Editing the Home page

Your Home page is important part of the shopping experience. In many cases, a visitor to your store will view the Home page even if they entered your storefront from another area (e.g., they first arrived to a product page from a Google search). Customizing this page with a short welcome message will add value to their shopping experience. You should tell your web visitors what your store is all about.

Read the Customizing the Home Page tutorial for more information.

Editing the Contact Us page

When you first start your store, the Contact Us page will have a placeholder address in the Contact Us page. You’ll want to make sure you edit this before you start doing business. Make sure you provide a way for customers to reach you for questions regarding orders, shipping and purchasing. The Contact Us page is broken down into two sections. The sidebar on the Contact US page contains your contact information. This could be a mailing address, email address or sales phone number if you have one. The main content section of the Contact Us page is blank and you can use this space to write a little bit about what a customer should expect when they contact you. How long does it take for you to respond to inquiries? Make sure you let them know.

You can also use the main content area to explain little bit about yourself if you don’t plan on adding a separate About Us page (see our post on the About Us topic).

Read the Customizing the Contact Us Page tutorial to learn more about how to edit this page.

Once you’ve edited your Home page and updated your Contact Us page, you’ve got your basic storefront theme ready to go. You can add more WebPages to your theme if you’d like or add more links in the header or footer. These edits take a little bit more experience with HTML code. You can read more about making these customizations with the Add a Link to the Footer and Add a Webpage tutorials.

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A simple way to increase the average sales amount per order is create an incentive for customers to spend more. You can use a coupon that will discount a fixed amount or a percentage of an order when a customer spends a specified amount. For example, if your customers spend an average of $18 per order, you might try promoting a $5 off coupon for orders of $30 or more (before shipping costs). This might encourage some shoppers to add more items to their cart and increase your overall revenue. Of course, you’ll need to calculate your risk and see if you can afford to discount prices.

Another great way to increase the average sales amount per order is to present shoppers with cross-selling and up-selling scenarios. Cross-selling and up-selling are two techniques that are used to get a shopper to either purchase a more expensive product (up-selling) or to get a shopper to add additional products (e.g., accessories) to the order (cross-selling). These tools are built right into Auctiva Commerce so that you can let your storefront do all the sales work. Read the Up-Selling tutorial and Cross-Selling tutorial for more information.

Beware of using Free Shipping promotions for the purpose of increasing the average order amount as they generally take too much out of profit margin. In this way, you won’t actually boost average order amount after you calculate your cost for covering the shipping.

Feel free to leave your own examples in the comments section. We’d love to hear how your growing your sales.

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It’s All About You

Before you start your Twitter account or create your Facebook Fan Page, take a moment to reflect on your branding strategy. Lock yourself in a room and don’t let yourself out until you’ve clearly defined who you are as a business and what makes your business unique. Consider how you fit into the marketplace against your competitors. There’s your simple and straight-forward branding strategy. We’ll return to this later to help guide our decision about which social media services to pursue. But let’s spend some more time reflecting on you and how you should approach social media.

Your Social Media Approach

Not everyone can be a Twitter rock star with thousands of followers and witty comments that whip the twittersphere into a frenzy. You should be much more realistic with your social media strategy. Wrapping the Internet around your finger is not your goal. In a vast network of users, the goal of social media is to simply create links between the nodes. In other words, your intent is to build meaningful relationships with other users. Anyone can achieve this goal of building relationships, but it may be helpful to pick an approach to your social media strategy that fits your style and your business goals. Let’s cover a few suggestions.

Be the Leader

An entrepreneur such as you may have some leadership qualities that can flourish in the right social networks. It’s seems natural that you should take on a leadership role in these communities by providing your insight and expertise. Or you may even carve out your very own community. For example, if you run a store that serves an obscure niche online, you may be able to lead this group by connecting them together. A great deal of information about forming online communities has been discussed within the sphere of social media itself. Take a look at Seth Godin’s blog post on leadership as a strategy.

Good Will Goes a Long Way

Aristotle defined one’s ability to be persuasive by several key attributes of their character (i.e., ethos—Wikipedia). Such characteristics are one’s phronesis, arête and eunoia—that’s Greek for wisdom, virtue and goodwill towards the audience. Are you someone who enjoys helping others? Social media is a perfect way for people to connect with other good people. Look for opportunities where your character can manifest in the social arena. You might be able to start a how-to blog with helpful demonstrations on a particular subject relating to your store. Or, join a forum or social network group in support of a charity. For example, if you run a store the sells pet products, you might create a blog on dog grooming or join a forum for your local Humane Society.

Be Yourself

Another wise philosopher had this to say:

“Here’s some simple advice: Always be yourself, never take yourself too seriously and beware of advice from experts, pigs, and members of Parliament.”
-Kermit the Frog

While being a leader and being virtuous are great qualities, make sure you “keep it real” and be yourself. There are thousands of smart, helpful people online, but there is only one you. Use this to your advantage.

As you build your identity online, you’ll find that you may use all of these approaches at times.

Your Social Media Mix

Connecting your business goals to the needs of your customers will help you define what social media services to use and how to use them. Here are a few tips that will make the social media selection easier.

Find Your Niche

There’s a good chance your customers are already out there, socializing with other users, huddling around a forum, blog, or what have you, and geeking out. Your first task is to find these places and join the party. Be a good listener and see if this community would benefit from your participation. Start out by looking at Facebook and MySpace. These are the two most prominent social networks. You may find another social network that is more popular in your region or industry. Do a Google search or ask someone you know if they belong to any social networks or forums. You might be surprised at what you’ll find.

Build Your Own Niche

If you haven’t found the right network, you might consider starting your own. Social networking platform Ning is a popular choice for leaders of small niches. This might be your best choice if you want to create a unique social network experience. You can also create your own forum, or group within a social network. You don’t necessarily have to start from scratch. Find some friends who share a common interest that relates to your store and start that group together.

Engage and Contribute

These days everyone has a Twitter account [http://twitter.com/]. Twitter has become more common than business cards or so it seems. Many influential people are on Twitter and it is likely there are at least a few in your field already there. Start a Twitter account and do a keyword search to find out who has influence. Follow these people, read their tweets and learn about how the whole system works. It may seem like you’ve landed on another planet, but it won’t take long to assimilate. Get started now and follow our Twitter account.

Blogs are another great social medium that influencers use to connect to their audience. You can use Technorati to search for keywords and find blogs within certain categories. If you find a blog that covers your field, add their RSS feed to your RSS reader. Read their posts, find out what topics attract “buzz” (the number of comments on a post is a good signifier). Feel free to engage in the discussion and leave comments too. Get started by subscribing to our RSS Feed by clicking on the orange Subscribe icon at the top-right corner of this page. And, consider starting your own blog with Blogger, WordPress, Live Journal, TypePad or another service. You may want to consider adding your blog to a subdomain of your custom store domain (if you have one). For example, you could have a blog at blog.mydomain.com and your storefront on mydomain.com or you could put your blog on mydomain.com and the store on store.mydomain.com. Then, build links between the two web properties.

The most important aspect to social media is contributing. After you’ve found these relevant communities, start interfacing with the influencers, participants and critics. Reflect on your branding strategy, find your approach and run with it. Don’t expect overnight success. The traffic you pull onto your storefront will not be very profitable at first. As you build more and more valuable relationships within your field, you’ll see greater returns in time. As an added benefit, you’ll also be at the forefront of your industry, learning about trends and perhaps starting a few of your own. You might find yourself becoming social media rock star with a following of your own. Just remember to not let it go to your head.

Where Are You?

Leave us a comment if you’re on Twitter or have your own blog. We’d love to make a connection with you!

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Why Promote Loyalty?

Just because you have repeat customers does not mean that you necessarily need a customer loyalty program. Some stores may get repeat business because they offer hard to find products, or shipping to a region that no other store can provide. Before you start cutting your customers a deal, understand the risk and opportunities that are associated with promoting customer loyalty with coupons and other savings.

As a general rule, customer loyalty programs are focused on retaining customers who might otherwise do business with a competitor. The sole purpose is to help a business keep its current customers. Are you doing business in a competitive market? If so, you should strongly consider investing some time and money into developing a customer loyalty program that will help keep your customers coming back to you.

Even if you don’t have a lot of competition, you can always consider giving loyal customers something in return to show your appreciation. Just make sure that your promotion is in line with your business goals. If there is really no risk in losing a particular customer, you probably should not consider giving them a deep discount. That will eat up your profit margins. In this case, you may want to consider a customer loyalty program that simply adds value using means other than discounting prices with coupons. A simple Thank You email message is a great way to show your appreciation and it won’t take anything out of your profit margins.

What Customers Should I Target?

The important customers to target for loyalty programs are the most valuable customers that are at the highest risk of shopping somewhere else. Valuable customers can be shoppers who frequently make purchases or shoppers that have only visited once, but made a large purchase. Sales volume is usually the metric you’ll use to determine the customer’s value. In Auctiva Commerce, you can view a customer’s shopping history and see just how much that person has spent on your store. We’ll show you how to do that later in this post.

Determining which customers are at risk for shopping with a competitor is much more difficult to do. If you’re in a very competitive marketplace, you could assume that all your customers are at risk. Or, you might find that buyers of a certain product might be able to get a better deal elsewhere. Knowing your level of risk requires that you’re an expert in your field. Spend some time reviewing the competition and what threats there are to your market share. Don’t think that you need to compete on all levels. Also review your opportunities (i.e., areas of strength over the competition). Your customer loyalty program should focus on promoting your store’s strengths. Ask yourself what qualities of your store attract these high value customers and think about how you can expand these qualities into a promotional campaign to keep them shopping on your store.

The Loyalty Club

Now let’s create a User Group in Auctiva Commerce that will allow us to group these valuable customers together and create a coupon that will only work for them. Follow these instructions to create a new User Group:

1. Log in to your Auctiva Commerce Administration.
2. Hover your mouse over the Admin menu and click on the User Groups link.
3. In the Add Group box, enter “Loyalty Club” (without the quotation marks) for the Group Name field.
4. Do not select any permission options in the Permissions field. This is for Administrators only.
5. Click on the Save button. Your new User Group will display in the box on the left side of the page.

Now we can find the most valuable customers and add them to the Loyalty Club User Group. There are a variety of ways to sort your customers using the Reports feature in Auctiva Commerce. In this example, we’ll Top Customer Report. Let’s generate that report now.

1. Hover your mouse over the Reports menu, choose the Customers option and then click on the Sales by Customer link.
2. In the Time Period field, choose an appropriate time period. If you’ve been operating your store for awhile, choose a longer period of time, such as the “Last 90 Days” option. The Top Customers Report will return a list of customers that is broken down by their email address, number of orders made and the total order amount.

With these numbers you will be able to quickly glance at your existing customers and see who is doing a great deal of business with you in terms of frequency and sales volume. While frequency is a signifier of loyalty, the Order Total field is the most important metric for determining the value of the customer. By default, the Top Customers Report is sorted by Order Total. Review the list of customers and see if there are any who are worth investing in with this promotion. If you having a tough time deciding the value of the customer and the risk of them shopping elsewhere, you can view each customer’s Order History by click on the email address link for the customer. We recommend that you right-click on the email address link and choose to open the link in a new window or new tab so that you don’t have to use the back button to regenerate the report. To find the customer’s Order History, scroll down the page (after you click on the email address link) and you’ll see the Order History box. Click on the Details link to view the actual order.

Now let’s add these valuable customers to our Loyalty Club User Group.

1. Return to the Top Customers Report, right click on the email address link and choose to open the link in a new window or new tab. The Edit User page will load.
2. In the Groups field, select the Loyalty Club option.
3. Then click on the Save button. This user has been added to the Loyalty Club User Group. Close the window or tab to return back to the Top Customer Report and repeat this process to add more users to this group.

Next, you can create a product coupon or order coupon and assign the Loyalty Club User Group to the coupon. This means that these users will need to log in to your store and apply the coupon code to receive the discounts associated with the coupon. Take a look at the step-by-step tutorials for Product Coupons and Order Coupons to learn how to create these discounts for your customer loyalty promotion.

Get the word out about your customer loyalty promotion using the Email List feature in Auctiva Commerce. Or, if you have your own method for contacting customers, feel free to use those tools as well. Make sure you approach your most valuable customers with care. Let them know why you’re emailing them and honor their privacy. Give them the option to unsubscribe to your email list.

Some smaller stores or stores that have just recently opened may only have a handful of customers. If this is your case, you may want to consider holding off on the coupons and just send a customer appreciation message to your handful of valuable customers individually. You can express your appreciation for their business and check in to see if they’re satisfied with the service you’ve provided. This can go a long way in retaining customers without taking a bite out of your profit margins.   

As your store grows, continue to add your valuable customers to this group and continue to assess your opportunities to keep these customers coming back to your store. Your attention to these customers will have a direct effect on your future sales and an indirect effect as these grateful customers spread the word about your store.

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Creating a New WebPage

Let’s create a new page for the About Us information. Most web visitors look for this information when they want to learn about who they’re buying from.  We’ve got a step-by-step tutorial for creating a new WebPage that you can read or just follow the abbreviated instructions here:

1. Log in to your Auctiva Commerce administration.
2. Hover your mouse over the Store menu and click on the WebPages option.
3. Then click on the Webpage icon in the Add WebPages box.
4. In the Page Title field enter “About Us” (without quotation marks).

Now let’s turn our attention to the actual content in this page. This information goes in the “Page Content” field. You can click on the HTML Editor icon if you want to use this tool to format your content.

About Us Content Approaches

Your About Us page is another store branding opportunity that allows you to communicate who you are and your business values to potential customers. This opportunity shouldn’t be taken lightly. Let’s sharpen our pencils and get ready for a quick writing workshop. First, let’s reflect on our store branding rules:

• Keep It Simple
• Keep It Brief (this is the Internet after all)
• Be informative, Be Yourself

With these rules in mind, let’s aim at writing about 150 words or 6-8 sentences for our About Us page. You can certainly write more if you like, but remember the most basic purpose of this page is to prove to skeptical buyers that you are a real person and not a scammer. That can easily be done in a few sentences, especially when you focus on being yourself. Make sure to personalize this text where possible and also clearly illustrate the benefits of doing business with you. To achieve this goal, let’s take a look at a few examples.

Writing Styles

Consider writing your About Us page in a first-person narrative if you run a very personal storefront. This is a much better writing style that can legitimize store owners who pride themselves on personal customer service. When writing a first-person narrative, you will use “I” rather than your proper name. You may also consider writing your About Us as a personal letter addressed to your customer. Here’s an example:

Dear Valued Customer,

Thank you for visiting my store. I started Fishermen’s Cove Online in 2002 to bring my 25 years of fishing experience to customers across the Midwest region. If you’re fishing the Great Lakes, I can help you find what you need to make your trip a great experience. I also fly fish many small streams throughout the year. But even when I’m gone fishing, I always put my customers first. My commitment to customer service means that you’ll always get your gear on time. I guarantee to ship 1 business day after payment has been received or I’ll pay your shipping charges for you.

Please email me <EMAIL ADDRESS GOES HERE> if you’d like recommendations or if you have any other questions. I’m always available to help you with your purchase.

Sincerely,
Ed Troutman
Owner, Fishermen’s Cove Online
Walled Lake, Michigan

In this example, we personalize the narrative and reinforce the benefits for shopping at this storefront in less than 150 words. Now it’s your turn. Ask yourself what kind of store owner you are and what benefits you provide to your shoppers. Make sure to connect your personal qualities to the needs of the customer. In the example above, Ed’s extensive fishing experience (especially within a specified region) is essential in his business serving his customers.

You can add a photo to your letter to if you want to personalize the About Us page even more. Feel free to try other approaches. You don’t have to write a letter. You could break the page down to different sections, such as “About Me” and “My Customer Satisfaction Guarantee.” Whatever you decide to do, make it consistent with your store branding found in other parts of your storefront.

Finally, check your spelling and grammar. Keep an eye out for typos. Click on the Finish button when you’ve completed your new About Us WebPage. Now it’s time to add this page to the footer of your storefront so that a web visitor can find it anywhere along the shopping experience. Click on the Preview icon for the About Us webpage and copy the URL of that page. We’ll need this for adding the footer link. We’ve got a step-by-step tutorial for adding a Footer link or you can follow the abbreviated instructions here:

1. Hover your mouse over the Store menu, then choose Theme> Customize Store Theme.
2. The Customize Store Theme view will load (it will look like your storefront). Click on the Customize Links button. A modal will load.
3. In the Link Text column, add “About Us” (without quotation marks) in the next available field then paste the URL into the Link Path field.
4. Click on the Save links button to finish.

Go to your storefront and make sure the link is working. It’s a good idea to update this page every so often with new information. Perhaps your business goals will change. You’ll need to make sure your store branding evolves with your business. This will give that personal touch that shoppers appreciate.

If you’ve created an About Us page and you’d like to share it with us, please leave a link in the comments. We’d love to see more examples of how store owners are customizing their shopping experience

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Killing Two Birds with One Product Description Field

Not only are product descriptions useful to search engine bots, but these fields are critical in making the sale. Shoppers will read product descriptions to learn everything they need to know about the product before adding it to their cart for checkout. When we optimize this field for search engines, we must also keep the reader (the buyer) in mind as well. This field is an opportunity to build a narrative that is rich with keywords that add meaning and value to the customer. Always keep that in mind. Not only do we want to rank higher in search results, we want to convert this web traffic to paying customers.

Your Headings Really Matter

Search engines weigh different sections of content more heavily than others and one signifier of importance is a header tag (that’s HTML lingo). A header tag breaks down to several levels of importance, starting from h1 (i.e., the highest of importance) and going down to h5 or beyond. On your Auctiva Commerce store, the most important content is stored in h1 headers. For example, the Featured Products heading on your homepage is enclosed in the h1 tag. This hints to the search bots that this is the most important part of the page. The hope is that the search engine bots will pay close attention to the products that you are featuring.

When it comes to product pages, there’s a different hierarchy for the importance of information. For example, the Page Header is enclosed in the h1 header tag and the Product Description is enclosed in an h2 header tag. So, search engine bots will weigh the keywords in the Page Header as more important. But it won’t stop them from crawling the Product Description for more keywords. Using the HTML editor in the Product Description field, you can add more header tags should you want to create more opportunities to signify levels of importance. For example, you could add another heading in the Product Description field and enclose it in an h3 tag.

The artist in all this header madness knows what to emphasize as important. Ask yourself, what is so important that it deserves a header tag in the Product Description field? Start to answer that question by remembering who your audience is. It’s not the search engine bots; it’s your potential customers. What would be important to them? Search engines do their job by connecting people to the content that they’re looking for. If it’s important to your shopper, it’s likely they’ll be searching for that keyword. Let’s take a look at an example.

Searching with Keywords

Let’s pretend we opened a storefront that sells collectables and our unique selling point is that we’ve got years and years of experience. We can spot a fake from a mile away and our customers trust that the vintage products we sell online are legit. In our Product Description field we might benefit from adding a “Product Authenticity” heading and enclose that in a h3 header tag. Then, we can follow-up that heading with 3-4 sentences that explain the product and how we know that it’s authentic. In fact, we’ll make sure to inject some valuable keywords. This is what the HTML code for this heading might look like:

<h3>Product Authenticity</h3>

<p>This vintage Care Bears lunch box is an authentic collectible dated 1987. Note the copyright date that is stamped on the bottom corner of the lunch box (please see images). We’ve compared this lunch box with other children’s lunch boxes from this era and its construction and design is consistent with the manufacturing techniques from 1987.</p>

In this example, we use the h3 header tag to inform search engine bots that this section is important. And we saturate the following paragraph with high value keywords that we think a customer who appreciates authentic collectibles would include in a search for this product. Take a look at the keywords we added: vintage, authentic, collectible, children’s, lunch box. These are all keywords that a buyer might include in the search for a product like this. Additionally, we added these keywords in a way that adds value to the reader (not just the search engine bots). A potential customer will read this section of our product description and hopefully feel much more confident that the product is indeed an authentic collectible. As a result, we are much more likely to sell this product to a person searching with these keywords.

Now it’s your turn. Spend some time thinking about who is searching for your products and what terms they will use in search engines. (Tip: Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools can tell you what terms visitors use to find your store. If you haven’t set those tools up, now is a good time. Here’s the Analytics and Webmaster Tools Setups ). Then invest some extra time in writing compelling content in your product descriptions. Make sure to include headings that specify the importance of the information. If you’ve done a good job, you should see more web visitors to these products and ultimately more sales revenue. That should be worth your time.

UPDATE: One of our readers (thank you Dave) has made a great suggestion that we absolutely must include. In practice, header tags can be overdone if you simply add a ton of h1 tags throughout your content. This is bad practice. First of all, your headings will look out of place because they are formatted differently (the font is usually bigger) and the search engine algorithms will see right through this strategy. Adding a bunch of h1 tags won’t help rank your page any higher than a page with just one intelligent use of an h1 tag. So, be judicious with headers and the universe (your customers and Google) will thank you for it.

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We’ll show you a simple and effective way to start capturing email addresses of web visitors so that you can create a dialog with these potentially profitable visitors. In our example exercise, we’ll use a store launch event as the hypothetical situation. So, if you’re new to Auctiva Commerce this will be right up your alley. More experienced store owners can customize this lesson to fit their specific needs. We’ll be giving you suggestions on how to do that as we go along.

The Power of Email Lists

Email lists are a terrific selling tool. It allows you to frequently keep in touch with your customers and drive high-quality traffic to your store. There are a variety of ways to do email lists, including a guerilla-style technique where you send emails to your email list through your standard email client (e.g., Microsoft Outlook or some other email application). This is one of the least expensive ways to operate an email list, however, it can become difficult to manage and design your email campaigns. This method also does not automate opt-in or opt-out functions or provide analytical data.

A good email list managing tool will automate the most essential email managing tasks and provide insights into the success of your email campaigns. This means that when you send an email to the recipients in your email list, you’ll be able view how many of those people open the email and how many of those click on a link within the email (i.e., the click through rate). This additional information can help you decide the value of the emails you send as well as assess which types of emails drive the most valuable traffic back to your store. Let’s say you want to feature a new product on your store next month. What kind of marketing copy would compel your email recipients to buy this product? You could write a hard sale, such as “Just Added to Our Inventory-Get 10% off Now.”  Or, would you do better with something softer by writing a paragraph about the product itself and why you are excited to offer it on your store?  These are difficult questions to answer, but a good email list tool should be able to offer us some insights. We encourage you to take a closer look at these tools and see if they’re right for you.

Email List Setup Summary

Here’s what we’re going to do:

1. Plan our Email Signup Workflow
2. Create a MailChimp account. We’ll tell you more about these monkeys later.
3. Create a new email list.
4. Create a Sign-Up form.
5. Create a new WebPage in Auctiva Commerce.
6. Create a link to the New WebPage from the Home Page.

We won’t discuss how to do an email campaign in this exercise. We’ll talk about email campaigns at a later date. This exercise is simply for creating the “net” that will capture web visitors so that we can sell to them, later. Let’s dig in.

Email Signup Workflow

It’s a good idea to have a game plan for converting your web visitors to email subscribers. We want to be efficient at converting new subscribers so that we can capture as many people as possible and also make sure the process is easy for the end user. Here’s how the workflow will go for your hypothetical store launch:

1. A visitor that views the Home page of your store will view a message about your forthcoming launch of the store that encourages the visitor to sign up for the Store Launch Newsletter. We’ll supply a link to the Signup WebPage.
2. When the visitor arrives to the Signup WebPage, they’ll learn more about the purpose of the Store Launch Newsletter. They’ll also be able to read the Email Privacy Policy. A link to the Signup form will be supplied.
3. When the visitor arrives to the Signup Form, they’ll enter their email address and first and last name. When they hit the submit button, they’ll be instructed to confirm their subscription by clicking on the confirmation email that was just sent to their email address.

That’s the basic workflow. You can add more links to the Signup WebPage (e.g., a link from the About Us page) or email the link to a list of existing customers if you’d like. You may also consider creating an email list for the purpose of reporting special offers to your customers if you’ve already launched your store.

Step 1. Create a MailChimp account

We’re using MailChimp for this exercise because they offer a free account and you can export your email list into a Microsoft Excel file. In this way, you can just use MailChimp for their handy sign-up forms to capture email info and then export this to just about anywhere. There is a limitation to the free account, however. We will be limited to 100 subscribers and 6 email campaigns per month. These limitations could be a problem for some of you. You can upgrade your account to the pre-paid $9.00 “Pay-As-You-Go” plan at anytime to be able to capture an unlimited amount of recipients. So, if you find that your email list is filling up fast, upgrading is an option. Is it worth $9.00? That’s up to you.

We should also let you know that we’re not affiliated with MailChimp in any way. In the Blog Notes section below, we have created a list of other email list providers that you can use if you’d like. It makes no difference to us. But for the sake of the exercise, we’ve found MailChimp to be ideal (free account + ease of use = a good time for all).

1. Go to MailChimp.com and sign up for a free account. Follow the steps provided in the account setup wizard.
2. When you’ve confirmed your account, you’ll be taken to the MailChimp Dashboard. That’s where we’ll begin our next step.

Step 2. Create an email list in MailChimp

1. In the MailChimp Dashboard, click on the “Create a List” link that’s located in the Getting Started section.
2. Click on the Start List Builder button.
3. List Name: Enter the email list name. In our exercise, we’re building a Store Launch Email list, so in this field we’ll write your store name and “Store Launch Newsletter.” For example, “Mike’s Hardware Store Launch Newsletter.”
4. Default From Name:  Enter the name that will appear to recipients as the “From” name. Your store name would be good (e.g., “Mike’s Hardware Store”).
5. Default Reply-to Email: Enter the email address that will be used when a recipient chooses to reply to the email.
6. Default Subject Line: Enter in the default email subject if you’d like. This will appear only if you send an email without a subject specified.
7. Leave both checkboxes for the Format Selection and the Campaign Toolbar unselected. You can give users the choice of format, but make sure that you will support their preferences in the Email List tool you plan to use.
8. Send an email notification of subscribes to: Enter an email address that MailChimp will use to notify you about new users that join this email list. Make sure to do this, especially if you think you might get close to the 100 subscriber limit. This will allow you follow subscriber totals more closely. You should also enter your email address for the unsubscribe notices just in case you want to monitor that process too.
9. Click on the Next button to go to the next page.
10. Permission reminder: Enter in the text that will display at the bottom of an email that reminds recipients why they’re receiving emails from you.
11. Contact Info: Enter the require contact information. This information will appear when a user subscribes to your email list.
12. Click on the Next button to go to the next page.
13. You can edit the Signup Database fields if you’d like.
14. You can include Interest Groups if you’d like, however, it’s unnecessary for a Store Launch Newsletter.
15. Click on the Next button to go to the next page.
16. Follow the checklist to make sure your Email List complies with the statements provided.
17. Click on the Skip List Import button. (We won’t be imported any recipients). A confirmation message will appear. Move to the next step.

Step 3. Create and Design the Signup form

1. Click on the “design my signup form” button.
2. Click on the “edit” button to change the Header of the form if necessary. You can remove it by clicking on the remove link or use an image by clicking on the use image link.
3. Click your mouse cursor in the box with the red dotted line to add text. Enter a brief description that describes the purpose of the Newsletter. You make also want to add a note about your email privacy policy.
4. Click on the Design It tab to change the colors if you’d like.
5. Just above the form you are building, copy the subscribe form URL. The URL will be http://eepurl.com/<your unique string> . Now paste this URL somewhere (e.g., in a text document) so you can access it later.
6. Click on the Save & Exit button in the upper right corner.

Note: Your MailChimp Signup Form will always display the “MailChimp Postage Stamp” when you are using the free account. This is an affiliate link that helps drive traffic to MailChimp. It’s their way of keeping your account free.

Step 4. Create a Signup WebPage in Auctiva Commerce

This WebPage that we will create is one of the most import pieces of the Signup Workflow. The copy we write on this page will need to be compelling enough to get people to click through to the Signup form. Take your time when customizing this page to make sure it’s easy to read and understand. Also be clear about your privacy policy. Finally, consider “juicing-up” the content with some images if you feel comfortable doing that. But, don’t muddy up the page. We really want people to quickly get a sense of what the newsletter is about and feel safe about giving up their email address.

1. Log in to Auctiva Commerce Administration.
2. Go to Store> WebPages. The WebPages page will load.
3. Click on the WebPages icon in the Add WebPages box. The Add WebPage page will load.
4. Page Title: Enter the title for the WebPage. This will appear in the head of the WebPage and also will be used for the URL. A title such as “Store Launch Signup” would work.
5. You do not need to use the Thumbnail, Alt Text or Summary fields.
6. Page Content: In this field, we’re going to put some content on this WebPage using HTML code. You can customize it to your taste. Here’s the code:

<p>We’re gearing up for our BIG Store Launch Party and you’re invited. Join our Store Launch Newsletter and receive an exclusive coupon that you can use during our opening week. This is our way of saying "Thank You" to all our loyal patrons and new customers who want to help us celebrate our new store. Please join our newsletter and you’ll be hearing from us shortly about our exclusive coupon and upcoming store launch. <a href=”http://www.eepurl.com/replace with unique string”>Add me to the Store Launch Newsletter</a></p>

<h4>Email Privacy Policy</h4>

<ol>

<li>Your privacy is important to us. We will never share your email address with a third party.</li>

<li>You may opt-out of our email list at anytime.</li>

</ol>

1. Make sure you replace the URL in the hyperlink to the actual URL to the Signup form.
2. HTML Head: In this field will enter some Meta Tags to help search engines understand this page better.  Copy and paste the code and replace the description and keyword properties with your own information.

<META name="description" content="Join the Mike’s Hardware Store Launch Newsletter to receive an exclusive coupon">

<META name="keywords" content="Mike’s Hardware Store, Email, Newsletter, Store, Opening, Launch">

1. Click on the Finish button. The Manage WebPages page will load.
2. Click on the Preview button (i.e., the Magnifying Glass icon) to preview the page. A preview will load in a new browser window. Copy the URL for this page. We’ll need the URL to create the link to this page from the Homepage.
3. If you’d like, you can continue to customize this page until you’re satisfied with the content.

Step 6. Create a link on the Home page

1. Go to Store> Theme> Customize Store Theme. The Customize Store Theme Viewer will load. This view looks like your typical storefront.
2. Scroll down until you see the Customize button (the one next to the Admin button). Click on the Customize button. A modal box will load.
3. Click on the Content button. The HTML Editor will load.
4. We’ll add some copy to our Home page using the HTML Editor window. You can customize the content to fit your needs. You can copy and paste the HTML code below as a starting point. Click on the Source button in the upper right corner of the HTML Editor window. Then copy and paste this HTML code at the top of source code in this window.

<div>

<h2>Store Launch Coming Soon</h2>

<p>We’ve being working hard to create the best shopping experience for you and now we’d like to have some fun. We want to invite you to our <strong>Store Launch Party</strong> and give you an exclusive coupon to use during our opening week. Go to our <a href=”/default.aspx”>Store Launch Party page</a> to learn more.</p>

</div>

1. Make sure you replace the URL for the hyperlink with the actual Signup page URL; otherwise it will link to the Home page. Click on the Preview button to preview the changes.
2. Make any edits you’d like in the HTML Editor. When you’re finished, click on the Save Changes button. Close the Edit HTML window. Close the Customize modal box by clicking on the Close link at the bottom of the box. Click on the Admin button to return to the Auctiva Commerce administration.
3. Now, double check your work by clicking on the Store icon in the upper-right corner of the Auctiva Commerce administration. Your storefront will load in a new browser window. Check to make sure the new content loads properly. Click on the link to make sure it takes you to the Signup WebPage. Click on the link that should send you to the Signup form. Now type in your email address to make sure the form is working properly. You should get a confirmation email that you’ve joined your email list.

Food For Thought

Our exercise focused on using a “Store Launch” theme, which might work for your store. You should also consider customizing the theme to fit the type of store your opening. For example, a “Ribbon Cutting Ceremony” might be a better fit for a women’s boutique or a store that sells craft supplies. Be creative with your approach, but make sure that it will be obvious to visitors what the event is all about. If you choose to create your own store opening theme, also make sure that it’s consistent across all the pages you’ve created. Don’t call it a “Ribbon Cutting Event” on the Home page and then call it a “Launch Party” on the Signup page. 

Not Launching a Store?

If you’re not launching a store, you can easily create a different kind of email list that can capture potential customers. It’s not uncommon for stores to have a “Specials” newsletter that informs recipients on store sales, discounts, coupons, new products, etc. If you’ve already launched your store, consider adding one of these newsletters.

Sending Email to Your List

Now you have a “net” that is capturing web visitors who want to be informed about your store opening event, you can focus on sending them email campaigns. Feel free to use MailChimp if you’d like. The free account will let you to send 6 email campaigns per month to your 100 subscribers. That should cover your store launch newsletter in terms of frequency (one message a week will do). And, you’ll get to use the handy email campaign design and tracking tools. That’s not a bad deal. But if you’d like to take your business elsewhere, follow these steps to export your list to an Excel file:

1. Log in to MailChimp, if you’re not already logged in.
2. Go to the Lists tab.
3. Click on the View List button for the list that you will export.
4. Click on the View All link.
5. Click on the Download Members to Excel link.

Make sure to invest a good amount of time refining your messaging on the storefront and within your email campaigns. You subscribers are a valuable bunch of customers. Treat them with a great deal of care and they’ll be a reliable revenue source.

Blog Post Notes:

Other Email List tools:

• CampaignMonitor.com
• ConstantContact.com
• Topica.com
• WhatCounts.com

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To read the complete article, check out our Auctiva Education Section.

DID YOU KNOW?
Nielson Online reports that YouTube is the No. 1 entertainment site for consumer product advertising. Videos provide great advertising—and they can be very entertaining.

Micro-blogging site Twitter can also be a great tool for promoting specials and discounts. Many businesses are already using “tweets” to promote their enterprises. According to one survey, 66 percent of respondents said Twitter was “somewhat” or “extremely” important to their business.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

• FaceBook: Connect with Groups that could be interested in your products; if you sell dog-care products, find an animal-lovers group.
• YouTube: Create a fun “how-to” using your products. Become an expert within your line of products.
• Twitter: Tweet about Sales and Specials. Provide a special discount to your followers.

Now go start connecting with others. Your Auctiva Commerce Store will greatly benefit from the exposure. Post links to your store in your social-network accounts, and link to any videos you make in your store’s “About Us” page. Remember, when it comes to spreading the word about your store, it’s all about going viral.

Remember, Auctiva Commerce has a complete Help Section, replete with step-by-step tutorials and video guides.

If you have questions or comments, please visit our Community Forums.
And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter!

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The Myth of the Perfect Store Logo

Auctiva Commerce store owners are a diverse group of online sellers that sell everything from vintage collectables to personalized doormats. Each store owner will have their own unique online identity (or brand). In this way there is no wrong way to create a store logo. But, we’d like to throw out a few pointers that will help create a shopping experience that inspires buyer confidence and ultimately generates more sales.

Rule #1. Keep It Simple, Keep It Tasteful

A store logo needs to be recognizable and unique, but it also needs to be readable and digestible. That means the logo itself shouldn’t be so eye-catching that it distracts the buyer from their main goal of making a purchase. And it should not take more than a split second for a buyer to decode its meaning. Designs that make you scratch your head are distracting for the wrong reasons. Ornate store logos are fine as long as it’s readable and fits in with the theme of the store. But often times, less is more.

Rule #2. Small Is Better Than Way Too Big

The ideal dimension of you store logo is 270 pixels by 100 pixels. This is the dimensions that our Store Theme Designers use to layout all the store themes. You can use bigger logos (up to 900 pixels by 400 pixels in fact), but if you go too big you may end up pushing other store content below the fold. Wait a minute, what’s “below the fold” mean? In the world of Internet browsing, any webpage content that is positioned below the viewable area on a buyer’s computer screen is called below the fold. This means that the buyer will need to scroll the browser down to see that content. Usability experts know that the odds that an average e-shopper will scroll down to see more content is not in the favor of the store owner. If your store logo is gigantic, the featured products on your home page will be less likely viewed by web visitors. That can mean fewer sales per month.

Rule #3. Be Informative and Be Yourself

Using descriptive language is a good idea to help inform buyers who you are and how you conduct business. Are you a mom and pop shop? Do you have a large sales and service staff? Do you do business worldwide? Ask yourself what kind of seller you are and how does the benefit your shoppers. This will become part of your branding narrative that tells potential customers that you can be trusted.

Examples: We Got ‘Em

Let’s take a look at some real life examples from the Auctiva Commerce network of store owners. Keep in mind that these are are hard working store owners. Any criticism is meant to be constructive.

Check out the Books To Go store. This store logo is simple, yet unique. It’s bigger than the ideal size, but not too big to block out the Featured Products section. (Keep in mind that every browser displays differently, so you might not be able to see the Featured Section while other can.) Perhaps the logo can be a wee bit smaller. The logo also has some nice descriptive text. The “your friendly Internet bookstore” line should help with buyer confidence. There’s even more descriptive text on the homepage that does the same.

Now let’s look at The Postcard Attic store. Here’s nicely designed store logo. Nice colors and tasteful art. The “A” in the “Attic” comes close to breaking Rule #1 as it’s a little challenging to read that word. Although, you could argue that it makes it more unique. Don’t buy into the myth that there’s a perfect logo design. Sometime it’s best to go with your gut and my gut says this looks good. The only down side to this store logo it that it’s pretty big. The Featured Products section is pushed further down than most stores.

Finally, let’s look at the Tic Toc Comics store. This is easy to read, a good size and it has great descriptive text in the content of the webpage. The only down side here is that the store logo lacks any unique quality, personalization or artistic flair. This could be the best opportunity to brand the store.

Let’s Hear It

I’m sure you know of a store or two that has a terrific store logo. If you do, please leave the URL in the comments and tell us what you like about it. Don’t be afraid to share your own store with us either.

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The Key to Keywords

The Google Keyword Tool is a great way to look at the words and phrases that are searched on Google. This can give you new ideas as to what words you’d like to emphasize in your product descriptions and titles or inject into your meta tags for a product. But, it’s relatively useless to you without qualifying the keyword results. In the end, we’re not looking for just any old keywords, but ones that bring in valuable buyer traffic. Let’s run through an example to learn how to use this tool and our 3-point Keyword Check to find the best keywords the Internet can provide.

Keywords Galore

Go ahead and point your browser to the Google Keyword Tool.

In this example we’re going to assume that we want to improve my search result performance for my Apple iPod Touch 8GB MP3 player. So far I’ve identified the basic keywords for my product and here they are: apple ipod, ipod touch, ipod, 8 gb, mp3 player. Basically, I’ve just broken down my product title into small bits of words and phrases that I assume people will be entering as search terms. In reality, that’s pretty effective, but we can use Google Keyword Tool to discover more popular keywords. Let’s do that now.

On the Keyword Tool page, enter ipod touch into the empty field labeled “Enter one keyword or phrase per line.” See Figure 1.

Now, you may need to enter in a CAPTCHA (the thing that makes sure you’re a human) field before proceeding, but what’s that’s properly entered, click on the Get Keyword Ideas button and a long list of keywords will return. What a treasure chest of data! Is there anything of interest to us in here?

Figure 1: Enter keyword for more keyword results

User Behavior Reveals the Best Keywords

All the keywords in the world won’t make us rich. The trick is to find the ones that bring in the high quality buyer traffic. So, looking at our Google Keyword results, let’s first indentify which ones have value

One of the first things I noticed in the keyword results is the “itouch” keyword (see Figure 2). This one is baffling me, because I know the product I’m trying to sell very well and to my knowledge it has never been called an “itouch.” Technically speaking, it’s an iPod Touch. So what’s the deal Google? Is this keyword of any value to me? Let’s take a closer look at these keywords using our 3-point Keyword Check process.

Figure 2

Keyword Check 1: Always check Google for Keyword Relevancy

Go to Google.com, type in “itouch” (without quotes) and click on the Search button. Now we’re seeing what searchers of “itouch” will see. Take a look at the search results. Does it return the product your trying to market? If so, then we pass the relevancy keyword check. And, much to my surprise, “itouch” does indeed return results for the iPod Touch product.  This is great news because it’s relevant and I didn’t have this keyword in my original list. On to the next keyword check…

Keyword Check 2: Check the Competition for Buyer Relevancy

What we know so far is that people are search for “itouch” on Google and they’re seeing a lot of iPod Touch results. But, we really don’t know if the people who are searching for “itouch” are looking to buy an iPod Touch. Let’s turn to our competition to see if we can find any hints as to whether or not this could be valuable.

Using a different tool, open the Google Search-based Keyword Tool in a new browser window. Type in your competitor’s URL in the Website field. Go ahead and type in http://www.walmart.com(See Figure 3). We’ll pretend we’re competing with them for iPod Touch sales. In the “With words or phrases” field, type in the original keyword we researched, “ipod touch” (without quotes). Click on the Find Keywords button. (Be patient, it may take awhile to load the data). What Google will tell us with this tool is what keywords Walmart.com is using and what pages are related to these keywords. If we happen to find that the “itouch” keyword appears, then we’ll know that this keyword is likely driving buyer traffic to their website.

Figure 3

Sure enough, you’ll see that “i touch 16gb” returns in the results (see Figure 4). While this isn’t an exact match, it does help confirm that it’s likely that some shoppers are searching for iPod Touch products using the “itouch” term. Also, Google tends to combine keyword phrases into groups. It’s likely that searchers of “itouch” and “i touch” fall into the “ipod touch” family of keywords. Who would have thought? You’ll also see that Google is showing that “i touch 16gb” is searched 190 times monthly. Click on the Magnify icon to see even more data. Don’t waste too much time here, we’ve got better things to do.

Figure 4

Now you can add “itouch” and/or “i touch” to your list of potentially valuable keywords. Run through more keyword options that you find in the in Google’s Keyword Tool. Research them thoroughly and add them to your list.

You’ll also need to find where the keywords fit. For example, “Apple itouch 16GB MP3 Player” will not work for a product title. First of all, that’s not the proper name and Apple would likely not be happy about that. Nor will it help customers who know the real name feel confident that they’re buying a legitimate Apple iPod Touch. So, this keyword would be best utilized in the meta tags, because consumers and Apple won’t see it, but Google will.

Keyword Check 3: Check Analytics for the Real Deal

Figure 5

Once you’ve put your new keywords in place, wait a couple of weeks to let Google’s keyword bots to crawl these new additions. Then, log into your Google Analytics account and view your Analytics report. Click on the Traffic Source link and then click on the Keywords link (see Figure 5). A list of keywords will appear in order of the number of visits per keyword. Review whether or not the new keywords you added brought in any visitors.

In the coming weeks will show you how to take a closer look and see if the keywords actually resulted in any purchases, too. This is the most important outcome. But for now, get to work on injecting potentially valuable keywords into your product titles, descriptions, meta tags and into the general copy of your storefront where possible.

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