I often talk about email marketing, but I realized I never actually discuss what makes for the best newsletter content for an ecommerce brand. So today’s post is about ideas for your newsletter content. Although all of the ideas below can be useful for a newsletter, you may not want to use them all at once. Your customers don’t want to read an essay, so make sure no matter what you do, you keep things relatively short and sweet. Here are some content ideas to try:

Promotional Content
This is where you tell customers about things like sales, contests,  or share coupon codes. You can also share other promotional content like information about special fund raising efforts or customer loyalty programs, for example.

The goal with this type of content is to encourage immediate sales.

New Products
Your biggest fans are interested in your latest offerings, so if you’ve launched a new product, a newsletter is a great way to spread the word. I recommend including an image of the new product or products right in the newsletter, but make sure you also include descriptive copy, since many email clients block images.

The goal with this content is to keep your customers in the loop, and also encourage some immediate sales.

Behind the Scenes
Maybe you want to give fans a little peak into the lives of the people that run the company. Tread carefully with this type of content because you want to share content that’s both interesting and not too deeply personal.  Don’t tell fans about your miscarriage or new AA chip. Keep things light.

You might talk about:
- a recent trip you took that inspired your creativity
- a new production technique you’ve been experimenting with
- a funny story that inspired a new product

At Ex-Boyfriend, we sometimes talk about the animals we foster for our local animal rescue. Many of our customers are animal lovers, and enjoy seeing the latest pictures of our foster puppies and kittens.

Be careful not to let this type of content get too wordy, your best bet is to write the details in a blog post and then send your customers there for the details. That way you’re not invading their inbox with a novel, but you’re giving them a chance to read more if they’d like.

The goal with this content is to increase brand affinity. It makes your brand seem more personal and relatable. Fans like to buy from people, not faceless companies.

Brand News
This is where you talk about events you might be attending like a craft show or convention. You can also talk about new stores that might be carrying your products, a gallery show you have coming up, a new return policy you’ve instituted. Anything like that.

The goal here is just to keep customers up to date on what’s going on with your company.

Entertainment/Information
A newsletter with something fun or useful is always more appealing than a newsletter that’s just trying to sell you stuff. If you sell baby clothing, maybe your customers would appreciate a link to a funny baby video. If you sell tea, maybe you’d want to share a recipe customers can make using your tea.

The goal here is to keep your newsletter fun to read and discourage unsubscribes.

Customer Feedback
A newsletter is a perfect place to solicit feedback from fans. You can send them to a survey, ask them for fan photos, or encourage them to drop by your online suggestion box.

The goal with this type of content is to get a first hand report on what your customers are thinking.

Bonus content suggestion: Always include links to your social media profiles in your newsletter.  Fans who get the newsletter are plenty likely to connect with you on Facebook or Twitter. Having them do so is a perfect opportunity to allow them to keep up with your brand between newsletters.

Bonus tip: Subscribe to your competitors’ newsletters. You may get some good ideas while seeing what they’re up to.

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:

• I Want More Sales Dang It! – thoughts on why making your current transactions more lucrative is preferable to a boost in sales volume
• John Straw on how SEO is changing
• Remove Barriers To Buyer Anxiety
• Are You Paying Too Much for Free Shipping?
• How to Optimize Your Site For Search – a beginner friendly guide
• The Psychology of Wording Your Discounts
• 404 Page Best Practices
• Three Ways to Beat Writer’s Block
• 3 Common Reasons Contests Fail – my guest post on Craft MBA

Back in May I wrote about affiliate programs, and maybe some of you have decided to start one. Great! The one thing you do have to keep in mind with affiliate programs is that not everyone plays by the rules. Some affiliates will try to get commission on a sale they did not generate for you. A common way to do this is with a tactic called cookie stuffing.

How Does Cookie Stuffing Work?
To understand cookie stuffing, it’s important to understand how affiliate programs work. In a perfect world, it might go something like this:

1. I write a blog post about Awesome Marketer’s new ebook.

2. You read my post and learn all about this new ebook.

3. You click my link to Awesome Marketer’s new ebook and buy the book. When you click a cookie is set on your computer indicating that you clicked from my site to Awesome Marketer’s site.

4. I get a commission because you discovered Awesome Marketer’s new ebook via my blog. We know I earned the commission because the cookie was set when you clicked from my blog to Awesome Marketer’s site.

Now enter cookie stuffing: In this scenario, I know Awesome Marketer wrote a new ebook and has an affiliate program. I sign up for Awesome Marketer’s affiliate program. I then write a script on my website that drops a cookie on your computer any time you visit my blog, saying you clicked from my site to Awesome Marketer’s site. It does not matter if I ever write about Awesome Marketer’s ebook. All I need to do is get you to come to my website and I can make it look like I referred you to Awesome Marketer.

Now imagine you read an article on my site about widgets. My cookie stuffing script drops a cookie on your site and you never know the difference because it’s all behind the scenes. The next day you google “new ebooks by Awesome Marketer” and then go over the Awesome Marketer’s site and buy their ebook. I get a commission, even though I did not send you to Awesome Marketer.

A Common Cookie Stuffing Scenario
Most likely, what you’ll see are coupon code websites joining your affiliate program. They then set up their site to cookie stuff for your site any time web surfers visit their site. Imagine Customer A is shopping at WalMart. She googles WalMart coupon to see if she can find a discount. Cookiestuffingcoupons.com comes up on Google with “Save 10% at Walmart.com”. Customer A clicks that link and goes to the Cookiestuffingcoupons.com’s website. A bunch of cookies get stuffed on Customer A’s machine, and she has no idea. She uses her coupon at WalMart and goes on with her day.

A month later Customer A googles “Silver Swan Pendant”. Your website comes up and she buys your pendant. You are now paying a commission to cookiestuffingcoupons.com because  a month ago they stuffed a cookie onto Customer A’s machine. The coupon site did not send you this customer, Google did, but they’ve manipulated your affiliate software into believing otherwise.

To Catch a Theif
If you really want to know where your sales are coming from, you cannot take the affiliate program’s word for it. You need to get into the guts of your users’ behavior. Personally I rely on two tracking methods to determine the source of sales:

1. Cookies
When a visitor comes to my ecomm website we set a cookie that stores their referring URL.

2. IP Tracking
We store our visitors’ IP addresses and keep a log of all the referring URLs and pages visited that are associated with the visitor’s IP.

When we get an order that’s from our affiliate program, our order system shows us all the referring information from that customer based on cookies and IP address. If the affiliate progam’s URL is not listed, we know something is up. Usually we’ll see something like a customer who placed an order after googling “cute tshirts” and find that cookiestuffingcoupons.com is claiming credit for the sale in our affiliate program. We’ll see no referring behavior from that site and see all referring behavior from Google, so we know the referral is fraudulent and we want to reject the commission.

Imagine you could lower your production costs. What would you do with the additional revenue?

Would you lower your product pricing? Would you lower your shipping pricing? Would you offer more valuable coupons and promotions to your fans? Would you keep the additional revenue as profit? Would you reinvest the revenue in some other way?

How do you look for ways to reduce your production and materials costs? What do you hope to do with the additional savings?

Congrats to Vivian! She won a free copy of the new ebook, 45 Contests. If you didn’t win a copy, you can still buy one, and you’ll want to do so by Friday at 11:59 pm EST! Here’s why:

Order your copy of 45 Contests and receive a $15 credit towards any smallerbox.net product or service.

Use your credit towards a consultation, 3 for 30, advertising with our co-op websites, advertising on our mailing lists. Simply order your book and then drop me a line to let me know how you’d like to use your credit.

Extra Special Bonus Offer: Order your copy of 45 Contests by Thursday at 11:59 pm EST and join ishopindie.com or cutique.com by Thursday, and you’ll receive an additional $15 off your co-op membership! (Bonus offer applies to monthly, quarterly and 6 month memberships ONLY.)

Ordered your book last week? Don’t worry, you can still take advantage of this offer. Just shoot me an email.

Last week Craft MBA wrote an article about making it easy for customers to give you money. This is a subject I talk about a lot over here because it can make a very big difference in your profitability. A lot of us get stuck in the mindset that our customers are just like us, therefore they want what we want. They’re indie like us, they have Etsy accounts like us, they grew up with the internet like us, etc.

We Are Not Our Customers
The truth is they aren’t just like us. They don’t know your website well, they may not be computer-savvy. They’re rushed and tired and usually multi-tasking. They don’t want to read a paragraph of instructions on how to place an order. They don’t want to create an account or call customer service. They want a hassle-free experience on a user-friendly, professional-looking website. If you don’t have that to offer, they’re going to the competition.

Asking customers to email you to get off your mailing list may be easiest for you. Selling on Etsy may be cheapest for you. Having a shopping cart that requires a login may be most convenient for you. None of this matters because you aren’t the customer. If you want to make money, all that matters is what your customers find easy, convenient and appealing.

Testing Beats Asking
If you want to improve your customer experience on your website, don’t rely on customer surveys! You may get some valuable feedback from customer surveys, but anything you get is going to be skewed and not give you a full picture of your lost revenue. Here’s why:

The people who already bought from you slogged through your possibly awful ecommerce system or website. They don’t represent the people who didn’t buy from you. These are the people who bothered to suffer through your account creation process. These are the people who already had an Etsy account. These are the people who went to the trouble of emailing you to apply a coupon code. These people are exceptionally patient. These people loved your items so much that they put up with a bad user experience. These are the people who are computer-savvy enough to make their way through your problematic website.

Those people represent the 100 people who placed an order this year. They don’t represent the thousands of people who left your website in disgust. If you’re content with your current sales figures, keep on keeping on. If you want to sell more, start testing.

That means implementing usability improvements on your site and testing to see if it improves your conversion rate. Perform an A/B split test. Send half your website traffic to the old version of your site and half the traffic to the “improved” version. See which version gets more conversions. Tests will allow you to see a truly objective survey of what works and what does not.

You Can’t Run a Report on Sales You Didn’t Get
Never assume your system is fine as is. Yes, you might be getting some business now, but you have no way of knowing how much business you’re losing unless you’re testing out usability improvements and constantly looking for ways to make things easier for your customers on your website.

Some sales are not an indicator that everything is fine as is. The only way to truly know is by studying ecommerce best practices and testing them.

Get Smart
If you don’t know what the best practices are, it’s time to get educated. I discuss them a lot here on Smaller Box. Every week I link articles on best practices. Start following some of the websites I suggest. It’s where I learn a lot of great stuff and get ideas for improving my website and increasing sales. Having a profitable ecommerce site is not a destination, it’s a journey. The web is always changing and it’s important to be adaptable and informed so you can change with it.

Note: Don’t forget about this week’s special offer for Creative Entreprenuers. Deal expires Friday!