E-marketing

E-commerce firms should turn to commercial, off-the-shelf, or open source software as a replacement for current custom web development initiatives to save up to 35 per cent of their ongoing maintenance and licence costs, Gartner advised in its report "Cost Cutting in E-Commerce, 2009".

An ecommerce website, boiled down to its dry essence, is a virtual salesman at best and a slow-to-deliver electronic vending machine at worst. Consciously or not, online stores are conceived, designed, and created to sell products while making as little personal contact with a customer as possible. And as such, well-written product descriptions can have a significant impact on a store's success.

BoldChat recently released research on The Effectiveness of Live Chat Technology which surveyed 264 US shoppers who consider themselves regular online shoppers.

Shayne Tilley is the Marketing Manager for SitePoint and was nice enough to do an interview for JungleJar. We discuss his new book scheduled for release in May of this year, current web browser releases, Twitter, and of course SitePoint.

Chad White from the Retail Email Blog recently spotted this email from TigerDirect that dynamically updates image files when a product sells out. This practice prevents the frustration and disappointment when one clicks to a product that's no longer available, creates urgency for other products and may prompt the recipient to open TigerDirect emails right away in the future.

As we see more and more businesses move their services online, and even more that begin their life on the Web, a greater need arises for websites that are designed and built to sell. A great-looking website may achieve the goal of shaping and delivering a strong brand, but its good looks alone aren't enough to sell the products or services on offer. For that, you need to introduce the element of marketing.

Though I'd never recommend "lowest prices" as a unique selling proposition, I notice many retailers use a Price Match Guarantee or even a 110% Guarantee to convince customers to purchase from them and not the competition. I'd venture to say Price Guarantees are becoming "Ubiquitous Value Propositions" rather than unique!

Since its release in 2007, the last volume of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, has garnered 3,286 reviews from Amazon.com customers. While response has been overwhelmingly positive for the book, several hundred Amazon customers rated the book as mediocre or worse. Because of a very subtle yet clever feature, Amazon makes the best of both the positive and negative reviews easy to find. And that feature, based on our calculations, is responsible for more than $2,700,000,000 of new revenue for Amazon every year. Not bad for what is essentially a simple question: "Was this review helpful to you?"

Many retailers allow site customers to sort site search, category and sub-category results by price, average customer review, top sellers, new arrivals to name a few. While this is great for usability, it's also an opportunity to glean information about your customer which you can apply to merchandising and personalization on home pages, product pages, promotional banners and even email campaigns.

A few months ago I went through the process of configuring a custom wheelchair at Spinlife.com. I needed help understanding the options and called customer service. Lisa walked me through the process like a knowledgeable saleswoman and prepared a custom quotation for me which I received by email.

Whether your customers are hunters (looking for something very specific), browsers (just poking around your site) or "howsers" (hunting for something but must browse to find the right product) - filtered navigation can be very useful to your site visitors. Filtered navigation:

The ecommerce business is partly a numbers game. And the object of the game is to increase your sales and profitability. You need to understand how your site's visitors are converted to buying customers. Not that you need to immerse yourself in the minutiae of data that many web statistics programs produce, but to reach your site's sales potential, you need to have an understanding of its key numbers and have a simple method for tracking them over time.

Are you selling your white papers short with poor merchandising? Many sites offering "free" white papers, case studies, or resources in exchange for some visitor information utterly fail to merchandise their downloads. Yet if your website doesn't treat your white paper as containing valuable information, your visitors won't either.

Guy Kawasaki comes through with more straight talk...and solid recommendations from an experienced entrepreneur who uses Twitter to great advantage.

Online communities like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tangle allow members to join groups, post content, and respond to other's activity. While some marketers have tried to exploit the media, there are positive ways for online merchants to participate in linking networks and build stronger relationships with customers.

I spotted vente privee (private sale) e-tailer RueLaLa inviting members to add upcoming "boutiques" (private sale events) to their Outlook calendars in an email:

Perhaps one of the most sensitive calls to action (aside from asking for credit card information) is the request for customer feedback (especially when the request is made through the intrusive and long-despised pop up window.)

Back in Crimes Against Hypertext, I identified several common examples of poor hyperlinking. It generated an interesting discussion so I thought I'd write a follow-up, adding a few more examples and some solutions.

Fill in the form information and click the Generate URL button below. If you're new to tagging links or this is your first time using this tool, read How do I tag my links? If your Google Analytics account has been linked to an active AdWords account, there's no need to tag your AdWords links - auto-tagging will do it for you automatically.