The Twitter Train of Social Ecommerce

All aboard! If you aren’t twittering yet, you’d better start thinking about how to integrate Twitter into your business soon. I think this one is here to stay. Dell has already proven that Twitter works for them, after producing over $1M on sale alerts and now offering exclusive deals to their 11,000+ followers.

Sure, Dell is a big name brand… but Twitter is a level playing field. Just as people sign up for your email newsletters today, they can start following you on Twitter too. But here’s the big difference — consumers like to stay in control. As soon as they turn over their email address, they lose that control. With Twitter, consumers stay in total control with the "follow" button, and they can choose to dump you (ok, "not follow") anytime they want.

Here is an example from Yahoo! merchant WineGlobe.com, an online wine retailer:

And it gets better. The open nature of the Twitter platform allows others to build cool applications, opening the door for you to create Twitter Coupons to begin your social media marketing campaigns, right now. The best part? The cost is your time, for now at least.

We would love to hear your thoughts and experiences with Twitter as a social ecommerce channel, so please share your comments with the Yahoo! merchant community.

Special thanks to @shawnafennell and @ecommerce for calling out these cool new tools, re-tweets and all. If you couldn’t tell already, this got me excited!

Tweet you later.

Michael Ober
Yahoo! Small Business
Follow me on Twitter

Email Works

Today’s Y!Store blog is yet another guest column by long-time Yahoo! Store owner and marketer Rob Snell of Snell Brothers, located in sleepy Starkville, Mississippi. Rob is a retailer who blogs about Yahoo! Store, speaks at search conferences about Yahoo! Store, and is the author of Yahoo! Store: Starting a Yahoo! Business For Dummies. Rob is somewhat nervous about his upcoming trip to rattlesnake country with his brother and friends to capture audio and video content for one of their Yahoo! Stores, Gun Dog Supply, because he’ll be the only one without a gun.

Howdy! A while back, I emailed my good buddy, Paul Boisvert, Senior Product Manager on the Yahoo! Store team, and I was bragging. Two days earlier I had launched one of the best email promotions of my entire career, and I was feeling my oats. Just thinking out loud, I reviewed all the things that worked and announced all my new email marketing takeaways.

Paul said "Give it up for the blog," so here it is…

Email works. In this episode, I’m going to open the books and share some real $$$ numbers from the email marketing behind several real Yahoo! Stores. To keep me out of trouble, I will not reveal who owns the stores, what they sell, or their domains, to protect their proprietary information so I can show you the nitty gritty.

Old Marketing Chestnut: Acquiring a new customer is seven times more expensive than selling something else to an existing customer.

The power of email marketing was never lost on my momma. She knew how effective it was to touch base with your customers every so often to remind them that you sell what they need to make their lives better. She was packing every box by hand and knew that the next order might be the difference between making payroll this week or not! Sending out that weekly email newsletter back in 1999 was a royal pain, but I knew better than to let the week slip by without shaking the tree.

I’m completely sold. I’ve been marketing via email for more than 10 years now, whether it’s newsletters on a weekly basis, auto-responders mailing prospects over the buying cycle, or highly segmented customer targeting. I tend to go with what works best with the least amount of effort with different approaches on different projects. Email works.

Here’s what I was bragging to Paul about: I had worked pretty late the night before. I woke up when the phone rang. My client had just finished inventory, discounted the products online, and sent me the information I needed to build the email. “Can it go out before noon?” That’s less than an hour!

I rolled out of bed, grabbed a Diet Coke and in less than 45 minutes I wrote the copy, tweaked the product descriptions and headlines, built the HTML page, published the store, updated my customer list, and hit the SEND button. Whew!

Anxiously, I watched the merchant order notifications come in all afternoon. We finished the day with more than 350 orders and close to 200 orders the next day. Holy moly! That one email generated more revenue than the entire first year our company was in business. Email works.

If you want to make money, your email marketing needs to be both relevant and compelling. Relevancy means your products, offer, and even your writing style are targeted to the right audience. Compelling means your offer is interesting enough to get folks to open up that email, click on through to your Yahoo! Store, and buy something.

Offer good while supplies last

I think the offer is the most important component of a successful email marketing campaign. I used to think that sending something — anything — on a regular basis was good enough, but my friend Craig Paddock has finally convinced me: It’s the offer!

Just because an email is relevant to a customer, doesn’t mean that it’s compelling. We need to make them an offer they can’t refuse! How can you do that? Offer them a deal! Like what?

• Use loss leaders to get folks’ attention! Sell stuff at or below cost to motivate shoppers to browse your store. You’ll sell products other than what you feature in the email. I just like to shake the tree to get more traffic to my Yahoo! Stores.
• Liquidate some overstocked inventory. Manufacturers love to sell stuff by the pallet. You can actually do your suppliers the favor of taking their entire obsolete inventory off their hands. It’s amazing what you can get if you just ask.
• Free shipping offers work wonders, too. With media mail, it’s easier to send books and videos cheaply though the mail. We use this as a customer acquisition tool.
• Coupons work, but they can be dangerous. Be careful! Don’t train your customers to wait for a coupon each week.

Once you figure out what your offer(s) are going to be, then you can write the rest of your email. The hard part’s done!

Let’s talk about me

I think relevancy is second most important factor of effective email marketing.

On my bigger stores I divide my customers into four or five separate buckets based upon what products folks buy. Then I pick products for each group and send 5 different emails. The more specific the bucket is, the more confident I am that the folks getting the emails will be interested in what I have to say.

I use the TopRight.com email segmenting tool developed by my friend, Ron Pereira. I import new customers from a Yahoo! Store data export. I filter my list and define my buckets in his segmenting tool, and finally I push my now-segmented email list to a top-shelf email service provider, where I build, send the email, and track the results.

Now we’re targeting the right folks, but we send them something really compelling to cut through all the clutter in their INBOX.

Write effective subject lines

The only goal of the subject line is to get folks to open your email. Here are some tips on how I write subjects:

• Make sure the subject line actually says what the email is about: The Offer!
• Use popular manufacturers’ names in your subject line
• Insert your customers’ first names in the subject
• What’s the deal? Show the percentage off in the subject

Also, maximize the sender/from field to get more customers to open your emails. Emails from a person look less like advertising than emails from YourCompanyHere.com. Personally, I use my name, followed by my 1-800-number and my domain.

Keep it real

Here are some ideas on making your body copy more effective:

• Increase the sense of urgency by telling folks how many emails you just sent out to get those competitive juices flowing. "I just sent out 49,365 notes to other folks just like you. We do NOT have enough inventory for everyone, so please hurry if you think this deal is for you."
• Increase conversions by throwing in free shipping or other deal makers.
• If you’re having a killer price, make folks buy in with a larger minimum order to receive better pricing. Increase your average order size when you give away margin so those killer deals won’t hurt so much.
• Authenticity is so important. Write your email message like you would write to a friend using a normal, conversational style. Leave the marketing lingo for the corporate folk.
• Sign your name on your emails. I hate getting impersonal emails from the
  “YourDomainHere.com Marketing Team.”

Email works. It’s so important that I believe you need to do it yourself for it to be done right. One of my favorite retailers just quit outsourcing his emails. He now actually hand crafts his weekly emails with a personal touch, relevant content, and tons of background information on the products he sells. I may never ever read YOUR newsletter, but I read his newsletter every time it hits my INBOX to see what he’s gonna say next.

Email by the numbers

The purpose of email marketing is to generate repeat sales. How will you ever know if the time and energy and expense is worth it unless you track your email campaigns? Fortunately for all of us Yahoo! Store owners, Yahoo! Web Analytics makes creating and tracking campaigns easy. You just add a bit of tracking code to the end of the URLs in your email, and Y!WA shows you how effective (or not) your emails are. Also, whatever service you use to send emails should have some tracking as well.

But what numbers do I look at?

• The goal of the subject line is to get folks to open and read your email. The metric I use to track that is Open Rate, or the percentage of opened emails compared to the total sent.
• The primary goal of the email itself is to get folks to click the link and go to your Yahoo! Store to the offer page. The metric I use to track that is Unique Clicks, or the percentage of unique visitors who click a link to the total number of emails sent.
• The primary goal of the offer page is to get folks to give you money. I track total revenue and revenue per email.

Top Right stats

• 49,362 sent
• 11,510 opened
• 23.3% open rate
• 4,583 uniques clicked (9% of total sent)
• $92.73 average order size
• $25,038.53 campaign
• 270 orders
• 51-cents revenue per email sent
• .005% conversion rate (of emails sent)

Yahoo! Web Analytics campaign

• 4,097 clicks
• 1,966 unique visitors
• 657 returns
• 13.18% bounce rate
• $18,562.35 campaign sales
• 200 orders
• 4.88% conversion rate (of visits to site)

By product / Yahoo! Store stats

590 orders with $44,380 in revenue for products in email, but these were also featured on the store so orders overlap…

Sometimes the numbers don’t add up. That’s why I track with multiple methods to make sure I can attribute all the credit to the marketing method that got the job done!

Your bucket list

Email works, but segmenting email works better! In one of our stores I doubled the effectiveness of my weekly promotional emails by segmenting my customer lists by interest. On other projects, sometimes I’m a bit lazy and send a generic email blast.

For example, in my Mom’s dog store, I can safely assume that most of her customers have a dog and would be interested in dog training collars. But exactly what kind of dogs do they have? And what activities do they like to do with their dogs? There’s a big difference between a guy like my baby brother (13 dogs and a Ford F-350 pick-up truck), a serious breeder / show dog competitor, and a guy like me with a mutt for a pet. When you send the same generic email to all three types of dog owners, fewer will open it, read it, click though, and buy.

Want another example? Say you sell licensed college sports apparel. Segmenting your customer list is a no-brainer. For example, filter all the customers who bought something containing "Mississippi State" or "MState" or "MSU & Bulldogs" in the product NAME field and you know you have a list of Mississippi State Bulldogs fans. Now, just send these folks emails about new Mississippi State Bulldogs merchandise — products they would be specifically interested in — and you’ll get more traffic and sales.

Don’t drill too deep, though. There’s definitely a point of diminishing returns. You just have to decide how much work you’re willing to put in on each bucket.

So how do you segment your customer list? It depends. Some Yahoo! Stores’ lists are easier to segment than others because product names often contain keywords that indicate the right customer bucket.

• Have 1,000 customers on your list? You might just send a weekly newsletter with specials and info on new products.
• Have 10,000 customer emails on your list? You could probably bucket your list into two or three distinct groups of customers.
• Have 100,000 names? Divide that list into 10-12 segments and still get a pretty good bang for the buck.

Today I covered how our company has used email marketing as an extremely cost-effective way to generate repeat business for our Yahoo! Stores and clients. Last summer, I did a webinar with Ron Pereira of Topright.com covering similar information. I uploaded the slides here (no audio though): Yahoo! Store Case Study: How I got an $826,221.62 sales increase.

Look — I don’t consider myself an email marketing expert by any means. I’m a merchant with a Yahoo! Store, just like you. Since 1997, I’ve found several things that have worked well for many different Yahoo! Stores to make more money online. The more info I share, the more folks share with me, so if you’ve got some good stuff drop me a line sometime.

Rob Snell
Guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business

Rob Snell Went to Vegas and Gave Us His PubCon Slides

Today’s Y! Store blog is another guest column by long-time Yahoo! Store owner and marketer Rob Snell of Snell Brothers, located in Starkville, Mississippi. Rob is a retailer who blogs about Yahoo! Store, speaks at search conferences about Yahoo! Store, and is the author of the almost three year-old book on Yahoo! Store: Starting a Yahoo! Business For Dummies that is still somewhat current. Rob is recovering from the frenzy of the Festivus shopping season in an undisclosed location somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line.

"My marketing consultant went to Las Vegas, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt."

Howdy! I would say I’m just back from Vegas, but PubCon was last year! PubCon in Las Vegas is the show of the year for me. I dare say it’s the best Internet marketing conference because of who speaks, what they say, how much they give away, and who attends. I love to "network" with some of the smartest retailers and Internet marketers on the planet, and being a speaker gets me on the guest list for some of the really cool parties, too!

As promised, here is my full presentation with 77 PowerPoint slides. This year we have audio, and I hope you enjoy my new theme song, too!

If you’d rather read it than listen to it, take a gander at an expanded transcription of my PubCon PowerPoint slides with additional info.

Here are some highlights:

• Skip to Slide 6 for Tip #1. You might want to skip three minutes on my marketing background and life story.

• One change in our company philosophy increased our conversion rate almost instantly by 20%. What did we do? We told folks what to buy.

• Buyer’s Guides work! With buyer’s guides we have had a 50% increase in conversions when buyer’s guide pages were used as entry pages. When folks would come into our site from a search engine organically, if they come in on the buyer’s guide page, they are 50% more likely to convert. For example, here’s our dog training collars buyer’s guide.

• Write unique product descriptions. It is good for your customers to show that you are an expert and you know what you are doing, and The Google loves unique product descriptions.

• Write one new paragraph for every $10 in item price. Now I just made that up. Write what makes sense to you, but that is a good rule of thumb for creating content. You say, "Gosh. That is a $600 product. You mean I have to write 60 paragraphs about the dang Garmin Astro?" Yep.

• Play 20 questions with every single product. Start at the top with your best selling products and work your way down. Ask yourself what customers have in their mind when they are looking to buy something. Customers want to know if this product is going to work for them. I literally have over 200 questions that I can ask about any product.

• Capture killer content in any which way you can. Like I said, I lock my brother up in a room and pull it out of him. Record everything. Audio. Video. Still pictures. I mean, everything. When I don’t want to carry a professional digital camera, I have a little FLIP (video) camera over here I carry everywhere I go. I can get my brother to jabber on about some product about why this manufacturer should do this, blah, blah, blah and I have great info for the Yahoo! Store.

• Blog to build content and attract links. I do a much better job of this as an e-commerce consultant and a speaker than I do with the dog stuff or our other stores. We take email questions that my brother has answered, his content, and we stick it on the Web. I got over 1,000 pages in a Word document from a year’s worth of Steve’s sent emails.

• Make your suppliers link to you. I finally have everybody in the company used to the fact that when we buy something from somebody, they are going to link to us. Or else! Linking to us is almost a condition for doing business with us.

• Romance your suppliers for additional links and free content. Example: Steve took a supplier out bird hunting on one of his fancy Texas quail leases. He gets to be good buddies with folks he needs to have a good relationship with and we ended up getting a link out of it, which is really nice.

• Add keyword modifiers to page text. I have over 600 modifiers that I have identified that generate revenue for different businesses, and I use those where they make sense in the text on the Web page. Ask me later. I’ve got some good secrets that I can’t share over the microphone on how to do.

• Survey your customers. One of the best things we ever did was install 4Q, the free customer survey software, on our website. What 4Q does is it asks your customers four questions. "What are you here to do? Did you accomplish it? How satisfied were you with the website, and why?"

Why I heart PubCon the way I do

PubCon is always hard on my ever-present notebook. I always fill up that little black book with takeaways or ideas generated from presentations. Speakers at PubCon tend to give away real-world, actionable advice. I know it’s going to be a good show when there are multiple sessions where I can’t make up my mind which class to attend. PubCon is the opposite of the worst kind of conferences or trade shows where the sessions are bought and paid for, and the speakers pitch you all day for their company’s products and services. Personally, I’d rather sit at home and watch Vince of ShamWow infomercial fame.

I get to speak at PubCon, too! For me, it’s a chance to give back a little to the search marketing community that I’ve learned so much from over the past 12 years. The high caliber of the other speakers makes the pressure to perform really intense. My friends make fun of me for over-thinking my speech. Instead of partying and going to all the sessions, I always seem to get stuck in my room tweaking my slides the day before my session.

And I tend to spill my guts, too. Sometimes I give away too much! I figure people spend a lot of money going to conferences, and I want to make sure they get their money’s worth for the whole show from my 20 minutes in the spotlight. One thing I always tell myself is that no matter what I give away, at least the good stuff is available only to the folks who spent a couple thousand bucks or so and showed up for my panel. They may archive my PowerPoint, but all the really good stuff is hidden in the stories between the slides.

Well, not anymore…

Keep capturing killer content!

I get somewhat obsessive about getting my retailers to capture content, and this blog post is a pretty good example of what I recommend fellow retailers do all the time. You have so much product info in your retail brain. Get it out! How? When you’re talking about stuff your customers are interested in, you need to record it, whether video or audio, and then get someone to transcribe it. Edit the transcription and insert relevant links. Finally, insert that keyword rich text in your Yahoo! Store where it makes sense, like in the CAPTION fields of relevant products. If it makes sense, edit some video footage together to make a little demo for your Yahoo! Store.

In the spirit of taking my own advice, this year I taped my session at PubCon mainly so I could see what I really ended up saying. I’ve got a pretty good idea what I’m going to talk about, but I always throw stuff in I didn’t plan on sharing! Doh! I ripped the audio, sent it to a guy who transcribes stuff for me and 3 hours later I had a 10 page Word document. Did I really say all that?

Wrapping things up, I hope you enjoyed the info, and your feedback is always appreciated, so please post comments or drop me a line. Before I put all this together, I got the blessing of PubCon owner and WebmasterWorld founder, Brett Tabke, so this post is authorized and official and all that. I don’t get paid to say this, but if you want to make more money, I suggest you attend the next show, PubCon South in Austin, TX, March 11-13, 2009. Your competitors will be there…

Rob Snell
Guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business

Making the move to a multi-channel model

I recently had the opportunity to speak on a forum panel at the National Jeweler Network (NJN) Online Retail Forum in New York City during the massive JA Show. Yikes, there was a lot of bling in that building! Even more eye-catching was the audience mix — I’m talking generations of independent jewelers. Grandparents, children, and grandchildren all sitting next to each other learning about e-commerce, with one common interest: How could they change the way they operate an “old school” business not just to maintain their local market share, but more importantly, to survive price-driven competition on the Web?

It’s not an easy question to answer. To thrive, these businesses need to adopt a true multi-channel model. They need to sell their individual value-add and to clearly articulate that value-add online and in-store. Competition online in the jewelry segment is very much price-driven, which is very different from the in-store experience. So, how do you reconcile an online price versus an in-store price? Sell YOUR value. Articulate the online experience versus the in-store experience and be honest that your cost of sale in-store carries a much higher overhead than it does online.

The relationship becomes true multi-channel. Those “cost only” shoppers that walk into your store with a website printout of three other jewelers can be directed to your website for a competitive sale. But, if they want to buy in-store after getting touchy/feely with the goods and being educated by you, they’re going to pay a premium for that benefit (and maybe get the benefit of some extras they wouldn’t receive online, such as free trade-ups or cleanings).

There was a lot of talk about “multi-channel,” “email marketing,” and “SEO.” It was buzzword bingo for many of the sessions. But it struck me that these businesses already have their “multi-channel” and “email marketing” tickets punched!

Think about it… we’re talking jewelers here. These businesses could request the contact info and email address of every customer that walks in the door, then give the customer something in return. How about an email reminder for a loved one’s birthday, their anniversary, Mother’s Day, Christmas, or Valentine’s Day? (Did I miss any?). They can then combine this information with the customer’s purchase history and send a reminder including a purchase recommendation that can be completed online or with an “in-store pick-up” option. That’s multi-channel, and a service husbands, sons, and daughters everywhere would love to have!

In fact, I’m going to send this blog post to my favorite spot for diamond jewelry in Boston and tell Eric to get it going! Not to mention the fact that he needs to e-commerce enable his own website as a Yahoo! Store. And maybe you can think of a way to apply these same ideas to your business? If so, we’d love to hear them.

Mike Ober
Yahoo! Small Business