I know that sounds a bit pessimistic, maybe even downright harsh, but hear me out.

There are really only 2 reasons why a retailer would offer Cyber Monday promotions: to gain new customers or reactivate old ones. Let’s talk about what deep discounting does in both situations:

Acquiring New Customers: Suppose a man offers a woman $1,000 to go on a date with him. She accepts. How much of a chance do you this couple has at a long term, quality relationship? Any business transaction based on bribery (and let’s be honest, that’s essentially what discounting is) only produces low-quality, low-affinity relationships. Customers acquired through steep discounting are far less likely to rebuy unless a similarly steep discount is offered again. If you’ve ever run a lifetime value calculation on these customers, you’ll undoubtedly find that it’s much lower than your typical customer LTV. (If you’ve never run this analysis on your customer database, please do yourself a favor and run it!) When discounting is the foundation of the relationship, future price increases are simply out of the question.

Reactivating Existing Customers: The second reason for offering promos is to entice existing customers to order again. In general, we like to tell ourselves that by offering an outstanding promotion, we’ll attract repeat customers who’ll place an additional order they would not have otherwise. While sometimes this is the case, more often than not you simply allow our customers to buy the same amount for much less. These discount purchases often cannibalize full price sales that would have naturally happened later. The spike in sales caused by promotions is illusory because heavy discounts simply shift sales backwards. (Again, this requires lifetime value analysis to see)

If you’re participating in Cyber Monday promotions this year, this post isn’t intended to make you feel dumb. I do encourage you, however, to ask yourself these 4 questions as you analyze today’s results:

1. How much actual profit did I generate from Cyber Monday? Forget about top line sales, what does the bottom line look like? Don’t forget to consider additional overhead or marketing expenses related to today. Most importantly, how does this profit compare to other days between Thanksgiving and Christmas in which you did not offer steep discounts? I think you’ll be surprised to find how close these numbers are.
2. For all of the first time customers you generated through the promotions, how many will rebuy in the next year? How much will they spend? And most importantly, how does this compare to the profile of your typical customer who is acquired without discounting?
3. What happens to the perception of your product when you offer it for 30% off one day, but not the next? As a customer who missed out on the deal, how would they feel about paying full price later?
4. How many of my customers would buy anyway without a promotion offered? This is perhaps the hardest question to answer, but a vital one. In the future consider performing a holdout test where a small group of customers are not sent your typical promotional emails. After a period of say, 3 months, analyze how these customers performed compared to your control group.

I suppose this post isn’t so much of a rant on Cyber Monday as it is against rogue, unstrategic discounting. Sure, there are times when discounting is a necessary evil, especially for retailers with commoditized products or large inventories. In addition, if your entire business model is based on discounting at massive volume (think Walmart) Cyber Monday is your chance to shine. But most of us are not like Walmart, and don’t have the luxury of massive scale. If you’re a niche retailer or brand manufacturer, you need to seriously ask yourself why you’re participating in today’s festivities.

What are your thoughts on Cyber Monday and discounting in general?

More than any other channel, social media deserves its own unique set of copywriting principles. Below are what I consider to be the 5 most important guidelines when writing copy for social media. Most of these recommendations are geared towards Facebook, but they can be applied to other platforms as well.

1. Keep it Short & Shareable

Short copy always wins. Bite size content is significantly more likely to be consumed or shared, regardless of the platform. Here’s my strategy: First, write your status update using as few words as possible, but without losing its impact. When you’re finished, review the copy and eliminate another 20%. If you’re like me, you’ll find that you regularly use unnecessary filler words that can be easily eliminated. Better yet, get used to writing within Twitter’s 140 character limit, regardless of whether you’re using Twitter.

2. Keep it Conversational

Ok here’s a challenge: You’ve just written a status update, and you’re about to click post. Pause for a minute, and copy the status update into your own personal feed. Now read it again. Does it sounds contrived, salesy, or impersonal? Would you ever post this to your friends? If not, then why is it ok for your company’s followers?

Recently I began trying a new strategy on the Facebook pages I run. Whenever possible, I’ve been writing the posts in the first person and signing my name at the end. So for example, a stodgy, corporate sounding post like this:

• “We’re proud to announce the release of our new green widgets.”

3. Find a Voice

Develop a unique voice that suits your brand. It might be quirky or it might be serious – just make sure it fits with the overall image you’re trying to convey.

Having a distinct voice actually makes writing easier. If you develop a persona and ask yourself, “How would my brand communicate this message in our unique way?” copy will flow much easier.

4. Give Breathing Room

One mistake I often see on Facebook is the failure to use line breaks when writing updates. Breaking up longer copy with spaces between sentences makes your messaging easier to scan and increases the liklihood followers will engage. This is vital especially if the end of your post contains a call to action and/or link. Which brings us to the most important tip…

5. Ask for Action 

Before you write an update ask yourself, what’s the goal here? Do I want to drive traffic to my site, get lots of likes, comments, or shares? Whatever your goal is, ask for action. Here’s a couple ideas:

• Click LIKE if….
• Leave a comment with you thoughts on…
• This or that? Comment with your opinion
• Tell us…
• Click the link below if…
• Watch this video to…
  

6. Comment with Your Tip!

What advice can you add to this article? Leave a well thought out comment with your tip and I’ll add it to this post along with your link

1. Focus on the Feed, Not the Profile

This is a classic mistake I’ve witnessed on countless platforms. The brands that spend the most time pimping out their profile pages, whether on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest, tend to have the worst engagement of all. I’m going out on a limb to predict that the new Facebook timeline and upcoming Twitter brand pages will not change this. Yes, milestones, and pinned posts, and cover photos are cool for branding, but if your content sucks, no one will ever  see them. People will still primarily interact with your business through the newsfeed.

Your content is what makes fans care, not a pretty profile page. Content isn’t just king, he’s a ruthless dictator that jealously demands your allegiance.

2. Don’t Buy or Bribe Followers

In effort to inflate followers, many brands incentivize followers by offering coupons, giveaways, or exclusive content behind soon to be defunct LIKE gates. While these tactics can be highly effective at growing a following, they produce very low quality followers who are far less likely to engage in the future.

Unless your only social media agenda is to give the illusion that a lot of people like you, an overemphasis on the sheer number of followers will always backfire. For example, by inflating your number of Facebook likes with low quality fans, you inevitably make it less likely for true fans to see your content. When Facebook’s EdgeRank sees that your engagement rate is low on a post, it drives down your content in the newsfeed, hiding it from those who do want to see it.

My advice, don’t polute your social networks with people who ‘sorta’ like you. Demand real followers. Put the your like/follow button prominently on your site header, footer, emails etc…. all the places that real supporters are likely to find it.

3. Keep in Short & Shareable

Brands that create content that’s short and easy to like/retweet/reblog/repin always win. Twitter gives your 140 characters, use 70 and get read more often. Facebook gives you virtually unlimited characters, keep it brief and stand out from the clutter. Regardless of the platform, people are busy and probably care more about what’s going in the lives of their family and friends than what your company has to say. If you keep it short and digestable, you stand a better chance of staying in their feed for the long term.

Do you think these tips will stand the test of time? What other timeless social media tips can you add? Share them below.

13 Link Acquisition Tips

Creating link-worthy content will only get you so far. Eventually you have to go on the offense. Below are some ideas for reaching out and acquiring links for your e-store.

#8 - Approach bloggers for reviews: Bloggers love to be recognized as an authority in their niche, and they’re always looking for new content to write about. For this reason, I’ve found that approaching bloggers with an offer of free product in exchange for a review is the absolute easiest way to generate links to an e-commerce site. Here’s the key, don’t shoot off a generic email asking for a link with anchor text “blah blah blah” in exchange for a review. This just screams SPAM. Instead, approach bloggers with sites that actually drive traffic and ask for a review without mentioning anything about links. Once they agree, you can drop a hint for a link to a specific page or with certain anchor text.

#9 - Supplier’s “Find a Store” pages: Take a moment and visit your product supplier’s websites. Odds are they have a “Find a Store” page. Are you listed there? If not, kindly “suggest” they fix that before you pay your next invoice.

#10 - Technology Provider’s Testimonial Pages: How many technology providers does your site use? Which ecommerce platform do you run? What about analytics or live chat? Contact your vendors and offer to write an testimonial in exchange for a link on their testimonial page.

#11 - Press Releases: Press releases can still work if used properly. While the links generated from sites like PRWeb aren’t as valuable as they used to be, the buzz created from a genuinely news-worthy release can create it’s own gravity of incoming links from other valuable sources.

#12 - Badges & Award Widgets: People love to be recognized. At C28, we created exclusive badges for our Street Team, and allowed members to embed their widget on their own sites. Each badge contains a small graphic recognizing their contribution to the community and strategic backlink to a key page. If you don’t have an online community, you can still make widgets work. Consider creating ones for your top product reviewers or VIP customers.

#13 - Blog Comments: I can feel you cringe when you read this. If you own a wordpress blog like me, you’re probably barraged with more SPAM comments than legit ones. However,  I’m not suggesting you use automated commenting software that produces crap links. I’m referring to genuine, well written comments linking to relevant content. Pick the top 3 blogs that are relevant in your industry, and begin commenting without backlinks. Overtime, you’ll gain trust from the blogger and his readers. Eventually, a well placed and relevant link back your site will be well received. The frequent interaction will also keep your brand top of mind for the blogger, and you just mind generate a do-follow link in a post someday.

#14 - Guest-Posting: Most people think of guest posting as a way to promote a blog. But why wouldn’t it work also for e-commerce? It goes without saying you can’t write a post directly promoting your products and expect a legit blogger to post it. Instead approach the task from this angle: what topic can I write about for an audience that would also buy my product? If you don’t know any bloggers accepting guest posts, try a service such as MyBlogGuest.

#15 - Sponsor NPO’s: Of course the motivation for sponsoring a non-profit organization shouldn’t be link acquisition. But the odds are, your organization has already sponsored many non-profits in the past who have highly authoritative websites. If so, drop them an email and ask if they’d consider linking back to you.

#16 - Industry Directories: One-size-fits-all directories once provided value, but those days mostly gone. However, industry specific directories still provide actual traffic and a relevant backlinks. If you’re not aware of any industry directories, run a Google search for “[your industry] directory” and see what comes up. If the site has authority, it’s probably worth the price to get listed.

#17 - On-Site Affiliate Program: Most affiliate networks, such as Commission Junction or Share-a-Sale, use redirect links that do little to help your link building. If you run a successful affiliate program with loyal affiliates, consider switching to on-site software that uses SEO friendly url’s. It’s likely that your affiliate’s have high PR sites, so this can provide a quick pickup of high quality links.

#18 - Competitive Analysis: Creativity in link building is sometimes overrated. After all, the moment you acquire that elusive, little known link, your competitors will know. For this reason, using a tool like Open Site Explorer, do a competitive analysis of your competitor’s link profile. Evaluate which links are influencing their ranking most, and go after them with a vengeance.

#19 - Niche Forums: Where do your prospective customers hangout online? Get involved wherever they do. Many forums allow do-follow links once you’ve met the minimum number of valuable contributions.

#20 - Just ask: If there’s one thing I learned from 5 years in person-to-person sales it’s this: If you want the sale, you have to ask for it. People don’t just volunteer to help you out. What relationships do you have that might result in a link? Just ask for it! If you’ve given your customers great service, they’re actually itching to pay you back somehow. There’s a ton of places to ask for a link. You can ask for links on your thank you/receipt page, your follow-up product review email, your product page, or the footer of your site. I’m constantly amazed when people email me and ask if they have permission to link to one of my sites. Heck yes you do, thank you very much!

5 Ideas for Crafting Internal Links

No discussion about link building would be complete without mentioning internal methods, which are often the lowest hanging fruit.

#21 - Share the Love: Using Google Webmaster Central, figure out what pages Google considers the most important in terms of inbound links. (under “Your site on the web > Links to your site”). Compare that to the pages you consider the most important. Odds are, they are very different. That’s why it’s crucial to pass the link love from Google’s important pages on to the pages that bring you conversions.

#22 - Redirect Links to OOS Products: How many out-of-stock products are in your catalog? Are those now defunct product pages doing you any good? By redirecting old product pages to appropriate new ones, you not only recycle the link juice, but also increase the likelihood of a conversion.

#23 - Contextual Links within Product Descriptions: Product descriptions are prime real-estate for internal linking magic. Here’s the strategy I use. On your top products, have a good copy-writer drop a well-placed link somewhere into the body of the description pointing back to an important and relevant category page or landing page. (I’d refrain from linking product pages directly to other product pages. It’s simply too hard to maintain static links when products go in and out of stock.) With this tactic, you have 100% control of the anchor text and a virtual unlimited number of product pages to work with.

#24 - Merchandise Top Sellers First: This is just basic merchandising 101. The default sorting option for your product listings pages should always show top sellers first. In addition to the obvious conversion benefits, this will pass the optimal amount of PageRank to the product pages that deserve it most.

#25 - Use Consistent Category and Product Page URLs: Depending on your e-commerce platform, your category and product page links may change at times when the need to pass a new query parameter arises. Be sure your developers know the importance of mainting consistent, SEO friendly url’s. There’s nothing worse than link building to several permutations of URL’s that are constantly changing.

You’ll notice that if you eliminate the SEO motive on these ideas, there’s still tremendous value. And that’s how it should be, value drives links, which drives rankings, which drives traffic, which drives conversions. What other tips can you add to this list? What’s working or not working for you?

For those unfamiliar with Google remarketing, here’s how it works. A visitor lands on your website. Google’s ad network writes a cookie in that person’s browser, identifying them as having previously visited your website. When this same person is visiting another website in the ubiquitous Google display network, your ad appears, “remarketing” them back to your site. The power of this concept is self evident. It’s far more effective to show ads to people who’ve previously shown interest in your products, versus the person whose never heard of you.

With that background in mind, let’s look at some tips for mastering this powerful tool.

1. Start Tagging Visitors Now: Because you need at least 500 visitors tagged with the remarketing cookie before Google will show your ads, you’ll want to start tagging visitors as soon as possible, even before you’ve developed ad creative.
2. Test Different Cookie Time-frames: Google allows you to to create different audience segments depending on how recently prospects visited your site. I would recommend creating several buckets to start, 180 days (the max allowed), 90 days, 30 days, 14 days, etc. Your bidding strategy should change depending on how recently the visitors viewed your site. You’ll likely find that you can afford to bid higher on more recent visitors because they’re more likely to convert.
3. Design Remarketing Ads Differently: If you’ve ever designed a banner ad for an audience whose mostly not heard of you, you need to approach remarketing creative differently. First, you need to catch their attention by showing a brand or product they’ll recognize already. Then you need a compelling reason get them to come back.
4. Target Visitors by the Content they Viewed: If you have a diverse product line, consider targeting visitors on a department level, rather than just a one-size fits all bucket. Showing an ad featuring women shoes to a visitor who originally browsed mens clothing in an obvious ad fail.
5. Target Visitors by their Stage in the Buying Cycle: Another popular ad strategy is targeting viewers by their stage in the buying cycle. One of the most effective tactics is targeting visitors who’ve recently abandoned their shopping cart. Or, if you sell products that customers buy on a regular schedule (say printer paper, toner, etc) you can target customers at a particular time after their last purchase, reminding them to re-order.
6. Create Ads & Landing Pages that Follow Scent: As with any ad-to-landing page relationship, there needs to be solid follow-thru that matches the promise of the ad. It’s extremely frustrating when customers click on ad featuring a specific product or offer, yet landing page offers no such fulfillment of the ad.
7. Optimize through Site Exclusions: This is the magic pixie dust of any Google display campaign. Once your ads have received a decent number of impressions, clicks, and conversions, visit the “Networks” tab in your remarketing campaign, and click the “show details” under automatic placements. Here you’ll find a list of sites that Google is displaying your ads on. Pay close attention to the performance of each domain. Despite the fact that your ads are always being shown to qualified visitors who have seen your site before, certain sites perform significantly better than others. For under-performing sites, reduce your bid or exclude them entirely. For the high-performers, raise to bid to attract more impressions.
8. Exclude Site Categories: Because remarketing targets the individual, and not a specific site, your ads will potentially be shown on sites that might not mesh well with your brand. Inevitably, you just might get a nasty call from your brand police who noticed an ad on a website that doesn’t fit with your product. To prevent these minor blow-ups, go to your Networks tab, and click the Exclusions link. There, you can choose to exclude specific sites, or entire categories of  sites you deem inappropriate for your brand.
9. Take View-Through Conversions with a Grain of Salt: I’m highly skeptical of view-through conversions. A view-through conversion occurs when Google happens to show one of your ads to someone who does not click, but who later completes a conversion on your site. In my view, just because an ad flashes for a second in the corner of someone’s screen, and that person subsequently makes a purchase doesn’t mean that the conversion wouldn’t have occurred otherwise. I’m not saying there’s no value to view-throughs, only that you should focus primarily on traditional click-through conversions when calculating your ROI.
10. Use All Ad Formats: While testing ad creative, I like to start with just designing one 300×250 image ad, because they tend to get the most impressions. Once you’ve tested and found a winner, be sure to create ads in all the available sizes to maximize your reach.

What’s been your experience with Google remarketing? Have you tried any other retargeting ad services?

Far too many online businesses worship at the alter of the homepage. While certainly important, homepages today carry far less importance than in years past. When I review the analytics on most of the sites I work with, the vast majority of visitors never see the homepage. (When you have a moment, take a look at not only how many of your visitors never see the homepage, but also what percentage of overall pageviews your homepage represents, you’ll probably be shocked at how low it is.) This is due to a myriad of reasons, one of which is that people simply search for specific content, and Google does a pretty decent job of landing you on the specific page you’re looking for. There’s just no reason to pass through an overly generic destination like a homepage.

I believe one of the biggest sins in web design is promoting mission-critical products and promotions only on the homepage. I typically see sites where an email signup or free shipping promotion is highlighted only on the homepage. This is a tragedy, because there’s very little leverage in the homepage, compared with other, more frequently viewed pages. The time you spend redesigning and testing is much better spent on your product, category, or shopping cart pages.

#2 – Most of your Web Marketing is a Waste

In reality, most web marketing rarely pays off in the long run. Once you account for the cost of goods, the direct cost of marketing, and the cost of internal resources, you might be shocked to realize how little you profit. The point here is not to suspend your marketing, but rather to track long term results and impact.

This is a lesson we learned at C28 the hard way. For years we believed that the PPC ads for our jewelry line were performing well. The ROI was far superior to the ads that promoted our clothing category. But once we analyzed the lifetime customer value of each category, we realized that the jewelry shoppers rarely ever made subsequent purchases. Over a period of 1 to 2 years, the ads with the lower short-term ROI produced the best long term results. Don’t be overly short-sighted when tracking your marketing ROI. Shoot for acceptable short-term ROI, and exceptional long-term ROI. Also, don’t forget to count the cost of goods and the cost of internal resources in your ROI calculations.

#3 – Google Analytics is Lying

Open another browser tab, go to the e-commerce section of your analytics. What percentage of  sales come from Google? What about Facebook or your email marketing? If you’re like most online retailers,  your analytics will tell you that well over 50% of your revenue comes from the big 3: search engines, email, and facebook. But do they really?

When was the last time you discovered a new business from an email? I’ll wager to bet not recently. When did  you last use Google to search for a brand you already know and love? Probably today. The point is that the big 3 frequently get credit for sales they don’t deserve because Google analytics gives credit the source of the last click. This means that revenue generated from a person who clicked on your banner ad, visited your site, and later return via a Google search is ultimately attributed to Google.

Marketing attribution is a complication subject. While the big 3 certainly deserve credit for assisting with conversions, they certainly should not always get credit for creating demand in the first place. Google analytics is a good first step, but ultimately you need to track all the variables involved with generating a conversion. When you begin looking all of your customers’ behavior prior to a purchase, you’ll be surprised at how your marketing campaigns work together. You’ll see that a banner ad generated demand, an email created a follow up visit, and a remarketing ad finally closed the sale. When you calculate ROI, it’s important to understand that the last step doesn’t deserve all the credit.

#4 – No one cares about your design

Now let me qualify this. I’m not justifying creating intentially ugly designs, or enganging in lazy web design. I’m arguing that all the ooo-ing and awe-ing your team is doing about fonts, colors, slideshows, etc is probably overkill.

People arrive at your website with a goal. It’s not like visiting an art gallery, where people stroll and savor the beauty of the art and the skill of the artist. People will judge your site on how easily they can complete their objective, not on how your design stimulated their senses.

Can you add anything else to this list? Leave a comment below with your thoughts.

I’ve heard this over and over. And to be honest, this was my experience up to a few months ago. But then I really got serious about Facebook ads. Keep reading and I’ll share some of the secrets that have helped me obtain up to 600% ROI on some of my campaigns.

#1 – Ignore everything you know about Adwords:

For those of us who come from a search marketing background, ignore everything you know about traditional pay per click. With Adwords, it’s not uncommon to create an ad and leave it on autopilot for years, all while returning excellent results. Not so with Facebook. Once your target demographic has seen your ad over and over, the click through rate will fall, and your cost per click will rise, therefore destrying your ROI. To be successful with Facebook ads, be prepared for a successful ad to have a lifecycle of as little as one week. Then move on to the next big idea.

#2 – Stand out or Stand Down

It’s extremely critical that your ad image be striking. I’ve spoken with many companies whose first Facebook ad consist of nothing but their brand logo. For most business, this is a horrible strategy. In fact, my most successful ads completely ignore the company that’s advertising and instead focus intently on one particlar product that people are passionate about. Pay close attention to the Facebook ads on your own profile. Which ones grab your attention and why?

#3 – Plan to Fail

You will fail with Facebooks ads, a lot. After months of learning what works and what doesn’t, still only 1 out of 4 of my ads actually works. The rest are quickly tested and discarded. Don’t get discouraged with early results. Just learn the lesson, and move on.

#4 – Target Passionate People

When you examine your product or service line, what are the things people get most passionate about? Passionate people click ads that speak to them. They also gladly hand over money for products they believe in. The best ads feature remarkable products and services that target passionate people.  The worst thing you can do is write a generic ad trying to please everyone. It will undoubtebly fail.

#5 – Bid High, then Low

Facebook always shows you a suggested bid range when you create an ad. Initially, this is where I made the biggest mistake. I would create an excellent ad, but my bidding strategy didn’t allow for decent ROI. If I’m spending .50 a click, and my conversion rate is half a percent, I can’t make money. However, with that exact same conversion rate, I can make money if I’m paying .07 a click. Here’s the problem though, if you bid too low initially, Facebook won’t bother showing your ad.

My strategy is always to bid within the suggested range initially, let my ad get approved, run it for a few hours. If I’m trending with a good click through rate, I will begin lowering my bid until I reach the desired threshold. However, for this strategy to work, you must have a good ad. In my experience, this is any ad with a click thru rate of at least .15% or above. Anything less than this, Facebook will simply stop showing your ads, or charge you a ridiculous click price.

#6 – Go Crazy with “Likes and Interests” Keywords

Facebook uses users’ “Likes” to determine who sees your ad. This is where you need to go crazy. In my experience, it seems the Facebook ad algorithm is biased against small targets. In other words, if after typing in your keywords you’re only targeting 1,000 people, you will probably being paying an astronomically high cost per click, which virtually guarantees poor ROI on your campaign.So how do you go about finding hoards of targeted keywords?

First, I like to visit to profiles of people who already “like” my page. Ask yourself, how can I target customer similar to this person? What other likes, dislikes do they show on their profile? Once you’ve found a good group of keywords, I like to employ a little know tactic using Facebook’s auto suggest. In the “Like & Interest” box, type your primary keyword, then a space, then the letter A. Facebook will generate a list of keywords contianing your keyword and anything with the letter A. Continue throughout the alphabet to finds hundreds of keyword combinations.

Conclusion

Facebook ads represent an undiscovered frontier in internet marketing. SEO, Adwords, and traditional banner ads are ubiquitous and ultra-competitive, whereas many companies have yet to dip their toes in the water of Facebook marketing. For me, this means less competition and better ROI. I’m currently getting twice the return on Facebook ads compared to Adwords campaigns that have been optimized for years.

How about you? What has been your experience with Facebooks ads?

1. Testing “Everything”

A common axiom in website optimization is to “test everything.” The problem with this advice is it ignores the reality we all find ourselves in, that we have limited time and resources. If you have the choice to test between testing your checkout process or a different colored add-to-cart button, which do you think will legitimately provide long term value to your visitors?

Quite frankly, not everything is worth testing. Yes, you might inch out a slight improvement to your add-to-cart rate with a flashy new button, but how will that translate to profit and lifetime customer value? My advice is to skip the gimicks and test stuff that matters.

2. Focusing Entirely on Conversion Rate

In the beginning I simply used Google website optimizer to test conversion rate improvements. Then I began testing along with another variable, the average order amount. I suddenly relized that Google lies. It tells me I have a winner, but when I factor in the average order, I don’t. In other words, one variation may have had a higher conversion rate, but the other had a higher average order amount, therefore resulting in a wash in sales or sometimes even the opposite result.

Google only shows conversion rate for one simple reason. Adding another variable makes their product (GWO) much more difficult and time-consuming to use. When you test 2 things, conversion rate and average order value, that test that would normally takes 2 weeks might take 2 months. Most webmasters don’t have this kind of patience.

Ultimately, profit pays the bills, not conversion rate. Your bank or investors don’t care what GWO says, they care about profit. If you’re not currently testing with average order and conversion rate, work with your web developer on creating a more accurate testing environment.

3. Bias towards one variation

Let’s be honest. We all have a preference for which variation in our test we’d like to win. Most likely, one of them represents the status quo, and one represents weeks or months of hard work to bring to fruition. We always have a favorite. And this is the problem. Sometimes we test our new pet feature over and over, believing that in the end, our view will be justified.

Ask yourself, will you and your team be able to accept the results of this test? If not, then don’t waste your time testing.

4. Testing Short Term Tweaks without Regard to Long-Term Effects

I recently ran a test for a company I work with. This site had recently began contributing a significant part of it’s revenue towards a charity they work with. As a result, they redesigned the homepage to clearly communicate the change. The new version of the homepage explained that each time their particular service was used, a significantly portion of the profits were donated to a charity.

Within 2 weeks, a old version was proven the winner by a slight margin. There’s just one problem though, that just wouldn’t do. This company was dedicated to communicating the social good their business was providing. They believed, long-term that this change would better set themselves apart in the minds of their customers.

Some companies just don’t test. Ever. They make a decision that fits their brand, and they stick with it. And there’s nothing wrong with this strategy. I personally land somewhere in the middle. Lots of things are worth testing, but I believe there are times when brands should stick with who they are regardless of short term test results.

What do you think?

Has a/b testing lived up to all of your expectations? How does your ROI for testing compare to with other web marketing avenues?

1) Too much imagination is required

All too many product pages require their customer’s to have a good imagination. For example, product images convey the product alone with a white background. Not exactly awe-inspiring. Online shopping can be devoid of context when product images aren’t show in use. Lifestyle and contextual images help create mental ownership by giving specific examples of use.

Yes, it’s a lot of work to get this type of photography on your site. But as I recently shared my experience C28′s lifestyle images, it can be earth-shatterly effective.

Don’t require your customer to have a good imagination. Paint a picture for them. How will it look in context, in their hands, in use?

2) Too much feature-talk

Here’s where our friend the curse of knowledge sneaks up again. The more you know about your products, the harder it will be to describe them to a newbie. If your descriptions are written from the perspective of an expert user, you’re probably throwing around terms that don’t make sense to the novice.

A great many products have failed due to feature-speak. Who even remembers Creative’s 5GB mp3 player? But we do remember the first Apple Ipod. While Creative beat Apple to the market, Apple pushed the benefit (“1,000 songs in your pocket”) vs. the feature (“5GB mp3 player”). It’s obvious which approach won out.

Remember that features are meaningless unless the benefit is understood. Don’t assume customers understand the benefits of your product’s features.

3) Lack of a Backstory

Every product has a story, but it’s rarely told. Why was the product made? Was it inspired by a tragedy or light bulb moment in the inventor’s life? Think of the last time you told someone about a product you’re passionate about. There’s a good chance you started with the backstory.

It’s the same reason we love hearing about how stars became famous. It’s the journey that makes them interesting and worth repeating. It gives the product meaning and purpose, and makes you feel like you’re buying more than just an “it”, you’re entering into the story.

If you don’t know the product’s story, talk to those who developed it. Convey any information you can to the customer to help create a meaningful back-story.

4) Focus on Logical vs. Emotional Selling Points

Too often we expect our buyers to be purely logical. One example is product reviews. A typical product review is written in a rather objective way, with the reviewer pointing out specific features they liked/disliked. But what if you asked your customers for stories instead? Instead a “review this item” why not “tell us a story of how you enjoyed this item”.  So a review on a fishing reel changes from “it’s a good, solid reel with a smooth drag” to “I spent a whole day at the Lake and caught 5 bigmouths with it.”

Though we all like to think we’re logical buyers, the truth is it’s usually an emotional appeal that hooks us.

Sometimes the easiest fixes are the low tech ones. The suggestions above won’t require hours of a programming, just some serious thought about your products. Let me know what you think. What techniques have you used on your product pages?

Offer Bounce Back Discounts: Your site will be flooded with traffic this holiday season. How can you harness that traffic to create year long business? Consider offering a good discount incentive for customers to come back and shop in January. You can automatically email them a coupon after each order, or send one along with the package. Don’t forget to email and remind customers to come back and use their discounts.

Loosen Up & Emphasize Your Return Policy: While a 30 day return policy is commonplace for the rest of the year, it may scare off early shoppers during the holidays. Make it clear to your visitors that you will accept returns and exchanges on all Christmas gift purchases. Be sure to let visitors know early and often about your policy, such as on product pages and the shopping cart.

Review Past Failures & Successes: Try this as you plan your busy holiday season. Take a look at you and your competitor’s website’s through the lens of the Wayback machine. What worked and didn’t work last year? What can you improve upon?

Communicate with Fulfillment & Customer Service: Don’t surprise your customer service and fulfillment staff with a unplanned for 24 hour blowout sale. (I’m talking from experience ). Taking 10,000 orders in a day is great, but if your warehouse can only ship 1,000, you’re in trouble. Work with your operations team in order to smooth out the volume spikes. One company I work for emails promotional offers to their customers by region, over a 2 week time period. This ensures that not everyone gets the offer at once, resulting in too many orders to fulfill in too short of time.

Use a Website Monitoring Service: Odds are, your website will go down at least once during the busy holiday season. If you’re not big enough to have a 24 hour IT department monitoring your server, signup for a website monitoring service such as Alertsite, who will email or text message you if your site goes down.

Put All New Web Development on Hold: December is not the time to be re-coding your shopping cart. Send your developer on a much needed vacation. Well, not really, but do put a temporary hiatus on all major web development projects. The 4th quarter is the time to optimize, not innovate.

Post Shipping Cut-off Dates Prominently: This is quite possibly the most important information to communicate to customers during the holidays. Check with your shipping carriers to determine what the cutoff days are for the various methods of shipping. As you get closer to Christmas, consider offering discounted priority shipping services to extend your selling period.

Do a Security Once-Over: Hackers don’t take time off for the holidays, in fact they probably work even harder. For this reason, have a professional audit your website for security flaws. Services like McAfee’s Scan Alert do a good job at detecting most eCommerce vulnerabilities.

Monitor those 404 and 500 Errors: Talk with your webmaster and ask him to setup a script that notifies him every time a 404 (page not found) or 500 (internal server error) occurs on your site. You might be surprised how often errors occur. When we set this up for one of my clients, they received over 1,000 errors in one day. These errors can be costly, especially at Christmas time.

Allow Gift Receipts: Gift givers hate revealing how much they spent on a gift. Make sure you allow customers to click a Gift receipt option that will hide the prices on the packing list from the recipient.

Allow Gift Messages: Let your customers add a personal message to their gift. For simplicity, you can have the message appear on the packing list which will already be included in the box.

Holiday Graphical Themes: Show some holiday spirit and redesign some of the artwork on your site with a holiday theme. Hopefully, this will get visitors in a buying mood.

Get Creative with your Creative: Every email blast you send doesn’t have to offer a discount or promotion. Consider sending out a gift guide or a Top 10 gift lists.

Promote your Wish List Feature: Start promoting your wish list feature, encouraging customers to share these wish list’s with family and friends.

Increase Server Capacity: Talk with your web host about how you can increase your server performance during the holiday rush. You don’t want to end up like Walmart or Amazon on  cyber Monday. Here’s a sad, but funny example of Macy’s servers getting overloaded.

Checkup on your Domain, Web hosting, SSL and Merchant Accounts:Letting your domain name expire mid-December will create a Christmas you’ll never forget. It’s not a bad idea to double check that your web hosting, SSL certificates, domains, and merchant account to ensure everything is all in order.

Audit Your Product Catalog: Have a detail oriented person visit each of your product pages to ensure accuracy. Check for typos, broken images, and bad hyperlinks. Small problems turn into big problems in the chaos of a busy Christmas season.

Seasonal SEO and PPC Landing Pages: Don’t forget to optimize your SEO and PPC campaigns for seasonal keywords. Visitors searching habits change around the holidays, so your marketing strategy should as well. Also, don’t fall into the trap of bidding wars, or allowing your ads to fall too low on the page.

Offer Online Gift Certificates: If your site doesn’t offer online gift certificates, and your visitors don’t find that perfect gift, they will just leave. Gift certificates make great last minute gifts. In addition, they’re a great way to drive sales at the beginning of next year.

Suggest Gifts by Person: Product category based navigation does little to help a frustrated gift giver find an idea for that hard to shop for person on their list. To help generate gift ideas, organize gifts intended for different people groups such as kids, teens, parents, grandparents, etc.

Suggest Gifts by Price: In addition, organize gifts for budget conscience customers by price range. For example, highlight gifts under $10, 25, 50, 100 or whatever price points are appropriate for your business. Be sure to highlight low cost products that would make good stocking stuffers. These can be a great way to increase your average order value.

Bundle Products: Gift selection is much easier when related items are grouped together in some sort of gift basket or bundle. You can add value to your customer’s experience by simplifying the gift buying process through product bundling.

Offer Gift Wrapping: Many don’t like the idea of sending gifts to friends or family wrapped in nothing but bubble wrap or Styrofoam popcorn. If you can, offer gift wrapping services to your online customers. Be sure to charge enough to cover the labor and material costs for this additional service.

Emphasize Urgency: Let your customers know it’s not safe to wait until the last minute. To prevent shipping issues or product stock outs, encourage your customers to shop early.

Mystery Shop your Site: Ask a friend to mystery shop your site or hire a professional service. Mystery shopping should include ordering, contacting customer service, and returning the product back to you. You might be surprised to learn about a few problems.

Need an outside perspective on how you can maximize your site’s holiday sales? Here’s one final self promotional tip Checkout Palmer Web Marketing’s 3 Things or MySitePlan website review services.

 Below I’ve gathered some Cyber Monday marketing ideas for eCommerce sites.

1. Bounce Back Discounts: Capitalize off the huge amount of traffic you’ll be receiving by offering an incentive for the next purchase. While Cyber Monday sales are great, you really want consistent customers who will order all year long, even when there are no special offers. Try sending out a follow up email with a gift certificate or coupon code to everyone who makes a purchase.
2. Make It Viral: Take to the opportunity to capitalize on this huge traffic surge to encourage customer viral marketing. On your emails and landing pages for whatever promotion you run, include a link to a tell a friend form where shoppers can email your special to friends and family.
3. Clearance Loss leaders: A classic strategy, but I’ve found it works well online. Most of the time, customers will buy additional full-price merchandise, especially when they realize they have to pay shipping anyway. 
4. Free Gift at Threshold above Average Order: Give away some sort of gift item once customers reach a certain threshold. In order to determine the threshold, take a look at your average order on last year’s Cyber Monday and increase it bit. However, make sure the gift warrants spending that much.
5. Offer Deal on CyberMonday.com: If you doing something really noteworthy, you may want to highlight it on CyberMonday.com, a deal site run by Shop.org. Many prominent brands feature promotion there all year round, not just Cyber Monday.
6. Random “Blue Light” Specials: Randomly highlight items throughout the day on your site. Better yet, highlight different items everyday through the holiday season to keep people coming back.
7. Send 2 Reminder Emails For whatever promotion you run, make sure you keep your company top of mind after the Thanksgiving holiday. There will be a ton of marketing emails floating around, so you may want to send an initial email right before or after Thanksgiving. Then follow up with another right as the sale begins.
8. Give Store Credit, Not Discounts: Don’t give away the farm by offering outrageous discounts on your products if you don’t have to. Consider offering store credit in the form an online gift certificate that can be used towards a future purchase. For example, rather than offering a $25 discount, offer a $50 store credit. Incentives like these tend to cost less, and they may actually be more attractive to your repeat buyers.
9. Spread it Out: 1 day sales are great for everyone, except your fulfillment staff. In order to prevent hysteria for your warehouse and customer service staff, run the sale over a few days rather than 1 day only. This also will allow time for customer viral marketing to kick in.
10. Create Product Bundles: The value of a product bundle can be perceived as greater than the sum of its part because you are conveniently creating a one stop gift.

For more ideas, you might considering using the Wayback machine to view your competitor’s site last year at the time. I hope some of these ideas have been useful for you. Happy holiday selling!

]]> http://www.palmerwebmarketing.com/blog/10-cyber-monday-marketing-ideas/feed/ 9 http://www.palmerwebmarketing.com/blog/10-cyber-monday-marketing-ideas/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PalmerWebMarketing/~3/qDwcJ4HDz4U/ http://www.palmerwebmarketing.com/blog/how-to-build-the-perfect-website/#comments Tue, 06 Jul 2010 14:30:18 +0000 Justin Palmer http://www.palmerwebmarketing.com/blog/?p=1173 If you’re seeking perfection on your website, stop reading this. It doesn’t exist.

In fact the search for perfection might just be more detrimental to your website than anything else.

That homepage that your designer has been tweaking for weeks, stop fiddling and make it live. That ebook you’re still perfecting, launch it now. If you have doubts, test it.

In the web world we are lucky to have a friend: instant feedback. Feedback in the form of customers, analytics, surveys, etc. If you were developing a tangible product or print material, you don’t have this luxury. You have to get it right the first time. There is no excuse for a typo on the front of your catalog or a defect on your product. But a website is a living, breathing, evolving creature. Problems can be fixed. Inefficiencies can be optimized.

This isn’t an excuse for sloppiness, but rather a call for constant forward motion. As Seth Godin would say, just ship it. Nothing is more discouraging or counter productive then a long, drawn out website redesign process or new feature project.

Don’t sacrifice progress on the alter of perfection.

1. The belief that visitors always enter your website through the homepage
2. You send all of your traffic PPC, SEO, or Ad traffic to the homepage
3. Promoting products, content, email newsletters, or promotions only on the homepage
4. The belief that the “wow factor” is the most important impression to a customer, so you make your homepage do a flash based song-and-dance
5. A disproportionately large amount of your web design budget goes to redesigning it obsessively

The truth is that visitor behavior has changed drastically. Homepages don’t matter as much as they used too. First-time visitors enter deep into the site courtesy of Google’s more accurate search results. Repeat visitors enter through landing pages from email campaigns or bookmarks to specific pages that interested them. If you take a look at your analytics, I bet you’ll be shocked out how many of your visitors never even pass through the homepage.

Instead of obsessing over the homepage, take a look at other pages that are a required part of your conversion funnel (in other words, buyers must pass through these pages). Look at your  product category pages, the product detail pages, shopping cart, and checkout pages. Odds are, there’s some low-hanging fruit there.

Are you treating every page on your site like a homepage, or just one?

1. Completely redesign it – If you redesign your site from scratch, you’re probably throwing out the baby with the bathwater. No matter what your web design firm tells you, very few websites are so bad that it must be completely redesigned. When you do this, you end up distrupting features that worked perfectly fine just to fix features that didn’t. Instead, redesign your site incrementally around business objectives and customer needs, not the design whims of you or your company.
2. Do something drastic without testing it - I’d like to think that by now I could predict which features will increase conversion, but the truth is I still get it wrong – a lot. This is why testing is so crucial. It’s not fun to spend weeks developing something new only to have Google Website Optimizer tell you it actually hurt your conversion rate, but nonetheless it’s essential. Don’t sabotage your site by not testing major changes.
3. Forget first things  - Odds are your website has more than one conversion. In additon to your primary goal of getting a lead or a purchase, you might also want to get email subscribers, Facebook fans, or Twitter followers. These are all good things, but only if you remember first things first. If you keep adding buttons, ads, popups, and pages to support secondary goals, before you know it you’ve created unprioritzed, cluttered mess of a site. Don’t let your site become a Frankensite monster. Keep your first things first.

Now its your turn… in what ways have you unintentionally sabotage your website?

Odds are you have these pages on your website. Last week I raised a question about the value of site if your products disappeared. But here’s another consideration, what if the above pages disappeared?

If your About Us page was gone, would customers still be able to learn about your company, your beliefs, your values, your unique offering, throughout your site? Or is the About Page the only place you communicate who you really are.

What about an FAQ page? Is this the only place you answer common questions? If they’re really so “common”, why not answer them in context instead? In other words, it doesn’t make sense to answer common questions about your shipping policy on an entirely separate page, it makes sense to answer them with a popup box or mouseover in your shopping cart when people are actually choosing their shipping option.

Or consider your Customer Service page. You can probably figure out the common points of confusion on your website. Shouldn’t your contact info be right there, plain and simple, when and where it’s needed?

I’m not suggesting you delete these pages. I am suggesting you to think differently about how customers flow through your site. The pages above can be crutches. We assume customers will navigate to them when they’re needed. But will they?

Don’t we want that first time visitor, who might only see one page, to intuitively understand our unique value proposition, our mission, how to contact us, answers to common questions… without going anywhere else? How can we better structure our sites and write our copy in a way that avoids unnecessarily detours?

What detours have you seen on websites that can be eliminated?