Like most shop owners, I’ve pretty much abandoned banner ads in favor of pay per click advertising. I’m a huge fan of accountability. The most interesting consulting job I’ve worked on was designing a highly complex marketing measurement system which would be able to trace the exact impact of every marketing dollar spent – and this client spent over one billion a year (that’s not a typo).
However, the niggle in the back of my mind with accountable advertising is always “but what about the brand?”. The older I get the more I realize the importance of brand, how much of an impact it has.
Here’s an interesting article on the psychology of branding, about a study which demonstrates that banner ads, despite not being noticed, can have a measurable positive impact on our perception of a brand. Fascinating!
Categories: Marketing | Date: May 29th, 2007 | Author: Mark | No Comments
Running an ecommerce site, there’s so much to do. Copy often gets thrown by the wayside, chucked up in 5 minutes with little thought. We’ve all been guilty of it. Here’s a good example of some small copy changes.
When some politicians in the US wanted to abolish the estate tax, they were getting little support from voters. What switched that around? They started calling it the “death tax”. Suddenly it became a subject people were passionate about. Death is a very emotional word which captures people, estate is, if anything, an alienating word with implications of pomp and wealth.
What “death tax” term can you use to engage your visitors, and turn them into customers?
Categories: Marketing | Date: May 24th, 2007 | Author: Mark | No Comments
So here’s a very simple teaser for my new project…
www.ecommercespot.com
Coming to a web browser near you on July 1.
Categories: General | Date: May 21st, 2007 | Author: Mark | No Comments
I just got a tip off about a new open source ecommerce solution in the works called Magneto. The details are pretty sketchy, but what they have mentioned on their blog sounds very compelling!
Check out this magneto screencast – very nice!
Categories: Shopping Carts | Date: May 17th, 2007 | Author: Mark | 2 Comments
When search engine optimizing your site, choosing the right keywords is one of the most important steps. How’s this for an interesting statistic to make you think twice:
The top 50% of searches generate 80% of the search volume while the bottom 20% of searches generate 60% of the sales! – Search Engine Journal, Rob Sullivan, 12/30/2005
Categories: Marketing | Date: May 7th, 2007 | Author: Mark | No Comments
Hopefully if you have a shop up and running you are doing a newsletter to your customers (and if not, why not?)
The problem is as always beating the spam filters. There’s obvious ones such as not using “FREE” in your text. And if you are selling Viagra, good luck to you!
I’ve been research “red flags” for spam filters. Here’s a small one that is easy to do but is a big red flag – using exclamation marks and question marks in your subject. They are big indicators of spam by a lot of spam filters.
So, if you are selling “FREE Viagra!!!???!!!” I don’t think you’re gonna make it! 
Categories: Marketing | Date: May 6th, 2007 | Author: Mark | No Comments