Email marketing - timing is everything

The humble email continues to drive the ecommerce economy. From baby goods through to wine, a merchant newsletter combined with a good email database can drive significant revenue.

The mass adoption of the smartphone is increasing the importance of email as a marketing tool and changing the time emails should be sent to customers.

Over 50% of personal emails are being opened and read on a mobile, with this number jumping to over 96% for smartphone users.

Technology does not yet exist to detect and render an email mobile friendly, it is therefore important that you the design and test to ensure your emails work on a mobile.

Mobiles are also transforming when and where people read their emails, the smart businesses are adapting to these changes in behaviour.

Gone are the days when ecommerce was solely conducted during working hours. Sending mails during drive time and Sunday evenings are seeing increased open and click through rates.

The great beauty of the mobile is that it always on so most people now have instant access to read and purchase from the device. The internet has moved from the office to the couch.

Access to customers has significantly increased making it more important even ever to know your customers. There is a fine line between helping and annoying your customers, do you think your customers would like to receive an email from you on a Sunday evening?

The better you understand your customers, the better you can be at taking advantage this mobile revolution.

Questions for your business:

1. How do your emails look on a mobile?

2. What time of the day and day of the week do you send out emails to your customers?
3. Which of your customers respond best to email campaigns?

Understanding the basics of SEO

Over eighty percent of people use search engines to find products and services, so search optimisation is important for your business success.

The objective of a search engine is to deliver a quality results to people searching on the web for a product or service. These results will hopefully provide websites with relevant information  to the customer.

Your ranking dictates where your listing will appear when people search for your primary keyword or term. Ideally you need to be on the first page of results. Understanding how your ranking is determined is the key to getting your best ranking.

The aim of this post is to provide a simple non-technical idea of SEO and things you should be focusing on.

Two components to SEO

There are two essential components to SEO:

1. On-site optimisation, how easy it is for the search engine to gather information and the quality of your site. This accounts for about 10-20% of ranking.
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3. Off-site optimisation which accounts for 80-90% of your ranking. This determines the authourity and reputation your site has in the market, or in other words how many people are talking about your site.

On-site optimisation

As the name suggest this component deals with the information you present on your website and the  ezimerchant technical code your site is built upon.

ezimerchant has taken a lot of the hard work away for you by making it easy for search engines to crawl your site and gain all the necessary information. In addition ezimerchant utilises Rich Snippets to allow search engines to present in their results an image associated with your product. 

Selecting a Keyword

It is important that your copy incorporates the  keywords you are optimising on your site, what search terms will your site appears from searches. You want to ensure that your site has relevance for the people you are attracting.

If you have not already determined your keywords, this is a good time to do it. Using tools like Google AdWords Keyword Tool can help determine the importance of the term, how many people search the term, and alternative keywords.

When selecting a keyword, it is pointless picking keywords where you have to compete with larger players. For example, if you picked a keyword in the music industry that the likes of Sony and other large players use, you will not be able to match their link popularity.

Off-site optimisiation

To maximise your ranking you need to gain an off-site presence, getting people to link to your site and talk about your products. Any offsite activities you conduct should be part of your wider marketing campaign to engage and reach your target market, marketing activities and SEO optimisation are closely aligned.

Listing on others websites

You want to aim to get other sites to link back to your website and/or products. The more important and visits the other site gets the more weight this link will have in your rankings. Gone are the days of link farms, google is too clever.

Directories

Directories are a good way to get listed and gain awareness with your potential customers. While it is easy to get added to a list, it is the same for your competitors.

Social media

Social media provides you with a great opportunity to engage your customers base and increase the level of discussion about your website. If you are to busy to keep on top of all the social media services you can use services like Hootsuite to schedule messages at different times of the day across several services.

Blogs

Blogs provide you with a great vehicle to educate and keep your customers up to date with trends in your market. In addition blogs help keep your website content up-to-date and provide an opportunity to share posts with business partners, helping grow each others web presences.

Remember if you start a blog you regularly need to add content, there is nothing worse than going to a company blog site that has not been updated for over a year.

Summary

There are a lot of articles from on the web about SEO optimisation with many of these articles being highly technical and companies claiming to be SEO experts. A good rule of thumb is when you can’t understand what you are being told, don’t spend money with that company.

SEO should be common sense, if you understand the needs of your customers, communicate and engage with them online, your rankings will look after themselves.

How shopping comparison engines can help grow your sales

Maximise your customer reach and boost sales by listing your products with a shopping comparison engine. Comparison engines were one of the earliest ecommerce tools developed but provide a highly effective way to drive leads and sales.

The benefits to your business if using a comparison engine service include:

1. Increase product reach

These services generate significant traffic and promote their service to attract customers. In addition some services run affiliate programs where your products are published onto a range of leading Australian websites. For example, GetPrice run the ninemsn shopping site.

2. Quality leads

These services tend to attract high quality customers who are close to making a purchase, the perfect lead.

3. Pay per click

Most of these services work on a pay per click basis so you only pay for results. Your budget is therefore never too small.

The myth of comparison engines

Many merchants think comparison engines only attract price conscious customers who are solely looking for the lowest price.  While price is always an important attribute most customers visiting the sites are looking at a wider range of criteria before making the purchase decisions, from brand reputation, to customer reviews to shipping times.

It is often the time poor customers that visit these sites to quickly assess the best solution for their needs.

Using the Data Feeds

To use a shopping comparison engine you need a provide these companies with a data feed of your product information. ezimerchant has worked with a number of the leading comparison engines to make it easy for you to connect with their services.

As part of your ezimerchant service, ezimerchant dynamically keeps all of the Data Feeds up to date, ensuring your listings are populated with your latest information and you obtain the best possible conversion rates.

What comparison engines does ezimerchant support

ezimrchant support the following comparison engines: Shopping.com, GetPrice, MyShopping.com.au, Shopmania, Clix Galore, Shopzilla, Nextag and Yahoo Product Submit.

How do I connect to the comparison engines

ezimerchant’s automated feed are located within the Data Feed tab. 

Once you have logged into ezimerchant admin you go to Marketing and then click on the Data Feed tab. All you have to do then is copy and paste the appropriate feed URL and paste this into your comparison engine service.

Scan your way to success

Mobile phones are revolutionising ecommerce and retail. With over 57%[1] of Australians possessing a smart phone a mobile friendly website is becoming critical to business success.

So how do you link your traditional promotions to mobile technology, QR codes.

QR codes, the square barcodes you can scan with your Smart Phone to get more information can be found just about everywhere. You'll find them in shop windows, magazines, flyers, billboards and just about everywhere where you see advertising. Why should they be limited to scan for information? 

Why not scan to buy?

Using ezimerchant it is very easy to make your advertising transactional. Every product you create in ezimerchant comes with a transactional QR code.

Step by step guide

1. Create an ezimerchant account by signing up for free at www.ezimerchant.com

2. Click the Products menu

3. Click Add to create your product

4. Enter product details such as name, description and price

5. Click the Buy Button tab of the product, where you will find the QR code.

6. Click the QR code to get a downloadable image

There are 2 possible actions for the QR code. Straight to checkout (the default) or add to cart. To change to add to cart, click the "change how this works" link to change the behavior. You would use add to cart if you are using more then one QR code in your advertising.

The cart and checkout provided by ezimerchant is highly optimised for mobile devices, so your QR code is immediately ready for use.

[1] Smartcompany 17 May 2012

Four steps to online success

Now you have your site up and running its time to attract customers, keep them and make some money. This post is designed to share with you what we know works and does not to promote ecommerce sites.

Take these four steps and you are on your way to success! It works!

Step 1: Establish your product in a niche or vertical market

If you already have product in a competitive market and you are not yet getting any results maybe you need to specialise. The biggest mistake many companies make is trying to be everything to everybody. Find an obvious void in the marketplace and fill it. Adjust your company or product to meet a specific need and then specialise. Ask yourself, what problem are you solving for your customers and why would they choose your service over a competitor?

Step 2: Getting found on the Internet

Aside from utilizing traditional marketing tools, there are three essential strategies that can be deployed in attracting visitors and sales to your website. These are:

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• Pay Per Click Search Engines (SEM)
• Pay for Inclusion Services (comparison engines)

It’s more than likely that you’ve recently used a search engine to find either a product, a services or other information. Search engines have become a part of everyday life. No doubt you would love to be found the same way.

The importance of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Promotion

When running your business on the Internet, nothing is more important than having a highly ranked site in search engines. The great advantage of having your customers find your website through search engines is that they are qualified leads. These customers are actually searching for your goods and services, not just passing by.

ezimerchant automatically populates product information into your website search data, optimising your site with Google. Each product is enabled with Rich Snippets, which provides an enhanced description and product image.

You can check how your website and each product within your site is displayed on Google by clicking here.

Step 3. Managing your customer and email lists

Email marketing and Customer List

We find that most of our successful merchants are very good at building; managing and servicing a growing customer email lists. From slow beginnings they have worked at it and built lists that are worth rivers of gold to their business.

Your most valuable email asset: an in-house, opt-in list

If you are online and you are not building an email list of customers and prospects, you may be making a costly mistake. Why? Because the opportunity to build opt-in lists will become more limited in the future as the volume of email rises. You'll need to make the collection of email addresses a top priority for every contact with customers or prospects.

The ezimerchant single page checkout provides customers with an option to register their details and opt into future mail campaigns.

The best email lists concentrate on quality, not quantity. Its better to have a list of 5,000 prospects who want to hear from you on a regular basis than a list of 20,000 who are only marginally committed. Good email lists deliver as much value to a subscriber as the product or service it promotes. Keep that in mind, and you'll do a fine job of building an effective list.

Of all the components needed to successfully build an effective email list, the most important component is the value proposition to the consumer and you are sending out emails at an appropriate frequency.

Remember when sending out emails you have to comply with the Australian Spam Act 2003, details can by found by clicking here.

Step 4. Be patient and budget for 6-18 months

Success can happen relatively quickly. But be prepared to wait, the majority of successful sites did not happen over night. Make sure that you have not spent all your money on the initial site design but budgeted money for promotions over the initial 6-18 months.