E-marketing

One of the basics of customer-centric, persuasive copywriting is using "you" and "you're" rather than "I," "our" and "we." People are self-centered and respond better when you make your site all about them. This goes for all touch points in your marketing - including your welcome emails.

We don't do a lot of posts on branding on Get Elastic, but I had to blog about Seattle-based ski, snowboard and wakeboard shop evogear. evo is an example of a retailer that has taken its corporate culture and incorporated its personality into nearly every aspect of its marketing.

According to Marketing Experiments' Dr. Flint McLaughlin, whenever you use an X-Y range in your ad, most people will revert to the first number as the mean (average) standard. In other words, on a range of 35-50%, one will assume that 50% off is the exception, and most items are 35% off. (Slide 18 of PPC Live Optimization Clinic replay)

Add to Cart buttons - they may be small, but no online retail store can do without them. These little, rectangular, sometimes colorful clickables connect the product to the shopping cart and are an extension of your branding. It's important to put some thought into what your "Add to Cart" icon looks like in your shopping cart.

Last year we posted cart buttons from over 100 top online retailers. Just over a year later, I spotted 46 out of the 111 retailers using different button designs. But does that mean they're testing? Not necessarily.

Many people, including myself, don't enjoy filling out forms. Forms are usually long, unclear, and contain too many required fields, etc. To the contrary, from a business perspective forms are an excellent tool for gathering information. Our job as web analysts is to make both parties happy and help optimize form length with input analysis.

Many ecommerce businesses receive international orders for both single items as well as large quantities. These businesses usually take credit card payments for the orders, which puts them at great risk of incurring chargebacks, especially for large ticket items and large transactions. They do not want to turn away an order, but they are frustrated with the level of chargebacks they receive. Implementing the appropriate payment methods and properly financing your export sales are two key factors to your success in exporting. The most widely used methods of payment instruments in business-to-business international transactions are bank wire transfers and commercial letters ALTof credit (L/C's). Typical financing can either be obtained through the normal lending channels or through the U.S. government when you have exhausted the conventional options.

Fireclick, an industry leading provider of web analytics services, is proud to introduce the world's first publicly-available web analytics benchmark index. The Fireclick Index provides an objective comparison of key metrics across a variety of segments. Compare the performance of your online business to the many successful industry leading web sites using Fireclick today!

We all want to know which sites, search engines and keywords are sending us traffic. But what about direct type in traffic? When people access your site URL by typing it in from memory, it can be a great indicator of your brand preference, success of your offline and online marketing efforts and customer satisfaction. If you're smart and lucky, you named your site your main-keyword-dot-com and you get search traffic from visitors who use their address bars as search engines. For example, a search on "reusable bags" sends you automatically to "reusablebags.com" which sells…you got it, reusable bags.

Cultivating a solid, permission-based email list can take a lot time. So some businesses understandably get impatient waiting around for their lists to grow. ALTFor these businesses, online contests may be an attractive quick fix. As an example, let's say a newly launched shoe e-retailer, Shoe-Fanatics.com, wants to grow its email list really fast. So it partners with a well-established fashion news website Fashion-Freaks.com, to run a contest or giveaway. Fashion-Freaks.com has been around for years, and they've built up a subscriber list composed of users with the same demographics that Shoe-Fanatics.com is looking for. Fashion-Freaks.com will send an email promotion to its readers, recommending they all visit Shoe-Fanatics.com to enter a contest, or redeem a nice coupon. When readers of Fashion-Freaks enter the contest, they can opt in to Shoe-Fanatics's email marketing list.

Trust in word-of-mouth recommendations is at an all-time high. Public relations firm Edleman says in its 2008 Trust Barometer study that "a person like me" is still the most trusted source for information about a company and its services or products.

Because the AdWords system rewards keywords with high click-through history (relative to competitors) with better ad positions and lower cost-per-click, click through rate is considered an important performance metric. Along with a keyword's relevance to ad text and landing page copy, click through rate influences a keyword's "Quality Score." Every PPC campaign is bound to have a few (or few thousand) keywords with low click through rates. You can identify them easily enough with web analytics and campaign reports, but what do you do with them?

Are you a Google AdWords advertiser using Google Analytics? STOP! You MUST read this post because you are losing money daily and we are going to help you stop the bleeding. There is a problem with the default functionality of Google Analytics when used in conjunction with AdWords. Google Analytics (GA) doesn't report the actual phrase a shopper entered into the search bar, only the keyword phrase you are bidding on.

As email marketers, we never know what mindset email recipients will be in at any given time. So a good idea is to design your copy and creative to speak to all personality types/buying modalities: competitive, spontaneous, methodical and humanistic. If this makes you go "hmmm?" make sure you check out our explanation of the buying modes in our personas webinar and webinar recap.

creative announcement of a new website version

example of context for clothes. a tool that allows you to dress a doll, to see possible combinations

A few days ago, I wrote about the power of the word "New" to get our attention - if there's a more potent attractor out there, it's almost certainly "FREE!" For years, advertising gurus have listed "free" on every compilation of powerful headline words. Now, research conducted by Dan Ariely (a Duke behavioral economist, previously at MIT) shows us that "free" is far more effective than "almost free." Indeed, a preference for "free" seems to be another feature hardwired into our brains.

The internet plays an important role in how people conduct research for purchases, but it is just one among a variety of sources people use and usually not the key factor in final purchasing decisions. PDF report