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Where Should the Unsubscribe Link Go?

In the old days of email marketing, the general thinking was that when designing your email templates, then unsubscribe link should go at the bottom of the email, in a tiny font that blended into the background. This is because we didn't want people to get off our list, therefore we didn't want them to easily find that link.

This article will explain why we do want people to get off our list, and why the unsubscribe link should be placed front and center.

Is Retention Email Worthwhile?

No matter how good your list is, it's still bound to obey the law of entropy. Basically, in relational to email lists, this law means that the list quality will degrade over time. This is true even if you use double opt-in permission methods. This is true even if your content is stellar. This would still be true if no emails on your list went 'bad' (inactive, obsolete). The simple fact is that people change. Their interests change, and their buying habits change. So what may have appealed to them when they subscribed may no longer be appealing six months or a year later.

As their response to our emails begin to decline, it's a common email marketing tactic to send 'retention emails'. But how many is too many? What risks do we run by being persistent?

E-commerce Optimization Part 2

This is the second of two articles on optimizing e-commerce site. If you read part one, you saw the step-by-step process I took to make an ugly site much prettier, and implement a far more intuitive design. But perhaps your e-commerce site isn't as bad as this one was, you've got the basics covered off. Perhaps you're looking for the enhancements to take your site to the next level. That's what this article is for!

Designing User-Friendly Forms with CSS

In the early days of the web, forms had one single purpose: to collect information. Whether is was a registration form, a survey, a comment form, they were all the same tedious rows of input boxes that we all grew aversions to. Now however, they've evolved to be much more than simple data input. Now forms give the web functionality, turning stateless web pages into feature-rich applications. However, just having a full-featured application doesn't mean people will use it. We need to design our forms and form elements ergonomically, to ensure user adoption.

Writing Effective Web Content to Drive Traffic and Keep Visitors

It's been said time and again: content is king. So you want your website to attract millions of visitors, and you want them to return, and you want them to buy your products. Well then, you're going to have to give them what they want, and what they want is useful content that speaks to their needs.

Personalized RSS Will Change the World

I've been following RSS since it's humble beginnings. I was looking to make use of it back in version 1.0. I was curious as to who would be the final victor in the whole RSS vs. ATOM debate; which has more or less just settled itself over time, RSS being the clear winner there. I immediately recognized that RSS - while it was basically just a small application of XML - was at least a pretty cool idea. And now it seems that the rest of the world is finally catching on, with almost every large website (and many smaller sites) offering RSS feeds. But the true potential of RSS is yet far from realized.

E-commerce Optimization - Get the Most Out of Your Online Store

Do you have an e-commerce site that is underperforming? Or perhaps you're in the planning phase now for a new e-commerce site, and you want to know how to plan it right from the start. Either way you'll benefit from this case study. This is basically the story of an online apparel/sleepwear retailer, and how I was able to increase the sales volume by 400%, without any increase in traffic.

Just so we're clear, this article is not about how to get more traffic. Nor is it about search engine optimization. This is definitely not about building links. Keep in mind that for this site, these steps were already done. The were done so well in fact, that the site maintains search engine ranking positions (SERPs) between 1-3 for their particular niche of Victorian nightgowns and related searches. The site already attracted thousands of visitors per month, yet the conversion rates were staggeringly low for such targeted traffic, around 0.3%.

Homepage Optimization
Of course, one look at site showed why sales were so low. Here's how it looked:

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It was both ugly and confusing. If I was here looking to shop the collection of victorian nightgowns, where was I supposed to click? The funny thing is, even the owner of the business was confused by the homepage! Another issue was that a link to a partner site was actually larger than the link to the products section!

A quick glance at the web statistics confirmed my suspicions, showing that over 50% of visitors were abandoning the site upon arriving at the home page. So something had to be done to make it less confusing.

Here's the new look/template I designed:

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So this new template was much more organized, clean, intuitive, and professional. If I were one to buy nightgowns (for my wife), I would definitely be more likely to buy them from a site that looks like this rather than the former.

Product Page Design/Optimization
So now it was on to the product page. It was just plain sloppy. There were colors everywhere, and they clashed with each other. There were multiple font faces and sizes. The options to customize the product were all over the place. Here's how it was:

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So I reorganized it. I made the fonts consistent, the options aligned, took out the colorful boxes, and made sure all product images were consistently oval shaped. The result was much cleaner:

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Category Optimization
Then I looked at the page that displayed all the products, the 'category' page. Sadly, it was just a bunch of images. There were no titles, descriptions, really no enticement whatsoever, and no calls-to-action. Here's how it looked:

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Again, I reorganized it. I ordered the items by popularity, so that the attention would be first drawn to the item most likely to be purchased. I also included a brief description of each product, which was really just an excerpt of the main description. Finally, I included a call-to-action for each, a link that invited clicks by saying 'choose size & style'.

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Web Site Structure
Now it was time to do some general site cleanup. There was a 'closeouts' page for discontinued products. The ironic thing was that there had never been any closeouts! So you'd better believe that page was removed.

Also the pages for links, privacy statement, and contact information were seldom visited, but of course still important. But why waste valuable navigation space on unpopular links? So links to these pages were moved to the footer.

Testimonials
The testimonials page on the other hand is different. It is extremely important. The best marketing is viral marketing, the recommendations you receive for a friend, the referral with the human touch. That's the point of the testimonial page, to attempt to provide that human recommendation. So there were excerpts from testimonials placed on every main page, and a link to the testimonials page placed in the main navigation. Even if people don't click on it, the prominence of the link suggests that we have happy customers, and they're happy enough to share their experiences, therefore you'll be happy too!

Shopping Cart Optimization
Next step: the shopping cart. Where was it? There were just buttons and links randomly placed throughout the site labeled 'view order'. It was quite confusing, it didn't mention anything about placing the order! So I simply renamed all the buttons to either 'view cart' or 'checkout', and put them put everywhere except on the checkout page itself.

The cart itself was not surprisingly quite ugly:

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So I gave it a cleaner look, used more concise wording, and easier instructions:

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Conclusion
So what was the effect of these site-wide changes? Well, within a couple of weeks the visits to sub-pages had increased drastically. This means that there was less homepage abandonment, therefore people were less confused.

There were also a few more orders, but still not enough, or at least not as many as such a highly targeted niche site could be getting. The conversion was not-bad, but it should be great.

The next part to this article will explain how I got it to 'great'.

Reach out to friends for input. Extra tips helped push from not-bad to great. Part 2.

How to Get Higher Email Deliverability Rates

One of the top concerns for email marketers is of course deliverability. A difficulty that we all face is when users too quickly hit the 'report spam' button, simply because it's faster and ostensibly more reliable than unsubscribing. Sure, you may know that your email is not spam. It may very well be transactional, or even a completely personalized double opted-in message, but it simply doesn't matter. If ISPs receive enough complaints (1-3% of the list), your email gets filtered, or worse yet your domain blacklisted. Here are some of the considerations and best-practices that need to be top-of-mind in your 'report spam' avoidance strategy.