Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:

• Small Business Marketing Reference Guide – Be forewarned, this is a ton of information but it’s a great way to get familiar with all the various topics related to small biz marketing.
• 17 Tactics to Inspire Customer Love and Get New Business
• Build Your Brand So People Will Refer You
• Be Ready for Holiday E-Commerce All Year Long
• 10 Steps for Creating a Fantastic Facebook Fan Page
• Bring Back Customers with Online Loyalty Programs
• Make Sure You’ve Checked Domain Availability Before You Brand Your Business
• 20 Ways To Get Links to Your Website

Photo by Alykat

In surfing the sites of some small businesses, I’ve noticed a trend I feel compelled to comment on. Some e-tailers are running ads on their blogs and websites! While it may be tempting to rake in a little bit of cash, this is why it’s a terrible idea:

1. It looks less professional
If you want wholesale buyers, press and customers to take you seriously your online presence needs to be professional. Ads for casinos and pharmaceuticals don’t help with that image.

Think about the larger more successful businesses you want to emulate some day. Would they ever run Adsense on their websites?

2. It’s not aesthetically pleasing
The balance of text to images and use of layout are important parts of web design. When you have a bunch of animated gifs or Adsense text running amuck on the page it’s just unpleasant to look at. The eye wants to go in too many directions and it’s impossible to focus on what you’re trying to sell.

3. You need 100% share of the voice
Your website or blog should be 100% dedicated to YOUR brand. I am not against cross-promoting with a hand-picked partner, but there is no reason to let competitors or unrelated businesses promote on your website or blog.

Note: I am only making this recommendation for e-tailers. If you make your money selling products you should lose the ads. If you are a blogger, and you make your money only by writing content, it’s much more understandable to have ads. You aren’t actually trying to sell anything and you have to make your money with ads.

Last week I wrote a little series about email marketing. So today’s post is a little follow up on that same subject. Below are 3 ways to get a better response rate from customers that subscribe to your newsletter. While reading this post, keep in mind that a lot of the advice here can be applied to anything you design for customers to see including blogs, websites, product pages, etc.

1. Make it Skimmable
People are busy and no one wants to read a novel in the inbox. Make your newsletter easy to skim by using bold and bullet points. You’ll notice I do a lot on this right here on my blog. Here’s a visual of what I mean:

I can glance at the newsletter on the right and immediately know what’s going on. I have to actually read the one on the left. Which one would you rather get in your inbox?

2. Make your Calls to Action Attention Grabbing
If you want customers to actually do something you have to be very clear about it. That’s why I suggest you make your calls to action such as shop, vote, enter our contest, etc. very attention grabbing. See my visual example below.

You need not make your design look exactly like my examples. I am just trying to illustrate how use of color and font size and bullets can change the way your customers react to your emails. You can see the email on the right makes the action the user should take very visible. The email on the left does a good job of making the content digestable but doesn’t call as much attention to the thing you want the customer to actually do.

3. Do NOT rely on images
Many email clients block images by default, including gmail which is a very popular email client. This means that if your newsletter’s copy is inside of images those customers may not ever see it. Make sure your newsletter design looks great both with and without your images.

Bonus Points: Don’t rely on style sheets. Some email clients (like gmail) only display inline styles. This means an email message that relies on a stylesheet will not look as you intended for customers that use gmail or clients like it. Make sure when you design new email templates that you test your design in a variety of email clients.

Whether you’re designing a brand new website or making some cosmetic changes to your existing one, it’s important to make sure your website’s going to look nice to ALL of your visitors. You could install every browser under the sun, and buy a Mac and a PC and another computer that’ll run Linux. That would certainly allow you to test every environment. But frankly, that sounds like a lot of hassle.

The easy way to make sure your site looks great to everyone who sees it is Browser Shots. This cool tool will let you request screen shots of your website in a large variety of browsers and operating systems. Neat!

It takes so much work to drive customers to your website, it’s a shame to lose them once they arrive because you’re not ready for them. The advantage to selling online is that you can have a 24 hour a day, 365 day a year business. To truly reap the benefits of this, here are a few pitfalls to avoid.

Out of Stock
Keeping stock levels constant can be tricky but it’s an important part of keeping customers happy. You don’t want to run out of a popular item and have customers go looking for it elsewhere with your competition.

To avoid going out of stock in the first place, make sure you’re staying on top of inventory levels. If something is selling especially well make sure you have a lot of it on hand. If you know a media placement is going out that’s going to talk about a particular product make sure you have a lot of that item in stock.

If you do run out, the second best thing to do is give customers a link they can click to request notification when the item is back in stock. You may even want to consider offering the customers who asked for stock notification a discount to complete their purchase when the item is back in stock.

Empty Product Categories
Make sure that if you claim to sell something that you do actually sell it. It can be very frustrating for customers to click links to product categories and find there is nothing actually there. It detracts from customer confidence and the overall customer experience.

Those empty product categories are also bringing irrelevant traffic to your website, making your conversion rate seem lower, not to mention introducing your brand to new people in a disappointing way.

Gone Fishin’
For the small business owner, this can be a tough one to avoid. Sometimes we go on vacation and we aren’t around to fulfill orders or answer customer emails. The bad news is that this costs you sales. A big bummer since you’re probably on vacation spending money. If you are a one person operation it might seem like putting a “closed for business” sign up is your only option. One alternative is getting a trusted friend or relative to business-sit while you are away.

If you’re only leaving for a short time, like a long weekend, you may not even need to put your business on hold. Simply update all your shipping turn around times on your website to account for your absence and have an auto-responder email set up that replies to customer emails letting them know their email will be replied to on the date of your return.

Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:

• Best Kept Secrets to Finding New Wholesale Buyers
• 13 Ways to Get Facebook Fans to Take Action
• What to do When Someone Writes a Dishonest Review About Your Business
• How to Choose Effective Website Photos and Images Ed. Note: This is hands down my favorite read this week. It nicely follows up my article about using models. This article is part 3 of a 3 part series about working with images. Check out parts 1 and 2 also.
• Sources for Free Stock Photos and Icons
• 10 Google Services to Help Your Ecommerce Business
• 31 Conversion Optimization Tips
• Giving New Life to Old Inventory

I have 100s of different business, ecommerce and marketing websites in my feed reader and I read all of their posts, and often the posts they link to.  About 99% of what I read is stuff I already know, total fluff. But the 1% that is news, that stuff is golden and it changes the way I do things with my online retail site. On average I find 3 good ideas each month, 3 things I want to try out for my business.

In the last year I probably changed at least 30 things about my website and business, maybe more. Each thing makes my business incrementally better and it’s all ideas I gleaned over time and study. Sometimes the thing I need to do isn’t even directly suggested by the article I’ve read, but I extrapolate a valuable idea any way.

The aim of this blog is to deliver my readers the best stuff, my good ideas. Good ideas I’ve seen on other websites. Good ideas other people have given me.  I am trying to strike a balance between stuff more experienced e-tailers would find interesting and stuff novices can benefit from too.

I also recently started offering my services as a consultant to e-tailers. As part of the launch, I’m offering a feature I call 3 for 30. For $30.00 I’ll email you a list of 3 customized suggestions for your online retail business. My suggestions can range from changes to your product photos, to adding some pertinent information I think your customers are missing. I’ll pick the 3 things I think you’ll benefit from the most and suggest those items. It’s a good way to get a quick sample of the kind of help I can provide, for a very low fee. If you’re interested in taking me up on this offer, drop me a line.

If you want to stick to figuring it out on your own as you go along, that’s cool too. Just sit back and stay tuned to this channel.

Once you’ve built a list of subscribers and organized them into a proper list management tool, you’ll want to make sure they actually read your newsletter and stay subscribed. Here are a few ways to make that happen:

Have a Good Newsletter
Duh, right? The best way to keep subscribers from checking out is by having a compelling newsletter. Make sure you’re delivering content customers want to see. If you’re only sending marketing messages you may have a lower rate of retention for your list, particularly if you email very frequently.

Here are a few ways to keep customers from clicking unsubscribe:

• Ongoing drawing for a free gift for newsletter subscribers
• Exclusive discounts/product previews/sales (most effective if you don’t email super frequently, otherwise it’s just non-stop sales pitches which gets old quickly)
• Entertaining content (share a funny link, picture or video in your newsletter, make sure it’s relevant to your brand)
• Informative content (share a useful piece of information with customers. For example a cosmetics company could share make up application tips.)

Have A Variety of Subscription Options
Smart retailers today are customizing the newsletter experience. When you unsubscribe from a department store newsletter for example, they may invite you to keep receiving offers that are only relevant to you (e.g. only receive offers for ladies apparel).

As a smaller business, you may not need to segment your newsletter based on content, but you may want to consider offering frequency options. If you send a weekly newsletter, allow customers the option to switch to a monthly format. This may keep some people reading your newsletter if they’re considering unsubscribing.

Another way to retain customers that unsubscribe is by inviting them to engage on another platform like Twitter or Facebook. Provide links to your social media accounts on the unsubscribe page so customers see there’s another way to keep in touch.

Homework Assignment: Subscribe to other e-tailers newsletters. Sign up to receive newsletters from the businesses you hope to emulate and take note of their offers, email frequency, subject lines, etc. If you have a competitor who you know is much bigger and more powerful than you are, learn from their strategies and apply those lessons to your own email marketing efforts.

Read Part 1 of this series: How to Get Subscribers
Read Part 2 of this series: How to Manage Your Mailing List

Once you’ve got some subscribers, you’re going to want to start sending messages out to your mailing list. Before you hit send here are a few things you’ll want to do.

Get a List Management Tool
Do not simply import your newsletter subscribers into your Gmail or Outlook and expect to email them from there. You need proper list management software for a few reasons. Proper list management software will have the following features:

• Automatically handle unsubscribers and bounces
• Allow you to see how your newsletter is performing (how many people opened it, how many people clicked links in your newsletter and which links did they click)
• All you to compare historic newsletter performance (did your March newsletter get more opens/clicks than May?)

All of these features are indispensible. You need to elegantly manage your subcribers and have access to solid analytical data in order to improve your email marketing program.

There are tons of options out there when it comes to chosing a list managing program. PHPlist is free but requires some technical savvy. Constant Contact, Mail Chimp and Vertical Response are  very popular and used by tons of internet businesses. I use Your Mailing List Provider, they’re affordable and provide the data I mentioned above. You can use any program you like, as long as it provides the features I mentioned above.

Have an Unsubscribe LINK
Do NOT send any marketing emails out unless they have an unsubscribe link. It’s the law and it’s just plain rude to go without it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been forced to report small businesses as spam because they put me on their list with no way to unsubscribe. If enough users mark your email as spam your email will stop being delivered altogether. Avoid this problem and make sure customers can unsubscribe.

Bonus Points: Have an email address dedicated to your list like whatsnew@domain.com. Only use this email address to send out newsletters. Use a different email address for answering customer emails, wholesale and press inquiries, etc.

In case you were wondering, it’s actually not sufficient to tell customers to email you to ask to be taken off your list. You’re making them go through too many steps and that “report spam” button is far fewer clicks. This is why you need a single click that lets people unsubscribe immediately.

(While we’re on the subject of unsubscribes, do not ever put someone on your mailing list unless they signed up for it. Never assume it is okay to send newsletters to customers without their permission.)

Read Part 1 of this series: How to Get Subscribers
Read Part 3 of this series: Keeping Subscribers Happy

Having a newsletter for your business is really a no-brainer. It’s an easy way to lure back past customers. It’s also a good way to nudge prospects on the fence about making a purchase. Before you can start leveraging this powerful marketing tool, you’re going to need subscribers. Here’s how to get some:

Make Signing Up Easy
If you go to events/shows have a way for passersby to get on your list. Let them put their email address on paper on a clip board or give them a laptop in your booth that they can use to sign up.

On your website, have a sign up form for your newsletter on EVERY page of your website, ideally above the fold. Do not bother with a link to sign up, put the actual sign up form on each page. (You’ll see I’ve done this on the top right side of this website.)

You should also include a checkbox on your check out system that lets users get on your mailing list. It’s even okay to have the box pre-checked, just make sure the customer can uncheck it if they don’t want to receive email from you.  (And, of course make sure you respect their wishes.)

It’s also important to not make your sign up form too elaborate. Let them just fill in their email address and click submit. If you ask for too much information (name, location, birthday, etc.) you may wind up with far fewer subscribers.

Let ‘em Know What to Expect
How often do you send your newsletter? No one wants to be bombarded with daily sales emails so make sure you tell customers how often they can expect to hear from you. A simple “Sign up for our Weekly Specials” headline or “Receive our Monthly Newsletter” line gives that information.

Give ‘em Incentive
We all get tons of email so make sure you give people a reason to sign up for your newsletter. What will they get if they sign up? Will they gain access to exclusive discounts? Will they be registered to win a free gift? Will they get useful information?

Make the benefits of your newsletter clear and concise for customers so they understand why they should sign up. On my retail website our newsletter sign up box says “Deals Discounts Giveaways & News”.

Note: To really get the most out of email marketing, it is easier if you have your own website. Sites like Etsy and Artfire don’t allow you to add customers to your list at check out or put a newsletter sign up box on your pages. You can read more about why I recommend you get your own website here. In the meantime, one thing you can do is provide a link to sign up for your list in your order confirmation emails that get sent to customers when they make a purchase.

No list of your own yet? No problem. Smaller Box has email marketing opportunities for indie designers. Visit this page for details.

Read Part 2 of this series: Managing Your Mailing List
Read Part 3 of this series: Keeping Subscribers Happy