Now that Facebook has gone public there has been a lot of talk about Facebook’s advertising business. Do you think Facebook’s ads are useful? Have you see positive ROI from it?

Infographic © 2012 WordStream, Inc., a PPC and Search Engine Marketing tools company.

Google AdWords has launched a new feature which provides you with detailed competitive auction information. You can now see how your bid stacks up against your competition.

With the Auction insights report, you can compare your performance with other advertisers who compete in the same set of auctions as you do. You can see how often your ads rank higher than other advertisers’ ads on the search results page, and how often your ads appear compared to theirs based on your estimated possible impressions. This information can help you make strategic decisions about bids, budgets, and keyword choices by showing you where you are succeeding and where you may be missing opportunities for improved performance.

The Auction insights report provides data at the keyword-level, and provides five different statistics: impression share, average position, overlap rate, position above rate, and top of page percent:

Google is rolling this out now. Are you seeing this in your account yet?

Are you ok with meeting random strangers? Does your product or service pop on video? Is your target audience primarily women?

Check out this guide from CPC Strategy:

Source: CPC Strategy Blog

Francesca StaAna is from AdMedia, an online advertising network that connects advertisers to consumers through a number of innovative products including ad remarketing, affiliate programs, pay per click advertising, and more.

Getting your online store’s homepage to rank high on Google is great and all, but don’t forget to exert more link building efforts for product pages. After all, these are the pages that actually generate revenue for your site, so you need ensure that they also have great spots on SERPs.

But since people are more inclined to link to your homepage instead of specific product pages, getting those coveted links can be a little tricky. If you’re having this same dilemma, don’t fret.  There are some tactics that you can do to get more product page links that would make Google give your product pages the SEO love that they deserve.

1. Write guest posts for related websites – Contact bloggers in your industry and see if they’re open to publishing guest posts. Once you get the go signal, be sure to write about something that would benefit that blog’s readers. Don’t get too promotional and plug your own products and services. This is a sure-fire way for your post to get rejected. Bloggers usually allow guest posters to add around 1 – 2 links to be placed in the author’s bio and not in the post’s body. However, if you develop a strong working relationship with a blogger overtime, then they might allow you to add a couple of your own links to the body of the post, provided that the links are relevant and beneficial to readers.

2. Spice up your product descriptions – Are you using “generic” product descriptions for your items? If so, then you’re making a big mistake.  Chances are websites that are selling the same products are also using those tired old manufacturer’s descriptions for their items. Stand out from the crowd and write your own unique descriptions. This doesn’t mean that you should use dramatic or exaggerated descriptions for your products. You should still be accurate and be sure to include relevant keywords in the content. But be original by thinking of your customers and writing about how those products will benefit them.

3. Sponsor events and causes – See if you can sponsor any industry-relevant events, causes, or charities to get a link or two in their marketing materials and website. You can also give away samples of what you’re selling, and include a tag with the link to that product’s specific page. Chances are customers or journalists looking to do product reviews will see it and might actually link back to that page.

4. Send out free samples to bloggers and journalists – Speaking of product reviews, scour the web for journalists and bloggers in your industry and touch base with them to see if they’re accepting free samples for review. If they’re open to it and decide to write about your product, be sure to send them the URL for that particular product page so that they’ll know where to link to when they publish the review.

5. Do your own product images – Remember that tip about spicing up your product descriptions? The same thing goes for your product images. If you’re using factory or generic images for your products, then you’re just like most of the other eCommerce sites out there that are selling the same things. If you can, be sure to take your own product photos. Put the items under good lighting, make them look great, and get them from every angle. Doing this won’t just make you stand out and look good in the eyes of your customers; it might actually get your more product page links. Think about it. If there are people out there who just happen to be writing about the products that you’re selling, they’ll be more inclined to choose to link to YOUR page simply because you have better product images and descriptions.

The folks at HubSpot created an exhaustive timeline infographic of the history of marketing. Check it out below:

Looks like I post a lot more about Google AdWords these days. Last time I tried this the highest ranking term was “shopping.”

Are there any other topics you’d like me to post about? Please let me know…

What is Remarketing/Retargeting?

Retargeting works by tagging every visitor to your site and then displaying your ads to those customers on other sites in the Advertising network. These types of ads usually perform better than standard display ads. This is because the potential customer has already been to your site and will recognize your brand.

There are many retargeting companies out there such as Fetchback, AdRoll, Collective etc… This guide is specifically for Google AdWords because the setup is very simple and can be done without opening up new advertising accounts or committing to large ad budgets. This can be done in your existing AdWords account.

How do I set it up?

Step #1 — Set up Audience Profile

Go to the Shared Library section in the left hand menu of your AdWords account.

This will take you to a page where you will want to click “New Audience” and select “Remarketing list”. Fill out the form with a name and enter the number of days you’d like to track people for. If you enter 30, your ads will be displayed to anyone who visited the site in the last 30 days.

After you save the form above, you will need to click on the “Tag” link in the list of audiences. This will show you the code that needs to be installed on your site. There is an option for HTTPS, be sure to select that if your site serves pages through a secure connection (as most eCommerce sites do).

Step #2 — Install Tracking Pixel(s)

After you finished clicking around in Step #1 and you have the final code, you need to get it installed on your site. However, before you install the code you will need to figure out what pages should collect retargeting info. Keep in mind that you can set up multiple audiences in AdWords and show different ads based on the audience profile.

For example, let’s make believe we have an apparel site that we’d like to run a Remarketing campaign on. It would probably be best if we made separate audiences for Men, Women and Children’s apparel. This will allow us to tailor the ads based on the visitors buying preferences. Someone who was shopping for kids t-shirts will see a relevant ad and someone who was looking at a men’s sweatshirt will see what they were looking for. The more granular you get, the better performance your ad will have. Keep in mind that you don’t want to get very granular if you do not have a lot of traffic on your site.

Once you decide how to set up your audience profiles, circle back to step one create them all and copy the code into your website.

Step #3 — Set up Campaign

Set up a new campaign with separate Ad Groups for each audience. You will need to enter the same information as a regular campaign. Make sure that you have the Display Network turned on.

Go to the Audience tab in your Remarketing campaign. If you do not see it, you need to enable it by clicking on the “more” arrow.

Once you get to the Audience tab, click on the “add audiences” button and select your Campaign/Ad Group. A new screen should pop out with the audience profiles that you created in Step #1. Click “add” to add these to this Ad Group. If you have several Remarketing list, you will want to put them in separate ad groups so that you can target the ad creative accordingly.

Step #4 — Design/Upload Banner Ads

This is the part where you want to upload existing banner ads or use the Google AdWords Display Ad Builder.

Image Ads

To upload standard image ads, go to the “Ads” section of your campaign, click “New Ad” and select “Image Ad”. You will then need to upload image ads one at a time.

Display Ad Builder

If you do not have any display ads or if you would like to build ads featuring several different products, you can use the Display Ad Builder. In the “Ads” section click “New Ad” and select “Display Ad Builder”. This will take you to a page with many different options. I like to use the “Product Showcase” which Google describes as follows:

Templates that show a selection of product images with different destination URLs. Promoted products are shown like a catalog in these templates.

You will be given a form where you can enter information for multiple products and it will automatically build a dynamic ad in a variety of sizes.

Once you upload you ads, just make sure all the standard campaign settings are filled out properly (keywords, bids, budgets etc…) — At this point you should be done.

Keep in mind that a Remarketing campaign takes a while to pick up because it needs to collect visitor information so that your “Audience” can be targeted properly. Every time someone visits your site where the code is installed they will be tagged with the audience profile and they will start seeing your ads within the Google Advertising Network.

Good luck. Happy Retargeting!

Think you spend a lot of money AdWords? Think again… Here is a breakdown from WordStream of where Google gets its money from.

Create a Google+ Page

The first step to getting set up with Google Plus is to create your Business Page. This is different from a Personal Profile. You can set up a Business Page here:
https://plus.google.com/pages/manage

Add The +1 Button

In order to facilitate easy sharing of the products and pages on your website, you will want to add the “plus one” button. The code for that can be found here:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/

Add A Google+ Profile Badge

Then ext step is to get customers and site visitors to follow you on Google+. The best way to do this would be to display the Google+ Profile Button. Go to your Google+ Business Page and copy the URL. Paste it into the form on this page and it will output the correct code for your profile:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/profilebutton/

Image Credit: Hongkiat / Artbees

Google recently started testing a new ad extension called the Communication Ad Extension. This allows merchants to collect customer email signups directly in the ad. As of now, this seems to be a beta program with no information published by Google besides for in the AdWords support forums.

What is this?

The communication ad extension is a new extension that allows AdWords advertisers to collect leads directly from Google search.

There are two types of this ad format:

1. Communication Ads for Daily Deal sites: This type allows Daily Deal sites to collect email addresses and zip codes of new sign-ups to their
offer emails.

2. Communication Ads for Newsletters: This variant allows large businesses to collect email addresses and zip codes of people interested in joining a
newsletter or email list from a given merchant.

How do I get this?

I wanted to test this for a client, so I emailed Google AdWords support requesting additional signup information. I received a reply from Google within a day or so requesting specific information so they can review the account in question.

Once they review the account and see whether you are eligible, the ad extension goes live pretty quickly. When the ad is live, you’ll start receiving email notifications whenever someone fills out the form.

There are no guarantees about which sites Google will accept into the beta, however it seems pretty straightforward and can’t hurt to ask. I would suggest you email AdWords support and see if they will let you in the program.

How does it perform?

I have been testing this for a few weeks already. Currently there are no reports in AdWords for this ad extension. However, it seems to work reasonably well as we have been getting quite a few signups on a regular basis since this went live.

Image Credit: Search Engine Roundtable

The folks at CPC Strategy just published a cool infographic on Amazon’s amazing growth. Check it out below.

Source: CPC Strategy Blog

Jimmy Rodriguez is CTO and co-founder of 3DCart, developer of an e-commerce suite for businesses of all sizes. As an authority on e-commerce best practices, Jimmy combines more than 8 years as an e-commerce developer and web programmer with SEO, social marketing and business intelligence.

One of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of selling more product is shipping, a feared part of the online purchasing process during the holiday season. It’s easy to fall to become disorganized during the busy holiday season, but it won’t reflect well on your brand and will turn what could have been loyal customers into one-time shoppers. Luckily if you prepare now and have a system in place you can easily avoid holiday shipping debacles.

1 – Offer a free shipping deal
Make it an exploding offer—or, if you can afford it without cutting heavily into revenues, offer it to all customers throughout the holidays. Shipping costs typically make up 5% or more of the total cost, a significant dent in profits. Still, over 46.5% of small to mid-sized businesses say that offering free shipping increases their profits.

2 - Extend the standard shipping deadline
Inform customers that standard shipping prices will go up on a day before they actually do, then announce an extension to the standard shipping deadline.

3 - Use a shipping aggregator for international sales
Shipping aggregators like Bongo consolidate your international products coming from different warehouses into a single, neat package. Merchants can simply ship to to the aggregators Domestic Facility, and the international shipping experts handle the rest.

4 - Stock up on shipping supplies
If you’re shipping products on your own, make sure you stock up on twice as many shipping resources as your projected sales. Being over-prepared is much better than being under-prepared because you can always use the excess materials for post-holiday shipping.

5 - Give customers the ability to track their purchases
Shipping through popular carriers and linking them to your backend CRM and email autoresponders makes it simple for customers to track their purchases.

6 - Showcase contact information prominently
Online merchants need to go the extra mile to make their customers feel safe and protected. You can put a customer’s mind at ease by displaying your contact information prominently in multiple locations on your site. Also consider listing your phone number and alternative email addresses in your auto-responder emails.

7 - Follow up on shipped orders
Through your order management system, track when shipped items are received and set autoresponders to send follow-up emails with links to feedback resources. Also consider jazzing up your holiday autoresponders with a seasonal images and sayings. It never hurts to spread the holiday cheer!

8 - Include physical promotions in shipped packages
Surprise your customer with a coupon! There’s nothing like the feeling of a coupon in your hand; send physical coupons with every order in hopes of inspiring a return customer. It also makes sure that your customer’s last impression of the purchase is a great one.

The above is an excerpt from 3dcart’s FREE eBook 12 Days of Online Shopping. Download yours today to automatically receive a $75 Google Adwords certificate & $100 Amazon Ad certificate and be entered to win one of 20 $100 Google Adwords certificate!

Image Credit: Drewski2112

This post was written by Helen Fang, marketing manager for Vendio.  Vendio offers ecommerce software and helps users in every phase of online selling, from finding the best products to sell online to opening a 100% free web store.

Auctioneers of the modern era are posed with multimedia challenges they’ve never been forced to deal with in the past. A poorly laid-out website or confusing product image can be the difference between making the sale and losing business. In this quick tutorial you’ll learn the basics for writing effective product titles and descriptions, and how to take quality photos of the items you are selling.

Product Titles and Descriptions

The descriptions you put forth of your products play a major role in the bidder’s purchasing decision when they are unable to physically see or touch a product for themselves. If they inquire via email about the product, not only should you be sure to email them back promptly, but you should go above and beyond what is required of you based on their question. If they need clarity on something, do not leave your description lacking. Your extra attention to detail will be remembered by the bidder and, as such, leave open the possibility of spreading good word about your business.

Titles should be as descriptive but short and snappy as possible, leaving nothing desired on the part of the bidder. Additionally, your initial product description should show clarity in shipping and various extra charges – don’t leave anything open-ended. You want your readers to trust you as a professional; your credibility will come along with how well the overall description is written, as well as the quality of the information provided.

Photographs

No, as an auctioneer you are not required to be a professional photographer or own an elaborate camera (a simple digital camera should do just fine). You are, however, expected to be able to take quality and visually appealing photographs of your products. When taking your pictures, consider what you would look for in a photograph as a consumer. Pictures should not be blurry, should be (ideally) taken in natural lighting and should be taken from a close enough distance so that viewers can assess the intricacies of a product. Do not use the zoom feature if it is not necessary, as it tends to distort or blur the image quality.

When finally uploading the images, make your site’s layout is conducive to your users. Do not upload large image files or small thumbnail images; these will only frustrate users who do not have the Internet connections to quickly open these files or, in the case of a thumbnail, who just want a bigger view of the product. Also, take into consideration what is included in the background of your photo. None of the photos you take should look like they were “home taken” pictures; these should be photos with plain backdrops or specifically setup to a fit a theme.

Following these simple tips can help make sure you’re appealing to your potential online customer base as much as possible.

Photo Credit: Stéfan

Google AdWords has allowed advertisers to show sitelinks since the end of 2009. Back in April Search Engine Roundtable showed examples of ads showing up to 4 sitelinks per ad. I am now seeing some ads with 6 sitelinks. It would seem as if this is somehow connected with Google’s push to expand organic sitelinks in the SERPs.

It seems that the Google help center has recently been updated to state:

If a user search triggers your ad to run with Sitelinks, our system may include up to six of your additional links on your ad, along with the main landing page link. The higher the quality of your ad, the more likely Sitelinks may be able to run on that ad.

How many sitelinks are you seeing?

Thanks David.

Alice Delore is an education specialist for SaleHoo.com, an online community of over 95,000 online sellers and retailers. Their product range consists of an online selling course, ecommerce software  and their flagship product, a wholesale directory. 

Most store owners graduate to owning their own website after learning the basics of selling on giant marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon. There are a host of benefits to owning your own store including having more control over the direction of your store and not having a percentage of your earnings eaten up by marketplace fees.

However, the one major drawback is that when you branch out from a marketplace, you no longer have traffic spoon-fed to your listings, which usually means very slow sales in the early days of owning your store.

It won’t come as news that one of the most effective way to attract buyers is by capturing them in search engines. However, knowing how to go about doing this can be the tricky part.

Here are my top 3 essential search engine optimization tips for new web store owners:

#1 – Write content-rich product descriptions

One of the ways that Google and other search engines determine which sites to rank is through the text content on the site. Therefore, it is crucial that your product descriptions contain keywords that your buyers will search for when they search for items you stock.

Try to write descriptions that are at least 250 words long and remember to include the keywords that closely relate to the product, but remember not to stuff your description with too many keywords. Doing so could tell Google that your content is not genuine. It’s also an eye-sore for buyers!

If you aren’t sure which keywords to use, try the Google Keyword Tool. It’s a free tool by Google which allows you to swoop in and identify exactly which keywords your potential buyers are searching for.

For example, if you are selling women’s dresses, you can enter ‘womens dresses’ into the keyword tool and hit search to see a list of related keywords that buyers are searching for.

#2 – Write a killer meta description

Your meta description is the text that displays in search results.

Above is a good example of a meta description. This company, Inch Blue, ranks on the first page of Google for the keywords “baby shoes”. Their meta description contains these keywords but, more importantly, it provides information to the person searching which encourages them to click-through and visit the web store.

Therefore, meta descriptions serve two purposes:

a)      They help you rank better in search results when you include relevant keywords

b)      They give you a chance to lure buyers into the store. Make use of your meta description by stating, as Inch Blue has, what makes your product different from other options.

How to alter your meta description depends on how your store was built or which store builder you use but, if you know HTML code, the meta description appears in the header code of your website.

#3 – Keep your content fresh!

Google and other search engines love when you update your site with fresh, new content. When you update your content, Google knows that your website is a ‘live’ one, not just a static website that is never updated, which improves your rankings.

There are a number of ways that you can easily update your web content to keep it fresh. One is by simply re-writing your listing descriptions every couple of weeks. You can still say the same things about the products, just freshen up the order of the wording. Adding customer reviews of the products or general feedback is another easy way to add new content. It also encourages customers to purchase because they love hearing positive feedback from other buyers.

Blog writing to increase your search engine placement

Writing blog posts on a regular basis is another way to brighten up your content. Additionally, when you write about the products that you sell, you show off your passion for the products which inspires customers to hit the “Add to Cart” button!

Most products or product lines are relativity easy to blog about.  If you sell handbags, you can write about the latest season’s color and style trends or about an outrageously expensive new designer bag that your audience would adore, but never be able to purchase themselves!

If you sell gardening equipment, you can write blog posts about gardening tips or keep a photo blog of the world’s most beautiful gardens.

Your blog posts do not need to be long or sophisticated: Web readers will engage better with a shorter, snappier and more personal blog post than a dry, boring post.

Above all else, aim to give valuable, informative or entertaining content to readers and avoid blasting them with advertisements for your products.

How well does your website rank in the search engines? 

Image Credit: Mike Atherton

The Google AdWords Product Listing Ads generally perform very well for most eCommerce retailers. You can read our guide on how to set up Product Listing Ads. Here are some extra tips to help you set up and optimize the campaign correctly.

Google Merchant Center

In your Google Merchant Center feed, you can add the following columns to help with Product Listing Ads.

Google AdWords

Once you add these fields to your feed file, you can filter your campaigns by grouping and labels.

You can find more info in the Google Help Center.

Craig Smith is the founder and CEO of Trinity Insight, a leading eCommerce consulting agency that provides multivariate testing.

Social Media & SEO

Recently, major developments have taken place within search algorithms to weigh social signals as ranking factors. Social signals present additional cues which can be leveraged by search engines, and these elements have been incorporated as secondary datapoints to be utilized when engines decide which pages to rank at the top of the results.

The reason for this shift is pretty clear. Search engines have been dealing with the problem of link spam in link manipulation for years now. Outside of on-site HTML, search algorithms really do not have many other factors to weigh.

The secondary link market caused search results to rank that were less than ideal for Google. The engines know that the competitive advantage they have is primarily attributed to query relevance.

Relevance is the key to everything that happens within Google’s business. If Google doesn’t give you, as a user, a phenomenal experience by providing accurate and quality solutions to the questions you pose within the search engine, you will simply use another engine and click on their paid listings.

Because AdWords (i.e. Paid Search) makes up over 90% of Google’s revenue this is clearly something that they protect as their number one strategic initiative, keeping their listings more relevant than any other search engine on the market.

Spammers and manipulated links are the number one threat to Google’s relevancy. For so many competitive listings, there are sites that are clearly built on scraped content, that have been manufactured solely for the purpose of generating affiliate revenue, and that have achieved top search engine rankings through link manipulation techniques.

Many of these sites were eliminated from the search engine results with the panda update that took place earlier in 2011, but still, many sites that present a less than ideal user experience are frequently at the top of Google’s search engine results.

In my opinion, Google realized that they had to add additional variables to their internal ranking algorithms to ensure that relevancy not only improves, but also that the additional garbage content that exists on the web is eliminated. The social web that exists in a high percentage of overall internet traffic, provides exactly what Google needs to supplement their existing page rank algorithm.

Facebook and Twitter are the two principle components of what I am calling the social web. The social web is the interconnection between humans that serves as a filter for content.

Because humans pass content that is of value, and that also provides connections on an emotional level, or for some type of learning experience, search engines can take these user actions of sharing and incorporate these “signals” into the link driven ranking algorithms that exist today.

What Should You Do?

So what are you to do as a marketer? Well, the first plan of attack should be to isolate the influencers that exist within the social web for your marketplace. Document the publishers, the URLs, and the specific Facebook pages or groups that have high levels of interactivity, and three occasions for the search terms they were targeting.

Next it’s time to look at your content. What content do you have on your domain that is of high value? What content do you have that will help answer questions or comments within prospects’ minds in your market? Document these pieces of content as these are the two types that you will be seeding in Facebook and Twitter.

If you don’t have content that is of high value, then you need to create it. Your SEO success will not proceed without your site being a leader in targeted copy that is geared for your prospects.

Conducting a proper keyword research effort, will help you understand what you need to write about. Schedule a marketing campaign and content distribution strategy that touches upon all of these categories and subcategories.

Lastly, after your content has been created, it’s time to engage. An analyst or representative of the organization will need to interact in social communities that are discussing the topical areas you are targeting within your SEO efforts.

You will want to present your content as solutions to questions within the social setting. The key is not being a salesman of any kind, but rather, a trusted individual that helps provide perspectives and insights to solving problems that users have. Don’t optimize anchor text, just present URLs as solutions to user questions.

By interacting in these discussions and communities not only will your brand receive increased exposure for prospects in your market, but Google and other search engines will see your content as a trusted resource as you are helping provide solutions to web users. This is exactly what Google wants you to do and your search engine rankings will benefit.

Best of luck within your SEO efforts!

Image Credit: Matt Hamm

Tomorrow is two years since I published the first post on eCommerceCircle. A lot has changed since then… I have since dropped the pseudonym Michael J. Kaye and started using my name, Menachem Ani. During this time I stopped spelling “E-Commerce” with a dash and switched to the easier “eCommerce.”

Over the past couple of years I have added some new sections, such as:

• eCommerce Links – a roundup of eCommerce links from some great eCommerce blogs
• eCommerce Resources – a directory of useful eCommerce tools and services
• Subscribe Via Email – ability to receive the latest posts via email

As always, you can view a full list of posts on eCommerceCircle on our sitemap.

eCommerceCircle would be nowhere without people reading it… So thanks to all my readers who brought this site from zero to 10,000 monthly pageviews. Hopefully that number will keep growing…

Thanks for reading and please let me know what eCommerceCircle is to you…

Jimmy Rodriguez is CTO and co-founder of 3DCart, developer of an e-commerce suite for businesses of all sizes. 3dcart just rolled out 3dcart 4.0 and with it we offered all merchants autoresponders free of charge. As an authority on e-commerce best practices, Jimmy combines more than 8 years as an e-commerce developer and web programmer with SEO, social marketing and business intelligence

Customer acquisition efforts are time-consuming. Online merchants spend hours upon hours exploring every possible channel to gain new customers – PPC, content marketing, social ads, banners, affiliate marketing etc. Acquiring new customers isn’t getting easier and as most eCommerce merchants know the process isn’t getting cheaper either.

Basic economics tells us that in order to be profitable, the amount of money spent on acquiring a customer (investment) must be less than the customer’s value (return). If I spend $100 to find a customer, the customer has to purchase $100 at my store just so I break even. The equation is simple, but some merchants feel they only are able to affect the investment as the return is in the hands of the customer. They attempt to lower their customer acquisition cost (CAC) by choosing inexpensive methods like bidding on lower value keywords that have a lower cost per click. More often than not, those methods are also less effective and result in much lower conversion rates – leaving them in the same mathematical dilemma as before.

Don’t be discouraged. CAC investments are well-worth the expense if the lifetime value of the acquired customer is raised or simply put, your return will be greater if the acquired customer purchases from your store multiple times. If I spend $100 to gain a customer and that customer purchases $50 dollars worth of merchandise (an even lower amount than the previous example) and continues to do so every 2 months, I have a 500% return on my investment! When you turn one-time customers into loyal shoppers, your advertising dollars go farther, you increase your campaign ROI and you can double your bottom line with no additional work.

How to raise the lifetime value of your online customers:

The key to offline sales remains true with online sales: following up with a client is just as important as the initial pitch. In eCommerce following-up with an existing customer, or “back-end selling” is just as important as attracting the customer in the first place. Instead of scrambling to find new customer after new customer, connect with shoppers who you already know want your merchandise & trust your brand – your existing customers.

Following up with existing customers with email marketing frees merchants from the lead generation rat race. According to research conducted by the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing was expected to generate an ROI of $42.08 for every dollar spent on it in 2010. Email marketing allows eCommerce merchants to maximize on their existing community and create a network of loyal shoppers and with auto-responders merchants can can set the efforts on auto-pilot.

What is an “auto responder?”

An autoresponder campaign is a series of messages programmed to send out automatically based on a predetermined schedule. Unlike traditional newsletters, autoresponder’s send out a finite number of emails as a part of a campaign.

Autoresponders make email marketing as easy as “set and forget.” Think of autoresponders as your personal email secretary. While you focus on growing business (and filling all of your new orders), your autorespond secretary is busy emailing personalized messages to customers, increasing conversions, and gaining loyal shoppers.

Setting up a successful Autoresponder Campaign:

Post-Sale Welcome Autoresponders

When a customer completes their first purchase from your site, welcome the user by expressing appreciation for their business and introducing your company with a sentence or two.

A post-sale message should focus on building trust and establishing a relationship, rather than trying to upsell. When wording your message, be personal & authentic and avoid cliches. Friendly ‘welcome’ messages excite customers & encourage return visits!

Post-Sale Follow-up Autoresponders

A typical autoresponder follow-up campaign sends a customer 2-4 emails over a period of 2-4 weeks post-purchase, but frequency varies depending on your audience’s profile.

Consider offering “welcome back” return discount or suggest products based on the customer’s past orders. The more personal & incentivized the message, the higher the conversion rate!

Activity-based Autoresponders

Set up multiple autoresponder campaigns for specific customer activities. For example, you can create separate message campaigns based on:

• The type of customers : wholesalers versus retailers
• Customers who purchase more than the average order amount. (Say Thank you!)
• Customers who purchased a specific product from your store to offer add-ons, up-sells and new models.

Activity-based autoresponders allow eCommerce merchants to create highly targeted messaging. The more specialized the message is to the user, the more effective the email.

Read more about autoresponders on 3dcart’s blog.

Image Credit: larskflem

How do you get more traffic to your eCommerce store? Advertising can be costly… Here is a list of 7 free comparison shopping engines which you should utilize to get free traffic to your store.

#1 – Google Shopping

Google Shopping is the king of free comparison shopping engines. It sends the most traffic out of all the CSEs listed in the post. You will need to create and account and submit a feed using the Google Merchant Center.

#2 – Bing Shopping

Bing Shopping is the Bing alternative to Google Shopping. Although they have less market-share, free is free. You’ll want to get set up here as well. NOTE: Bing has placed a temporary hold on new merchant signups, keep your eye on this page for updates. When they do allow new merchant signups, use this guide to setup an account within adCenter.

#3 - TheFind

TheFind.com has been growing quite a lot over the past year. Their model allows you to list your product for free. If you add their UpFront badge to your site, you will get better placement. Sign up at TheFind.com Merchant Center.

#4 - Oodle

Oodle is not really a comparison shopping engine, it is more of a classified listing site. However, they allow you to upload your product catalog via FTP with a datafeed, so you may as well submit your products here.

#5 - SortPrice

SortPrice has a different model from all other comparison shopping engines. They charge a flat fee for every merchant and you get whatever clicks you get. In addition to this, they offer to list a percentage of your products for free. More info is here.

#6 - ShopMania

ShopMania offers a free account with the option to upgrade to their premium packages. The free plan can only be used if you install their “We’re listed on ShopMania” site seal. Sign up and get more info here. ShopMania also offers a free Facebook Store for merchants listed on their program.

#7 - GoShopping

GoShopping.com is similar to ShopMania, they offer to list your products for free if you install their badge on your site. You can sign up here.

Introduction: What is the Google +1 Button?

Until someone creates a Magento extension for the Google +1 button, like there is for the Facebook Like button, here is a quick and easy way to add it to your Magento store in two steps:

Step #1

Add the JavaScript code to your Magento config: System –> Configuration –> Design –> HTML Head –> Miscellaneous Scripts.

<script src="https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Step #2

Place this tag in your template phtml files where you want the +1 button to render (example location: /app/design/frontend/XXXXXX/XXXXXX/template/page/html/header.phtml)

<g:plusone></g:plusone>

Please Note: Google has several styles of this button, you can select the proper code when you get the code here.

• Comparison Engine Dominos: New Rate Cards
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• Develop Useful Error Pages
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• Learn from some of Shopify’s Top Stores
  some pro tips from some of the more successful stores on Shopify’s blog
• Keeping Up With Google: 3 Updates You Should Know About
  as always, it’s important to keep up with the Google
• 14 Ways To Optimize Your Ecommerce Marketing
  great list from Elastic Path

This post has been submitted by PixelCrayons. PixelCrayons is a creative web design and development agency that specializes in providing custom web design and development, PSD to HTML, Content Management System and ecommerce solutions.

An e-commerce solution has become the utmost requirement of every business website. It is rather indispensable. Without a good e-commerce shopping cart, an e-commerce website is incomplete and can’t expect good returns in terms of traffic, sales, ranking and ROI. There is plethora of e-commerce solutions available in the market. However, selecting the right e-commerce shopping cart software can be a daunting task. Planning for a shopping cart is very important. This is because e-commerce significantly affects your website’s layout and available features. Therefore, it is important to have an e-commerce shopping cart that not only offers the required features but also meets other important criteria. Here is a complete guide to selecting the right shopping cart for your e-commerce store.

If you are considering creating a shopping cart on your own, then mind it, it is very complicated, time consuming and a lengthy task. Also, it requires proper knowledge of various technologies. There are a number of viable shopping carts available commercially. Thus buying would be much better than spending both your time and resources on creating one on your own. The commercially available shopping carts range from free to price ones.

An important point to consider before buying a shopping cart is- do you want to integrate with an existing website or start from scratch. There are some shopping carts that are simple and handle only the check out process. Such shopping carts require you to simply add snippets of code to your existing pages. Thus this type of shopping cart is best for those who are looking for an e-commerce solution for their existing website. But if you are starting from the scratch, you may want to have a more complex and customized system. Shopping carts that can create your product pages are extremely useful when changing product information, adding new products or deleting products.

Next point to consider is- what all features do you need in a shopping cart? Just like every business operates differently, their requirements also vary. Every online store is unique. It has to be. Visitors prefer user friendly and attractive online stores. Although, depending on your business, you many need a shopping cart with only basic functions or you may need all the attention grabbing features of a big e-commerce website. This depends entirely on you to determine the type of features you want in your online store. This will help you utilize both time and resources. It is better to decide before hand than to repent later. It can be really frustrating to be half-way done integrating a cart into your website only to find that it does not support a necessary feature.

Some of the essential features an e-commerce store should have are

• It should support dynamic product/page creation.
• Ensure that it is database-driven
• It should provide options like user registration, coupon codes, product reviews, product options etc.
• It should provide affiliate tracking and inventory tracking
• It should have shipping integration
• It should be template driven
• It should have features like order management/editing and product categories and sub categories.
• It should support multiple currencies and multiple payment processors

The technical aspects also require some consideration. There are many shopping carts that require you to host the site on their servers. Hence, if you already have a website, it would not be a viable option for you especially if you have paid for a year of hosting in advance. Before installing the shopping cart, ensure that it is compatible with your hosting. An alternative is to get hosting that is compatible with your shopping cart. An ASP/MS SQL shopping cart will not work on a Linux web server (and vice versa). Make sure your web server meets all the listed requirements before purchasing the software. Ask the host service if they can install the missing components for you.

Price is also an important factor. The prices of shopping carts range from free to hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is important to make sure that the solution you choose meets all your needs. However, refrain from going overboard. You may end up spending a hefty amount on a solution that you may not need so much. At the same time, do not go for the free solutions either. This is because most free of cost shopping carts are developed by programmers on part time basis and some of them are not updated for months or even years. If you plan to go with the free shopping cart, make sure that there is adequate support from either the developers or other users online. Also ensure that bugs or security issues are addressed immediately.

Scalability counts a lot. When one starts with an online store, one has plans to make it big and turn the store into an internationally recognized store. For this, it is mandatory that the shopping cart is scalable and can handle a large number of orders and visitors simultaneously. Also make sure that it has all the features you will need, or that you can upgrade to a more advanced version if needed.

Also look out for the technical support available. You will need assistance for either setting up or installing, configuring or maybe customizing the cart to fit your website. If an error appears, it also needs to be debugged. Therefore, ensure that there is quick support because a small delay can lead to a significant number of lost sales (and revenues).

From the above mentioned points, it is clear that it requires a lot of factors to be considered while looking for a shopping cart for your e-commerce site. It is important to analyze the requirements and then proceed with the process of searching for a shopping cart. Keeping the above mentioned points in mind will help you to select the right shopping cart for you website.

Image Credit: The Rocketeer

Google AdWords/Google Checkout Badge

Hello,

Please be aware that beginning on June 2, 2011, the Google Checkout badge will no longer appear on your ads on Google search results.

We’re making this change to improve the user experience on Google search results pages.

For more information, please visit https://checkout.google.com/support/sell/bin/answer.py?answer=1323905

Sincerely,

The Google Checkout Team

ShopMania offers free product listings which is a great way to get started on comparison shopping. Aside from the benefit of free listings, they offer an easy to set up Facebook Store. Once you have a ShopMania account, all you need to do is add the application to your Facebook page. Click here to get started.