Breakthrough Ecommerce

A while back, I put together a list of 10 free tools to enable you to build an online business for free. (Actually, it ended up being 21, but who’s counting.)

Anyway, I already have another 10 that I just have to tell you about, that are not only free but actually really very useful.

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Ecommerce, Freebies, Online Marketing | 2 Comments »

photo credit: ttarasiuk

Email is still the killer online marketing tactic, however, making sure your carefully crafted email gets through to the intended recipient, let alone read, is a real obstacle course.

Undelivered and bounced emails are the bane of most online marketers, and the reasons emails bounce can be endless and labyrinthine.

Given that email is still one of the most effective online marketing tools, it is well worth fine-tuning everything about your email campaigns to get the maximum return you can. (See Email is Still King of Online Marketing.)

Recently a fellow Goouze and Linkedin contact, Kathryn Millette, Internet Manager at R. G. Barry Corporation, asked why her latest email was triggering high spam scores and being bounced.

A quick look at Kathy’s email immediately revealed some obvious, but all too common problems. Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Email Marketing | No Comments »

And the Top Five Things To Do First

Ninety nine percent of online advertising doesn’t work. Two more reports highlight the appalling click thru rates generated by online ads. One from Adtech and another from ABI.

photo credit: Pascale PirateChickan

After a study of more than 10 billion banner inquiries across Europe, Adtech found the average click-through rate fluctuates between 0.11% and 0.19%.

That’s a 99% failure rate for attracting visitors to your site. Any sporting coach with a 99% failure rate would quickly find themselves looking for a different line of work.

So why do so many people keep wasting huge amounts of money on something that is a total failure: In a word: HOPE.

But as a good friend of mine always used to say, “Hope is a t*#d with a cherry on top.”

For those of you who are ready to abandon hope and try the world of effective marketing then enter here. Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Ecommerce, Online Advertising | No Comments »

photo credit: kimberlyfaye

More than 90 percent of all online marketers and businesses are leaving vast amounts of money and business on the table by ignoring conversion rate optimisation.

A recent survey by Alterian found that less than half of the marketers they surveyed use any sort of analytics.

Of those that do, many find it hard to interpret the data, and less than 10% regard analytics as a vital tool in improving their business results.

Alarming as the results are, they are not surprising. Optimising conversion rates and using analytics go hand in hand. Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Conversion Rates, Ecommerce, Online Marketing, Web Analytics | No Comments »

photo credit: saguayo

I could have easily come up with a 1001 tips, but that might have been too much to digest in one sitting. As I say on my main site, most online businesses are suffering from”The Death of a Thousand Cuts“. With conversion rates till stuck at around 2.0 percent, for the vast majority of online businesses, there is still plenty of work to do. So, in no particular order here are are the first 101 tips to boost your online results: Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Conversion Rates | 1 Comment »

How the Online Giant Makes a Classic “Noobie” Conversion Faux Pas.

The other day I rediscovered the Google Analytics blog . A great read and one I instantly wanted to add to my RSS feed list.

However, for the life of me I couldn’t find the friendly orange RSS button. See screenshot. No matter how hard you look, you won’t find it.

“What?” I thought. “What’s going on? Surely not?”

Eventually I found it after scrolling down the page and finding the universal orange button below the fold.

“Below the fold? Is anyone still making this mistake?”

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Calls To Action | No Comments »