The 7 Deadly Sins of E-mail White Listing

Posted on February 22, 2011 by martinnormark

E-mail White Listing is something you should really care about. If you’re not already paying attention to e-mail white listing, now is the time to begin. You see, just because someone opts in to receive your e-mail, does not necessarily mean that their spam filter or e-mail client agrees with them. White listing your e-mails is another step in the opt-in process – a step that we cannot control. How do you make sure that new e-mail subscribers white lists your e-mail?

This is 7 Deadly Sins of E-mail White Listing. To clarify the consequences of not being white listed, here’s a short list of the issues you’ll bump into on a daily basis of doing e-mail marketing.

Images are not displayed immediately, thus making open rates difficult to rely on.
Your e-mails may be going straight to the recipient’s SPAM folder – and will probably never get read.
If you e-mail ends up in the SPAM folder, and the recipient (for any reason) wants to unsubscribe, frustration may mount as the unsubscribe link is inactive until the recipient trusts the e-mail. I know this is not your fault, but in frustrating circumstances, your brand name is present and will most obvious be on the receiving end of the blame.

So now we’ve got (at least some of) the consequences covered, what are the 7 Deadly Sins of E-mail White Listing?

#1 – Not knowing, or caring about white listing

Did you not know about white listing? Fair enough. We learn all the time, and so should you, right now. I’ll admit that white listing is a very boring topic, and not the first thing on anyone’s mind when opening up the world of e-mail marketing. We’re so benefit driven, that we have difficulties identifying the pitfalls. But we also have to know about pitfalls so we can avoid them. Most of the times when we improve something, whatever it is we’ve improved, the source of improvement is often a result of a pitfall avoided.

Not caring? You’ve only got yourself to blame!

#2 – Not telling new subscribers to white list your e-mail address in the subscription confirmation message

It’s a bad mistake not to mention the second step of the opt-in process, already on the website where they sign up. Do it as part of the confirmation message, and make sure to give them the e-mail address to white list. Display the message as “if you don’t want to miss out on [All your e-mail benefits], make sure to white list our e-mail address”. Be sure to reiterate the benefits of receiving your e-mail. That will justify the action they need to take as step two of the subscription process.

#3 – Not sending a confirmation e-mail

You’ve already got them to sign up. They liked you enough to give you their e-mail address, so why not give them a warm welcome e-mail to cheer them up a little. If you sell products that are more complicated to sell, you could use an autoresponder series to send them a few e-mails, first of all a welcome e-mail that tells them to white list your e-mail address – but then continue educating about your products. Send them useful links to some related resources. If you sell digital cameras, send them a link to some articles about how to avoid red eyes, or how to shoot great photos indoor where there’s little light.

#4 – Not telling to white list in the confirmation e-mail

The title says it all. If you’ve already setup a welcome e-mail, and you’re not telling/asking them to white list your e-mail – well, that’s a missed opportunity. Some say, that 20% of all e-mail does not reach the destination, so make sure to ask right away.

#5 – Not maintaining the relationship

Having an e-mail list, should be regarded as a list of hot prospects that turns cold if they don’t hear from you. You need to maintain a relationship, not only by sending marketing-ish e-mails, but also telling them some useful stuff, sending links to great resources, educate and build trust. The more they trust you, the more likely they are to do business with you.

#6 – Not hosting images on your own domain

To make your e-mails as deliverable as possible, host the images you include on the same domain that is used as from and reply-to e-mail.

#7 – Not making it easy to unsubscribe

Make sure to have a link in *every* e-mail you sent that, preferably, unsubscribes instantly and not requires the recipient the enter the e-mail address or click something to unsubscribe. You can never maintain subscribers for the rest of their lives, and by making it easy to unsubscribe you can avoid a lot of spam complaints.

To get even more out of your (hopefully) already successful e-mail marketing, make sure to implement the above steps.

Who Else Wants an International Online Shop?

Posted on February 20, 2011 by martinnormark

E-commerce and online shops is all about minimizing geographical boundaries, and taking advantage of the internet to make to entire world your target audience. There’s no point in limiting yourself, and stay inside the borders of your country. But transforming your local online store into a world wide user friendly website is easier said than done. What does it take? What is absolute vital to have in place, and what can I do without?

I’ll try to answer those questions in this blog post.

Start local, become global

If you’re just getting started on your own online store, don’t plan to be global from the beginning. It is just a step too big for you at this time. You should be focusing on getting started on your local market, learn about your customers and improve along the way.

When you start getting momentum on your local market, consider the headlines below as a few steps for expanding your business to a global online store.

Translate content into other Languages

As soon as you expand your reach to a new country, it is very likely that the new country does not speak your language. Therefore, you need to translate your entire website into a language that is understood. If the new country is the only country speaking its language, consider their english abilities and decide if that is enough.

A common pitfall in translation, is to forget images that contains text. It is important that you now change your content strategy in such detail, that you do not produce any images with text. Use an image as a background and real text on top, instead. If you absolutely need to use text in images, make sure that your e-commerce software or content mangement system supports dynamic images, based on language.

Show prices in local currency

Do go a long way to offer your visitors converted prices, so that they can see in their own currency, how much they’re going to pay. If you can’t process credit cards in other currencies, make sure that you inform that charges will be made in another currency and the converted amount may be a little off.

Be sure to update exchange rates on a daily basis.

Calculate exact shipping prices

When your customers are from outside your own country, it probably increases your shipping costs. Do you want to pay the extra cost, or should the customer pay extra? Make sure that the customer is given the exact price including shipping costs. It is very important for online shoppers to be able to compare prices of a single item, but also see where they “lose” most money on shipping. Shipping is a kind of “tax” on top of the price they pay for the goods.

Local credit cards and bank payments

A lot of countries have their own credit cards. In Denmark, we have Dankort. In Holland they have Ideal. In Norway, it is very popular to pay online by logging in to your bank account and select an account for a transaction. In other words, if your new market has their own and very popular payment solution, you should support it.

Be clear about returns

Handling returns can become more complex when selling internationally. This is the case when your goods cross the border and the local tax authorities take over. They may add tax that the customer pays, but what happens when the goods goes back? Done wrong, you can end up paying tax for your own goods twice. Make sure to account for this scenario, and make sure that the customers gets back any paid tax.

Check online for tax rules in your target country, or contact the target country’s tax authority to ask how to do things right.

New requirements for your e-commerce platform

Taking your online business to the next level, and selling internationally is a challenge both for you but also your e-commerce platform. You need to make sure that your current e-commerce platform can handle mulitple languages, multiple currencies, dynamic shipping costs and supports local payment solutions.

Some Advantages: Facebook Advertising vs. Google AdWords

Posted on February 7, 2011 by martinnormark

You might already be using paid advertising services like Google AdWords? Do you think the price per click you pay is reasonable? What do you think of the price now, compared to when you started using Google AdWords?

Google AdWords is the grand old man in terms of Pay Per Click advertising. These days, it is not a question of whether or not you’re going to use Google AdWords – it has sort of become the norm. The status quo of advertising online. Because of that, it has become a rather mediocre, but solid way of marketing. You should not expect the big bang for a buck, but it’s entirely possible to generate a solid stream of traffic coming into your site, and keep an acceptable conversion rate.

Facebook Ads, on the other hand, is the new kid on the block. It’s the natural refresh of Pay Per Click advertising. With the social breeze of Facebook, ad targeting has reached a whole new level, you can leverage social proof even more right there in you ads, and most importantly the price per click can get extremely low compared to Google AdWords.

Facebook Ads are very different from Google AdWords

Since users on Facebook are not performing a search to trigger your ads, but are shown multiple ads at random, they’re more likely to get annoyed, and some people will get annoyed. Some people are very aggressive towards ads, so what happens when they get a close button right there with the ad?

Some people will inevitably report your ads!

This feedback feature is more importantly used by Facebook to rate your ads. During the initial 48 hours of your campaign, Facebook will monitor your Click Through Rate (CTR) and the feedback very closely. As they’re only interested in quality ads, you will pay a lower price having quality ads. To kick start your campaign, you should start off with a bid that is in the region of what Facebook recommends. You could try to go for a little higher bid and start lowering it after 24 hours. The goal is to get as many clicks as possible, so that Facebook can see that you have a quality ad.

Another different thing you see in this screenshot is the social proof aspect. At the bottom it says that Brian Jensen played this. I can see right there, that one of my friends have already played it and that’s a strong message to send.

Try Facebook’s targeting features

Because the nature of Facebook is to tell your friends who you are, where you live, what you’re doing, what you like and so on, it gives advertisers an extremely detailed targeting method. You can basically target based on sex, age, location, work, education, relationship status, interests, what pages they’re connected to, what pages their friends are connected to. There’s no limit.

A small idea would be to extract your best converting demographics and showing ads exclusively for them. Go as far into details as specifying age within a range of 2-3 years, as well as targeting an exact city as location.

Google AdWords don’t give you all these possibilities, so this should be one of the reasons to use Facebook Ads more and more.

Images are extremely important on Facebook

I recently watched Jeremy Schoemaker’s excellent soup to nuts guide on Facebook Advertising, and he points out that images is by far the most important aspect of Facebook Ads. Be sure to have several images to test, based on Click Through Rate (CTR).

Before you begin

As PPC Hero points out in their 10 Tips for Advertising on Facebook, it is very important that you familiarize yourself with the advertising guidelines on Facebook, as they’re very strict. Also familiarize yourself with the overall advertising platform that they provide, both the interface, targeting and so on. The Guide to Facebook Ads would be a good place to start, and can also be used on a daily basis.

Running an international E-commerce store – Initial thoughts

Posted on October 6, 2010 by martinnormark

If you’re running an online store, targeting your local market will be the most obvious in the beginning. As soon as you get going and gain some market share, you might start to think about expanding your online store into new markets.

But what does it take to enter a new market? How do you get there? What about support? Are they savvy internet users?

There’s a lot of challenges when expanding your online store into new markets…

Research before you jump

Before deciding to enter a new market, some research is a must. How many people lives in that country, how many is online, how likely are they to order online. A lot of questions pop up.

Facebook can answer some of those questions for you. A few weeks ago, I blogged about how you can use Facebook to determine the size of your target audience. As the picture below shows, you can see how many from a certain country is on Facebook:

Now, use that number and compare it to the total number of people living in that country. This will give you a percentage. Use that and compare it to your home market, and maybe other markets where you’re already present. It will at least give you an indication of how internet savvy a country is – at least in comparison to countries you already know.

Organizing content

Content is what matters. Users needs information in order to make a purchase. Search engines needs content, to display on their search results pages so you get some traffic.

When you start having multiple languages for every product and page etc., it becomes even more important for you to stay organized.

The classic way, of treating every language as a separate store of its own simply doesn’t work. That is because, most often you have duplicate products – only they belong to their own individual store. This results in loads of administrative work, it’s harder for you to get an overview, integration with other systems based on products become cluttered - it just doesn’t work.

That said, you still want to be able to hide individual products for certain markets, or specify a different price.

How big is my target audience? Use Facebook Ads to find out! It’s free.

Posted on August 24, 2010 by martinnormark

If you ever wonder how many people are actually in your target audience, Facebook has a very useful tool that can help you find out.

Say your target audience is men and women between 20 and 35 years old living in Spain. What you do is, you go to Facebook, sign in and go to the Facebook Ads section.

Go click the ‘Create an Ad’ button. Now you just have enter some random data to the form, in order to continue:

As soon as you click ‘Continue’, step 2 becomes visible. That step is called ‘Targeting’, and here you’ll find the magic number that you’re looking for. Take a look at the ‘Estimated Reach’ value, shown on the right:

Estimated Reach is just above six million people. At the bottom of this section, you’ll find even more options to add to your criteria. You can filter by relationship status, job, education, interests and much more. This is of course dependent on the details users on Facebook chose to add to their profile.

Try Facebook Ads – it’s cheap!

If you are not using Facebook Ads already today, you’re really missing out! It is by far the cheapest Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing available today, and it still maintains an enormous reach! I just read the latest blog entry from the Social Media Examiner called 7 Facebook Marketing Tips From World’s Top Pros. Tip #2 on that list, is to “Try Really Inexpensive Facebook Ads”:

“The best ‘bang for the buck’ in Internet marketing today is Facebook advertising. The targeting options are limitless and surprisingly inexpensive for businesses of all sizes. Facebook advertising can help marketers of all kinds get insights into how different demographic groups respond—and for a fraction of the cost of other alternatives,” said Chris Treadaway, co-author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day.

Seriously, try it. I’ve seen an online store get 400+ clicks per day at an average Cost Per Click (CPC) of $0.16!

Increase Revenue with Friendly Credit Card Errors

Posted on January 3, 2010 by martinnormark

If you want someone to give you their money, you better treat them well… So why is so many online businesses speaking to their customers like they were doing something stupid?

It’s the same thing you see over and over again – and even though I love and use a variety of open source software, I have to say that larger open source E-commerce initiatives does a terrible job at handling user input gracefully.

I’ve been there myself, as a developer, I tend to write unfriendly error messages from time to time. I realized years ago that it was time to sharpen up my skills and focus more on the user. After all, that’s what matters the most.

Some time ago, I read an excellent blog post over at Get Elastic called “Losing Customers At The Register: 12 Checkout Blunders” about how e-tailers lose revenue on their site. First point on the list you’ll see unfriendly credit card errors!

I was working with one of our pilot customers, The Wall Company, and did some research looking into their data to see that credit card errors occurred a few times a week.

We changed their error messages from the nasty “Something went wrong, please try again”, to this:

That alone, helped 49 of 126 credit card error turn into success. Data from the past 3 months shows us that 10% of all completed orders have at least one credit card error!

The E-commerce Framework

Posted on January 2, 2010 by martinnormark

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just add a new product to your store front and get measurable feedback in a matter of days? You always need to get feedback on how your product details are helping you sell the product. How can you know that you’ve set the price right? What about the images? Headline? Page title? How does the product page perform in the search engines?

All these questions are very hard to answer by digging up data from your visitor and sales statistics. Using Google Website Optimizer can give you a good idea – but it’s not the easiest thing to install if you haven’t got the technical skills it requires.

I’ve been thinking about a metric that gives you an idea about overall performance of your E-commerce store. This metric (Site Experience Index) is part of what I call The E-commerce Framework, that will be part of an upcoming Milkshake Commerce release. Let me explain what The E-commerce Framework can do.

Ordinary web analytics data does a terrible job at giving you an overview of how visitors use your site. You get loads of details, but at the end of the day it’s about trends and overall performance. If you could get a site level metric that tells you how much value your visitors brought to you today, divided into areas such as category pages, product pages, shopping cart, about pages, FAQs, contact forms, checkout process – you’d easily get an overview of site performance.

So for each area of your site, you get a score. That score will change from time to time. If you just deployed a complete redesign of your site, you could see if your score decreased, or increased. The score is a relative score, meaning that it is abstracted from site traffic which will make you able to compare your own site to other sites – every day of the week with each one another, and you can compare the score after deploying a new design, adding new functionality and such.

This is more than a conversion rate metric. It’s a metric that tells you the overall experience of your site, with the ability to drill down into certain areas of your site.

Dealing with barriers to enter

Posted on January 1, 2010 by martinnormark

Happy New Year!

One thing I generally don’t like when speaking with others about entrepreneurship, is the illusion a lot of people have that you have to have something brand new that has never been seen before to succeed. This is a big misunderstanding, and I even think that most times it’s an advantage to have competitors. If you have competitors people already know what your product is. You don’t have to teach them about that and create a demand for your product.

Competitors will also keep you awake. You have to keep moving all the time, to avoid getting shot.

I recently read an article by Joel Spolsky, called Strategy Letter III: Let Me Go Back!

As Joel writes, there’s nothing wrong with competition:

There’s nothing wrong with being in a market that has established competition. In fact, even if your product is radically new, like eBay, you probably have competition: garage sales! Don’t stress too much. If your product is better in some way, you actually have a pretty good chance of getting people to switch. But you have to think strategically about it, and thinking strategically means thinking one step beyond the obvious

Joel talks about his experience from working on the Microsoft Excel team when Lotus 123 was leading the market for spreadsheets. The single thing that really caught my attention was his list of barriers to enter. Not barriers to entry, which is something very different.

As Joel writes:

The only strategy in getting people to switch to your product is to eliminate barriers. Imagine that it’s 1991. The dominant spreadsheet, with 100% market share, is Lotus 123. You’re the product manager for Microsoft Excel. Ask yourself: what are the barriers to switching? What keeps users from becoming Excel customers tomorrow?

And then he provides a list of barriers along with solutions that they needed to get right in order to succeed. And we all know where Lotus 123 is now.

*Barrier*	*Solution*
1. They have to know about Excel and know that it’s better	Advertise Excel, send out demo disks, and tour the country showing it off
2. They have to buy Excel	Offer a special discount for former 123 users to switch to Excel
3. They have to buy Windows to run Excel	Make a runtime version of Windows which ships free with Excel
4. They have to convert their existing spreadsheets from 123 to Excel	Give Excel the capability to read 123 spreadsheets
5. They have to rewrite their keyboard macros which won’t run in Excel	Give Excel the capability to run 123 macros
6. They have to learn a new user interface	Give Excel the ability to understand Lotus keystrokes, in case you were used to the old way of doing things
7. They need a faster computer with more memory	Wait for Moore’s law to solve the problem of computer power

That got me thinking about barriers to enter in regard to E-commerce software.

Barriers existing shop owners have when switching E-commerce software:

*Barrier*	*Solution*
Having to manually enter existing data	Make it easy to import data.
Fear of losing existing URLs in search engines	Match old URLs with new URLs, so that a 301 permanent redirect is done to ensure search engine positions.
Having to learn a new product/UI	Have in-UI help for every feature. Use question marks with un-familiar input fields with a tool tip that explains in detail. Have a read more link in tool tip, if a more extensive explanation is required.
Fear of having to renew existing merchant account and payment gateways	Add support for merchant accounts and payment gateways as needed.
Fear of losing expensive SSL certificates	It is possible to export and import those. Explain!
Fear of losing domain names	Communicate up front that this is not the case. All domains are supported.
Fear of losing existing e-mail lists	It is possible to import. We keep it safe in our database.

And I hope I’m not done yet.

Think about yourself, and count how many times you’ve actually contacted a company when having questions about their product or services that are not adequately answered on their website. My count is definitely very low, and I think that is simply because we all know that no matter what you’ve found online, there’s another website that offers the same thing. So we just hit the back button to see the search results page and click the next result.

Same thing for users online

Have you thought this way about your own business? Imagine all the small details that people could be worried about. If your product is somewhat complex, there are probably a million questions you have to answer immediately.

It’ll gain you trust, and as a user you’d feel happy about visiting a website or store where you, yourself, found all the answers to your questions you had and decided to buy.

You have to make users happy, and you can do that by making them feel in control.

Context-Sensitive Help in Software

Posted on October 22, 2009 by martinnormark

Providing help for users in web applications, as well as any other application, is important to get right. And with the freedom you have as designer or developer to create your own concept, even more and better help is required if you want your users to understand what they can do, what they should do and how to achieve that.

At the same time, it has to be a no-hassle operation to find and learn from help pages for a web application. How can you do that?

Context-Sensitive Help

The definition of Context-Sensitive Help, from Wikipedia goes like this:

“Context-sensitive help is a kind of online help that is obtained from a specific point in the state of the software, providing help for the situation that is associated with that state.

Context-sensitive help, as opposed to general online help or online manuals, doesn’t need to be accessible for reading as a whole. Each topic is supposed to describe extensively one state, situation, or feature of the software.”

It doesn’t have to be difficult, advanced or anything like that. Rich tootips works very well. If something can’t be explained inside a rich tooltip, add a “Read more” link that opens in a new window.

Take a look at some inspiration from a Smashing Magazine article:

Google Reader, that is.

And that was TasteBook

Flashden.net

Do not hide problems

Posted on July 26, 2009 by martinnormark

To have a open comunication whit the media and press is one of the best ways to get free media time.

Normally companies always want to teel about all the good things they can do for people.When theres something wrong people normally hide and stay away from the press.

I belive you shall tell everything, even when things are going very wrong.

If you can get time in the televison and make a clear point out to people that you are aware of this issue and you are handling it the best you can. Then you will get more credit then the one that’s hiding

Its even better if you can give people some extra info that suprises them and maybe also the media..

Think in theese lanes and you will get a good mediasucces

Think offensive. Even when things are going downhill

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