At BigTurns, we provide the software for all businesses to easily create, send, and track their email marketing campaigns. But we don’t stop there. We have an amazing technical support department to help you every step of the way, Account Managers to make sure your campaign begins with a bang and stays successful, and a product that is very easy to use. As much as you want your business to succeed, we want to help your business succeed.  Read More

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For those of you who love to wade through the plethora of standard reports offered by Google Analytics and spend hours mulling over reams of data trying to find that elusive key metric please feel free to skip this article.

However, if like most of us you want quick access to key web analytics custom reporting data and your boss (and his boss!) are breathing down your neck then look no further than the superb blog post written by the outstanding Avinash Kaushik over at Google. Read More

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Content is the basis for all marketing online. Content creates credibility.  Credibility leads to conversion. And conversion leads to new customers. Read the 4Cs formula

The 4Cs Formula

Create Content

Good content will address your customer's needs. You need to continually create, recreate, and build content. Search engines love good content and will reward you with sending visitors to your site.
Traffic coming to your site for your content is your traffic. You own the traffic and can decide what and how to greet the visitors.
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Fifty characters could be all that stands between you and the success of your next email campaign. Why? Because 50 characters is all the space you have in a typical subject line – to catch the attention of your reader, entice them to open your email and take action. With so much at stake, marketers need a quick and proven reference tool for developing subject lines that get the desired
result: opened emails.

Let these rules be your guide.

Rule 1: Read the Newspaper

If you want to develop subject lines that result in higher open rates, pick up your local paper. Headlines usually highlight a story’s most important point with brevity, while taking the audience into consideration. Use that approach to make your subject lines short and intriguing enough to compel your subscribers toread your emails.

Subject lines should clearly state what your readers can expect from your email, what’s in it for them and what you want them to do as a result of the email. And your subject line must stand out from others in your customers’ crowded inbox in the most relevant way. Emulating the headlines from newspapers can be a good starting point in the development of subject lines.

Rule 2: Focus on the Objective

What is the objective, or end goal, of your email marketing program? In most cases your end goal is not necessarily high open rates, but rather to have subscribers take a specific and measurable
action. Determine what that one action is, and make sure your subject line will achieve your objective. For instance, if your goal is for recipients to purchase from your online store, don’t use a subject line that is informational in nature. Instead, use a clear call-to-action that emphasizes their opportunity to make a “must have” purchase.

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PayPal  recently published a survey of online transactions (or non-transactions)  and here is how we read the results:

The biggest challenge for online merchants is getting them through the eCommerce Conversion Funnel.  The funnel usually looks a little something like this:

StoreFront (Home Page)
> Catalog View
>> Product List View
>>> Product Detail View
>>>> Shopping Cart Summary**
>>>>> Check Out Form

** The Shopping Cart Summary is the page where the buyer sees a summary of the products selected, the taxes, and the shipping charges.  This is where the ABANDONMENT occurs.

We can measure and test abandonment rates to help your site reduce abandonment.  And PayPal has helped us to see what items need to be considered or tested to increase sales.

Here are our interpretations of PayPals survey:

Main reason why visitors leave the Shopping Cart Summary:
 - To gather more information like "Shipping Costs"

Main reason for abandoning:
 - Shipping Charges were too high
 - Wanted to compare prices with another website
 - Wanted to compare prices with a Bricks and Mortar store
 - Wanted to look for an online coupon
 - The preferred payment option was not available

Main Suggestion for Online Merchants
 - Provide shipping charges upfront before the checkout
 - Provide as many options for payment as possible

Shipping still seems to be the main driver for visitors to leave a website behind.  We suggest that all online merchants carefully examine their shipping policies and consider making "Shipping" a marketing function rather than an "Operational" function.

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The year 2010 should be used to optimize your existing eCommerce Platform. Many Online Shops I see out there have enormous potentials for improvement. Some of them can't be implemented easily, e.g. Clean URLs (URLs which just reveal their resource, but not their technology) - here you are often limited by the technology and platform you use. However, there are many things you can do in the field of technical Search Engine Optimization (SEO). For this purpose one option would be to create a whole new template to get started. You can overhaul the GUI (graphical user interface) and optimize the template for all the search engines like Google and Yahoo. What needs to be done for this can be listed quickly:
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Sure, your web store looks just great and you have a right to be proud of it. But did you ever sit with a focus group to see what problems they had with it? Did you ever have top web site designers analyze it to find its hidden flaws? Have you listened to dozens of eTailers describe in detail how they vastly improved their online sales and conversion rates just by making basic design changes that eliminated the most common web site design faux pas?

Online retailing is expected to return to double-digit growth this year, and the web merchants that enhance their web site design and usability early in the year will lead the way. The growth will be achieved by avoiding the most common web site design and usability mistakes that cause shoppers to abandon the retail sites and result in an average conversion rate of just 3%.

Here's a list of 9 common online store design mistakes:

1. The Self-Satisfaction Syndrome

It may comfort you to assume that because your web designers and staff can whip through your site without problems your customers can do so, too. Unfortunately, beauty is in the eye of the online shopper, not the web designer. You need to find out how customers really use your site. Find out how to test your site to make sure consumers can navigate it as easily as you can.Contact BigTurns for a No Obligation Free Consultation

2. Throw money at your Web Designers to fix problems.

This idea can be an excellent way to throw money away. The Internet is overturning the old adage that "You get what you pay for." Many free or low cost design and usability tools can help retailers uncover how to take their sites to the next level of performance—if they know where to find those tools and how to evaluate them. Contact BigTurns for a No Obligation Free Consultation

3. What Works in the Store Works on the Web

No, not so much. Many merchants still mistake online merchandising as an extension of in-store merchandising where the merchant simply stacks items in aisles for shoppers to see. But online merchandising must be a much more engaging and interactive experience. Contact BigTurns for a No Obligation Free Consultation

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Starting an eCommerce business is becoming easier by the day. More business owners are looking to expand their online efforts to include eCommerce and build a true online business. Unfortunately, this presents a large set of challenges, not least of which is the threat of larger, better funded competitors online.

Thankfully, the key to successful eCommerce isn’t complicated. By planning ahead and considering your goals and your audience you will greatly increase your chances of success. Here’s three simple ways to make your online shop stand out from the crowd.

Step 1) Focus on Your Best Products

Selling your entire inventory online is unnecessary and often a mistake. Instead, sell a small sub-set of your products that you think may sell well online. For each product, provide a high level of detail describing the product. Follow up with some solid advice on how to choose the correct product for you, or provide expertise and background on the origins of the product.

This way, instead of building an impersonal warehouse-style shop online, you’re providing more of a boutique, - a personal experience that actually engages the customer and answers more of their questions than other shops do. Think of a supermarket versus a boutique fashion store - one simply fulfills their function, the other assists you to make the right buying choice with passion, knowledge and a personal connection.

Make a conscious decision to be the boutique; supermarket-style online stores are everywhere. Most products can already be found online, but there’s often a lack of detail and advice regarding the product. This can become an important and trust-building point of differentiation between you and your competitors.

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When you are building an eCommerce site there are so many things to think about.  You need a website, a customer database, credit card processing, marketing, Inventory management, reporting, and the list goes on. Sometimes there are just too many things to think about. That's why it's good to have a list.  Building a "to do" list and checking it off is the best way I know how to get through the multitude of tasks when starting a new venture like an ecommerce site.

For the purpose of this article we are going to focus on the Six Page Views of a typical ecommerce shopping cart. This list is a great check list for designers and integrators looking to set up an ecommerce site.  Each one of the six views is equally important in that each page view is one stage in the conversion path or sales funnel.  If any one of the six page views is broken then you have a problem and the orders will slow or worse stop.

>> Catalog View

The catalog view is the main entrance to most shopping carts.  This is where the main categories of products,the main classifications or items being sold.  We need to be smart in our classifications in the Catalog View.  This is where your online visitors are going to start their journey browsing your product offerings. 
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When you are setting up an online store you should consider in which currency you charge your customers. Either you accept only one currency or you offer your customers the opportunity to choose from different currencies. In this article some of the of the Pros and Cons of single and multi-currency stores are discussed.

Single-currency Store

• Allow anyone around the world to purchase - but in your currency.
• The customer's bank takes care of the currency conversion.
• Are easy to set up - one payment gateway, one set of prices, one set of shipping options.

Here's an example: You set up your store on a xyz.com site. Every visitor on that URL will be shown US product prices, US shipping options, US tax codes an so on. The visitors will be charged in US dollars via the payment gateway that is assigned to the USA.

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