w3roi can generate a unique code for each of your customers that they can use when placing an order by phone or by mail. You can call this a referral code, a promotional code, a coupon code — whatever works best for your business.

When your sales associate receives an order by phone, they ask for and record the associated tracking code for that customer. You can add a field to your mail-in order form to collect the code from those customers.

Either at the time of sale, or any time after, log in to w3roi and record the customer codes and sale amounts from those offline sales. You’ll find the form under Synchronize » Record Offline Actions in your menu. All of your reports automatically populate with this sales data, showing you exactly which of your advertising lead to those new customers.

Introduction to the Google Ad Auction

Google AdWords Bidding Tutorial

Optimizing for Success on Google’s Content Network

Advertiser Education: What is Return on Investment?

Conversion Optimizer: Increase your profits with AdWords

Here’s what we shared with you this week:

Hidden Secrets of the Amazon Shopping Cart – Bryan Eisenberg explores the history of the Amazon shopping cart interface, and shows how Amazon has evolved its process over time to become and remain one of the top converting ecommerce sites on the web.

Authority Rules – A short report by Copyblogger author Brian Clark about the importance of authority, both in the traditional sense and in terms of SEO and online marketing.

Web Analytics Demystified – An old but packed and completely relevant article about the types of web analytics available and why they’re important to any website.

Bid Like a Pro with the Bid Simulator – A Google AdWords blog post announcing the new Bid Simulator, which lets you see the clicks you would’ve received had you placed certain AdWords bids in the past week.

Speeding up Google Analytics Load Times with a jQuery Plugin – Load times are incredibly important to the bounce rate of a website, and external scripts can influence them drastically. This tutorial provides code for loading the Google Analytics tracking code after page load, instead of during, using the jQuery JavaScript library.

9 Characteristics of Well-Designed E-Commerce Websites – A rundown of 9 important characteristics of good e-commerce design, with examples from sites that make use of them well.

Understanding Linking Intent; the Spam Connection – One of the most in-depth explorations of the various ways search engines analyze links between sites we’ve read. Essential information for planning a link building campaign as part of your SEO efforts.

With over 4 billion combined monthly searches, Bing results will be a major source of traffic for much of the web. No longer will “But It’s Not Google” be an acceptable excuse for ignoring that potential. If you want to be sure your site taps into as much of that traffic as possible, it’s time to start paying attention to just how Bing works.

To get you started, here are a few resources for getting started with Bing SEO:

• Bing’s SEO Guide for Webmasters [PDF]
• 5 Bing SEO Tips
• Bing SEO Guide
• Top 10 Things the Microsoft/Yahoo! Deal Changes for SEO
• Bing Webmaster Central
• Bing Webmaster Blog

How do you keep those e-mails fresh? Send out a re-introduction mail. Remind your subscribers when and how they signed up for your list, and let them know you’re going to start sending them mail again, and what to expect. Make it easy to opt-out if the subscriber doesn’t want your messages anymore, or even start fresh and offer the option to opt-in to a new list instead.

We’re just tackling this very issue ourselves right now. We’ve been offering a “subscribe to our e-mail newsletter” checkbox on the signup form of one of our websites for the past 3 years, but haven’t sent a mail in a few months. To make sure we only have an active list of interested users, we just sent a short message out to the list letting them know we’re going to send some news their way soon, and offered a chance to unsubscribe if they’re not interested anymore.

Do you still want to hear from #SITENAME#?

Hello #FIRSTNAME#,

You signed up with #SITENAME# back on #SUBDATE# and requested our email updates. We haven’t mailed you in a while, and want to make sure you’re still interested in receiving news from us. We’ll have a great new site launching this month we want to tell you about, for example, as well as some #SITENAME# news. We don’t want to send you e-mails you don’t want, so feel free to change your mind and unsubscribe with the link below. You won’t receive another e-mail from us again.

#UNSUBSCRIBE LINK#

#SIGNATURE#

The friendly reminder is much less likely to evoke a negative reaction, and gives us the opportunity to clean up the list before sending out full-blown newsletters again.

If you’re not making use of one or more trust marks, your conversion rates may be much lower than they could be. A study released this month by Harris Interactive showed that almost half of consumers have left the checkout process or abandoned an online shopping cart due to security fears. There’s still an inherent mistrust in most people of the ecommerce process. Stories of identity theft and leaked credit card information on the news have contributed to an increased awareness of data security online.

The web browser padlock icon indicating a secure connection is the first place your prospective customers look to verify the security of your site, but increasingly, they’re also looking for the presence of trust marks. Trust marks are small graphics, often linked to additional information, that show a 3rd party has verified the privacy, identity or security of the website the visitor is shopping on.

You may have seen the logos of BBBOnline, Mcafee or Verisign often displayed by large retailers during the checkout process. Trust marks like these reassure visitors that their information is secure. A separate study conducted by independent research firm TNS indicated that 80% of shoppers understand the purpose trust marks serve, and that 53% indicate the presence of a seal would have prevented their termination of an ecommerce transaction.

With statistics like these, it’s worth looking into whether a trust mark would increase the conversion rate on your site. Below is a compilation of some of the top trust marks available for verifying privacy, identity and security. While some marks can cost thousands of dollars a year to license for a high volume ecommerce store, most vendors allow a trial period in which you can try out the mark at no cost. If you don’t see a big enough conversion rate increase to justify the price, you can cancel without purchasing. Others are available at a low enough fee even a new store can afford to add a mark to their site.

	Comodo Hacker Proof From $2295 per year
	McAfee Secure From $1479 per year
	Secure Metrics Credit Card Safe From $699 per year
	TRUSTe Certified Privacy From $649 per year
	VeriSign Secured From $399 per year
	TrustGuard Business Verified From $197 per year
	WebSafe Shield Hacker Free Site From $79.95 per month
	Secured by thawte From $149 per year
	Network Solutions SiteSafe Guarantee From $89 per year
	Secured by GeoTrust From $249 per year
	ControlScan Verified Secure From $149 per year
	BBBOnline Reliability Program From $200 per year plus local BBB fees
	GoDaddy Secured From $29 per year

We’ve just released a 12-page guide that explains it all and tells you exactly what you need to do to increase your Quality Scores. To get your free copy, just subscribe to our e-mail newsletter using the form on the home page.