The team at Timberline would like to extend a thank you to all those that worked with us though the holiday season! We know everyone was busy as people do more and more of their seasonal shopping online. In the doldrums after the holiday rush it is almost hard to remember how much we were all scrambling to make sure everyone was prepared to accommodate their respective clients. Perhaps this relatively slow time would be best used reflecting on the past month or so. Time for some new years resolutions! Maybe less sweets, more gym time, or throwing that pack of smokes in the garbage? That’s up to you and your version of Jiminy Cricket. What I would like to suggest is a bit different. I am encouraging you and your co-workers to take a look at the past year of business with emphasis on the end of the year. What went right? What went wrong? What would you have liked to have that you just didn’t get going? There is no time like the present to get started and your friends at Timberline are standing by to help you reach your goals! So drop us a line at marketing@tli2.com and we can start the progress train a’rolling. Make that wish list and let’s work together to ensure that we not only have as good of a year as last, but we increase productivity, efficiency and income! We hope that everyone had a happy, safe and fun holiday season and we look forward to working with all of you throughout the upcoming year!
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Is Your Email Branding Consistent?
You work hard on your image on your website, but if you’re like many people, the branding on your emails may have slipped by unnoticed. Email design is important, it sets the tone. Your emails don’t just convey your company’s message they also help to build engagement with your brand. We now offer an Email Overhaul package where we’ll review all your outgoing email templates (abandon cart, wishlist notification, etc.) and will unify the branding for you to ensure that they are consistent and match your website look and feel. Email Andy today to find out more details on the Email Overhaul package and get started.
Thinking about a site refresh?
Read how long-time customer SERRV did just that- and the impressive results that followed!
We’re proud to announce the recent launch of the new shopping site for our long-time customer, SERRV, a $9.5 million fair trade network connecting thousands of artisans in developing countries with customers and volunteers across the United States.
A Timberline partner since 2005, SERRV has created a website to support and supplement their catalog sales of unique gift, home decor, clothing, jewelry and other items made by artisans and farmers in Asia, Latin America, Africa and Europe. Serena Sato, Directory of Marketing at SERRV, says the process of working with Timberline and CommerceV3 to revamp their website was a pleasure from start to finish.
“I can’t say enough good things about Timberline and Deb Brisson [Timberline’s VP of Software Development],” Sato says. “She’s done an amazing job, and our new site is a huge improvement over the old one. Deb helped us problem solve, take advantage of opportunities, and even agreed to be on call when issues came up. We could not have done it without her, for sure!”
The SERRV redesign features several improvements to the site, Sato says: “We now have more flexibility in how to categorize products. For instance, we can use one, two or three tiers, which makes it much easier to navigate. Also, CommerceV3 cross-sell options now allow us to use that field to focus on our artisan stories, which we’re really excited about. Images are now nearly double the old size, which makes a huge difference in the look and feel. The new redirects have also helped us a lot, as has the ability to do top and side navigation. And we love the zoom, which highlights the hand-crafted quality of our products. Though we’re a non-profit, it’s really important that our customers see us not just as a charity site, but as a purveyor of high-quality products. In so many ways, the capacity of the new site has helped us display our products and our story in a manageable, flattering format.”
Sato reports excellent results for the new SERRV site when comparing sales from October 2010 to October 2011, including a 22 percent increase in individual consumer order sizes; a 30 percent increase in individual consumer purchases; a jump to just under 50 percent of orders coming in via the new web site, a slight increase over 2010; and a 12 percent increase in wholesale store orders, with nearly 60 percent of those orders coming in via the new web site.
Deb Brisson adds, “Working with Serena and the rest of the SERRV team was fantastic. They are all very smart, driven and focused on producing a high quality shopping experience. Due to the complexity of their pricing and business rules, we spent a lot of time up front determining how to structure their data so that each of their different customer types would see the appropriate display, product and pricing information. We did this by heavily utilizing the CommerceV3 customer group and promotion tools, a very robust strength of the platform.”
If you’re ready to take your online sales to the next level, find out how to get started with CommerceV3 or Timberline, please contact me, Sharon Rogers.
Get Out of the Import/Export Business
Many of the businesses we work with here at Timberline Interactive (and CommerceV3) use email service providers (ESP) like Bronto to send out their email marketing campaigns. The last thing any time-strapped creative director or marketing manager needs is to spend time exporting subscribers from their store, and uploading them to an ESP… And rightly so: their time is better spent creating better emails, more refined target segments, and everything else that makes their email marketing channel a success.
So we cut out the middleman, and leveraged Bronto’s sophisticated API to be able to directly import new subscribers from anywhere on your CommerceV3 site: checkout, catalog request pages, “my account” member signup forms, and (of course) your standard email newsletter signup. Any information collected on the pages can be brought over to the subscriber’s record in Bronto, allowing you to take advantage of Bronto’s segmentation capabilities by geotargeting, signup source and whatever other relevant segments you might conjure up (now that you’re not spending all of your time exporting/importing csv files).
Ready to streamline your website’s integration with your ESP? If you’re on the CommerceV3 platform and working with Bronto or another ESP, contact us here at Timberline Interactive, and we’ll discuss what what your integration options are.
Socialize your Email Marketing Campaigns
Socialize your Emails Part 1
by Kathie Ross
Rarely do you see an email marketing campaign these days without social links. They have become synonymous with email campaigns. There are many different ways to use them and to promote them. Some of which are:
- Join Us and Like Us links
- Share with your friends links
- The big trade – offering something for liking them on Facebook, etc ( I will talk about this in a later blog post)
- Community involvement with a twist ( I will talk about this in a later blog post)
The most common way is to use the social icons as ways to get customers to “Like” or “Join” the social community. This allows companies to communicate with their email recipients in many different ways. It will also help the company to go more viral in their approach thus getting more followers, more email sign ups and ultimately more purchases. Over time I have collected some of my favorite designs. It’s fun to see the style that each company puts into their individual email – the branding of their social programs.
Following are some of my favorites:
Join/Like:
Social Email Marketing
Socialize Email Campaigns
Facebook and Twitter in Email
Icon for promoting Facebook in your Emails
Social Icons for Email
SWYN (Share with Your Network) Share icons allow companies to get their email recipients to pass on their email campaigns to anyone in their Facebook, Twitter or other networks:
Socialize your Email with Share Buttons
Socialize Your Email with Facebook Buttons
The examples above are great ways to get started with socializing your email. In the next blog post I will follow up with some further examples of getting new followers.
Adwords Position Reporting
It’s no secret that those paid search ads at the top of google search results get the most attention and the most clicks. Eye-tracking heatmap studies have long identified this “golden triangle” as the area where online shoppers focus.
If you’ve ever wondered just how big a difference there is between and average AdWords position in the top yellow box (typically 1-3) or down right side (usually 4 or more), now you can find out. The new segmenting option in AdWords allows you quantify just how big a difference placement can make. Top vs. Side stats can be readily accessed inside AdWords:
Select the Campaign, Ad groups, Ads or Keywords tab
Click the Segment button in the toolbar above your data
Select Top vs. side from the drop-down – you’ll see the results in rows beneath each of your ads.
We’ve seen top ad placement clickthrough rates over 10 times greater than right side placements. Suddenly, that slightly higher bid seems a lot more appealing, doesn’t it? It’s certainly worth examining your data, and looking at ways to optimize your bidding and take advantage of top placements. With a significant lift in clickthroughs, those higher bids may pay for themselves before you know it.
Optimize email for mobile devices
According to a report from Knotice over 20% of retail email is opened on a mobile device. This number has certainly grown since Q4 2010. Are your emails optimized for a mobile device? According to Kathie Ross of Email Energetics you should follow these tips in the design of your email:
1. Include pre-header text at the top that is clickable
2. Include link to mobile version which is a text version.
3. Top navigation should be text links
4. Use alt text on images
Presenting, by Popular Demand, the Tracking Parameter
We often get questions about tracking parameters. Specifically, people wonder about what tracking parameters are, how to add them to urls and how to use the parameters provided by Google Analytics.
First, just a quick overview on why you should care about tracking parameters. The bottom line is that without tracking parameters, many campaigns are very difficult to track. Tracking parameters allow you to tell your reporting engine how to show tracking data in reports. They allow you to give the data in your reports the names that make sense to you, and to group the data in your reports into units that make sense and are actionable.
Like many things in the internet space, understanding tracking parameters is simple once you know it, but sometimes you need someon to give you a foundation of understanding before you can internalize the
knowledge. That’s what I’ll try to do here.
To start, you’ll want some vocabulary. Tracking parameters are a specific kind of query string parameter. A query string is a part of a url. A url is the tech term for a web address.
Now, let’s dive in…
These are all urls:
http://www.commerceV3.com/
http://www.commerceV3.com/index.php
http://www.commerceV3.com/index.php?q=dayparting
http://www.commerceV3.com/index.php?q=dayparting&sort=asc
http://www.commerceV3.com/index.php?utm_campaign=email&utm_source=NovemberRemail&utm_content=full
Of these 5 urls the last three have query strings. A query string starts with a question mark and contains one or more name-value pairs. The name
value pairs have a parameter and a value. Let’s look at these in more depth.
http://www.commerceV3.com/index.php?q=dayparting
http://www.commerceV3.com/index.php?q=dayparting&sort=asc
The first url above has one parameter, “q”, whose value is “dayparting”. The second url has two
parameters, “q” and “sort” with values “dayparting” and “asc” respectively. You will notice that the name value pairs are separated by ampersands.
Generally speaking, query strings pass specific information to the hosting server (the server that has the file that you are requesting with your web browser) so that the hosting server can deliver specific
information back to you .
In the case of Google Analytics, tracking parameters are added to the url to talk to javascript on your webpages that in turn talk to Google so that your Google Analytics can understand the visit better and report on it in a useful way.
There are 5 parameters used in Google Analytics.
Utm_medium
Utm_campaign
Utm_source
Utm_term
Utm_content
I won’t go into what these parameters correspond to in GA reporting (let me know if you want that and I’ll do it in another post.)
How to add Google tracking parameters to your urls.
The key is that each url should have only one question mark. The question mark says to the server “ my query string parameters start here”. Having more than one question mark can cause errors.
If your url does not have a query string parameter you need to add one at the end of the url and then put your name value pairs.
could become
http://www.commercev3.com/?utm_campaign=email&utm_content=banner
http://www.commercev3.com/blog/eric/
could become
http://www.commercev3.com/ blog/eric/?utm_campaign=email&utm_content=banner
If your url already has a question mark, you need only to add your tracking parameters as name value pairs.
You start with an ampersand (to say, “here is another parameter”) and keep going.
http://www.commercev3.com/?q=workshops
could become
http://www.commercev3.com/?q=workshops&utm_campaign=email&utm_content=banner
http://www.commercev3.com/blog/eric/?sortorder=asc
could become
http://www.commercev3.com/ blog/eric/? sortorder=asc
&utm_campaign=email&utm_content=banner
Did you see how the two examples I gave end in a slash, “/”? Adding the query string is easy in
these cases, you can just add it at the end.
However, not all urls do. What do you do if yours doesn’t? Unfortunately it depends on the case and I’ll need to explain why.
To understand the slashes in urls, it’s helpful to remember that urls are requests to a webserver for a file. The slashes give a path to the information you are requesting. They indicate which folder (aka directory) the file lives in. There is a master folder called the root for your domain name that holds all the other folders. It can be found either by typing in the domain name
or by typing the domain name with a trailing slash
Beyond that, all the other folders are specified using slashes for each level you go in.
http://www.commercev3.com/blog/eric/
specifies that I am looking for a file called within a folder called “eric” within a folder called “blog” which is found at the root.
No file is specified in that request. That’s OK. Most servers have a default file they will serve if no file is specified. However, sometimes there is a file request. This is the last thing you need to know (I think).
File names end with a suffix. A file suffix starts with a period. Common file suffixes for web files are
.htm
.html
.php
.asp
.aspx
If your url ends with a file name, you can simply add the question mark and your tracking parameters.
http://www.commercev3.com/index.html
could become
http://www.commercev3.com/index.html?utm_campaign=email&utm_content=banner
Generally speaking the order of your parameters does not matter as long as you are following the proper syntax of starting your query string with a question mark and separating your name value pairs with
ampersands.
Here are a couple of common examples of using Google Analytics tracking parameters to get reports on common campaigns:
Ad Center CPC Destination URLS:
Email:
Cyber Monday Sets New Record
ComScore announced that 2010′s Cyber Monday grew 16% from a year ago, tallying record-breaking online sales of over $1 billion.
While Black Friday is still the shopping event of the bricks-and-mortar world, Cyber Monday — the first Monday after Thanksgiving — has increasingly become a major event for online retailers, who prime the pump with major promotions, sales, email campaigns and advertising blitzes.
“Cyber Monday was a historic day for e-commerce as we saw daily spending surpass $1 billion for the first time,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “The online holiday shopping season has clearly gotten off to a very strong start, which is welcome news. At the same time, it’s important to note that some of the early strength in consumer spending is almost certainly the result of retailers’ heavier-than-normal promotional and discounting activity at this early point in the season. So, while we anticipate that there will be more billion-dollar spending days ahead as we get deeper into the season, only time will tell if overall consumer online spending remains at the elevated levels we’ve seen thus far.”
Of the total 16% gain, comScore attributed most of the lift — 12% — to an increase in average order size. The remaining 4% sales growth was due to an increase in total online shoppers. Source: comScore
| 2010 Holiday Season To Date vs. Corresponding Days* in 2009 Non-Travel (Retail) Spending Excludes Auctions and Large Corporate Purchases Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore, Inc. |
|||
|
|
Millions ($) | ||
| 2009 | 2010 | Percent Change | |
| November 1 – 29 | $12,008 | $13,553 | 13% |
| Thanksgiving Day (Nov. 25) | $318 | $407 | 28% |
| Black Friday (Nov. 26) | $595 | $648 | 9% |
| Weekend (Nov. 27-28) | $805 | $886 | 10% |
| Cyber Monday (Nov. 29) | $887 | $1,028 | 16% |
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