Internet Marketing Magazine Feb2013

february 2013

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INTERNET UPDATE

THE STATE OF THE INTERNET In this section of Internet Marketing Magazine we cover the low down on what are the big plays that have happened online recently and how they affect you.

Facebook Changing the Way You Think About Search It would be fair to say that Facebook haven’t exactly been a leader in search in recent years, but that may be about to change with the launch in Beta of their ‘Facebook Graph Search’ product.

Facebook Graph Search is not like any other search that you’ve used in the past, its 100% personalised to you because of who your friends are and what they like, listen to, love and where they have been and what they have done.

The Internet in 2012… The Numbers

An Example of Facebook Graph Search

The team over at Pingdom have produced a summary of the amazing numbers of what happened where and how on the Internet in 2012. They have explored all the corners of the Internet to collect all kinds of fantastic data that describe the Internet in 2012.

Here’s some of the more important ones.

Graph Search and web search are very different.

Web search is designed to take a set of keywords (for example: “country music”) and provide the best possible results that match those keywords. With Graph Search you combine phrases (for example: “my friends in Seattle who like Country Music”) to get that set of people, places, photos or other content that’s been shared on Facebook. So Graph Search and Web Search have two very different uses.

Email • 2.2 billion – Number of email users worldwide.

• 35.6% – Usage share of the most popular email client, which was Mail for iOS. • 425 million – Number of active Gmail users globally, making it the leading email provider worldwide.

• 68.8% – Percentage of all email traffic that was spam.

Local search may be one of the use cases where Graph Search really takes off because it will take the risk out of choosing a local service with a search such as “restaurants my friends like in Sydney”.

Web pages, websites, and web hosting • 634 million – Number of websites • 51 million – Number of websites added during the year.

• 43% – Share of the top 1 million websites that are hosted in the U.S. • 48% – Share of the the top 100 blogs that run WordPress.

The best way to bring yourself up to speed on it is check out this quick video courtesy of Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook team.

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• 75% – Share of the top 10,000 websites that are served by open source software.

• 59.4 million – Number of WordPress sites around the world.

Web • • • •

Server Market Share 63% Apache 20% IIS 14% NGINX 4% Google

• 20.8% – Usage share of HootSuite as a social media management tool among the world’s top 100 brands.

Web Browsers

Domain names • 246 million – Number of domain name registrations across all top-level domains.

• 104.9 million – Number of country code toplevel domain name registrations.

• 100 million – Number of .com domain names at the end of 2012.

• 32.44% – Market share for GoDaddy.com, the biggest domain name registrar in the world.

• $2.45 million – The price for Investing.com, the most expensive domain name sold in 2012.

Internet users • 2.4 billion – Number of Internet users worldwide. o billion – Number of Internet users in Asia.

• 519 million – Number of Internet users in Europe.

• 274 million – Number of Internet users in North America.

• 255 million – Number of Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.

• 167 million – Number of Internet users in Africa.

• 90 million – Number of Internet users in the Middle East.

• 24.3 million – Number of Internet users in Oceania / Australia.

• 565 million – Number of Internet users in China, more than any other country in the world.

Social media • 1 billion – Number of monthly active users on Facebook, passed in October.

• 47% – Percentage of Facebook users that are female.

• 40.5 years – Average age of a Facebook user.

• 2.7 billion – Number of likes on Facebook every day.

• 135 million – Number of monthly active users on Google+.

Search • 1.2 trillion – Number of searches on Google in 2012.

• 67% – Google’s market-leading share of the U.S. search market Mobile • 1.3 billion – Number of smartphones in use worldwide by end of 2012.

• 465 million – Number of Android smartphones sold in 2012, a 66% market share.

• 31% – Percentage of the U.S. Internet population that used a tablet or e-reader.

• 13% – Mobile share of global Internet traffic.

• 500 megabytes – Amount of monthly data traffic consumed by the average smartphone.

Google Adwords Enhanced Campaigns Google has released a new type of Adwords campaign called Enhanced Campaigns. Google state their goal is to provide the best search results for users regardless of where they are and what device they are using.

Effectively it’s a new type of Ad campaign where you can have your mobile as well as your tablet and internet marketing magazine february 2013

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desktop traffic within one campaign. You then use bid adjustments to manage bids across devices, locations and time of day.

Here’s the example Google provides of how it would be used…

“Discount Mattress Company wants to reach on-thego customers within 5 miles of their shop during business hours. Now, starting with a single campaign that reaches people across all devices, Discount Mattress can easily increase bids by 20% for a prospective customer searching on a smartphone who’s 5 miles from the shop, or decrease bids by 30% during the hours that the shop is closed.”

rise in the number of businesses successfully adopting Remarketing campaigns for lead generation.

Remarketing lets you show ads to users who’ve previously visited your website as they browse the Web. Remarketing is a powerful way to stay engaged with your target audience by presenting them with highly relevant ads and offers across the Web. This helps to make sure your brand is top of mind when they’re ready to buy and can radically improve ROI.

Early reports are that Google will force all Adwords accounts to be migrated across to Enhanced Campaigns by mid 2013, although this is still to be seen if it comes into effect, as it doesn’t seem to make sense to force advertisers to use this new campaign type.

Whilst in theory this major change is designed with the end user in mind to create the best experience possible regardless of device and location. The reality is it may just be a push from Google to get more advertisers invested in the ever-fast growing mobile advertising market so as to push mobile bid prices up. There is probably a bit of truth to both arguments.

Google Adwords Enhanced Campaigns Explained

Remarketing Lead Generation Internet Marketing Magazine’s sister company Internet Marketing Done For You is seeing a significant

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The most common form of Remarketing use we are seeing is with the Google Display network and then other Demand Side Platforms such as AdBuyer or SiteScout.

The conversion rates across multiple industry verticals are excellent, with some of our clients with traditional bricks and mortar businesses seeing remarketing as their second or third biggest leadsource for online leads. The other real benefit is the branding exercise as its possible to show your banner and text remarketing ads to your exact target market 100,000’s of thousands of times for literally less than a hundred dollars.

Since Facebook launched it’s Facebook Exchange in 2012 it is now possible to remarket to your website users once they’ve left your website and end up over at Facebook. Since almost 30% of U.S. ad impressions occur on Facebook, it is the logical next choice for the Remarketer, and we expect to see massive adoption of this technique in 2013.

From the Desk of the Editor A big thanks goes out to you the Internet Marketing Magazine community for your loyal support in 2012. In 2013 we have a massive year planned with an amazing line-up of Industry experts and amazing interviews and features.

A special thanks to those who have left reviews in the apple platforms as it really helps us out. If you are getting good value from Internet Marketing Magazine and you can spare 1 minute of your time to click this link to give us a quick honest review that would be greatly appreciated (click ‘view in iTunes’ then scroll down and click ‘write a review’, thanks :).

Recently whilst I was at the Digital Marketer ‘Traffic and Conversion Summit’ in San Francisco I heard from several of you that the ‘State of the Internet’ section is your favourite way of keeping up to date We hope you implement with speed and precision with what’s changing online, so we’ll keep rolling and cut your losers short and run your winners long that out for you. We’ll be right on the leading edge for a massive 2013. of everything that happens and will give you the blow-by-blow reports of the big plays online.

Regards, The members area continues to grow in usage, although it’s still only a relatively small percentage of Internet Marketing Magazine readers who have claimed their free membership. If you haven’t got access to the members area please feel free to do at http://internetmarketingmag.net/become- Greg Cassar Internet Marketing Strategist member/ (it’s free). This month’s complete audio & Editor – Internet Marketing Magazine interview with Ezra Firestone has now been added.

It has lots of learning’s in it that were not included in the magazine, so be sure to check it out.

GregCassar

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EXPERT INTERVIEW

EZRA FIRESTONE

ECOMMERCE MILLIONS An Interview by Internet Marketing Strategist Greg Cassar Ezra Firestone is an eCommerce expert with a highly successful track record having sold many millions of dollars in products online. Ezra has managed over 22 eCommerce properties and is now a partner in the highly successful Boom! by Cindy Joseph.

Ezra you have quite an interesting origin story, very unique actually. Can you please tell us a bit of your history and how you came to be doing business on the Internet?

Ezra: I grew up on a hippie commune in Berkeley, and on the north shore of Oahu. This was a group of people with an alternative lifestyle experiment where these people were experimenting and talking about different things about relationships.

I found that all that mindset and strategy and relationship information has actually served me

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really well with my business life.

When I was 18 years old and I left home and I moved to New York city, and I began playing poker for a living at these underground clubs. In 2004 met a guy who was making his money as a life coach, he was selling information on the Internet teaching people how to become a life coach – this is before the life coaching and wellness coaching and health coaching space really blew up.

really learned about traffic, and learned about conversion, and learned about business and landing page psychology and all this different stuff.

He was using search engine optimisation, which was really easy at the time to generate leads for his business. His lifestyle looked really interesting to me because I was staying up all night at poker clubs and sleeping all day and spending all of my time with men, and it was a degenerative lifestyle living under fluorescent lights in poker clubs with these Mafia guys.clubs with these Mafia guys.

Once I figured out how to do it I started doing consulting. Then I realised that it’d be better to use the skill set that I developed to market and retail my own products, my own things, and build my own businesses, rather than do consulting. Now I’m kind of back to doing both, but that is how I got into it.

So we struck a deal and I said, “Hey man, teach me search engine optimisation and I will teach you how to play poker.” So we kind of just went from there. I ended up taking over the marketing of his company and once I got into it I just dove head on and put my 10,000 hours in and

Ezra you are particularly strong in the eCommerce space. There are many common mistakes that business owners make in eCommerce – What are some guidelines that you stick to when choosing or establishing an eCommerce business in a new market?

Ezra: Yes, eCommerce and the retailing of physical products are what I specialise in – I like eCommerce because it is scalable and the businesses are liquidatable; it’s a real legitimate business model where you’re shipping someone a physical product that they’re actually looking for. You don’t have to persuade them or convince them to buy your stuff – they came looking for it. I found it to be the best business model, once you figure out how to generate leads and how to get them to take you up on the offers.

Here are some of the main market criteria we look at when we’re considering getting into a market.

1. One of the things that you want to look at is the average order value of your products. You want your average order value to be between $75 and $200. The product itself doesn’t have to cost $75, because perhaps it’s a product line where people buy multiple accessories and the main product is only $30, but by the time they’ve added on all the accessories it is a $75 order.

The reason you want it to be $75 is because generally in the drop-ship market you’re getting a 20 percent to 30 percent margin, so you never want to make less than $25 in your pocket on any one given sale, because you just can’t really afford to buy traffic and run your company if you’re not making more than $20 a sale. The reason why I like to keep it under $200 or $300, is because when you start getting into larger prices orders, what happens is that the customer service is a bit of a nightmare; people really want to be educated and they want to talk to you a lot more and it’s not like people are just going to pull out their card and buy that sort of expensive product, they require a lot more work.

2. Your gross margin should be 20 percent or more. This one is not a huge one because if you’re making more than $30 on an order than you’re kind of good to go if it’s a smaller market. But I like to be making sure that I’m getting more than 20 percent margins on my products, and that’s just to ensure that I’m getting enough profit per order to be able to afford to buy traffic and run my business.

3. You also want to make sure you’re in a market that lends itself to return customers and multiple item orders. So, for example, if you’re selling TV stands, well they’re probably only ever going to buy one TV stand, so you’re not really going to get that customer back next year. It’s not a seasonal thing. You’re not going to be able to retail unless you are diversified and you’re also selling channel changers, and all these other things. That’s why you want a market that has accessories. A market with accessories is really good because you’ll get multiple items per orders. So, you want to look at, are you able to sell to this customer more than once, and are you able to sell them multiple items at one time.

4. Another question that you should ask yourself is, can you add value to the market? You should be willing to, because the answer for everyone is, yes. You could absolutely add value to whatever marketplace you’re in by bundling products together, by putting together videos that educate people on the product you’re buying. For example, I’m recording this interview on a Rode Podcaster Microphone.

I was looking around at different sites, and the site that I ended up buying it from, not only did I buy the microphone, but I bought this bundle that came with the stand and a whole bunch of stuff.

The reason I purchased it from them was because they had this video that educated me all about the microphone and why I needed these accessories

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You want to make sure you’re in a market that lends itself to return customers and multiple item orders.

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and how to put it together. They had added value that none of the other sites had done, and I thought, ‘You know what I want to buy from these people because I know they know what they’re talking about, and they’re doing more than just presenting me products.’

Greg: Yes, that’s very powerful isn’t it. They made it a richer buying experience. And the use of video is very powerful as well in that regard. It is a more powerful medium than just images, which most people use. We find when we’re working with eCommerce stores often people think it’s too much effort to go to producing videos about main products and services. We find if you 80/20 it and you sort your products by sales and then start producing that sort of richer content for the big hitters, the things you’re selling most of, and then working your way down. That way you’re really spending your time in an efficient manner with that content creation.

Ezra: Exactly. And you will see a nice boost on your store if you start creating videos of your products.

If you don’t know what to create, if you’re confused about how to create product videos, just do an open the box video, where you basically take the product, turn your camera and you say, ‘hey, this is the product and this is what it looks like when you get it’, and you just show them the products – that’s enough. You don’t have to be an expert on your products, you can just show them what it looks like – and just the video of you opening that box and having them see what it looks like when they buy it, will just skyrocket conversions on that page.

them with care and show them that you appreciate their business, it will pay big dividends. You will end up getting better deals on products, you will end up knowing when new products come in before everyone else. You’ll just get this special treatment because you took the time to treat your suppliers special.

Platform, platform, platform - This is the main question we get asked in the eCommerce space, and I’m sure you must too. Do you have any preferences for which eCommerce platforms to use for the beginner basic type store, and then moving in to something that’s got to be able to scale as an enterprise type store environment?

Ezra: Right now in the eCommerce space we’ve got a lot of players out there. We’ve got ShopSite, Magento, X-Cart, osCommerce, Bigcommerce, ShopperBuy, NCart, 3DCart, UltraCart, Yahoo Store – the list just goes on and it’s no wonder people are confused about what shopping cart to use.

If you’re just getting the store started, you don’t know how much volume you’re going to do, it could be a six figure store, it could be a bust, it could be a seven figure store, you’re just kind of not sure about it, you’re just getting started in the market, I’d recommend that you go with BigCommerce – and here’s why. It’s simple. It’s easy. It’s plug and play with outside apps and add-ons.

One of the hardest things about eCommerce is making the maths work. You just shared about the pricing of the products. What about on the suppliers side? You’ve obviously negotiated with a lot of suppliers over time. What do you think are some of the keys to really buying well and then, but making it a win-win so that you maintain a good relationship with the supplier? bigcommerce.com

Ezra: The thing about suppliers is that suppliers are just people, and if you take the extra time to actually communicate with them, to know everyone in their office by name, know their customer service people, send them cards on the holidays – if you really take care of your suppliers and treat

Almost every one of these live chat integrations and cart abandonment integrations, and all these different sort of plugins and apps, plug in really easy to Bigcommerce. The other thing is that they have the best customer service out there.

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Now, if you’re an enterprise I think you’ve got to go with Magento, because they’ve just got virtually infinite flexibility, they’ve got powerful reporting features, they handle complex discounting and vouchers and they can be integrated into other systems like stock control – and beyond that they’ve got an interface for customisation and they’ve got XML integration, and just you know, they’re elaborate and they’re a bit confusing and all that stuff, but they also have this plug in architecture that works the same way Wordpress does.

about creating a community and a brand around your products.

This is also how you free yourself from channels, like Google and Amazon and all that stuff. If you have your own customer base, if you have your own community who is interacting with your brand, take Boom for example, something like 50 percent of our traffic is direct traffic of people typing our brand directly into the browser and directly into Google, because we’ve created this community.

Greg: Yes, it is very powerful.

One thing we love about it is Magento Connect where you can find the plug-ins you want to do a one-step check out, or basically anything you can think of you can get a plugin for.

One other thing we found out about with Magento – it is complex so you really need to have access to a development team.

One thing you alluded to before, eCommerce is changing and evolving and it’s no longer just about selling products online. You spoke about enhancing the user experience. So, content and community are becoming more and more important from both an SEO point of view as well as engagement.

What are your thoughts on best practice content strategy and also engaging community for an eCommerce store?

Ezra: I think the days of faceless eCommerce store over, and that community is coming everything and it’s

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Boom Post Purchase

The way that you create a community is you create relevant and engaging content each week that’s relevant to the conversations and problems that your community is having. You can do that in multiple ways. So, you could create informational content that’s about your products.

It talks about how to use them the and how to put them together. are You can also create content like be- we do on Boom that’s geared toall wards the conversations that our

target demographic is having we’re dealing with a group of 76 million women in America who are collectively having the experience of their hair going grey, their skin wrinkling and their bodies aging on the outside faster than they are on the inside, and society treating them differently because of it – and we’re having conversations with them about that.

You create this weekly video and you put it out on all favourite channels - put it out on Facebook; have it transcribed and put it on your Blog; pin it to Pinterest etc for your community to see.

You end up building up this community of people who are following you and who are listening to you and who are interested in the same things you’re interested in.

It’s a really effective strategy for generating a group of people interested in your market place.

Changing tact slightly. What about on the PPC front with Google’s changed a lot of the rules recently. Have you had much experience playing with the Google merchant centre and product listing ads and that sort of stuff – good, or otherwise?

Ezra: I love product listing ads.

You get about 30 percent discount running product listing ads right now.

Here’s how you do it. Obviously you need to take your products and upload your feed to Google Merchants Center. Then you sync that up with your adwords account and now you’re able to run what are called, ‘Product Listing

Ads’. And the cool thing is, for any given query – let’s say your query is Elvis costume, you can have both a Google adwords text ad on the top of the page, and you can also have a Google adwords product listing ad.

So you can have two ads for your store for the same search query.

pany that’s intending to exist for longer than a year or two should think about creating a brand. Most small and medium size businesses couldn’t afford jingles before. It was just something that was reserved for big businesses.

You’ll find that every one of the fortune 500 and pretty much most big businesses use jingles in their marketing in advertising in one way or another. And that’s because they work. The human brain is wired to hear a sound and identify it as friendly or hostile in a hundredth of a second. Using jingles you can tap into that part of the brain – so someone hears your jingle at the Greg: You’re doing it very, very beginning of a video or when they clever. You’re taking up as much hit your blog, or on the radio, or real estate through all those differ- on your site, or whatever and they ent medias on page one of Google, immediately associate your brand as possible. or product with a positive feeling – often times before they know much Ezra: Yes, and it goes back to uni- about you. Good jingles are very versal search. It goes back to what powerful sales tools.

Google’s trying to do, which is organise the world’s information, And we’ve been able to break the and the way that they understand price barrier. I’ve been able to crethat different groups of people ate this company where we proprefer to consume media in differ- duce these jingles at a fraction of ent formats, some people like vid- the cost, and they’re just so effeceos, some people like audios, some tive. people like text, some people like images, and so they want to have each one of those media formats For people that want to find out that’s relevant for each different more about you; we’ve got readquery. ers and listeners really all over the globe now, how can they best find you online?

We came across your smartjingle. com site. A lot of business owners Ezra: They can find me on my new with small or medium sized busi- marketing blog, which is SmartMarnesses don’t really think about keter.com and I’ll be releasing vidjingles, but a lot of big corporates eos starting mid February. This is do. Who needs a jingle and really where I share what I’m up to in my what is the benefit of a jingle for a businesses, I share what my commubusiness or a product or service? nity of entrepreneurs and business owners and mastermind friends are Ezra: Any company that wants to up to in their businesses; case studbe around for a while, any com- ies, and things I’m working on.

You can also have an image listing ad, or a product listing ad for Google pay per click. You’ll have a video result the YouTube video ranking. You’ll have an organic result ranking, and you’ll have your product in a channel like Amazon.

It’s a very clever way of dominating page one of Google.

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MARKETING STRATEGY

AVOIDING MARKETING EXTINCTION:

3 KEYS TO SURVIVING & THRIVING

By Todd McCormick Today, marketers must adapt or risk going the way of the dodo. Biological changes are making old marketing strategies extinct. In this new marketing world, we can either change or become outdated and outmanned — or even worse, irrelevant.

smartphones, this global village is now accessible any time, from anywhere, and on any device. As a result, information is always available.

• The advent of the self-service customer: Today’s customer doesn’t wait to be offered this information. He or she takes it.

So, with all this knowledge and power at customers’ fingertips, what do they want from businesses today?

They want to be educated. They want to work with companies that understand what they value and how they behave. And they want quick, timely information and support. Fortunately, the same environmental shifts that are complicating marketing efforts have also provided us with a wealth of opportunities to engage with customers.

Research shows that 57 percent of customers have made a decision before a salesperson is involved.

Marketers need to get involved earlier, but knowing how – and with what information – to reach these newly empowered customers is where savvy marketers can create a competitive advantage.

Darwin first coined the term “natural selection” when talking about a key mechanism of evolution. What are the environmental conditions that are changing the buying process and leading marketers to the point of survival of the fittest? The big three to consider are:

The secret is creating new content that’s relevant to an individual on that individual’s device of choice – at the right time. This is behavioral marketing, and it’s the key differentiator between survival and extinction. Here are three key steps for surviving and thriving in this new marketing world:

1) Build a persistent database: Marketers can now use existing analytics and tracking software to col• Social networking: The world is now a lect a multitude of customer information. This is global village, and through social network- the time to move away from static lists and toward ing, consumers create their own unique en- a centralized persistent database that’s constantly vironment where they have access to un- pulling in new information about your contacts, such limited information, choices and opinions. as whether they clicked on your email, visited your • Mobile computing: With the proliferation of new product page, requested a demo and much more.

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2) Embrace automation: Today, only 5 percent of companies have marketing automation software in-house. That means you have an opportunity to get a huge edge on the competition by combining a persistent database with the power of marketing automation. With the right technology in place, you can build rules that enable you to serve up dynamic content and automatically route contacts down different messaging paths depending on their actions.

3) Deliver relevant content: If you want to engage customers and prospects in today’s ultra-competitive landscape, it’s essential to provide the content your contacts want, when and how they prefer it.

Equipped with a behavioral database and marketing automation, you can deliver content based on each individual’s buying habits, product preferences, mobile environment of choice, financial parameters and purchasing timeline. In short, behavioral marketing drives relevant content, which boosts engagement, encourages social sharing and increases revenue.

As the buyer’s journey continues to become more digital and self-service based, marketing skills need

to change. With the right technology and strategy, you’ll become a welcome part of the buyer journey, providing an intimate customer experience and delivering the right content at the right time in the purchasing cycle.

By building a persistent database, embracing marketing automation and delivering relevant content, you can harness the power of behavioral marketing and overcome today’s evolving marketing and sales challenges.

Adapt or die. Are you a survivor?

Todd McCormick

brings 15 years of experience in executive sales management and team development to his role of senior vice president of sales at Silverpop. His expertise in building strategic partnerships and penetrating emerging markets and product lines, coupled with his understanding of the critical linkage between sales and marketing, makes him ideally situated to lead Silverpop’s sales team to continued new and existing U.S. sales growth.

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E-COMMERCE

FIVE SIGNS OF AN ADVANCED E-COMMERCE SITE

By Gil Remy There are basic features that make up the skeleton of every self-respecting e-commerce website out there: product sorting, add to cart, guest checkout, and order tracking.

Then there are those features that are more recent developments used only by the e-commerce elite— sites that are pushing the boundaries of the online shopping experience.

2. Inline Field Validation Frustration during checkout is likely to lead to lost transactions. And there are few things more frustrating for users than hitting the “Submit” button on a form to find out that a field was left invalid.

With inline form validation, a checkout process comes one big step closer to eliminating frustration over invalid field data.

Along with the accompanying microdata that assists Here are five telltale features that separate the users through a checkout process, field validation “men” from the “boys.” helps reduce error rates and checkout abandons.

An added benefit is the chance to build a rapport 1. Advanced Suggested Search Results with the user through the messaging in either valid When users type in a search field, it’s nice to give or invalid fields. As mentioned in Smashing Magathem some suggested autocompleted searches, zine’s “The State Of E-Commerce Checkout Design but it’s even better to show them some potential 2012,” address validation is not an ideal solution search results right then and there. Advanced sug- here. Sites that won’t allow users to process an orgested search results instantly provide users with der if the address validator mechanism or database images, category names, product details, and insists that the address is invalid lose customers. pricing without them having to click through to a Validate fields that can truly be validated, such as search results page. email addresses, credit card numbers, zip codes, etc.

Altrec does this nicely, combining autocomplete and suggested results. With autocomplete, users still know that there are options other than the suggested results being shown next to, in this case, climbing shoes. At the same time, users become aware that if they do take the time to spell out what it is they are looking for, they will be instantly rewarded with a result.

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Target validates fields instantly.

3. Animated Shopping Carts For some e-commerce websites, keeping visitors engaged in shopping, rather than sending them straight to checkout when they add an item to the cart, can lead to increased revenue per-transaction.

That’s where the animated cart comes into play.

It’s an effective way to give users the confirmation that their product has been placed in their cart and that they can easily checkout if they so choose, without requiring them to take any action to keep on shopping.

when products are going out of stock, if possible, inform them of when the product will be back in stock as well. This increases the chances that they’ll pre-order or sign-up to receive updates about it.

Here’s how Threadless handles their inventory American Eagle opens a frame at the bottom of data, down to the size, before a user even makes the screen when a product is added to the cart, a selection. with details on the transaction and a checkout button.

5. Video Product Demos There’s nothing like a live person demoing a product for an online shopper. When well executed, product tours can push an already good e-commerce experience to the next level by giving users an enhanced sense of confidence about their purchase decision.

Crate & Barrel does a nice variation on that idea.

The website shows the total in the cart along with other suggested items in a pop-up window.

4. On-the-Fly Inventory Tracking Another source of frustration for users can be Zappos uses video to sell this pair of Doc Martens finding out that the size they are looking for is out (as well as many other products). of stock. A nice way to keep them aware of your diminishing supply is to provide that information on the product page. Along with informing users internet marketing magazine february 2013

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Conclusion These are just a few of the more recent features that users will increasingly expect to be part of their online shopping experience. They all use wellestablished technologies and none are particularly difficult to implement. Therefore, there’s really no excuse for not making them available on any ecommerce site striving for success. These features have shown to improve conversions and overall user experience and also help convey the feeling that the people behind the website care about their users and have put forth the effort required to deserve their business.

Gil Remy is an information architect and mobile GUI crusader at NYC digital agency, Blue Fountain Media. He is always eager to apply the right mix of no-nonsense approach, outof-the-box thinking and diplomatic skills to every situation in order to get things done. * This article originally appeared on UxMag.com

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MOBILE E-COMMERCE

BEST PRACTICES FOR MOBILE E-COMMERCE

By Jennifer Mathews

designing mobile e-commerce websites. There is a big difference between surfing on a PC and on a smartphone or tablet. Since there is very little room for navigation, the search box essentially becomes the epicenter of internet browsing. It needs to be placed in a clearly visible place (generally top center) and it should be highlighted and given prominence. In fact, in an effort to make the user experience more pleasurable, the search box should be on every page so viewers don’t have to head back to the main page to start a new search.

The web design field has gone through immense advancements and in some cases overhauls over the last decade. These advancements have undoubtedly introduced new technologies and innovations in order to make online consumer experience more pleasurable. However, they have also brought about new challenges as well, especially when it comes to mobile sites.

Ever since e-commerce websites went mobile, the playing field changed beyond recognition. New rules were made. Older ones were rewritten. And in some cases, traditional design approaches were abandoned altogether in favor of new versatile web design practices. These practices had one thing in common, to make mobile sites more responsive.

Today we’ll look at best practices for mobile ecommerce sites that new start-ups and even SMBs involved in e-commerce should pay attention to.

These field-tested strategies essential for any designer working in this field.

1. Make the search box easy to find Being a smartphone user myself, one of the first things I observed while browsing online was my constant dependency on the search box. This is something that designers should keep in mind when

Amazon.com is a good example to illustrate this point. One of the most well known commercial entities in existence today, Amazon.com is also one of the world’s most visited websites. If you look at the website’s mobile version, you will find that it is virtually impossible to browse products unless it gets featured on the main page as the hot seller. To compensate for that, Amazon has placed a search box at the very top of every page to assist customers in navigation.

2. Add social media to your site We all know that this is the era of social media; hundreds of millions of people are sharing content, ideas and experiences with the world every day.

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With that being said, social media should be an integral component of any mobile e-commerce site regardless of industry. Survey after survey has shown that if people have a pleasurable online experience, they will share it through their mobile devices. This includes product reviews, recommendations or comments in general about a service or overall experience. This is highly valuable feedback that companies should seek out and display on their site wherever possible. It also factors into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as search engines consider user experience and product ratings when displaying results in the search listings.

Facebook and Twitter are a given. Google Plus has recently come into the spotlight courtesy of Google’s influence and then let’s not forget Pinterest, currently the fastest growing social media platform in the world. These are all platforms to establish and solidify company web presence.

3. Establish a flexible foundation We’re not just talking about flexible screen resolutions, although it’s true that there are simply way too many devices nowadays that can access the internet. Just a decade ago it was primarily PCs, Macs and laptops. Now you have to add smart TVs, smartphones, tablets, and net-books into the mix; all capable to displaying multiple resolutions with rotating horizontal/vertical text. Designers simply cannot factor in all the devices and go about creating multiple versions of the same website.

Use fluid grids and flexible layouts Instead of focusing on the device, the smart way forward is to focus on the web browser and make

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use of its capabilities. Creating a fluid grid and flexible layout is an amazing way to creating a responsive website design. In a nutshell, it is the ability of the website to change its appearance based on the screen resolution of the device that is accessing it. Fluid grids can resize and reposition content as the screen width changes. There are many tools that can assists designers in creating a these grids.

Golden Grid System and Simple Grid are a few examples. Tiny Fluid Grid is another good one.

The same applies to images. As the columns resize, images should resize along with them to accommodate the relevant content and improve readability.

Images can be dynamically cropped to only show the most important elements or be resized completely for the most desirable results.

This is a revolutionary approach that is being eagerly adopted by millions of e-commerce businesses worldwide. However this is not an easy task to pull off. Complex websites that use a three to four column approach in their design architecture will require more work to fully transition the website.

Mobile driven customer service There is no denying the importance of quality customer service whether it’s in person or over the phone. Over the years, online customer service has also been gaining steady prominence and many companies smartly implemented this strategy into their business infrastructure. Zappos was one of the first companies to truly exploit the benefits of this approach, delivering top-notch customer service via Twitter. Many companies followed suit.

panies still focus on traditional mediums to display their website. However recent surveys have shown that the number of mobile internet users is growing at an astounding rate and it won’t be long before they are neck and neck with PC’s and laptops. Furthermore, in-depth cases studies done on multiple companies have safely concluded that mobile commerce plays a key positive role in a company’s return on investment (ROI).

Today more and more customers want to connect via the internet and engage in real time conversations. This has resulted in the demand for mobile driven customer service because of its instantaneous interaction and amazing results. For an ecommerce website to be successful it needs both strong products and strong interaction and if leveraged correctly, mobile driven customer service can be the brand differentiator between a failed product and a house hold commodity. Just look at where Zappos is today because of it!

Always be ready for change It is the way of the tech world. What’s in demand today can be completely obsolete tomorrow. Designers and e-commerce companies need to be in an ever-ready state of alert regarding shifting market trends especially those pertaining to mobile devices. On average, a consumer changes his or her mobile every two years. This means that mobile platforms in different geographical locations will be rapidly be changing every couple of years. Retailers need to be aware of this and closely monitor the situation to seek out not just new opportunities but also threats to the current system.

The mobile internet has now become a phenomenon and there will always be more that e-commerce websites can and should be doing in order to better market themselves. However, the above mentioned practices standout because of their immense potential and long proven track record to deliver immediate positive results.

To illustrate this point, consider the following: • eBay’s iPhone application alone generated $400 million dollars in sales in 2010 • Intuit sales grew 30% immediately after the company introduced mobile tax products in 2010 • One out of every 10 Smartphone users listens to Pandora on a daily basis, contributing to the company’s massive growth and authority in the music marketplace It’s a no brainer that mobile commerce can significantly impact a company’s revenue, its brand and its overall authority in today’s competitive market as the trend setter for others to follow. It does require a fair bit of investment; but the return on that investment is substantial and combined with rock solid competent e-commerce practices like the ones mentioned here, it is the perfect recipe for success for any e-commerce website.

Jennifer Mathews

is a creative logo design consultant for LogoSnap.com, helping small businesses create a brand image and grow their online presence. She likes to stay ahead of trends, explore new mediums and blog about her experiences.

Mobile commerce and ROI Mobile commerce does not often get the attention * This article originally appeared on WebDesignerDepot. it deserves from consumers, mainly because com- com

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Make Your Website Easy to Read & Effective on all Mobile Phones

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VENTURE CAPITAL

PLAN B FOR FUND RAISING

By Guy Kawasaki

Here’s how most entrepreneurs approach venture capital funding raising. I call it Plan A. It’s a plan and an outcome that no one talks about but happens all the time. I’ve been on both sides, so I should know.

Step 1: the entrepreneur cogitates: “Let’s raise $1-2 million so we can focus on programming and marketing and not worry about raising money. We’ll hit all our milestones and then go out for another $5 million in two years and get acquired or go public soon after that.” Believe it or not, many companies raise the $1-2 million and sometimes more because venture capitalists compete for the deal.

Step 2: the entreprenur fantasizes: “Our most conservative forecast is one million users in the first six months. We need to scale to prepare for this, and the reason why VCs gave us money is that they want us to scale and win the land grab.”

Step 3: the product is late, and the dogs don’t eat the food. After six months, there are 10,000 users, not one million. The company has scaled up its expenses but for no reason. Money is tight, but the VCs are still clueless and accustomed to initial projections being off by orders of magnitude.

Step 4: Unbelievably, the company is still able to raise a second round of $5 million. Life is good. The entrepreneur “knows” that things are going to pick up so she scales up some more to prepare for the “hockey-stick” growth curve that coming soon.

Step 5: Another six months go by, and there’s still no viral explosion. (To continue the hockey analogy, the handle, not the blade, is touching the ice.) The venture capitalists that the entrepreneur thought were true believers and BFFs (best friends for life) go to Demo and see three products that do the same thing that appear to be further along.

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Step 6: Out of the blue, the lead-dog venture capitalist calls up the day after a partners meeting and says, “We just don’t see how you’re going to make it. We want to give your company a ‘soft landing’ by merging it with our online dogfood company.

And we’ll call some executives we know at Yahoo!, Google, and Fox Interactive to see if they’re interested. We want our money back before you burn through it because my partners think this has gone on too long.”

you keep your day job at Microsoft. You hope your spouse doesn’t get laid off. You have no office, but work virtually and meet your co-founders at Starbucks if you have to. Everything you use is Open Source or shareware.

Step 2: Rather than trying to boil the ocean (“the mobile sector”), you boil a tea kettle. Rather than paying to attend high-end conferences, you hang out in the lobbies of the hotels where the events are and meet the same people for free. Rather Step 7: The entrepreneur hangs up the phone in a than hiring a PR firm, you suck up to bloggers and state of shock. A week ago in a board meeting, no hope they cover your product. Rather than buying one said anything about shutting down the com- booth space, you get on Twitter and use it to gain pany. She thought that her investors were getting a reputation for your product. a little antsy but were fundamentally still behind her. She calls the investors “stupid, arrogant bas- Step 3: You’re late with your product too (because tards who don’t get it” in her staff meeting–conve- everyone is late), but you’re not burning $250,000/ niently forgetting that she’s missed three years of month, and you don’t have to tell increasingly forecasts by 90% and has burned through $3 million. greater lies at monthly board meetings. Finally, you release your prototype. TechCrunch covers Step 8: The company rapidly implodes. No one your release because you wrote Mike Arrington a wants to merge it with another dog in the ven- compelling one-paragraph message that you sent ture capitalist’s portfolio, and no one at Google, on a Friday afternoon because you know he reads Yahoo!, or Fox Interactive is interested. This is a email on weekends. fundamental fact of companies: they are bought not sold. That is, an entrepreneur or investor can seldom call up logical buyers and get a deal done.

All an entrepreneur can do is create a good company and pick up the phone when a buyer is calling.

The company is sold for pennies on the dollar for what little assets (intellectual or physical) that it has. Some money is returned to the investors. The management team toys with two ideas: first, buying the company from the investors, but it quickly realizes that it created a dog that’s not worth buying. Second, suing the investors for not fulfilling their fiduciary responsibility to the company, but when the lawyers laugh at this idea, the team gives it up too.

As readers of Internet Marketing Magazine, I want you to be open to another way. I call this Plan B. In this plan, you take very little if any venture capital until you need capital to expand, not create, your product. Here’s how it works: Step 1: You dig, scratch, and claw yourself to $100,000 of funds from your friends and family.

Maybe you work as a Y Combinator company. You take no salary. You live with your parents, and

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Step 4: This is where the miracle occurs–lo and behold, people like your product. (Truly, miracles have to occur whether you’re bootstrapping or venture-capital funded. It’s just that if you’re bootstrapping, there’s more time for the miracle to happen, and a smaller miracle suffices.) Month to month, you’re showing 10-15% growth, and monetization, praise God, has started.

Step 5: Now you have options. First, you can contact venture capitalists with a company that’s already shipping to raise capital to expand your business. This is a very different discussion than raising capital to build a product. Second, you can continue to bootstrap and grow by using your cash flow. Three, you can pick up the phone and agree to meet with Google, Yahoo!, Fox Interactive, or any other company that has noticed you.

Many readers of this blog are not tech entrepreneurs, but the merits of Plan B are the same for almost any type of business. You can try Plan A as long as you realize that the hard work begins after you raise venture capital, and you will need a bigger, faster miracle to make everyone happy. Or, you can just believe me: “Plan B, don’t leave home without it.”

Guy Kawasaki

is the author of APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur--How to Publish a Book.

Previously, he was the chief evangelist of Apple. Kawasaki has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College.

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CHARITABLE GIVING

SPIKE HUMER, Entrepreneur & Business Growth Expert My goal is to raise $7,500.00 for victims of domestic violence & sexual assault I’m walking a mile in high heels to raise critical funds for WEAVE - a dedicated provider of services for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault since 1978.

Be part of the solution to ending violence against women and take the “next step” by supporting the Walk A Mile in Her Shoes event. Make a quick and easy donation here.

If you are in or plan to be in the Sacramento area, join me at the fun filled event festival on May 4, 2013!

If you’d like to find our more about WEAVE, you can visit www.weaveinc.org

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RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN

CAN A “MOBILE FIRST” RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN BOOST YOUR SALES?

By Leanne Byrom Your website analytics will prove it. The world has gone mobile.

And smart marketers and web designers are going responsive.

Responsive design is a new trend in web design that uses a fluid and flexible layout. Websites are developed in HTML and through CSS3 media queries you can adapt your entire website for particular devices or operating systems, handling enhancements with JavaScript.

Mobile usage has double every year since 2009 and now accounts for almost 10% of Internet usage. By 2014, internet access via mobile is expected to overtake fixed line access.

This isn’t a fad.

The screenshot below shows what mobile devices are being used to access a boutique eCommerce website. On this particular website, mobile devices account for 12.5% of traffic. They are split between iOS, Android and Blackberry operating systems.

Application or mobile web?

‘Mobile’ does not simply mean cell phones.

Mobile refers to cell phones, tablets and everything in between such as the Galaxy Note which is a mix of the two.

So, the question is: Should you build an app or design a mobile website?

There are hundreds of businesses that decide to go the application route. The problem with this is that you generally end up have a restricted amount of content and functionality and many apps are device specific (e.g. you have to download and install an app on your Android handset or on your iPhone – and it needs to be done on every device).

This immediately restricts the reach of your product to the end audience you have in mind because of their device. It is, however, a more predictable one off cost, and if you have customers that are only iPhone users for example, this will work well for your company.

If you have a store or service that needs to reach a large number of people your best way forward would be to go with mobile web, using responsive design.

Start with the smallest device first (in terms of screen size) and work your way up to tablets and then up to computer screens. This is called a “mobile first” approach.

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The Mobile First Approach The “mobile first” approach is actually a concept that pre-dates responsive design.

Mobile first design allows you to enhance your website to cater for bigger and more complex browsers/devices when required, rather than trying to degrade and simplify your desktop experience.

A List Apart has an excellent set of responsive web design publications (online and in print) that can help you in refining and implementing your responsive design approach.

A Good “Mobile First” Design One of the best examples I’ve found of “mobile first” responsive design is Burberry.

Their website reformats all the content no matter which device you access it from. Screenshots below show access on a 10.1inch Android tablet, a 27” widescreen cinema display and on a 13” laptop. No matter what device has been used to access this website, the user can easily view all the content and buy the products.

Burberry 13” laptop view With this website I can get to the product page in THREE CLICKS, and it’s a full and rich experience.

I can also find everything I need to know about my product and make the purchase.

In addition, Burberry makes the best use of screen space available with full screen images on a widescreen.

Burberry product page on 10.1” tablet

Burberry 10.1 inch tablet view

Their tablet version has very similar content to the computer version, has an excellent touch interface and even tells me what content cannot be viewed on the tablet. It is this kind of attention to detail that can win or lose you customers and which truly demonstrates a unified customer experience.

And all of this comes from one primary code base.

Example of Poor (or No) Responsive Design In many ways it is unfair to compare Argos, a budget price store with the likes of luxury etailers like Burberry.

Burberry 27” widescreen view internet marketing magazine february 2013

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However, the Argos website may have an even greater need to be device agnostic given the wider customer types they need to service.

The screenshot below is from the Argos website viewed on a Samsung Galaxy Tab2, 10.1 inch.

Going to the same website on a mac, viewing in a 27” widescreen display, see how much screen real estate is being wasted here? How many special offers or products could I have got on to this home page if I had made use of the full space?

You can see from the URL that I’ve been redirected to a “mobile” version of the website, the problem is, its formatted for a phone, not a tablet. This is a waste of valuable screen real estate.

Furthermore, its not particularly useful and it takes on average SIX CLICKS to get to a product page using their menu. That’s far too many clicks for an easy purchase journey.

Argos on 27” widescreengos on 10.1” tablet Lastly, here is the Argos website on a 13” laptop screen, which is where the Argos website is optimized to work.

Argos on 10.1” tablet When I finally manage to get to the product page, all the product details are well below my viewable screen area, forcing me to scroll to find more information. Even the “Reserve” button is below my immediate viewable area and I cannot “buy now” or arrange home delivery unless I force the browser to go to the “full” version of the Argos website.

Argos on 13” laptop Argos has done themselves a disservice by using a fixed width design. The main reason this happens is it that many companies have designed for computers (desktop/laptop) first and are now going back to retrofit their mobile versions into these designs.

More often than not, and as shown by Argos, this results in a poor user experience and further demonstrates why “mobile first” with responsive design should be adopted.

Leanne Byrom

Argos product page on 10.1” tablet

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is a freelance User Experience Practitioner and UX Lead for Phosphor Digital with a focus on the role of online in the end-to-end customer experience. http://leannebyrom.com. Follow her on Twitter.

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SIZE MATTERS:

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INFOGRAPHIC

HOW TO MAXIMIZE PROFITS

BY SIZING INVENTORY

By Camille Brenkwitz

Do you know what we love? Good coffee, beautiful design, and DATA. We decided to combine these three things by compiling some of our interesting data into a beautifully designed infographic.

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It took us a lot of time, and a lot of deliciously brewed cups of coffee. We looked at how sizing affects costs, expenses, and consumer behavior. This will prove helpful for making business decisions, and we hope you enjoy it.

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Camille Brenkwitz

Plain and simple, Camille gets people excited about what Stitchlabs is doing. She absolutely loves her job developing marketing strategy for Stitch, and executes it with supreme gusto. She has a deep passion for cultivating community, and rocks Stitch’s social media and community management. When she’s not spreading the word about Stitch, Camille is always down for some delicious food, passionate people, and a helluva good conversation. * This article originally appeared on Stitchlabs.com

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