I finally did it! Out of complete frustration with my mailing lists, I decided to switch to MaxBulk Mailer. I really like it. It has simplified my life…. HUGE!

What I love about it is that I can preview my mail in a variety of different browsers, send both html/text emails, check my mail for spam content, and send my mail without attachments. Until now, I’ve been sending my mail as an inline html attachment, so that anyone not set up to view attachments, didn’t see my mail.
I can also take a large list and stagger it, and send out 100 every 2 minutes. Here’s the other thing that I think is very different from mailing lists… it sends an individual email to each address, instead of one blanket email to a list. It takes longer, but it runs in the background, and I believe I could schedule it if I wanted to. I have just begun using it, so I’m still learning.

I have to figure out how to handle subscribes and unsubscribes. I believe Brian from Practical Ecommerce blogged about this to me before, so I need to try to find that back in my archives.

I think that by changing to MaxBulk, more of my subscribers are seeing my mail. I would get emails daily saying that they can’t open my mail, or couldn’t see it. Lee Ann started asking her phone orders yesterday how they heard about us, and a number of them said they just saw our email for the first time today! I’d say that’s a huge success. I hope it continues. It’s a huge relief for me. Because when someones says they can’t see your mail, it’s hard to trouble shoot. And in many cases it’s user error. In most cases they just need to click a “view images” button, but that must not be obvious for all people.

ok, gotta go! The family is taking a trip to Tulsa in a few days and I have lots of errands to run to get ready. Both of my kids are in a wedding, and it should be fun!

I wish I could write and tell you my sales are booming, and I need to update order fulfullment software because I’m swamped and we just can’t keep up. We’re doing ok, nothing exciting to report…

Well, unless you consider finding a company that wholesales purple plus sized rhinestone studded fine dress suits exciting.. WHICH I’m embarrassed to tell you, I do find sort of cool. It’s hard to find plus sized purple clothes. Lee Ann is a whiz at finding products.

I also have a theory I’d like to pass on. Well, not so much a theory, as an observation I’ve made over time. It’s crucial to show them something new, even as small as a new pen… to peak interest. When I show them something REALLY expensive and beautiful, they probably won’t fly off of the shelves, but it will create interest, and make people click in off of my direct sales campaign. What it really comes down to is this… whatever you show them, on your home page or an email campaign should really take some thought. The photos should be colorful, and interesting.

I’m laughing at myself as I’m typing this.. I mean, duh, right? I’m a graphic designer! I’m always aware that strong visual can immediately move a consumer into my site. Pardon me for stating the obvious, but when you are your businesses web developer, direct marketing manager, mailing list manager. etc, etc, sometimes you want to just the the stinking email out! Or just get the product posted, I mean who cares if your supplier gave you a junky photo, it’s a photo right? NO!
This is one area that I think you can’t skimp. Web design and product photography is critical to sales on your site, just as critical as making sure the “checkout” button is  obvious. I have to think navigation through a bit more than the average consumer because my audience isn’t as web savvy as others.

What keeps customers “in” your store,  is design that is thought through carefully. Organize your product intuitively. I was on a website the other day shopping for swim suits. I left within a few minutes when I wasn’t shown complimentary items.. ie tops and bottoms. So the company goes to the trouble to show me a mix and match section, but doesn’t bother to show me which items go with each other. It isn’t simply about color with swimsuits, it’s about texture of fabric, too. I ended up buying from a site that put the exact mix and match items that work together… together! They made it REALLY simple for me.
Look at it this way… If I walked into a swim shop to buy a two piece suit, and they put the tops in the front of the store, and the bottoms in the back, you’d never think to put them together, right? You’d probably never even know there were bottoms and then you wouldn’t find what you were looking for, unless you asked. I hate asking.
It has to be easy to find your product, and find the complimentary product. I’m not claiming that I do this perfectly. I do a lot of redesigning on my store. I move things around quite a bit, and have always seen things move that haven’t when I’ve repositioned them in my store (ie showing them in a different department)

The other thing I’d encourage you to do if things aren’t moving is rethink your departments. Sometimes I worry that I have too many departments. If the average consumer spends two minutes on my site, my impulse is to show them as much product as possible in any department they click on. However, I’ve revised this thought process  to keeping my departments specific, and refining my navigation instead. I now offer my most popular sections in a navigation bar at the top of every page, that leads into a more detailed navigation from there, and a very prominent search button, and product rich in descriptions with keywords.

This is a hard one for me. And I have to set aside time to go in and work on this constantly. Product descriptions are important for a variety of reasons. Even if your navigation is lacking, good product descriptions will yield good search results for your customers. It’s also important for the search engines, and will most likely be the text that shows up under your product when it’s indexed on Google.

Another tip that I heard is that if your site offers Free Shipping, or another feature that sets you aside, put it in your product name… “Red Wool Hat FREE SHIPPING”, and here’s why: When the sites index your dynamic pages, and someone does a search for Red Wool Hat, guess what comes up for a result? “Red Wool Hat FREE SHIPPING”. If you saw that next to 10 others that didn’t, which one are you going to click on?

Now, I’m guilty of not doing that last one. I used to be good at it, but I have such an extensive product line, that I stopped doing it, simply because it was hard to put into everything. I think I need to take my own advice and refine that, because I think it helped us tremendously since we place high organically, and it’s such a competition to get the click off the engines, anything different I can do is probably a smart move.

So that’s my TO DO list this. It’s really a bunch of spring cleaning and updating. I hope some of that info is helpful. Have a good week.

Hi there. It’s Sunday morning at 7:30. Cold and overcast here in Michigan. But besides my trusty labrador the house is dead quiet and it’s just me and my coffee…. my favorite time of the day. I figure I’ve got an hour of this bliss.. tops.

Anyway, I’ve been referring to a site called Quantcast. They sent me an email, and that email has opened my eyes quite a bit. I knew our traffic was lower compared to our competitors, mostly because I don’t have the engines on. And many of them do, which, it goes without saying, drives more people into a site. I don’t like turning on the engines because even though it drives more people in, the conversions are high. I’ve blogged about this many times before.

Anyway. Quantcast gives you statistics on your site: demographics, unique visitors (in relation to your competition), it’s sort of interesting. It goes on to say that the figures are rough, get “quantified” if you want to know more. It’s similar to analytics, but analytics doesn’t tell you about your competition. It was an eye opener. And is making me rethink what my competitors are doing, and is it a better choice?

The other thing I like about Quantcast is that it gives me a similar audience section. ie. where else my demographic likes to shop. It also lets me look at all of these same statistics for any site I want. For instance, according to this, my audience likes to send ecards to each other. And I’m considering that this may be something I could do. A freebie off of our site, that would make people come in, and share our site with their friends. We’ve been aching for a way to build our mailing list, and this could be successful.
Oh, by the way… my bliss is over… one sleepy child is staring at me from the top of the stairs. : (

So, I sort of like this quantcast site. Most of it I already know due to analytics, but it’s still interesting, and worth a check for your own site. So now I’m off to figure out how difficult it would be to have ecards on our site. Any ideas on this, let me know!

Don’t you HATE it when customers call complaining they are having a problem and you can’t duplicate it? It doesn’t always happen, you may go a whole month without hearing about it. But trust me.. it’s like termites, if you actually have a customer who’s motivated enough to call, there are ten more who just abandoned their carts who didn’t bother.

So lately we’ve had customers calling and saying that when they are ready to checkout, they are getting a message saying “Your Shopping Cart is Empty”. However, Lee Ann has been running orders for those folks all week without experiencing any problems. I kept going in and couldn’t get the message myself. I couldn’t chalk it up to user error, since we got at least 5 calls inside of a week.

I called my technical support, and they said it was a Miva problem, contact them. So I was off to Miva, and checked their message board, and found some REALLY useful information about how to clean up my store, and more. I can’t believe in all the years I’ve been running my business that I’ve never done that. My shopping cart doesn’t have long wait times anymore. It was a simple fix, see My Miva store hangs periodically. Why? (This is a big problem that causes duplicate orders since people are not patient, so if you have Miva, read it!)

So back to my empty cart issue… I found nothing at Miva, however with all of my reading, it occurred to me that I had made some brilliant changes the weekend before. I had made my checkout button more obvious to my customers. I did this sort of on a whim in my massive store redesign, which I have yet to blog about, and is not yet complete. I had put a CHECKOUT option just above my RETURN TO SHOPPING button in my Shopping Cart. AND HERE IT IS…. I NEVER CHECKED IT! I’m an IDIOT.

I had pasted the wrong code into that link.
I was able to not only duplicate the problem once I realized this, but I found it in other places, too! And the reason we couldn’t duplicate it was because we use the original checkout button at the top of the page out of habit. My biggest mistake was that I didn’t test it, and I lost a lot of business because of it. I was so impressed with myself last weekend when I made what I thought were insightful changes to my store, and shopping cart. I tried to make it more user friendly. Miva 5 allows you to go in and manually changed your dynamic pages. The problem was that I made so many changes, and spent so much time making it look pretty, that I didn’t think to make sure it was put to use, that it worked.

This has happened to me before, and I didn’t learn my lesson. Test, test, test! Take my advice, and don’t lose a whole week of business because you were too busy to try the pudding, or you’ll be like me, and have to sample the crow instead!