You’ve probably heard the news by now — Microsoft and Yahoo! are combining their search engines. Within a few months of the deal getting regulatory approval (meaning early 2010 at earliest), Yahoo! will retire its search technology and display Bing results on its sites. Unless something drastic changes between now and then, which is unlikely with Bing’s positive reception and marketing budget, the combination will have Bing answering around 28% of all search queries.
With over 4 billion combined monthly searches, Bing results will be a major source of traffic for much of the web. No longer will “But It’s Not Google” be an acceptable excuse for ignoring that potential. If you want to be sure your site taps into as much of that traffic as possible, it’s time to start paying attention to just how Bing works.
To get you started, here are a few resources for getting started with Bing SEO:
E-mail subscriptions have an expiration date. You may have offered an e-mail subscription to a newsletter or other mailing list months ago and never sent them a mail, or simply stopped mailing a list for a period of time. If it’s been too long, sending a new message is likely to result in a low open rate, high bounce rate and even spam reports from subscribers who’ve forgotten who you are. A few too many spam reports and you’ll end up on ISP blacklists the next day.
How do you keep those e-mails fresh? Send out a re-introduction mail. Remind your subscribers when and how they signed up for your list, and let them know you’re going to start sending them mail again, and what to expect. Make it easy to opt-out if the subscriber doesn’t want your messages anymore, or even start fresh and offer the option to opt-in to a new list instead.
We’re just tackling this very issue ourselves right now. We’ve been offering a “subscribe to our e-mail newsletter” checkbox on the signup form of one of our websites for the past 3 years, but haven’t sent a mail in a few months. To make sure we only have an active list of interested users, we just sent a short message out to the list letting them know we’re going to send some news their way soon, and offered a chance to unsubscribe if they’re not interested anymore.
Do you still want to hear from #SITENAME#?
Hello #FIRSTNAME#,
You signed up with #SITENAME# back on #SUBDATE# and requested our email updates. We haven’t mailed you in a while, and want to make sure you’re still interested in receiving news from us. We’ll have a great new site launching this month we want to tell you about, for example, as well as some #SITENAME# news. We don’t want to send you e-mails you don’t want, so feel free to change your mind and unsubscribe with the link below. You won’t receive another e-mail from us again.
#UNSUBSCRIBE LINK#
#SIGNATURE#
The friendly reminder is much less likely to evoke a negative reaction, and gives us the opportunity to clean up the list before sending out full-blown newsletters again.
You’ve planned and launched an effective marketing campaign that’s driving prospects to your ecommerce website. The traffic is flowing, and the prospects are finding exactly the products or services they were looking for. Your pricing is great, your site is well designed and visitors are quickly funneled towards making a purchase. You’re even starting to see the sales come in. Your job is done, right?
If you’re not making use of one or more trust marks, your conversion rates may be much lower than they could be. A study released this month by Harris Interactive showed that almost half of consumers have left the checkout process or abandoned an online shopping cart due to security fears. There’s still an inherent mistrust in most people of the ecommerce process. Stories of identity theft and leaked credit card information on the news have contributed to an increased awareness of data security online.
The web browser padlock icon indicating a secure connection is the first place your prospective customers look to verify the security of your site, but increasingly, they’re also looking for the presence of trust marks. Trust marks are small graphics, often linked to additional information, that show a 3rd party has verified the privacy, identity or security of the website the visitor is shopping on.
You may have seen the logos of BBBOnline, Mcafee or Verisign often displayed by large retailers during the checkout process. Trust marks like these reassure visitors that their information is secure. A separate study conducted by independent research firm TNS indicated that 80% of shoppers understand the purpose trust marks serve, and that 53% indicate the presence of a seal would have prevented their termination of an ecommerce transaction.
With statistics like these, it’s worth looking into whether a trust mark would increase the conversion rate on your site. Below is a compilation of some of the top trust marks available for verifying privacy, identity and security. While some marks can cost thousands of dollars a year to license for a high volume ecommerce store, most vendors allow a trial period in which you can try out the mark at no cost. If you don’t see a big enough conversion rate increase to justify the price, you can cancel without purchasing. Others are available at a low enough fee even a new store can afford to add a mark to their site.
You advertise online, but not all your sales involve a customer reaching the final page of your website checkout process. If you take sales by phone or mail order, you want to track these sales back to the advertising that generated them as well. Many of our users aren’t aware we can track those sales [...]
Google recently began publishing videos on their YouTube channels which are designed to help advertisers make better use of Google’s various advertising services. If you want to learn to maximize the profit from your AdWords advertising, and learn a few tidbits that you can’t find reading Help Center documentation, you must watch these five videos.
Introduction [...]
