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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How the Right Title Tags Can Improve the Performance of Your Website

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.