Author Archive
At Gorilla, we are constantly keeping an open eye for changes to the marketplace as it relates to ecommerce. As we serve as the hub with many of our client’s ecommerce channels, we hear various viewpoints on ecommerce platforms, modules, plug-ins, complaints, suggestions, and disruptive new technologies on the horizon.
Talking about disruptive technologies is like that band that you claim you knew was going to be famous before a major label picked them up and now you brag to your friends about how you saw them play open mic night.
One of these disruptive technologies – soon to be opening for the headlining band at Madison Square Garden –is Dwolla. Dwolla presents itself as an alternative to credit cards, debit cards and checks, and is about as close as you can get to using cash when paying online.
Their core value proposition is their industry-rattling low fees, which amount to $0.25 per transaction, paid on the part of the recipient, regardless of the transaction’s size. This puts Dwolla in direct competition with the major credit cards, PayPal, Square and Google wallet. Each of those payment providers charge their merchants a percentage of each transaction, ranging from 1.5% to 3% off the total transaction value.
Consider that many of our clients have average order values in the $100 range. Multiply those transaction fees by orders per week and that amounts to a significant cost going out the door. (Let’s do some math, assuming $10,000 in online sales at an average transaction total of $100. With a 2% credit card processing fee, a merchant would owe $200. With Dwolla, the same transactions would cost the merchant $25.) Multiplied across total annual sales, the savings for merchants can easily run into the tens of thousands of dollars, or more.
With Dwolla offering the same convenience of paying online at a fraction of the cost, etailers could use the savings to improve their SEO, SEM, Customer Service staffing, or their ecommerce channel—investments that bring real value to the bottom line.
Similar to how Magento has been a disruptive force in the ecommerce platform space, Dwolla threatens to do the same in the online payment arena. The lower cost to merchants, without sacrificing functionality or security, is the same value proposition that drove Magento to become the fastest growing ecommerce platform in the world for the past 2 years. And coincidentally, or not, Dwolla has built a Magento extension that allows for seamless integration between the 2 platforms. And with the Dwolla service rolling out nationwide in coming months this should be a feature every Magento merchant should consider offering to their customers.
While we at Gorilla don’t claim to have a Crystal Ball, Dwolla is a technology to watch out for in 2012. With significant funding from VC’s and major corporations like John Deere, the prospects seem bright for this technology. To learn more about Dwolla, check out their website www.Dwolla.com, or checkout this video from NBC Chicago.
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It’s not far-fetched to say that online marketing has evolved to become so sophisticated, it’s almost, well, creepy—an indication that segmentation is becoming ever more important.
When I first took a job out of college as an Online Marketing Specialist, uninformed people would ask me if I was the guy that made those annoying popups appear on sites. I wasn’t, but at the time that was really the only frame of reference most people had for the fairly new term “online marketing”.
Those “one-visitor-fits-all” popups have proven to be ineffective and sites that still use them are labeled as suspect. Now, online marketers have looked to targeting customers based on the information that is available to them such as past purchases, demographic information, and what you volunteer to tell the site about yourself. (Yes Facebook, I know, I’ve been “in a relationship” for awhile. I get it. You can ease up on the engagement ring banner ads.)
The one medium in online marketing that has stood the test of time and is consistently evolving is email. In a recent Gorilla pitch meeting, the CMO of the prospective client called Email, “old School, but very effective.” This is a very common sentiment among etailers, with Forrester reporting that etailers spend anywhere from 12% to 26% of their online marketing budgets on email, depending on industry.
To stay effective, email marketing platforms such as MailChimp (www.mailchimp.com) have to evolve with the industry and technology. Features like list segmentation, template and custom theme creation abilities, and A/B testing, not to mention ease of use, make MailChimp a powerful, yet affordable email marketing solution for etailers of all sizes. Gorilla’s client marketing consultants have vetted MailChimp integration with Magento Enterprise as one of the best combinations of Ecommerce Platform and Email Service Providers in the industry.
With that in mind, here are 5 tips to enhance your Magneto and Mail Chimp marketing.
5. If You Write It Make Sure it’s Read – Promote your blog via email. MailChimp allows you to set up a RSS feed to notify MailChimp whenever a new blog is posted. You can then automate which list receives these updates.
4. Bricks and Clicks – For those Magento etailers that also have retail physical locations, use MailChimp’s list creation module to segment customers into groups of those who shop in store to, those who shop only online, and those that shop via both channels. Through Magento’s promotional code engine, it’s easy to create promo codes to entice visitors of one channel to try the other channel. Such as offering 10% off online purchases on the physical store receipt if “INSTORE11” is entered at checkout.
3. Living Social – Be sure to enable the MailChimp Facebook application to make it easy for your Facebook followers to add themselves to your newsletter list. Combined with Magento’s newsletter module for on-site visitors, your list can grow exponentially.
2. Variations are Key – Utilize MailChimps A/B testing application to adjust email titles, content, and calls to action to easily learn what works for future emails campaigns.
1. Segment & Target – With Magento’s attribute features, marketers can transfer product and customer details into MailChimp segment lists. Do you want to target the purchasers of Sony LCDs in the past 2 months? You can do this very easily with minor programming knowledge and utilizing Magento Connect’s MailChimp extension.
Beyond these tips, at Gorilla we typically like to take it a step further and add some minor modifications to the checkout process. We can create a form field that allows users to check which product line or demographics they fit into. For example, if you are a sporting goods retailer, a simple drop down list of sports could appear at checkout if the person elects to be part of your mailing list for exclusive offers. Once that person selects, say lacrosse, and checks out he will be automatically entered into the MailChimp Lacrosse-Customer marketing list. You are now able to create content targeted to that email list of Lacrosse purchasers and including the Magento Enterprise promotional codes to generate sales and repeat customers.
If you have questions about Magento’s MailChimp Integration, email marketing, or enhancing Magento to fuel your marketing engine, feel free to contact us.
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We always ask each client what are the most important areas of your business as you look to launch or revamp a B2C ecommerce channel. The phrases “SEO” and “more of it” are almost always mentioned.
As we’ve found through reviewing hundreds of ecommerce sites each month and discussing them with ecommerce channel managers, it appears that much time, energy, focus, and especially budget seem to go into a site’s SEO, but many etailers seem to neglect the sites’ most important content, product descriptions. After all, the product description is likely one of the final page elements a site visitor reads before deciding to add a product to the cart.
10 Tips to Enhance Product Description SEO:
1. Length – 150-250 Words – Keep it short, sweet, and descriptive, for the benefit of both users and search engine spiders. Use bullets whenever possible.
2. Unique Content – Create original descriptions whenever possible, or if you need to use the manufacturer’s descriptions, tweak them slightly.
3. Word Order – Place the broad term that you want to rank first in the product title. Example: Nike Zoom Air Shoes
4. Add Synonyms – Put synonyms of your products in the description or create a separate “also known as” section on the product detail page, as to not distract or confuse readers. Example – Custom Pint Glasses also known as Custom Beer Glasses, or Custom Bar Glasses.
5. Crowdsource – Let others write good content for you, – Allow product reviews on your pages and carefully monitor posted content for spam.
6. Page Placement – Place your most important SEO product detail pages with the shortest click path from the homepage.
7. Search by Solution – Whether you’re selling vitamins to cut fatigue or the right paper stock for resumes, people are coming to your site looking for the right solution. Add a main category.
8. Remember Your Audience – If your customers know what certain descriptive terms mean, leave them in the description. If they are terms that only make sense to internal teams or your copywriter, leave them out.
9. Quell Concerns – If you are selling hiking boots, your potential customers may want to know if they are waterproof. Add the concern and the answer; it will only help with long tail keyword (multiple term) searches.
10. Use Tabs - Tabs allow you to place more extensive content descriptions in a categorical structure. This allows for better organized product detail pages and more product detail content.
Are any 1 of these tips the magic bullet that will skyrocket search engine rankings? No. But collectively these best practices will allow your product detail pages to be seen as relevant not only to search engine spiders but to your site visitors. Searchers find your site. Searchers become customers. Customers share your products with their network. A win, win situation for all.
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Wikipedia defines Affiliate Marketing as “a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s own marketing effort.”
In the olden days of business development and marketing for small and medium-sized businesses, affiliate relationships meant enticing customers to visit similar, but non-competing, stores to share the market pool. An example could be a restaurant offering specials to diners heading to a nearby theater. There would be an agreement set up between the companies to share revenue, commissions or other perks.
Ecommerce Affiliate Marketing has taken the same principals of customer sharing to a more extensive network of affiliate relationships around the world.
- Websites are created to attract traffic from banner ads, search engine marketing, search engine optimization and offline marketing efforts
-The visitor will see information about their product or service and then be transferred directly or indirectly to the affiliate partner’s site
-The affiliate site in some way will be compensated for visitors that result in a sales lead, purchase, download or other pre-defined conversion
In a metaphorical sense, affiliates sit between the fishing boat and the school of fish, catching a portion of the fish in the net, and selling it to the fishing boat.
Forrester Research’s U.S. Affiliate Marketing Forecast for 2009-2014 estimates that the affiliate marketing industry will grow from $1.9 billion in 2009 to $4 billion by 2014.
This growth will be facilitated by the relatively low barriers to entry to create websites, blogs and affiliate ecommerce sites. Open source tools such as WordPress, Drupal and Magento are allowing Online Affiliate Marketers to set up shop in a relatively short length of time and at low cost.
The owners of these sites could then join the popular affiliate network sites such as www.commissionjunction.com and CJ will connect your sites with retailers within your market or focus area. CJ will then provide tracking, reporting, and facilitate commissions while—you guessed it—taking a portion off the top.
Companies are also electing to create their own private affiliate networks. The benefits are higher commissions, stronger partnerships, often exclusive relationships (i.e. a site cannot direct traffic to competitors), and mutual marketing opportunities. The downside is the time and infrastructure investments needed to allow for tracking, reporting, and metrics appropriate to both parties. There are also additional marketing and sales costs involved in reaching out to potential affiliates create the initial partnership.
If affiliate relationships are not part of your online marketing mix, there could be a significant opportunity for traffic and revenue.
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Imagine this situation at to your local favorite fictional brick and mortar sports equipment store, called Rick’s.
You have been a fan of Rick’s since they were a small shop. Now their store is too small to hold the demand. They have been so successful that they moved their digs to an anchor store at a new state of the art shopping mall in the heart of downtown.
However, at the grand opening only a small trickle of people show up, most stop in browse and leave without purchase. To add insult to injury, Pro Shops down the street is piling in customers looking for new fitness gear, stealing Rick’s would-be customers.
After a few painfully confused looks from management they realize that they never advertised the new store opening, or let their customers know that they were moving. Rick’s is now left with tumbling revenue, unsold merchandise, staff cuts, and negative profits. Their loyal customers that were able to find the store so easily before were peeved to see an empty parking lot at the old store and vowed never to return.
This sounds like a far-fetched situation to happen on Main Street, but it happens all too frequently in the Ecommerce space. As you may have guessed, the new shiny store downtown represents a site redesign and replatform. The customers, mainly those that found the site via search engines, are now finding the competitors’ sites instead, all due to a drop in search engine ranking.
If you are looking to redesign, replatform or make significant changes to your site, it is important to conduct an SEO Equity analysis to identify the core keywords, site pages, and offsite links that are driving traffic and enhancing your SEO profile.
The goals of the audit are:
1. Identify pages and content that are at risk for a drop in rankings
2. Target pages that should be recreated on the new site
3. Build a 301 redirect plan to properly transfer over the highest equity content
An SEO Equity Analysis should cover the following:
Traffic from Brand vs. Non Brand Keywords - Non branded keywords are at a higher risk for a rankings
Landing pages and % of overall traffic – Helps to identify key content pages for 301 RedirectsHigh equity
External links – Who is linking to your site, what pages are they linking to, be sure to add those to the 301 target list
If your company is considering a significant development effort where SEO Equity may be affected, Gorilla’s Online Marketing team will be able to help with this transition.
Below shows site analytics screenshot examples of recent Gorilla redesign and replatforms. The line represents traffic from Search Engines before and after re-launch. It should be noted that post launch traffic could fluctuate until the search engines are able to re-index the new site completely. With the SEO transition plan in place you will notice a overall steady increase in SEO traffic after time.
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