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Most owners of online stores typically run extensive promotions and marketing campaigns to capitalise on the festive season at the end of the year, and watch with delight as their sales volume soars. You are likely one of them.

Now that you have set up your promotions and campaigns for the peak shopping season, it’s time to focus on another equally important element for success - Customer Satisfaction!

If you had any reason to wonder just how important customer satisfaction is to your ecommerce business, we have compiled the top 5 reasons just for you!

1.Satisfied customers are the ones who return

As obvious as it may sound, it’s important to always keep in mind that only those customers who are satisfied with your products and service are likely to return for more. Of course, not every satisfied customer will become a repeat customer, but it’s almost certain that a dissatisfied customer will never return, especially given the large variety of options available in today’s highly competitive market.

2. Returning customers are cheaper to retain than acquiring new customers

If you’ve ever run a successful marketing campaign, you are well aware of the high cost of customer acquisition. The cost involved in getting a satisfied customer to return to your website is a lot cheaper than the marketing spend required to acquire new customers. One thing successful businesses have in common the world over is a high volume of returning customers. And, as I’ve already said, the only customers who are likely to return are the satisfied ones.

3. You can make it part of your brand’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

As you already know, in today’s highly competitive market, customers have a number of businesses to chose from to satisfy the exact same need. Good customer service can often become one of a brand’s USPs that customers take into account when making their choice. Price  is of course an important differentiator, especially for first-time customers - but research has shown that very often, people are willing to pay a slightly higher price for better customer service.

4. It leads to customer loyalty, increasing Customer Lifetime Value

The more frequently a customer returns to your store, the more value he or she creates for you. Your Sale Cost reduces with regard to that customer, while your Sale Value keeps increasing. The longer you can keep a customer satisfied, the more you stand to gain from them.

5. It affects your Online Brand Reputation

Research shows that more and more online buyers are depending upon product reviews and customer testimonials to make their purchase decisions. The more positive reviews you have, the higher your chances of acquiring a sale. On the other hand, negative reviews will turn away customers in a devastatingly efficient way.  So when you start getting those great customer reviews, be sure to post them on your website for all to see!

Conclusion: It's Worth It!

With these important reasons in mind, be sure you go the extra mile to please your customers. Fulfil your orders quickly, communicate well with your customers, ensure your products are high quality and well packaged – all with a goal of ensuring the highest levels of customer satisfaction. You'll be glad you did it! And your customers will too!

After you get your business online, the first thing you’ll likely want is to have people find it. One way to do this is advertising and marketing, for sure.  But one critical (and free) step you should do right away -- once your website is ready and optimized for SEO -- is to index your site with Google, so that people can find your site through search. 

Think for a minute about how you shop online. You search for the product you want in a search engine like Google, and then click on links that show up as results.  So you need YOUR business to show up for people who are looking for YOUR products and services in the same way. 

As we’ve said before, Google is by far the most popular search engine today, with 67%+ of all searches happening there, so it makes sense to focus your attention on Google’s search engine.  You can make sure your site shows up on Google quickly by indexing it.

What is indexing?

It’s a way of telling Google that your website exists. Google’s search bot may eventually find and index your site, but you really have no idea how long it will take, it could take weeks or more.  So this is a way to speed up that process.

How to index your site with Google

Here are the steps:

1) Go to Google Webmaster Tools site. You will need to sign in with a Google Account. If you don’t already have one, you will need to create one.

2) Click on the ‘Add a Site’ button and submit your website URL.

3) You will be given different options to verify that you are the owner of the site. The easiest option is to choose the “HTML tag” option under “Alternate Methods”. You will be given a code that you need to copy-paste in the meta tag of your home page.

Webware clients, to paste the HTML tag into your homepage, go to Website > Site Pages in your workspace and select “Home” page, or ask your Guru for help with this. 

4) Once the site is verified, you will get an email from Google that looks like this:

This email will help you set up your Google Webmaster Account.

If you are unsure of how to do the set up, there are helpful links to explain the whole process in easy-to-follow-steps. Whether you make use of the other options or not, be sure to submit the sitemap of your online store.

Once you have set up your account, your website, along with all its pages, will get indexed by Google soon thereafter. And once your site is indexed, it will show up in search results for searches that are relevant to your business.

How is indexing different from SEO?

SEO is about page rank, which is the next step. First, your site needs to be indexed.

Note that indexing does not guarantee your website will appear on the first page of Google search results.  It only guarantees that it WILL show up on relevant search results.  It won’t be missed. 

For a new website, it’s highly unlikely you will show up on the first page right from the start. You need to work on your SEO to get it moving up the Page Rank, hopefully to the first page, for your most important keywords.

Conclusion

Indexing your site with Google is a key and simple first step to getting your site noticed by Google's search engine.  

Webware customers, we’re now offering an SEO marketing package, where we will make sure that your site has all the right title tags and meta descriptions, and we will take care of indexing your site on Google for you. Contact support@powerstores.com or your Guru for more information!

We have talked about why online businesses need Marketing Analytics and what kind of data to look for in Marketing Analytics. Now, let’s look at some specific tools that you can use to gain insight into the performance of your website as well as marketing campaigns.

1) Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the best website analytics tools, and it’s free! You can gain insight into many different parameters related to user behaviour on your website, such as:

• Deep insights into your audience - where they are coming from, their demographics and interests, the devices they use, etc.
• An overview of their usage of your site - number of pages, time spent, etc.
• Tracking your social marketing campaigns and how much traffic they have brought to the site, and
• Details of all sales on your website, to help you identify marketing strategies that work.

Google Analytics also offers real-time analytics, in-page analytics and visitor flow visualisation that can have a deep impact on understanding how well the website is performing and which elements need to be improved.

2) Compete

Compete is a paid tool and its prices vary based on the types of features you need. Compete offers comprehensive information on keywords that attract your target audience to your website as well as your competitors’ websites. Such information can be very useful in creating advertising campaigns that provide a high Return On Investment (ROI).

You can also find out where viewer came from and where they go, for both your website and those of your competitors. This can help you identify the best referral websites to place your ads or content on as well as understand how customers behave when they leave the website.

3) Google Analytics Content Experiments

Formerly known as Google Website Optimizer, Content Experiments is now part of Google Analytics. Content Experiments enable you to test all different segments of your website to identify the best options. For instance, you can try different layouts, images and content on different pages of your website in rotation and easily find out which ones or which combinations perform better than the others. This will help ensure that all elements on your website are as optimised as possible.

4) KISSinsights

KISSinsights is a free survey tool offered by KISSmetrics. It enables you to reach out to your customers directly and get answers to important questions like:

• What are visitors attempting to do on your website?
• Are they able to do it or not?
• How satisfied are they?

KISSinsights is an extremely simple survey tool, and its best advantage is that it’s short and does not impose on your visitors for too long, while providing you with the most important insights you need into their opinion and experience of your website.

5) Social Media Tools

Let’s look at tools for two of the most popular social networks: Facebook and Twitter

Facebook: Page Insights

If you have a Facebook Page for your Brand, Page Insights can provide you with a whole lot of information about it.

You will find the Insights tab in the top left corner of your Facebook Page. 

Here you will get deep insight into the Likes your Page has received, your Posts that have been popular, the kind of audience your page attracts and their ages, genders and locations. Such information can be very useful in targeting your Facebook ads and promotions.

Twitter: Twitalyzer

Similar to Facebook Insights, Twitalyzer offers comprehensive insight into your number of followers, retweet insights, how often a specific account replies or engages with your brand on your Twitter feed, and more.

Conclusion

As you can see, these are tools that assist you in every aspect of your online presence and engagement - your website, your audience and your social networks. Using these tools will provide you with all the data you need to ensure the best performance of your brand on every net property.

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‘No Pain, No Gain’ seems to be the way things go for everything in life, whether it’s a fitness program or even an online business. No matter what it is we want to achieve, we have to endure a painful ordeal to get it, right?

Let’s look at all the hassles you will have to go through (or already have gone through) when you want to build an ecommerce store and/or take your business online.

PAIN #1: Finding the right designer

You need someone who can translate your vision for your website in a web-ready design, while keeping in mind all branding requirements.

PAIN #2: Finding the right developer

Then you need to find a website developer who can translate the visual design into a functioning website, keeping in mind user experience and functionality.

PAIN #3: Finding the right domain-selling and hosting company

You need to decide where to buy your website’s domain name from and on whose servers you will host your website. Understanding the choices and all the features offered requires major time spent just educating yourself on all of it.

PAIN #4: Finding the right payment gateway

If you’re selling online, you have to choose a payment gateway that is right for you, based on many different technical and non-technical parameters, then have your web developer integrate it with your website.

PAIN #5: Finding the right vendor for site maintenance

Once your site is ready and launched, you will need someone who will update and maintain your website on a regular basis. Often, the developer who built your site has then disappeared when it comes time to make changes!

PAIN #6: Finding the right fulfillment partner

Finally, if you’re shipping products to customers, you will also need to find the right logistics partner and then negotiate with him to offer you a reasonable deal.

THE BIGGEST PAIN: The Cost

More than anything else, you will need to start with a large capital investment to pay for all the above-mentioned professionals and expenses.

It is easy to see why so many people are put off by the thought of taking their business online.

But imagine if this process was not as convoluted or as expensive as it is right now… Would you let anything stop you from breaking the Internet barrier and offering your goods and services to the large number of shopping buyers online?

Meet Webware.

Webware is a DIY Online Store Builder. We believe that ecommerce has the power to transform the lives of small business owners, and that it should be as easy as possible for them to have a great website where they can promote their business and sell products. That’s why we’ve created an extremely easy-to-use platform that’s as effortless as managing your Facebook page.

With Webware, you get pain-free access to:

1. Create your own professional-looking website yourself in a matter of minutes using our beautiful website themes.  And they're all free, even the mobile responsive ones.  
2. Or you can have us build it for you in a matter of days, at about one-third the cost you’d pay a web developer!
3. Try out many different designs, colors and other elements of look-and-feel of the website, as many times as you want until you have a website that you like - and it’s all for free!
4. Web hosting on blazing-fast Amazon servers. And the hosting cost is included in your highly affordable monthly subscription.
5. The best Payment Gateways available, like PayPal and Stripe, pre-integrated into your website. Just enter your merchant account info and you’re ready to accept payments for orders.
6. Webware  tie-ups with several logistics partners to help you find the right fulfillment partners at reasonable rates.
7. Finally, Webware is such a simple platform to manage that you will be able to make any and all changes to your online store on your own. You’ll never have to rely on a developer again!

Webware offers a host of other features that make it easier for you to manage your website easily, like:

• Easy web-based tools to manage orders, update product info, and communicate with customers
• Integration with social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter
• Discount coupons and Loyalty programs
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) friendly
• Blog platform hosted right on your site
• App Store with a wide range of third-party apps to plug into your site

Webware does not require any upfront or setup fees, so you avoid a large upfront capital investment, plus the monthly subscription prices that you pay are also extremely affordable. Check out our Pricing Page to see for yourself!

So, what are you waiting for? Join hands with Webware, and say good-bye to the pains of cobbling together a website and chasing elusive and expensive web developers! Set up your online store in minutes and watch as your business grows online!

Our recent blog post took a look at why you need marketing analytics and how it can help you streamline your marketing efforts. Here, we’ll explore what kind of data you need to study and how it can guide your marketing decisions.

Let’s consider what kind of data you need to mine from marketing analytics.

Website Performance: What to Track

You will have visitors coming to your online store from many different places, like Facebook, Twitter, blog, email links, organic search, Google Ads, etc. Website Analytics will not only help you indentify which channels of incoming traffic are leading to conversions (ie sales), but will also provide a large amount of valuable data like conversion rate, lifetime customer value, and cost per acquisition.

These figures can give you meaningful insight into what is performing effectively and what isn’t, thus helping you to decide how to allocate your marketing budget across various channels.

Sales: What worked?

Focus on actual sales and conversions on your website. Go as far back as possible in users’ behavior  to track down the path of clicks from how they entered to your online store all the way up to actual sales. Did a click from a text ad on Google search bring the sale? Or was it a link on Facebook? Maybe discount coupons in emails led to terrific sales!

Find out everything you can about what worked. If you compile enough data, you will start to see trends and be able to identify which channels work better than others in bringing in sales. You will also find out what kind of products the user was interested in and you can target your ads accordingly using remarketing tools. (Read more in our blog post covering remarketing).

Offline and Online Metrics: Consider Them Together

If your marketing strategy includes both online and offline marketing, it is important to ensure that the data record does not get interrupted in-between. So, for instance, if you advertise in a local newspaper or you give out leaflets with discount coupon codes on it, it is important that you keep records of these channels so that you can later combine both the online and the offline records to get a holistic picture of how well your marketing efforts are creating conversions on your online store.

There are many ways of doing this. For instance, in the case of discount coupon codes, create a separate coupon code for different channels, e.g. your Facebook ad can have the code FB123, while the code in your emails can be EM123. You can then look at the records of which codes were used to get an idea which channel was more effective in bringing in sales.

Vanity Metrics: What to Avoid

There are lots of metrics available that do not add any meaningful insight into what helps the bottom line. But easy availability of these metrics makes it very easy to get distracted by them. These metrics are called Vanity Metrics and they include elements like page views, time spent on site, number of pages visited, etc. These numbers do not add any value to your marketing strategy and are best avoided, to save time.

Social Media: Keeping a Bird’s Eye View

If there are any social media networks, like Facebook or Twitter, that you use to market your online store, it is important you use marketing analytics tools to keep a bird’s eye view of your performance there. You need not pay attention to every single like and share, but it is important to know where your audience is coming from whether the network is leading to website visitors and especially buyers, the demographic breakdown of customers who found your website through social media, etc. There are many tools that can make it easy for you to access this data, e.g. Google Analytics.

We will provide more in-depth information on various tools that can help you get the right Marketing Analytics data in our next post in this series. In the meantime, you can start identifying the most critical types of data you are going to need with regard to your own marketing efforts. Watch this space for more!

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So you have decided to start a company blog on your online store/ website to drive more traffic, promote your business and engage your target audience. But what should you write on your blog? What kind of content is considered appropriate for a business blog? And, how to create content that will benefit your brand as well as your bottom-line in the long run?

Here are 10 ideas on what to post on your company blog:

1. Tell your Story: People are inherently interested in stories, and you can use your own story to develop interest in your brand. Talk about how you got the idea, how you met your collaborators, how you came to start your business, etc. If there are some really interesting facets to your brand, talk about them - the designers, the craftsmen, the techniques, etc. Introduce the people on your team, talk about their dreams and aspirations. The more people get interested in your brand, the more they will care about it.

2. Make Announcements: Whatever announcements you may have with regard to your brand- whether it is a new product launch, a new collection, a season-ending sale, use your blog to make these announcements. The blog provides a whole new channel as well as attracts a different section of your target audience.

3. Answer your Customers’ Questions: There is an important caveat here and that is ‘before they ask them’. You are surely aware of your target audiences’needs, concerns, demands, questions, etc. with reference to your products. Address these issues long before they actually come up. Use your blog to provide all the relevant information your potential clients are likely to need with reference to your brand, company and products.

4. Educate your Customers: Apart from pre-empting the questions your potential customers may have while buying your product, you can also use your blog to educate your customers in using your product most effectively and efficiently. If you have any guides, tutorials, how-to videos, etc. post them on your blog. Not only can you use this as a ready resource when your clients make a purchase, you also develop a reputation for being concerned with customer satisfaction.

5. Get Customer Feedback: Undoubtedly, a lot of market research goes into product development. You already know what your customers want and you have developed a product to fulfill that need. How about finding out exactly how your customers will respond to your products BEFORE you launch them? Use your blog to provide sneak previews of your products and get feedback on them from the very people who are going to be using them. You will have time for fixes, changes and troubleshooting before the launch, should the need arise.

6. Create a Platform for your Customers: Use your blog to create a space dedicated to your customers. Add their pics taken with your products, post their comments and testimonials, answer questions that they may have, link to blogs they may have written about you. Your blog can become a community space to help create a community of your customers.

7. Provide Industry News and Information: This is your opportunity to establish yourself as an industry expert. Report and remark on important industry news, identify and analyse trends that you see, write your opinions on how your industry can create a greater impact.

8. Create Engagement: Fun engagement opportunities can bring tons of traffic to your blog if done right. For instance, run a photo or a caption contest on your blog. Announce the contest, provide all the rules and guidelines, keep updating the page throughout the duration of the contest and announce the winners of the contest on your blog. Use other social media networks like Facebook and emails to promote such contests. Watch as traffic increases and your brand awareness builds.

9. Follow Relevant Blogs for Ideas: Look for the market leaders and thought leaders in your industry and follow their blogs. Of course, you never want to plagiarize their content, but you can easily find out what the industry is talking about, concerned with, aspiring to, etc. and use these ideas as a starting place for your own blog post.

10. Entertain: Use your blog as a space to provide relevant entertainment to your target audience. If you find a comic strip, a funny video or a quirky experience with regards to your product, brand or industry, post in on your blog so you and your target audience can share a laugh together and bond over it.

Now, you have the secret to creating the best possible content for your business blog. Once you get going on your blog, you’ll get better at knowing what works and what doesn’t, and it’ll come as second nature to think of new post ideas.  So go ahead and blog, and you’ll be interacting with your target audience in ways that were not possible before! 

Note: Webware customers, go here to read about how to add a blog to your Webware today!

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Top 10 Reasons Why Your Online Store Needs a Blog

Do you have an online store? Then, you need a blog! Blogging is one of the most critical channels available to your business to attract new audiences, engage them, retain them, create brand loyalty, and in the long run, make your business profitable and successful.

If you were looking for one good reason to start a blog for your online store, we give you 10!

1. No-Pressure Communication: Your website needs to sell your products your ads need to drive traffic, your Facebook posts need to go viral, but your blog offers respite from these pressures and allows you to communicate whatever it is that you think might interest your target audience- news, updates, industry information, tips, company values and philosophy, tutorials, guidelines, the people behind the scenes, history and tradition associated with your products and services…. And the list goes on & on!

2. Two-Way Channel: A blog offers a platform for your target audience to engage in a meaningful conversation with you that goes beyond a ‘like’, a ‘re-tweet’ or a ‘re-pin’. A blog with a comments section offers a place to share ideas and have discussions with people who matter the most to you – your existing and potential customers.

3. Fuel for SEO: Regular updates, relevant & original content and additional tags are all things that get search engine algorithms to rank your website higher on relevant searches. Blogs also generate a lot of inbound links when they get shared- another plus for SEO.

4. Content for Social Media Marketing: The content you generate on your blog is the perfect material to share on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Newsletters, etc. These links will further help your SEO efforts.

5. Long Term Results: Most blog posts continue to produce results for years, as long as the information you have provided is original and relevant. Research shows that unlike news, blog posts are often read and referred to months, even years after they have been posted.

6. Establish Credibility and Expertise: A blog is a great way for you to establish your credibility and expertise as a thought leader in your industry. The more this perception increases, the easier it will be for your target audience to trust you and give you their business.

7. Build a Brand: Blogs go a long way in building a brand because they provide the perfect platform to share the story behind the brand. Human beings love stories and can relate to a company better if they have insight into the brand that runs deeper than just the products and services they provide.

8. Create Symbiotic Relationships: Blogs are a great way of building mutually beneficial relationships with other complementary brands and thought leaders. For example, if you sell cookware, you should easily exchange links with a recipe website and blog. This is beneficial to everyone involved - both for the brands as well as for the readers of both blogs.

9. Get Insight: While the blog provides your readers insight into your brand, it also provides you an insight into your target audience. By analyzing popular topics, clicks, shares, comments, etc. on your blog, you can gain deep insights into the needs, likes, preferences, etc. of your readers. This can go a long way in strengthening your overall marketing strategy.

10. It’s Easy! If you already run an online store, managing a blog is likely to be a breeze for you! You need no technical expertise to create and maintain a good-looking, easy-to-navigate blog. All you really need is just good content and appealing pictures to go with it.

Note: Webware customers, go here to read about how to add a blog to your Webware today!

So, you have set up your online store. And you are keen to spread the word and have more and more people find out about your online store. Apart from online advertising and marketing, is there anything else you can do to promote your online store? Of course!

Here are the top 5 ways you can promote your online store offline:

1. Printed Stationary

Add your online store URL on all your printed materials. Like visiting cards, your letterhead,and envelopes, invoices, receipts, packing, and labeling. Ensure that your website URL is always present when your brand name, logo or contact details appear in print.

2. Your Physical Store

If you have a brick-and-mortar store, then you already have an excellent venue to promote your online store. For most of your existing customers, an online store will be an added convenience and they are likely to take to it enthusiastically. Add your online store URL to all your signage - outside your store, window dressing, direction boards, announcement boards, etc. If your business requires your employees to wear a uniform or ID badge, add your online store’s web address on the uniform or badge. And put the URL on the shopping bags!

3. Outdoor Signage

On the other hand, if you do not have an actual store, you can still find ways to post signage for your online store.  Make use of signposts and other locations where signs are required. You can piggyback on signs for existing landmarks, by offering to pay for painting the sign and adding your brand name and URL in return.

4. Promotional Items

Many businesses invest in creating and gifting promotional items to their customers, vendors, investors, shareholders and potential customers on various occasions like festivals, anniversaries, etc. If you are one of those businesses, you now have one more vehicle to promote your online store! Add your online store URL to all promotional items and watch more and more people find out about your online business.

5. Pass out Leaflets

This is another great way to promote your store offline. Make brochures, leaflets, posters, catalogues, etc. for distribution and pass them out at locations where your target audience is likely to be found in large numbers, like the shopping mall, or the multiplex. This will be especially useful if your business is local and you cater to customers in a fixed geographical location.

So, now you have some great, cost-effective methods of promoting your online store in the offline world. Go out and try them all, then focus on the one that gives you the best results. All the best!

Marketing Analytics? What it is? Why do you need to pay any attention to it? It’s not as if online sellers are not already bombarded with enough jargon to make their heads spin!

Simply put, Marketing Analytics is analyzing the results of your marketing campaigns. You may be marketing your online store through various online channels like Facebook marketing, Google advertising, blogging, email marketing, etc. Marketing Analytics helps you analyze the results of each so that you can ensure that you are getting the best value, or the highest Return on Investment (ROI) for the time, effort and money you are spending on various marketing initiatives. Here are top 5 reasons why Marketing Analytics is critical to your success.

1. Identifying what Works:

Not all channels produce the same results. Some may bring in a lot of traffic, others may lead to higher sales, while other channels may not be adding much value to you at all. By employing Marketing Analytics, you can easily identify which channel works best for each goal.

2. Streamlining your Marketing Goals:

What is more important to you right now? Is yours a new online store that requires brand awareness and high traffic, irrespective of sales? Or do you want to focus on sales, and you’re not really concerned with many new people discover your website? Marketing Analytics will help you streamline your goals based on the kind of results each of your marketing channels is capable of producing.

3. Making the Right Investments

Most new online businesses have limited resources, so it’s extremely valuable to know how to invest those resources to get the maximum value. Once you have streamlined your goals and identified the strengths and weaknesses of all your marketing channels, you will find it a lot easier to decide which marketing channels to invest your time, effort and money into.

4. Save Money & Avoid Unnecessary Costs

If you have figured out which channels are most important to you, you can either completely stop or dramatically reduce your other marketing channels. This way, you can ensure that your resources and budget are not being wasted on initiatives that don’t contribute to the goals you are pursuing.

5. Have a Ready Toolkit

Once you have associated every channel with the type of results they are capable of producing, you have at your fingertips a ready toolkit for the future. Now going forward, no matter what short-term or long-term goal you want to achieve, you will always have ready knowledge of which marketing channel to employ to meet that specific goal.

Important Note:

It is important to also understand that online marketing is a highly dynamic field which is affected by a number of factors like seasonality, industry trends, new technology, quality of content, marketing expertise, etc. You will need to factor in these changes, trends and updates into your Marketing Analytics to ensure that you have an accurate understanding of all your marketing channels and their ability to produce specific results.

Watch this blog for more posts on this topic, including more specifics on how exactly to gather and analyze the data you have access to, for the most insightful Marketing Analytics for your business.

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If you have an online business and are like most, you’ve also set up a Facebook Page to promote your business on social media. Setting up the Page is easy, but knowing what to post there is the hard part. 

Do you see posts “go viral” on Facebook and want to know what to post on your own Page that can get the same level of exposure? Do you see other Pages get hundreds of ‘Likes’ for each and every post and wonder what their secret is? Exactly how do you determine what is the right kind of content you should be posting?!

Fret not! Here are some tips to guide you in choosing the right blend of content for your Facebook Page.

Remember these 5 things and you’ll be on your way to great posts with lots of likes:

1. It’s a Brand Page

First things first - your Facebook Page is your Brand Page. It should only contain content that is relevant to your company and your brand. This is not the place to post personal posts, opinions, rants, etc.

2. A Brand is Different from Products

While products form a very important aspect of Brand Identity, there are other elements to consider as well, like brand philosophy, vision, influences, accomplishments, press coverage, etc. Of course, you will need to post about your products, sales, news arrivals, etc., but your Facebook Page should also encompass all these aspects of your Brand Identity and not just be a catalogue of products that your company sells.

3. A Brand Belongs to an Industry

Your brand also belongs to a larger fraternity - your industry. Including news, trends, changes, etc. about your industry on your Page is a great way to be a part of the bigger picture and keep your fans informed of the larger factors that affect your industry, as well as news that your fans are likely to find interesting. For instance, if you sell organic products, posting news that a well-liked celebrity has endorsed an organic lifestyle can give you great mileage.

4. Know Your Target Audience

Just like in Advertising, the most important thing to keep in mind is your target audience. It is important to understand all sections of your target audience and know what they like. If you are selling sarees to women, think about the various activities and occasions where women like to dress up, and tailor your posts accordingly. If you are selling tees to the youth, think of their various influences – music, celebrities, etc. - and post about them. If you are selling electronic gadgets to young employees, talk about how your gadgets will help save time, improve productivity, increase efficiency, help them stay connected, etc.

5. Images Get Attention

In this age of information overload, you have very little time to connect with your target audience. Web users on social networks do not typically spend more than a few seconds on a post on their Facebook News Feed before moving on to the next one.  If your post has only text, chances are people will not take the time to read it. On the other hand, if you post a great picture of something that your Target Audience is likely to be attracted to, chances are that it will attract their attention immediately.

Here you go! Follow these 5 Basic Tips to find the right blend of content to post on your Brand’s Facebook Page and see how many likes and shares each of your posts is able to generate! 

So you’ve created a Facebook Page for your business, and now what? You might be thinking, how does this translate into getting more sales on my website? What do I do with this page? How can I get more “likes” and more engagement with my “fans”?

Facebook offers some great tools to help you get more out of your page.  By just putting a fraction of your marketing budget towards the following actions, you should see some exciting results. Let’s take a quick look.

1. Boost Your Posts

When you post something on your page,  not all your Facebook Page fans are going to see it every time. You can see this in the notification you get under the post, with regards to how many people were reached. You need to “boost” your post to ensure that it reaches all your fans. The good news is that this also exposes your post to the friends of your fans, who are likely to become your new fans, given that friends often have many shared interests.

So, how to Boost your Facebook Page Posts?

1. Every time you post an update on your Facebook Page, you’ll see the option ‘Boost Post’ under the post.
   


2. Clicking this button will allow you to choose the amount of money and the number of days you want to boost your post for.


3. The number of people who will see your boosted post will depend upon your chosen budget. The approximate number of viewers is provided to you when you select the budget.

2. Promote Your Page

Given the very social and casual atmosphere of Facebook, many brands (depending upon the products they sell) try to first attract their target audience to their Facebook Page to give them a taste of the culture their brand promotes. Instead of directly trying to sell products while people are busy socializing, brands often attempt to create desirability of the brand and products before attempting to get them to go to their website to make a purchase.

So, how do you get your target audience to your Facebook Page? By Using ‘Promote Page’ option! Here’s how:

1. At the top right corner of your Page, you will see a drop down menu under Build Audience. One of the options is “Promote Page”.
   


2. When you click on “Promote Page”, a dialogue box opens which allows you to choose the defining characteristics of your target audience like: Target country, Interests, Age, Gender, etc.  


3. Choose these options based on the profile of your target audience as well as the reach of your brand. For example: If you sell formal women’s clothing in India, you will choose “India” as target country, gender as “women”, age as “22+” and interests such as “fashion”, “clothing”, “formal wear”, etc.

3. Advertise on Facebook

Facebook also offers an advertising platform called “Ads Manager”. This feature provides you with far more detailed targeting options.

Here’s how to use Facebook’s Ads Manager:

1. At the top right corner of your Page, you will see a drop down menu under “Build Audience”. One of the options is “Use Ads Manager”.
   


2. Start a new ad campaign by clicking on “Create Ad”.
   


3. You will get a variety of campaign type options to choose from, eg: Page Likes, Clicks to Website, Website Conversion, etc. Make your choices based on the results you wish your campaign to produce. If this is your first Facebook ad campaign and you don’t have too many “likes” on your page yet, we recommend starting off with “Page Likes” option. This will help attract more people to your brand and help make your Page more vibrant and dynamic.
   


4. After this, you will get the opportunity to add photos, add a tag line to the image as well as write an ad text.


5. Once you have created your ad, you will get detailed targeting options including country, age, education, preference, etc. of your target audience. Make your choices based on the kind of people you think are most likely to be interested in buying your products. We recommend you limit your geographic focus to India, so that you can get more with your budget.


6. Finally, choose the budget as well as the duration of your ad campaign.


7. Then click “Submit” and your campaign will start!


8.  To follow the performance of your campaign once it starts, go to the Ads Manager and click on the campaign name.

So there! Now you know all the techniques required to promote your brand on Facebook! So, what are you waiting for? Go ahead and try these techniques to attract your target audience to your brand and watch your sales grow!

In an upcoming post, we will offer tips on what kind of content to post on your Facebook Page and how to keep your audience engaged. Be sure to look out for that blog post coming soon!

UPDATE 8/8/2014: Our post on creating the right kind of content for your Facebook Page is now up, read it here!

So you have decided to set up an online store! Congratulations and welcome to the world of ecommerce! Have you stopped to think about how you will personalize your online store to reflect your business? In other words, have you considered the importance of creating a brand identity?

Why does Brand Identity Matter?

In today’s world, where comparison-shopping is a norm and consumers are likely to look any many different online stores before they make a purchase, it has become more important than ever to have a distinct brand identity. With a strong brand identity, you will stand out from your competition. This is what will ensure not only top-of-mind brand recall by online shoppers, but will also eventually lead to brand loyalty.

What constitutes Brand Identity in an Online Store?

Let’s first look at all the elements that constitute Brand Identity when it comes to a website. What are the things that distinguish your ecommerce store from that of your competitors, apart from your specific inventory?  The answer would be: 1. Logo 2. Banner 3. Colours 4. Look and Feel 5. Site Architecture Now let’s look at why each of these elements is important and how it contributes to your Brand Identity.  We'll use the website of Zeus Motorcycle Gear, a Webware customer, to illustrate our points.

1. Logo

Your company’s logo is a visual representation of your identity. It offers a glimpse into the values and philosophy of your company as well as its aspirations. A logo also helps distinguish one company from another, in much the same way that a face helps distinguish one person from another. That is why it is important that you put in substantial effort to create a smart, professional logo that will actually be able to represent your company and its ideology in full, with an eye-catching and professional-looking image that you display on every page of your online store.

2. Homepage Banner

First off, we want to stress that your home page banner image (or images) are changeable and, in fact, should be changed often to promote different  products and promotions, and to keep your home page fresh and interesting for returning customers. So in general, here are some tips on the types of images you should use in your banner space. It is important to remember that:

• images make a deeper impression on people than text, and
• your banner image is going to be the first, and most likely, the largest image a visitor is going to see when they land on your online store home page.

For these reasons, it is important that ALL your banner images are consistently able to wow your site visitors. They should be original, unique and highly representative of the company’s standards in terms of quality as well as values. Don't just use the default images that come with your theme. You should really take time and effort (and hire outside designers if necessary) to personalise your online store with exciting and beautiful banners.

3. Colours

This is perhaps the easiest and one of the most effective methods of distinguishing your online store and creating a "personality" for your brand. If you choose distinct colours for your brand and use them consistently across all your communications like your website, visiting cards, letterheads, invoices, labelling, packaging, etc., your customers as well as any visitors who land on your website will come to associate those colours with your brand. Such brand associations can become very valuable both in the short and the long term. So it's important that you choose your brand colours with care, and that you use these colours consistently on your online store as well as your offline mediums.

4. Look and Feel

The ‘Look and Feel’ of your e-commerce website represents the essence and quality of your brand and products. In the case of Zeus Motorcycle, their website has a look and feel that reflects their brand -- masculine and action-packed. On the other hand, if you are selling traditional sarees for example, you’ll likely want your website to have a more vintage, authoritative and artistic look. Aside from colours, the elements that contribute the most to the look and feel of your online store are:

• Most importantly, your website template (or “theme”)
• Fonts, font sizing and spacing
• Images and image sizes
• Image-to-text ratio

It is important that you create a look and feel for your store that is right for your brand and your product catalog, because this is the background against which your products are being showcased, and they should complement each other.

5. Site Architecture

This one seems like an unusual entry into a list about personalising your online store to create a brand identity. In fact, it is a very critical element. Your site architecture determines how easy and effortless it is for the visitor to browse your site and find the products they are looking for. A visitor’s experience while visiting your online store is going to play a large role in how they perceive your brand. In today’s day and age when people are shopping online more and more, people tend to remember and frequent those online stores that make their shopping experience easy and hassle-free. A good e-commerce site should have:

• Easy-to-navigate product categories
• Products grouped in logical categories (think about how your customers would browse in a real-world store)
• Use of sub-categories if there are many products (ie Men/Women/Children, then each of these would have Shirts/Pants/Shoes subcategories)
• A product search bar

Ensuring that your online store has the right site architecture goes a long way in creating brand loyalty because your site visitors will have a positive shopping experience.

Now you try it!

When you set up your online store, be sure to personalise your website with a logo, colours, fonts, and banner images that reflect your brand. From the start, when choosing your theme, always keep your brand in mind. Even if you haven’t thought in terms of brand identity before, the fact is that these elements will make a big difference in how people perceive your company and products, and it will affect whether or not they choose to do business with you. So, take the time and effort to make the right choices, always keeping in mind how you want customers to think and feel about your brand and your business. And here’s wishing you all the success in the world!

Since our release of Webware 2 in February, we’ve gotten so much great positive feedback on our new platform. We’ve also received requests for even more features from our customers, and we’re listening!

Our team of developers are hard at work improving our platform and adding features.  Here are some new features that we’ve recently implemented.

Photo Uploader Enhancements

Now it’s easy to upload beautiful photos to your Webware, even from your mobile phone!  We have two great improvements to our photo uploader that make the process simple and the outcome stunning.

1) Upload your image from anywhere. When you’re uploading a photo, you can now grab your photos from anywhere, including Dropbox, Instagram and more, and easily import them to your online store. Have a great pic on your mobile phone or on Facebook that you want to use? No problem!

2) And edit your photo right there. Once you’ve uploaded your snap, you can make it look beautiful in seconds with stunning filters, frames, stickers, touch-up tools and more from Aviary.  Edit your image right there -- including cropping, resizing, and special effects – and your image will be updated automatically.

More Currencies Supported

We’ve added support for two new currencies, the Singapore dollar and Hong Kong dollar.  As we’re expanding our customer base across the world, we will continue to add support for more and more currencies.

We now support all of these currencies for purchases on Webware online stores:

• Canadian Dollar (CAD)
• Euro (EUR)
• Hong Kong Dollar (HKD)
• Indian Rupee (INR)
• Russian Ruble (RUB)
• Singapore Dollar (SGD)
• US Dollar (USD)
• United Kingdom Pound (GBP)

New Themes

We have three new responsive themes: Sushi Delight, Contemporary, and Fashionist.  Each of these themes is mobile-responsive, so your online store will look great on all devices and screen sizes. We’re continuing to add new themes every month!

Webware customers, it’s easy to change your store’s theme. For complete instructions, read our support article on Changing Your Theme.

Automatic Upgrades

As always, all software upgrades are done seamlessly and automatically and do not require any action on the part of our merchants. It’s all part of why Webware is so great!

Our #1 priority is to help our customers create successful online businesses.  We hope that these new features help you to get there.  And thanks for your support!

What is the best way to ensure that the bottom line of your online store goes from strength to strength? Why, make sure that you build customer loyalty! If a solid chunk of your revenues comes from the same customers giving you repeat business over and over again, then all the new customers you add over time only help in increasing your profits!

Let’s look at how you can ensure brand loyalty by using one simple tool: Customer Registration on your Online Store.

1. Use their contact info to contact them: The first and the most obvious advantage of customer registration is that customers give you  their contact info. This gives you the means to contact them every time you have exciting news for them, e.g. New Arrivals, End of Season Sale, Special Discounts, etc. Statistics show that emailers continue to be highly effective (check out our blog post that talks about this in detail.) So, not only do you help cause immediate sales, you also create top-of-the-mind brand recall amongst your customers who get your emailers regularly.

2. Make their experience easy and hassle-free: When customers register on your online store, one of the biggest advantages is that they only need to save all their details like contact info, shipping address, etc. one time. The next time they log in and make a purchase, this information gets auto-filled. This may not seem like a big thing, but habits of online users are changing and people are beginning to shop online more and more often. Even something simple as this removes the hassle of entering the same information over and over again and adds to a positive customer experience.

3. Create a database of their order history for them: What do you have to do if you want to tally your credit card statement with the purchases you have made online? Most likely, search and look through records of these transactions in your email, right? Make this process effortless for them by providing your customers with their order history at your online store. This will help them keep tabs on their purchases and make it easy to cross-reference them at any time.

4. Create Loyalty using a Loyalty Program: All credit cards and most major online stores got this right a long time back. Reward your customers for spending and give them incentive to spend more and more with you. Offer your customers reward points for every purchase they make based on the value of the purchase and make these points redeemable. Your customers now have a solid incentive to spend at your online store and accumulate these reward points so that they can get a large discount on a highly-priced item. You are not only getting them to spend more, you are likely up-selling your inventory, too! Read more on loyalty programs in this blog post.

5. Pamper them with Exclusive Privileges: A fun member benefit you can offer is to make pages of your website accessible to ‘Members Only’. On these pages, you can give your registered customers a highly exclusive preview of your hottest new arrivals with an opportunity to buy them before everyone else does! This works particularly well when you offer items that are limited in number. You can also offer your members exclusive discounts on these ‘Members Only’ pages, giving them further incentive to shop at your online store.

It may seem daunting at first, but really it is not very difficult to create brand loyalty. We are all creatures of habit and once we get used to something like a certain web store, it is just a lot easier to return there than to find one’s way through a whole new website.

Of course there will be people who will look for the cheapest possible deal for each and every purchase. But for most regular online shoppers, familiarity, ease of use, and small savings on time and effort go a long way in building brand loyalty.

And when you add exclusive discounts, exclusive privileges and rewards points to the mix (as benefits of being a registered customer), you can make your online store tantalisingly tempting to your customer base!

If you’ve already started your online store, you have probably learned that it takes some effort and money to acquire a new customer. So how does one KEEP a customer, get him or her to return often, and even better, spread the word about your store to others?

Needless to say, a customer’s experience with your store, the products you have on offer and your pricing are big factors in driving repeat purchase. But there is one more important business tactic you should have – a Customer Rewards Program.

Here are some tips on how you can implement a points-based Loyalty Rewards Program and how to make it truly effective, especially for small retailers.

1. Make it worthwhile to collect points

The points have to be redeemed for the customer to enjoy her rewards. So make it possible for her to earn enough points from two or three average value purchases to get a tangible saving on the third or fourth purchase. For a low value item 10% savings don’t work, it should be at least 20%. But for a Rs. 1000 item, a saving of Rs. 100 is sweet.

2. Make it easy to figure out the value of points earned

Keep the maths simple. Each point is worth Rs. 10, or 10 points are worth Rs. 1. Don’t have complicated formulas.

3. Offer starter points for customer registration

You want customers to register for your store for many reasons – that allows you to add them to your email mailing list, collect data on their purchases and track repeat visits.  So you can encourage them to register by offering points on registration.  It also gives them a nice balance of points right from the beginning, which will excite them to return to your site to earn more points and to redeem their points.

4. Play with the points values to drive purchases of specific products

If you want to specifically promote select merchandise, give a higher number of points as compared to similarly priced products. And don’t forget to advertise the offer, alongside the promoted product or even on your homepage.

5. Reward customers for helping promote your store

Customers who like your Facebook page or recommend your store to others are friends you don’t want to lose. So reward them for every friendly action with bonus points.

6. Have seasons or days when you run Points Multipliers

Instead of giving discounts away, give points away on special days and festivals. For example, earn 50% more points on Women’s Day and for the fortnight leading up to Deepawali.

7. Give away bonus points on special occasions

Present a customer with some bonus points on her birthday, or even on your store’s birthday. Send her a nice email on that day to announce it. The unexpectedness of such a gift usually works well to build a special bond which can lead to a repeat purchase.

8. Give your points a name that links to your store

Suppose your store is called The Baby Store and sells things for babies. You can call your points Baby Steps. So when a momma earns 10 points for her purchase she gets a message saying "Congratulations, you earned 10 Baby Steps for your last purchase!" It helps in standing out from the many loyalty programs that are running.

9. Talk about your rewards program!

Remember, the sense of reward is felt when the points are redeemed. So remind your customers that the points are there!  Notify customers who have a certain number of points by sending them reminder emails, and suggest purchases they can make using their points. Communicate when points are earned. Build it into the invoice and the confirmation email you send. Display “points earned” and “points required to purchase” on your product pages.

Using a points-based Loyalty Program is a great way to keep customers coming back to your store and to encourage behaviours you want, like member registration and more.  Think of all the places where you’re enrolled in Loyalty Programs – airlines, credit cards, supermarkets, the local coffee shop – and how it influences your purchase decisions.  If you could make your online store a place where people want to keep coming back, why wouldn’t you?

Cory York, CEO Webware tell his inspiring story of ambition, determination and success against all odds. Read and be inspired!

http://yourstory.com/2013/06/from-ice-hockey-in-canda-to-selling-books-door-to-door-in-india-to-setting-up-a-mini-incubator-goa-based-entrepreneur-cory-york/

In one of our earlier posts in the Quick Results Marketing series, we talked about how you can place your ads right in front of potential customers when they are searching on Google. In this post, we talk about reaching your target audience while they’re browsing the web and visiting other websites that may be relevant to your products or service. The combination of the right audience, the right website, and a powerful advertising message can be a powerful combination, leading to lots of click-thru’s to your ecommerce site.

Google has partnered with literally millions of sites to create the Google Display Network (GDN), a one-stop-shop advertising network to place your ads all across the World Wide Web.. Sites include well known ones like Gmail and YouTube as well as relatively obscure ones, but in all cases your ad will appear right next to content that is relevant to your product (how does this work?). GDN covers over 80% of all Internet users, so you are not missing out on any major audience segment by placing all your online advertising on this network.

Here are the reasons why you should be using the Google Display Network.

Reason #1: Context-Specific Advertising

Find your needle in the massive Internet haystack.

The ability to zero in on a very specific audience in terms of their demographics, their interests, and the content they are consuming when shown your ad is what makes the GDN the powerful marketing tool that it is.

Google Display Network works just like Google AdWords. When you set up your campaign, you select your keywords and ad groups, and then Google identifies sites that have content relevant to your selected keywords. Google then displays your ads on those relevant sites.

Here’s an example of contextually relevant advertising:

Reason #2: More engaging ads

Wow them with visuals.

Another feature of GDN is the ability to place ads in different formats – Text ads, Image ads of various sizes, Rich Media ads, Video ads, and even Mobile ads.

The ability to have ads with visuals, animation and video is what makes the GDN different from the text-only ads that appear on search result pages.

Reason #3: Remarketing

Hi, it’s me again.

A third exciting and extremely valuable feature of GDN is “remarketing”. Remarketing is the practice of serving up your ads to people who have previously visited your website. Once a person has visited your online store once, if you’ve got a remarketing campaign set up, when he visits other sites on the GDN he is shown your ads. Remarketing has the effect of a multi-pronged campaign directed at your target audience. It can be used by etailers for specific tactical objectives, such as addressing all people who added an item to your shopping cart but didn’t complete a transaction, or more commonly, creating top-of-the-mind brand recall to get an edge over your competition.

Accessed through your Google AdWords account, the Google Display Network is a powerful yet easy to use tool that allows you to set up a hybrid campaign that combines context-based ads in various formats to create brand awareness, visibility and website traffic and remarketing ads to increase conversions, thereby impacting your ROI.

So first off, DO create an email marketing campaign! It can have a big impact on return visits and growing your user base.  Here are the steps to get started. 

Step 1: Build Your List

All raring to go? You can’t do any e-mail marketing without a list of relevant e-mail IDs. So if you are just starting out with your e-commerce business, put some effort into building your list. You need to develop, grow and maintain your e-mail database and make sure that it is yours and yours alone. Some of the ways you can build your list are:

• Invite site visitors to register with you for your newsletter or your blog
• Allow visitors who make purchases to become registered customers for your online store, by incentivizing them with loyalty programs or to receive special offers
• Collect e-mail IDs of your customers, even customers at your physical stores (if you have any)
• Pull out your old visiting card stacks and create a customer list with all the email addresses

Step 2: Choose an Email Marketing Application

Once you have your email list, do not send mails just from your regular email client by putting addresses in BCC field. You should use an email marketing application like one of these: Free options:

Affordable options:

Professional options:

The advantage of using these tools is that it is easy to set up mail blasts, handle responses, and analyse the results, such as Bounces, Opens, Clicks, Unsubscribes, and Actions. This will help you progressively improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your email marketing activities.

Step 3: Create Your Campaign

Now that you have an e-mail marketing tool, it’s time to put it to use. Here are some best practices to improve the results from your marketing e-mails.

• DO write quality content – provide information that is relevant and valuable to your customers
  • Be clear and concise
  • Include a clear call to action with a link, or better yet, a big button
  • Create a sense of urgency
  • Keep the design clean and uncluttered
  • Ensure the most relevant messages are at the top above the “fold line”
• DO segment your e-mail list – address the needs of different customers differently. At the very least be sensitive to gender, age, and nature of your relationship. Address a new customer differently than you would an old one.
• DO consider the “From” line:
  • Use a name the recipient will recognize
  • Include your company name or brand
  • Or your own name, if it is well known
  • Shorter is better
  • Be consistent
• DO keep the “Subject” line  short and simple:
  • 30 – 40 characters (5 – 8 words)
  • Be interesting! People are bombarded with emails - give them a reason to read yours.
  • Incorporate a specific benefit
  • Capitalise and punctuate carefully
• DO carefully consider the first sentence. Most email clients like Gmail and Outlook have preview mode and/or alerts that often show the first line of text only.
• DO personalise it by using the recipient’s name. Be sure to also have a fallback for those customers whose first name you don’t know, such as “Hi there”.
• DO design your e-mail and landing page for mobile – nearly 45% of all marketing mails are opened on a mobile device.
• DO experiment! Try different versions of your emails. Send one version to half your customers and another version to the other half.  See which gets better stats, especially conversions.  Many of the email marketing applications like MailChimp have a built-in A/B testing option so you can easily run these tests.

The DON’Ts of E-mail Marketing

And now for what NOT to do.

• DON'T buy e-mail lists. Earn them the legitimate way.
• DON'T use words like “free”, “guarantee”, “spam”, or “credit card” in the “From” field or “Subject” line. This will definitely end you up in the spam folder.
• DON'T send mails at odd hours. This will negatively affect your “open” rate.
• DON'T send e-mails out before testing them
• DON'T bother too much about click-through rates, instead focus on conversions
• DON'T forget to welcome a new subscriber
• DON'T spam! Even if you are in another country, adhere to the US guidelines, ie CAN-SPAM act.

Now go and put it to the test! You may be surprised at how effective email marketing can be!

This is our first article in the "Quick Results Marketing" series, which, as the name suggests, will cover marketing tools that start delivering results (usually traffic or sales) within a short turnaround time. If you want to jump-start your online business, these are the marketing tactics for you.

Search Engine Marketing with Google AdWords

Whether they’re in the browsing stage or even the buying stage, shoppers use search engines like Google to find web sites where they can source products or read reviews about products. It takes time and effort to get a high ranking in natural search results (see our blog post about SEO), but it is possible to get seen on the search results page by buying advertisements. The Google advertisement service is called AdWords, and you can buy ads as shown in the visual below.

With Google AdWords, you pay only if the shopper sees your ad and shows interest in your web site by clicking on it. So if she sees your ad and doesn't click on it, you don't pay anything. This is called the “pay per click” pricing model, or PPC, in Internet marketing. On AdWords, you can set a daily spend budget and a maximum amount you are willing to pay per click. So you are really in control of your overall ad spending and the amount you spend per visit to your web site.

Step 1: Target Your Audience

The secret to being successful with any kind of advertising plan is to target the right audience. With AdWords, you choose the keywords (see this post on identifying your keywords), so your ad is shown only to people who have searched on those keywords. In other words, your ad only shows up for people who are very likely to be interested in your products or the content of your site. You can also further sharpen your targeting by location, for example you can show your ad only to shoppers within India and UK, or only to shoppers in one particular city.

Step 2: Fine-Tune to Perfection

The secret to being successful with AdWords is to experiment with different tactics. Change keywords and try out different ad copy styles and messages. Observe the effect of different tactics on click-through rates and cost per click. And then drop the ads or keywords that are less effective, and increase your attention and investment in those that do work. The Google AdWords control panel allows you to manage and analyse all aspects of your campaigns, from keywords and ad building to ad placements and finally measuring results. So the whole cycle of testing, measuring, and fine-tuning can be done without any guesswork right from the control panel.

What else does Google offer?

There are other ad placement options that Google offers, including banner image and text ads on millions of partner sites across the web, image ads on Google Search, ads on mobile phones and devices, and ads on YouTube. This is called the Google Display Network. Look out for our post on contextual advertising on the Google Display Network. So what are you waiting for? The best way to learn about AdWords is to try it out. Visit the Google AdWords site for an overview and to get started. Google will even provide you with assistance to set up your first campaign.

Search engines like Google are the primary way in which your web site gets found by customers and interested parties. So, helping search engines find you is absolutely critical to your ability to build traffic to your site. The process of getting search engines to notice your site and report it in the search results is called Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO for short.

SEO is everything to do with managing how well and how high up you appear in the search results when a potential customer types in keywords relevant to your site. People rarely go beyond the first page of results, so your aim is to get into the first twenty search results for your keywords.

To clarify, this is different from being placed in the advertising sections of the search engine results page, ie, the ones in yellow on top, or in the right-hand column, of a search results page on Google. To appear there, you have to pay for a Google AdWords campaign.  That is a separate discussion.  Below the ads are called the “organic” search results, the unpaid ones.  You want to be as high on that list as possible, that is the purpose of SEO.

Since over 85% of searches are done on Google, we will focus on Google in this primer on SEO.  Here are some guidelines to consider.

1. Identify your keywords

This is THE most important step, so we’ll go in depth here.  Think about your business and your site content. What words or phrases are people likely to use when searching for sites like yours? Make a list of these, then go to the Google Keyword Planner and enter your words and phrases into the tool. In order to use the tool you need to create a Google AdWords account which is easy to do and is free.

Type in your preliminary list of keywords, and you will get two important results: search volumes and related searches. The “related searches” results will likely return some keyword options you did not think of, so add a few of those that you think work for you to your short list.

You can also type in the URL of your website in a separate box provided for the same. This allows Google to crawl through your website and identify the most common themes and return a list of keywords that are most likely to be appropriate. (If the results come up with keywords that are not directly related to your business, you may want to re-think the content of your website!)

Competitive vs. Niche Keywords

When you choose the keywords that you wish to optimize for, you can adopt one of two strategies – optimize for competitive keywords or for niche keywords. Some words naturally generate high search volumes and such words usually are of interest to a large number of web sites and hence are highly competitive keywords. For example let’s say you have an online store selling traditional wooden toys from Channapatna, which is a town famous for such toys. The key words “Toys” and “Wooden Toys” have search volumes of 12100 and 590 per month and are labeled as competitive. Now look at the search volumes for the keyword “Channapatna toys”. The volumes are reasonably high at 720 per month and the level of competition is low.

Now you could tune your SEO to the keyword “Toys” and try to get a high ranking and hence a high potential traffic volume from the 12100 searches every month. But you would need to do lots and lots of things better than the other toy web sites in order to earn that high ranking.

If you adopted the niche keyword SEO strategy, you would optimize for “Channapatna toys” and you would stand a good chance of attracting a percentage of the not so high but not so low search volume of 720 per month. In other words, one strategy is to aim for a small share of a large market and the other is to go after a large share of a small market. The choice is yours. Now, let’s explain what to do once you have selected all your keywords.

2. Create titles for each of your website pages

Page titles are what appear at the top of the browser when a page is displayed. It is part of the HTML code for the page. You should include two or three of your keywords which are relevant for that page in the page title. And try to keep the title short, so that it is not cut short by Google in the search results. As a general rule, stick to a max of 65 characters in your titles.

Also, place your keywords early in the title. For example:

"Pure leather handbags, style accessories | Aparna Fashions"

works better than

"Aparna Fashions | Your online store for stylish leather handbags and fashion accessories"

Try to have a unique title that contains some or all of the keywords you have selected for that page. Now do this for all the pages in your site. If you built the site yourself, you should know how to edit and create the page titles. If someone did it for you, give him or her the page titles to enter and upload.

3. Write appropriate Meta Descriptions for each page

Meta descriptions and keywords were originally used by Google as an input into deciding page ranking, but this is no longer the case. Google's various algorithm upgrades, ranging from Panda to Hummingbird in October 2013, have shifted the importance more towards natural content and away from backend manipulation. Meta descriptions however often appear in search results as the snippet below the page title. Because of this, you should think of your meta description as if it’s an ad for the page.

However, search engines are not obliged to use the meta descriptions you have added unless they really do reflect the page’s content correctly. If they don’t, the engines will simply use snippets from the page’s content and this may not always turn out to be in your best interest, depending on which snippet it chooses.

So, make sure that your meta description accurately matches the content of the page it points to. The best way to do this is to ensure that you use the prominent words that actually appear on that page, like your headlines, bullet points, etc. Make sure it is well-crafted and keep within the recommended limit of 150-160 characters to ensure it appears as a full message.

4. Write content that is search engine friendly

Google is smart. It will figure out if your content is of good quality and whether it addresses users’ search queries. So once you have your keywords, go through the copy text on your site and check whether you have used the keywords naturally AND added value and information relating to the keywords. Your content needs to be engaging to visitors, as this helps to build up your page reputation. Google looks at average time spent by visitors to your page, so your content needs to make the visitor want to linger. But if you fill page with irrelevant content, Google will punish you. You need to maintain the relevance by ensuring your keywords are naturally sprinkled throughout the page.

5. Make your images search engine friendly

Search engines cannot “read” images, so you need to associate some text with them to help the engines read the pictures. First of all, give your images descriptive file names. If the image is a picture of a Channapatna wooden toy car, give it the file name “channapatna_wooden_toy_car.jpg” and not some filename auto-generated by the camera.

Secondly, give the image an “Alt Tag”. This is a feature available on the platform you use to build your web site. In event of the image not being displayed, the browser will display the alt tag as text in the space reserved for the image. Also, provide a description of the image. Try to use a relevant keyword in your alt tag and in the description, and keep the description short and accurate.

Finally, keep your image file sizes as low as possible so that page loading time is minimized. Google considers loading time for the page when deciding on your search rank.

6. Carefully build external links to your site

Google measures your web site reputation by the number and quality of external links to your site. But the moment you have a link from a spam site, you risk being taken off the Google directory altogether. Hence it is better to have genuine back links in limited numbers rather than vast numbers of junk links.

So, submit your website for a listing on directories you are familiar with, those pertaining to your industry or trade, perhaps a locality guide, or even wider interest directories. Provide the option for visitors to share your web pages either on social media networks like Twitter or Facebook or to add the URL to social bookmarks like Reddit. In order to earn these shares, you need to have dynamic content on your site such as news feeds, and also have useful content like blogs or white papers that are valuable enough to be shared by visitors.

7. A caveat: do not try to fool Google

There are a bunch of disingenuous techniques called “black hat SEO” which some web sites use to try to get seen as more relevant and reputable than they actually are. NEVER do this, because you stand the risk of being blacklisted completely by Google. For example, do not put keywords into your metatags that are not relevant to the particular page. Do not have gibberish text full of keywords strung together in meaningless sentences. Do not conceal keyword-stuffed text on your site in small size fonts and/or same colour as the background. These are all tricks that Google knows about and will penalise you for.

Now What? Do not expect overnight results

SEO is an extremely important part of marketing your web site. There is no quick SEO solution. Once you start doing SEO, you’ll want to monitor how your site is ranking. You will find the movement sluggish at first. It takes a couple of months for Google to notice what you have done and then move you up the rankings. On your part, keep fine-tuning your SEO and when you do reach Page 1 of search results, do give us a shout by adding a comment below.

The future of SEO

Google is always tweaking or even modifying their search algorithm. The most recent update is called Hummingbird and was rolled out in September 2013. The principles that guide the new update are mobile search, social media, and author reputation. Mobile search will have more speech inputs and hence natural language. Social media and author reputation imply that Google+ will start playing a bigger role in search rankings, and so will the presence of your website and blog on social media networks. But these are the basics of DIY SEO, and they will not change in a hurry.

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Mobile internet is a big trend we are seeing today, especially in Asia where computers are a luxury. Webware is taking mobile very seriously! Today we are announcing our first major step towards becoming a mobile-first product company.

A few days ago, our core dev team pushed our mobile upgrade live! This is a hugely important landmark that we’ve been working towards for over a year.

With the newest Webware release, here's what went mobile:

1. Three new mobile responsive themes (with more on the way)

A “responsive” website means that the page layout changes as the screen size is changed from narrow to wide and back again. Each of our new themes has been created with a smaller screen size in mind, and the ability to scale to a large screen as well, to ensure a great experience for all.

See how this page has reconfigured itself to 3 different screen sizes: 

Isn’t that cool? For those of you who already have a Webware, in order to make your site mobile-ready, you need to upgrade your theme to a responsive theme. Check them out here. It’s very easy to change themes. For a tutorial on this, click here.

This is a totally new framework that we have introduced to enable this awesome feature! For our techie users, you will want to know that we have enabled "Foundation" as the selected technology.

2. The entire checkout (payment) process

When a user is shopping on your responsive theme they will enjoy a completely mobile friendly checkout payment process. This is really important for helping your customers complete a successful transaction right from their mobile device!

3. All standard system pages 

When you create a new page in your Webware, you select from a library of page layouts and templates. All of these page layouts are now mobile friendly. Simply change the content as you wish and all changes will reformat for the tablet or mobile experience, as long as you are using one of our responsive themes. We have already seen a few customers quickly convert to the new responsive themes. Check them out with your phones!

Scott Morgan Fine Art - http://www.scottmorganfineart.com/

Tia & Tan - http://www.tia-tan.com/

With our new responsive mobile-ready designs and system pages, you can make your Webware available to anyone on any device.

From the home page all the way through to checkout, visitors can now browse and buy products on Webware websites with their computers, tablets, or mobile phones.  In this new mobile world, you can have a huge advantage over your competition.  Get started now!

View our Responsive Themes

Sign up for a free trial of Webware

Every businessperson knows the importance of marketing. As soon as you put up a signboard or print your visiting cards you have started marketing your business. But what next? And what is the best way for an online store to market itself? Here’s the no-jargon quick guide to online marketing. We’ll get into more depth on each of the marketing channels in future posts.

In the infographic below which we call the “Wheel of Marketing,” we’ve covered all the different marketing channels that most online stores rely on. If you are just starting out, do not try to do all of these at the same time. Start with one or two channels, try different tactics within each channel so you get to understand how they work and eventually where you should put in more of your time and money. Talking of money, when you are starting out, that is the one thing that is usually in short supply. So we are going to talk about the marketing channels in order of increasing spend levels.

Zero-money marketing

Yes it is possible to market your online store for zero or near zero money. Here are some ways to grow traffic to your site without busting the bank.

On your home page, feature the hot selling items. Offer a time-bound discount with a coupon code. Run a festival-specific special deal. Announce these on your home page and change the announcements frequently.

First, start building your mailing list. You can start with your friends and relatives, people you meet at parties, ex-colleagues and classmates. Collect visiting cards and enter the details in a spreadsheet. Ask people visiting your site to register for new product announcements and special deals. Create emails for each group separately so that they do not feel you are spamming them. There are great online services for email marketing such as MailChimp, which can make very professional looking emails.  But don’t overdo mails because everyone is fed up of getting spam email. Once a month is okay. Ensure that everyone you are emailing has opted-in to receive your emails. And always give the person a chance to unsubscribe and stop receiving your mails.

This is a huge and always changing area but the basics are easy. When you build your site, create unique and accurate page titles for all pages, not just the home page. For each page you should have a “description meta tag” which is a few sentences describing the content of the page in more detail than the title. Submit your online store URL to search engines such as Google. You can do that on the Google website “Submit your content” section.

These two go hand in hand. This blog post is an example of content. You can also write a blog or make a video that is related to your store but which has useful information or opinions. For example if you sell masala and spices on your store, your content could be recipes using the same. And the video could show how to make a particular dish. You could even shoot it with your mobile phone camera. Once you have some content to share, you can get social by creating a Facebook page for your online store and tweeting on Twitter. The important thing is to be chatty and social. People have to find you interesting enough to follow you. Talk about your products and how they fit in with peoples’ lives, without blatantly advertising your products at all times.

Little-Money Marketing

It’s like having salesmen who only get paid when they make a sale. In this case, the salesmen are other sites belonging to an affiliate network. You sign up and place an ad on these sites. The ads result in traffic and some of that traffic results in sales. You pay a commission if there is a sale, and if not, you don’t pay anything. Here’s a list and ranking of the top 10 affiliate marketing companies in the US and in Canada.

Little-to-more-money marketing

Results are very good here, but you need to commit and spend some money. You can start with Google AdWords which places your ads next to related search results, or on partner sites where the content is relevant to your ads. The good thing is that you only pay when someone clicks on your ad and therefore visits your site. You can use text ads which show up on both search results and partner websites. Experiment with different ad texts and determine which ones work best for you. Alternatively, you can use image ads, which only show up on partner sites, but here you are able to use an alluring visual along with ad copy. You can also advertise on Facebook to people interested in your product categories or fitting a demographic specification that you provide. These kinds of ads are considered highly targeted and even if they do not result in a store visit, your brand awareness starts building.

It takes a little patience as well as practice to start getting results from any of these tactics. But, once you start getting the hang of it, you will find them working wonders to your bottom line.

So set the “Wheel of Marketing” in motion and increase the movement of traffic to your site! We’d love to hear what your experiences with marketing have been like. And, so would our readers.  

So many people out there have exciting business ideas, but they have one thing in common – they are new to doing business online. And naturally there are a lot of questions about how to get started. So if you have ever thought about going online with your own store but were not sure how to do it, read on.

1.Think about what you want to sell online.

It can be anything. Your business idea could be conventional or unusual ... Maybe your wife makes a very good masala powder for some dish, or you can source T shirts with funky designs real cheap, or you already have an offline business that you want to take online. Whatever your business idea, think about how you are going to source the goods and how you are going to deliver them to your customers.  

2. Give your business a name and register the name for your website.

So if your name is FunkyTees, then you might want to register www.funkytees.in. There aremany companies who do this for you online. Big Rock, net4india, and GoDaddy are some of the popular domain registering firms.  Just ensure that domain name is registered in your name and your email ID is associated with the domain for renewals and cancelations.

3. Build your online store.

This is the fun part. With the right online store builder platform, you can do it in as little as a day. The new e-commerce platforms make it possible for a businessperson with basic computer and internet skills to actually build an online store, stock it with merchandise, and dress it up just like a designer would. You can have sections in the store such as different sections for men, women, and children. Decide which products go into which section. Then upload pictures of the products you want to sell, give them names and short descriptions, decide on the pricing and your store is almost ready. You can play around with themes to change the look of your store until you find one that you really like.

Of course, you can also get a web developer to build you an online store from scratch, but not only will you need to make a large upfront investement, you will also likely to forever be dependent on the developer to make even the smallest changes on your website. An online store builder is not only quicker and easier, it gives you complete control of your online store.

4. Sign up for your payment gateway.

Don't get scared by the big words. You need a payment gateway to be able to accept payment from your customers via credit or debit card or online bank transfer. Your store builder or e-commerce platform will help you get your account set up and walk you through the application process. You will need some standard documents for the “Know Your Customer” (KYC) submission.

5. Sign up with a courier company for delivery of the goods you sell.

Initially you may want to try out a few different courier and delivery services. You can start with Indian Post and send your packages by parcel post. If your customer is in a hurry, then use a courier company like Blue Dart or First Flight. After your business picks up, do a deal to get bulk rates from these couriers.

These are the basics, but that's really all there is to get your feet wet in the fast growing world of e-commerce. You can be in business in as little as one week. After starting your shop, move on to the next stage of business development. Run some marketing campaigns to grow the business, develop new products, analyse who your customers are and serve their needs well.  As the number of people visiting your store builds up, so will your orders.

But the first step is to get started. So what are you waiting for? Get started today!