The E-Commerce Blog

It might seem silly to think about Christmas in August, but if you are an owner or marketer of an e-commerce business you’d better start thinking about the holiday shopping season now or it’ll be too late. Fortunately for us, Retail Email Blog just released the Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season.

Packed with information collected from 4,700 emails from more than 100 top online retailers during the fourth quarter of 2009, this report has invaluable information for anyone marketing an online business.

It includes information on:

• When to send email campaigns
• What continues to work for online retailers
• What was new for 2009 shopping season
• How to stand out from the competition

This guide shows you what major online retailers are doing, how the industry is changing and will help you plan an effective online marketing strategy for this coming holiday season. Don’t hesitate, download the report and read it now.

As I mentioned on my personal blog yesterday, my book Online Marketing Inside Out, co-authored with Shayne Tilley, is now available on SitePoint.com. As an added bonus, they’re bundling the book with ProBlogger Darren Rowse’s new eBook 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. Order now and you can get Darren’s book for FREE (a $20 value).

Buy Online Marketing Inside Out at SitePoint.com

That’s right! The reason this blog hasn’t been updated recently is because I’ve been slaving away co-authoring The Art & Science of Online Marketing with Shayne Tilley.

The book is a complete overview of the entire landscape of online marketing and covers a wide range of topics including:

• The changing face of online marketing
• Search Engine Optimization
• Search Engine Marketing & Pay Per Click
• Social Media and PR
• Email Marketing
• Affiliate marketing
• Much more

The book is aimed at business owners, entrepreneurs and traditional marketing managers who want a practical introduction to online marketing. The Art & Science of Online Marketing is scheduled to be released in May, 2009.

Last week we sent an email newsletter with a coupon code to about 6,000 recipients. The coupon wasn’t fully tested, and was not configured to work with the appropriate products. It was several hours until the mistake was found, and naturally most of the traffic from the email had already visited the site.

The site received several orders, some noting the coupon code didn’t work, which is how we realized there was a problem. We had a choice to make… what do we do now? We could simply fix the coupon code and be done with it. We could fix the coupon code and resend the original email. We could fix it and send an apology.

We decided to write an apology and resend to all 6,000 recipients, effectively doubling our newsletter costs. Our response to the problem is below:

I want to apologize. Yesterday, we sent out an email newsletter that had a coupon for 15% off all Propet and Columbia items on our website.

Unfortunately, when the email went out the coupon did not work. In our haste to get the newsletter out in time, I didn’t test the coupon code. Oops!

I’m sorry if you tried to place an order using the coupon code yesterday morning.

We have fixed the coupon code and it now works properly.

We’re extending the sale through Sunday night.  All Columbia and Propet shoes and boots are eligible for 15% off:

Propet

http://www.2bigfeet.com/propet.php

Columbia Sportswear

http://www.2bigfeet.com/columbia_sportswear.php

To redeem, just enter “SELECT15″ in your shopping cart and click the “Recalculate” button.

Again, I’m sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your business.

All the best,

Brandon Eley
Owner, 2Bigfeet.com
brandon@2bigfeet.com

What’s the lesson here? First, test, test, and test again. If you’re sending out a coupon code, test it with the actual products it should work with. All of them.

Second, man up when you make a mistake. Apologize, make it right. We extended the time frame people could redeem the coupon code and sent another email letting them know we had issues. The coupon code had already been fixed, and many people had already ordered successfully (never knowing we had a problem). Apologizing lets them know you’re human… and it lets them know you care about your customers.

The average conversion rate for e-commerce websites is 2%, which means that the vast majority of customers don’t make a purchase.As many as 10-20% of your unique visitors will place an item in their shopping cart, but leave before closing the deal.

Below are the main reasons people abandon shopping carts:

• Unexpected or high shipping costs
• Total cost of purchase more than expected
• Comparison shopping
• Product was out of stock or didn’t want to wait
• Checkout process was too complicated

You can take steps to improve your checkout process and convert many more of these visitors. By simplifying checkout and shipping options, you could see your conversion rate increase by 50% or more.

Below are a few quick tips to reduce your shopping cart abandonment rates:

• Offer free or flat-rate shipping
• Post your guarantee or return policy clearly on your website
• Post your toll-free phone number on your website and shopping cart pages
• Consolidate the checkout process to as few screens as possible
• Use real-time inventory and show quantity on hand on product information pages

It’s also a good idea to do usability testing on your website. There are a lot of inexpensive tools available that will record users’ responses and even where they looked on your pages. They can provide a lot of insight into why visitors are leaving.

Today is Election Day in the United States. This is probably the biggest election of all time, and voter turnout is amazing. With all the people at the polls, who has time to shop online? A lot of people, apparently.

By 8 o’clock this morning I had already received 3 emails from online merchants. I don’t just subscribe for research, we buy almost everything online so I love a sale like anybody else.

I never would have thought an “Election Day Sale” would be a great idea, but after receiving several newsletters this morning, we hussled together one of our own and got it out the door around 8:30 AM.

The response has been amazing. Sales have skyrocketed and all from a simple text-only email newsletter. The email we sent is below:

It may just be the most important election in our country’s
history. If you haven’t already voted early, please find your
polling place and go vote today.

To say thanks for voting, TAKE 15% OFF ANY ONE PRODUCT

Use coupon code ELECTION2008 at checkout.

http://www.2bigfeet.com

If you’re not up to speed on the issues, checkout Glass Booth:
http://www.glassbooth.org

It’s a very good tool to determine where you truly stand on the
issues. You don’t have to vote like us, but be an informed
citizen and vote based on what you believe not what you see in
the media.

Also, please encourage your family and friends to do the same.

Sincerely,

Your friends at 2BigFeet.com

It’s probably too late to get an email out for Election Day, but take a look at the calendar and see how many holidays and national events occur throughout the year. These events are excellent chances to connect with your customers. Even if they don’t buy anything, it shows you’re human and care about what’s happening in the world.

GrokDotCom’s latest conversion rate report is out and Office Depot leads the pack with 26.9%. Checkout July’s Top 10 Online Retailers by Conversion Rate.

These numbers are incredibly amazing, but are these conversion rates realistic for small e-commerce merchants? I have personally seen small e-commerce retailers with conversion rates between 8-10%. Compared to the national average of 2%, I’d say that’s pretty substantial.

These large companies spend millions of dollars on branding and marketing, which must be considered when looking at their conversion rates. Their customer acquisition cost is likely much higher than small merchants selling the same type of products. They may even lose money on the initial sale, knowing they’ll make it back over the lifetime of the customer.

What does all this mean to small e-commerce merchants?

Strive for somewhere in the middle. Don’t settle for 2%, but don’t go crazy trying to get your conversion rate to 25%. Always keep making changes, testing, and making more changes to continuously increase your conversion rate.

Don’t let people tell you that 8% or 10% conversion rates are unattainable though. They are very attainable. Though conversion rates will vary from industry to industry, 10% conversion rates are fairly common among small to medium sized merchants.

Other factors to consider…

Other factors can greatly affect your conversion rates. A website’s conversion rates will vary greatly depending on the source of the visitor. Visitors from organic search, PPC advertisements, referral links and direct type-in traffic will all have distinctly different conversion rates.

Marketing promotions can have a big impact on conversion rates. Specials and coupons have a big impact on conversions, though they may decrease the average profit per order.

It’s the end of the busiest shopping season of the year, and a lot of retailers are probably thinking they could have done more to spark growth in holiday sales. Did y ou do everything you could to increase sales this season?

Probably not. None of us did… there are hundreds — thousands — of ideas for increasing sales, and it’s almost impossible to implement them all in time for the holiday season, even for large companies. We had a list broken down by priority, and as fast as I could check items off the list, another 2 ideas would be added.

We had a great holiday shopping season, but now that it’s almost over, I realize that I should have started much, much earlier. With more time, some more of my ideas could have materialized.

So, my advice as this holiday season comes to an end — Start planning for Holiday Season 2008 now. Make a timeline and start working towards it now… so when October/November rolls around next year, you’ll be ready!

Are you ready for the holiday shopping season? Thanksgiving and Christmas will be here soon, and you better have your site ready now because people are out in force shopping online so they don’t have to get stuck in traffic jams and hectic malls getting last-minute gifts.

Here are a few tips to help you get ready:

• Make sure your website is error-free.
  There’s nothing worse than getting halfway into the busiest season of the year only to find out that you have an error on your shopping cart pages. Test your entire site for errors, misspellings and inaccuracies.

• Make sure your website is error-free
  There’s nothing worse than getting halfway into the busiest season of the year only to find out that you have an error on your shopping cart pages. Test your entire site for errors, misspellings and inaccuracies.

• Review your Pay-Per-Click Campaigns
  Check your Pay-Per-Click campaigns to make sure that you are bidding on all the appropriate terms, and make sure you have conversion tracking setup to test your campaign’s effectiveness.

• Dust off your email list
  If you haven’t seen an email newsletter lately, now is the time. Make sure you have an opt-im list and start promoting your seasonal specials to your customers and newsletter subscribers.

• Check your search engine rankings
  Check your ranking in the major search engines. It’s a little late to get a large improvement before the holiday season, but you can make small changes that will have an impact. Even moving up one position can make a big difference in overall sales.

• Check with your suppliers
  Make sure your suppliers have ample inventory for the holiday season, and place orders to fill in any inventory you are low on now. As December comes closer, many suppliers will begin having shortages and will be shipping slow because of the volume.

• Update your return and shipping policies
  Let your customers know about your holiday return policy and shipping policy. When is the last day they can order and still have their items for Christmas? What if they need to return after the new year?

• Update your home page
  Make seasonal changes to your website and home page layouts to show off new colors and specials. Show your customers your holiday spirit.

Here is a great post on why confirmation emails are so important.

Lesson: Don’t miss a chance to connect to your customers! Use every communication to build that relationship.