-based Suggestions

The previously laborious process of researching interests and related interests of your target demographic has been made easier by Facebook’s new auto-generated list of interest suggestions.

Once you type in your targeted interest in the “precise interest” field you’ll automatically see a list of generated related interests below the field.

These auto-generated suggestions shouldn’t be a substitute for your own detailed demographic research, but they will definitely aide you in finding new areas you may have overlooked.

And finally, Facebook has added bulk interest pasting available for interest targeting so you can quickly copy and paste your detailed list of interest targets for your campaigns.

Downloaders were presented with a list of recommended price points, each increased price added more value (eg. higher bitrates, vinyl album). One final pricing option asked fans to name their own price for the album.

At the time, this pricing model was heralded as innovative and ground breaking for the floundering music industry.

In 2011, the independent gaming industry’s Humble Indie Bundle added innovative psychological components to Radiohead’s 2007 “pay what you want” model.

The Humble Indie Bundle’s checkout page (screenshot below) has two fields that you normally don’t see on “pay what you want” checkout pages.

Are you average or above average?

The pricing field displays pricing options with a twist.

Two additional fields list the “average price” and the “above average price” with the above average price being $1 more than the average price.

This is interesting because it utilizes what’s known as the “above average effect” or more specifically illusory superiority.

In short, some people feel they’re above average people, and this not-so-subtle display of the average and above average price points attempts to appeal to those people.

Control your contribution

The second field gives buyers control of the profit distribution.

Buyers use the sliders to slice up their payment and reward people according to their own specifications. Or, alternatively, they can simply use the default split.

This is another interesting technique because it gives the buyer full of control of their payment before the purchase. This control of profit-sharing and price transparency allows the buyer to take ownership of their purchase.

One of the first and most fundamental lessons of e-mail marketing is that it’s a privilege to have someone opt-in and allow you to e-mail them.

When a customer completes your sign-up form, they’ve agreed to allow you into a special place. A place where only their friends, colleagues and family members can message them. It’s up to you, as a marketer, to deliver the most relevant and timely promotional e-mails.

I recently received a promotional e-mail from Hanes.com that is a great example of what goes wrong when a company doesn’t segment and send relevant messages to their subscribers.

A few weeks ago I created a profile and shopped on their website. I viewed men’s shirts and men’s underwear and even placed these items in my shopping cart. I never converted, or purchased these items.

You can imagine my surprise when yesterday I received an e-mail promotion from them stating that it’s the “Last Day for $8.99 Bras & Free Shipping Offer”.

So, in an instant, Hanes.com has wasted my time, sent me an irrelevant message and lost a conversion. Most importantly though, they eroded my trust in their ability to send me relevant messages.

This type of blind targeting is all too common in many e-mail marketing campaigns. Fortunately, it can easily be prevented with a few simple tweaks.

Here’s three things that Hanes.com can do to make certain I get more relevant promotional e-mails in the future:

• Segment by Gender

By simply adding a gender field to their sign-up form Hanes.com could easily segment their e-mail marketing lists and develop ad copy separately targeting men and women.

• Segment by Behavior

By using behavioral targeting measures Hanes.com could have detected that the last items in my shopping cart were from the men’s section of their website, ergo it’s more likely that I would be interested in products targeted toward men.

• Segment by 3rd Party Data

And finally, by using 3rd party e-mail data services like Rapleaf, Hanes.com can cross reference their current database of e-mail subscribers with Rapleaf’s gender and demographic profile. This would allow them to quickly segment their existing e-mail subscribers and increase relevancy.

It’s a win-win when companies take the time to carefully segment and send relevant messages to their customers. The customers win because they receive relevant messages and the companies win because these customers are more likely to convert when the messages appeal to them.

Few things perplex my eCommerce clients more than the nebulous world of online sales tax collection.

Many eCommerce companies want to collect sales taxes and be a fair partner in helping states collect revenues. Unfortunately, it’s challenging for them to reasonably comply under today’s laws.

The brief history of online sales tax legislation centers around the Internet Tax Freedom Act of 1998 and its many extensions, including the most recent Tax Freedom Act Amendment Act of 2007, which expires in 2014.

Nexus of Operation

One key excerpt from the above legislation is the following:

states cannot require an out-of-state seller to collect a use tax from the customer unless the seller has a physical presence (aka nexus of operation) in the taxing state.

It’s the language of “nexus of operation” that allows many of you to order items sales tax-free. For example, since Amazon has fewer nexuses it can sell sales tax-free to many states (though this is changing).

But what does “nexus of operation” mean?

Here are a few examples of situations that may constitute a nexus of operation in states:

• The business has a physical location in the state.
• There are resident employees working in the state.
• The business has property in the state.
• There are employees who regularly solicit business in the state.
• And more recently, states that have affiliates of online retailers.

Nebulous Nexus is Expanding

Expanding the definition of nexus to include eCommerce affiliates has been a useful tactic for Big Box retailers with locations in all 50 states to encourage their online competitors to collect sales taxes on purchases.

But even online retailers without a nexus in a state, who want to collect sales taxes there, face challenges.

States and individual zip codes within states have their own unique taxing structure and laws. This added complexity makes it very difficult and expensive for eCommerce companies to comply with each unique tax code.

The Economist summed up this ambiguity in their recent article entitled “The Amazon war”:

That is because the Supreme Court ruled in 1992 that states cannot force retailers without an in-state presence, or “nexus”, to collect sales tax; it would lead to chaos in interstate commerce, since America has some 8,000 different sales-tax jurisdictions that are constantly changing their rules and are not even aligned with zip codes. But there was ambiguity in that awkward word, nexus.

Streamlined Sales Tax Project

There have been good faith efforts to streamline the ambiguities in state and local sale tax law.

One such effort is called the Streamlined Sales Tax Project and though its adoption has been slow it could serve as a foundation for future online sales tax legislation.

The Main Street Fairness Act

In late July 2011 Senator Dick Durbin (R-Illinois) introduced a bill designed to mandate sales tax collection by all retailers if the states participate in the Streamlined Sales Tax Project.

This bill already has the support of Amazon and may be the best chance in years for serious online sales tax reform.

Here’s an excerpt from Senator Durbin’s press release:

The Main Street Fairness Act would also relieve consumers of the legal burden to report to state tax departments the sales taxes they owe on online purchases, and help struggling governors and mayors collect taxes they are already owed and therefore reduce the need to raise new taxes to fill gaping holes in their budgets.

Here are some key highlights from this recently introduced legislation:

• Certify the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement
• Provide states who choose to use it with the clear authority to require retailers to collect sales taxes already owed
• Require the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement to meet a lengthy list of simplification requirements to ease administrative burdens for sellers
• Exempt small businesses (as defined by the Governing Board of the Agreement) from collecting sales taxes
• Compensate retailers for startup administrative costs associated with collecting sales taxes
• Treat all retailers equally regarding sales tax collection
• Release consumers from their existing sales tax remittance obligations and
• Help states and localities collect billions in taxes that are already owed.

Most notably, Amazon supports this legislation and Paul Misener who is Amazon’s vice present for global policy released the following (pdf):

Amazon.com has long supported a simple, nationwide system of state and local sales tax collection, even-handedly applied to all sellers, no matter their business model, location, or level of remote sales. To this end, I am writing to thank you for your bill that would allow states that sufficiently simplify their rules to require collection of sales tax by out-of-state sellers.

This legislation may have the support of the world’s largest online retailer but it does have its opponents. Ebay along with the Direct Marketing Association oppose this legislation, both citing the excessive regulatory burdens it will place on small businesses as one of their chief grievances.

Brian Bieron, eBay’s senior director of federal government relations and global public policy released his thoughts on the legislation:

A collection of state tax commissioners have again been able to get an outdated Internet sales tax bill introduced in Congress, but we are confident that it will be rejected because it would harm small Internet retailers

Online retailers, traditional Big Box merchants, interest groups and politicians are clearly preparing their arguments for the upcoming debate regarding this new online sales tax legislation.

I highly recommend that all online retailers keep a careful eye on this bill as it makes it way through Congress.

Photo Credit: Photo Credit: Dave Dugdale // CC

Earlier this week I read an interesting post on the UX Booth blog that listed the top ten missing user experience (UX) features on top 100 eCommerce websites.

As a conversion rate optimizer and someone who is always experimenting with new Web technologies, I’m eager to analyze the latest innovations in eCommerce product pages.

The post was authored by the founder of a UX research company called Usography. Usography reviewed 100 top retail websites this summer, and created the Retailer UX Audit to present the results.

The following two missing features stood out for me in the post. One for its lack of ubiquity and the other for its sensibility.

Product Videos

A disappointing 9 out of the 100 eCommerce websites used video to promote their products. This number surprised me because A/B testing has demonstrated that videos do increase conversion rates.

Companies like Visual Website Optimizer, Unbounce and Treepodia have produced data to support the value added by product videos.

It is laborious and resource intensive to create unique product videos for your catalog. Additionally, if your company sells smaller items, such as parts or inexpensive commodities, then investing time and money into video creation isn’t practical.

One company that does an excellent job of promoting their products using video is Zappos. The opening image to this post is a screenshot from Zappos product pages. You’ll notice that the product images include a video at the end.

If you’re interested in filming some short videos to promote your eCommerce products then I highly recommend a post by Practical eCommerce called Using Video to Convert Shoppers; 8 Pointers.

Spanish Translations

Translating your website to another language in order to increase conversions is particularly interesting to me.

I didn’t expect many websites to have Spanish translations available, in fact only 4 out of 100 did, but given the impressive growth of the Hispanic community in the USA I would expect more eCommerce websites to start testing Spanish translations soon.

It shouldn’t be difficult for companies determine if they need Spanish translations. A combination of analyzing your Web analytics traffic sources, performing some voice of customer in-page surveys and beta testing select product pages will give you a clearer picture on whether or not a sitewide translation plan will deliver the return on investment you need.

It’s my hope that more companies will begin testing and experimenting with new product page features. No eCommerce company should rest on their laurels. A culture of constant measuring, testing and optimizing is needed to ensure long term success.