So if you're looking for new buttons, here are some absolutely free ones that I made for sharing. No payment required, no link back needed (though it's appreciated if you want!). If you use them, leave a comment so others can take a look, if you feel like it. Regardless...enjoy!

Each ZIP file contains the original Adobe Photoshop .PSD file, "Buy Now" and "Add to Cart" versions of the buttons, and a blank button for you to add your own text. Several buttons are provided in multiple colors.

Button 1

Button one is a dark gray button with yellow text. It has a slight 3D effect that actually works a little better on circular buttons, but isn't bad at all on this one. If you're sticking to a monochromatic theme, this adds a bit of color without being overwhelming.

Download Button 1

Button 2

Button two is a shiny "Web 2.0" button with a nice shine, in several bright colors to complement many sites.

Download Button 2

Button 3

Button three is also a shiny one, but has a nice touch of a faint diagonal stripe to it. I also made it in several different colors.

Download Button 3

Button 4

Button four has a faded drop-shadow and a circular area for an icon. It's shown here with a shopping-cart icon, but could be replaced with other graphics as desired.

Download Button 4

Button 5

Button five has a glassy feel, but is in the shape of a heart instead of a normal button shape. Linda Bustos and Brian Eisenberg have discussed unusual shapes for buttons in other places, so here's a non-traditional shape in a few colors.

Download Button 5

However, if you're actually trying to SELL something, or to drive traffic through search engines, or both, it's incredibly beneficial to take a look at beefing up the content on your site's product pages.

But HOW do you add more content?

Manufacturer's Description

Most e-commerce sites start with the manufacturer's description. There's nothing wrong with using this, in most cases, but you don't want it to be the only content on the page. The truth of the matter is that many of your competitors will have the same product and the same copy on their pages, too. So if you include the manufacturer's description, take one of two approaches:

1. Label it as such: Include a section of your product page specifically for the "manufacturer's description" and label it with that phrase so that customers know what they are reading. Include your own description as well, and keep them separate, so that people can easily see what you wrote versus what the manufacturer wrote. See the following screenshot from Amazon (UK) who clearly distinguishes between the two descriptions.
   

   Manufacturer's Description on Amazon

2. Rewrite it: If you don't want to label it as such, make sure to do a thorough job rewriting the text so that it doesn't appear to search engines to be the same content as found on other sites.

Your Own Description

Much better than canned text is a hand-written and thoughtful description of the product you're selling, along with a convincing argument for its purchase. This is the time to list not only the features of the product, but to detail how it can be used and what its benefits are. Most of the time, the manufacturer's description doesn't do a good job of selling, so here's your chance to really woo your customers.

Something to note about implementation: if you're going to include separate descriptions for your own copy and the manufacturer's, it's a good idea to store them separately in your database. The reason I suggest this is for when (or if) you start an affiliate program and need to provide a product feed to your affiliates. You can give them the manufacturer's description in the feed, instead of your custom product copy, so that the content you worked so hard to complete doesn't get spread across the internet. You can also use the same approach when you list your product on marketplaces like Amazon and Ebay, and comparison shopping engines like Nextag or Shopzilla.

Customer Reviews

Customer reviews are considered the holy grail of user-generated content on an e-commerce site. Why?

• Customer reviews are inevitably unique, because people don't typically submit the same review to multiple sites.
• They give other customers a sense of third-party endorsements - which is why it's good to include even negative reviews from customers.
• If reviews are provided regularly, search engines see this as fresh content and are likely to give the page a boost in rankings, to crawl the site more often, or both.

Zappos.com is a company that really puts customer reviews to work for them. In addition to displaying the reviews on the product page, they have enough volume to also show recent reviews on higher-level brand pages. Here's a snippet from their Reef Sandals page:

Customer Reviews on Zappos.com

Employee Reviews

The downside of customer reviews is that they are hard to generate, especially for a site that is still working to build traffic and sales. You don't want to write a fake customer review, because it's not ethical, and they can often be easy to spot. So if you're not getting them yet, ask your employees to contribute a review, publish it on the website, and note that it's an employee review. With their permission, you might even list the employees' names or qualifications with the review. (For example, if you're selling textbooks, list their major or degree subject.)

Although it won't be seen as an unbiased opinion, like customer reviews often are, an employee review still provides unique and fresh content for your pages. It also gets a person's voice onto the site, and if a customer feels a connection with a person, they are more likely to make a purchase.

Q&A

At this point we start to get into some of the lesser-used strategies, one of which is a question-and-answer section. Although not applicable to all products, a Q&A section can be developed based on customer inquiries that come into your call center or email. Chances are, if one person took the time to contact you to ask a question, there are ten others who wondered the same thing but didn't bother to ask (or buy).

A Q&A format is nice because it starts to put words into the customer's voice. People who read the questions can often relate, thinking "I wondered that myself" or "Good question", which creates a more personal experience. It also has the added benefit of reducing customer inquiries, because they are more able to find answers to their questions up front, rather than relying on one-to-one communication.

If possible, think in advance what some common questions might be, and provide answers to them as soon as you list a new product.

Product Documentation

If you sell a product that comes with documentation, include the contents of that documentation on your website, after getting permission from your vendors. PDF documents are scanned and indexed in search engines, and there's a good chance that this kind of content can bring in visitors. Granted, they may already own the product in question and are looking for support, but they may be interested in buying accessories, related items, or additional quantities of the item as gifts.

Restaurant Equipment Solutions, a site that sells restaurant supplies, does a great job of providing digital copies of documentation for their products. Here's a screenshot where I've labeled the different documents that can be viewed for one of their refrigerators:

Product Documentation

Ingredients or Specifications

Many products lend themselves to having descriptions that include their ingredients on specifications. Ingredients and even nutritional details can be specified for food, vitamins and supplements, and health and beauty supplies. Specifications are extremely useful for many products, but especially for electronics and computers, which need to interface or interact with other equipment.

Other Content Specific to Books

However, our focus on NetBlazon left us with too little time to manage the customer and vendor relationships for Coolest Kids Furniture effectively, and as a result we turned off the ability for customers to check out on the site. It gets some traffic, so we didn't want to take it completely offline - but without bringing in revenue, it likely wouldn't have been very enticing for a buyer. As it was, the site was just sitting there doing nothing.

We were left with the question of what exactly to do with it?

Then I ran across a neat set of posts by Eric Nagel on coding a datafeed site using PHP. That sounded like a lot of fun! I don't get to do much PHP work anymore, and the thought of getting my hands dirty on some code was enticing. So weekend-before-last, I sat down with his scripts (there's an entire series of posts Eric wrote), my ShareASale and Commission Junction accounts, and the templates from Coolest Kids Furniture's shopping  cart. Although I made a number of tweaks and adjustments to the scripts Eric provided, they saved me hours of work (especially on the CJ web services) and let me get the site up fast.

The site is now pushing traffic through to a number of other furniture retailers through the two affiliate networks. I shut down the old merchant accounts (that should save me $35/month) and moved the shopping cart to a backup directory. Plus I threw some Google AdWords campaigns on there to see how they might perform too.

Last week I added a Wordpress 3.0 blog to target additional keyword phrases for the site's SEO efforts. The new version of Wordpress is so easy to install, and the default template is wonderful. I made a quick header graphic, installed a few SEO-related plug-ins, and it was ready to go. Plus, all the work I did on the site a couple of years ago left me with enough knowledge about the products that the posts are quick and easy to write.

Almost makes me wish I hadn't let some of those other domain names expire!

Do you have any old sites sitting around that you don't know what to do with? Are you up for a rehab? Or looking to sell? Let us know your plans by dropping a comment below.

The benefit extends beyond Digg's site itself, however. The more people discover your content through social bookmarking sites, the more people you have writing about you, linking to you, and subscribing to you.

The problem is that e-commerce and social media bookmark sites have a "ne'er the twain shall meet" relationship. Digg strictly prohibits commercial content in its terms of service. And even if a site doesn't prohibit it, you won't get very far with a post that tries to sell people something. After all, that's not why people use the sites.

You'll often see newbies on Digg submitting homepages, products and categories in the hopes of finding a magic bullet to boost their traffic and sales. These posts rarely get any natural clicks, and if the submitter gets enough people to vote it into the recommendation engines, they'll quickly get buried. Worse still, the entire domain (including all subdomains) may get banned entirely from Digg.

Fortunately, content that works well for an e-commerce blog also often works well on social bookmarking sites. Top ten lists, images of product design, breaking news stories relating to your store - all of these can be great content for social link sharing sites. Remember why people use these sites - to discover interesting content - and keep that in mind while writing your blog.

The key is to make sure that the page you're submitting isn't blatantly commercial - in fact, make sure it's not even subtly commercial! Trim away any links to products, especially obvious ones with product imagery. Don't talk about how you sell any items that might be a part of the story, and definitely don't include any prices. You can always add inter-content links back in after the story expires from the social link scene. But at the time of submission, there shouldn't be more than a single link to your store in your main navigation or footer.

If that's not feasible for your business, another idea is to create a completely separate site with content that relates to your store, and dofollow links back to your site, but without an "in your face" connection between the two. Submit and promote your content site, and as it gains popularity, use it to drive traffic through to your store.

It's also good to vary the type of posts you submit. People will start to notice trends when they vote on your stories. If everything you submit says "Download..." and eventually leads to a free trial for your software, you won't have many friends. (I use that example because I just unfriended someone like that myself.) Also make sure you're also submitting news stories from popular sites (major networks, for example) to keep things varied. A good rule of thumb is that no more than 10% of your submissions should be to your own site.

Digg users especially are highly tuned to spam, so do your research well and participate for awhile without submitting, to get a feel for how things work. Then work really hard to generate great content. A little preparation and a lot of understanding will help you succeed in driving traffic to your e-commerce site through Digg.

So how do larger stores manage to display their breadth of navigation choices while still having a usable website? Let's take a look at some examples.

Let's Start with Amazon

Possibly the largest e-commerce site online today is Amazon.com. Although their approach to navigation may not work for every e-commerce site, it's a great one to study because of their large customer base. Initially, on the Amazon.com homepage, you see a vertical list of top-level categories with flyouts in the left column, and a search bar across the top in place of a horizontal navigation bar:

Amazon.com's Homepage Navigation

The top-level categories in the menu aren't clickable, so the highest you can navigate to is a second-level category. Once there, the next level of navigation appears as a horizontal navigation bar below the search form.

Top Level Navigation from Subcategory on Amazon.com

Additionally, the search form now defaults to searching within the current category - you can change that to a higher-level category or "All Categories" if desired. There's also a list of faceted "drill-down" navigation links in the left column. Finally, hovering over the orange "Shop All Departments" link in the top left reveals a menu of the top-level categories, which is identical to the menu on the homepage except that it's a dropdown instead of fixed in place on the page.

This navigation works well for Amazon, and has replaced what used to be rows and rows of tabs representing each category. It's often said that what works on Amazon won't necessarily work on other sites, but if you manage a wide range of products in many categories, it might be worthwhile to test this kind of navigation.

Highlighting the Most Popular Categories

A second approach is to list the most popular top-level categories in a standard navigation bar, and to include a link to a sitemap-style page that lists all categories in a hierarchical fashion. VitamimWorld.com does a nice job of this, with a 2-level horizontal navigation bar that includes popular categories such as Bodybuilding and Diet, along with promotional categories such as Spectacular Values and Top Sellers on the top level, and a second level with a link to "A-Z Shopping" (which links to the sitemap-style page) along with other non-categorical links. The two levels of the navigation bar are visually separated by color.

VitaminWorld Header Navigation

Costco is another site that uses this approach, with the menu item labeled "View All" but serving the same purpose as VitaminWorld's "A-Z Shopping" link. Costco's header menu is quite a bit more overwhelming, though, with 4 distinct rows of links, including two rows of top-level categories with no visual prominence or separation other than one being above the other. This makes the "View All" link less noticeable, but once you find it, you end up at the same kind of sitemap style page as VitaminWorld, which lets you see the wide variety of product types that the sites carry.

Costco's Menu with View All Link

Alphabetical Navigation

This one is a little harder to find online, but for stores with well-known kinds of products, an alphabetical navigation bar with dropdown menus can be very usable. OfficeMax has been noted for this kind of navigation, though it's not currently in use. (I borrowed these screenshots from GetElastic's wonderful article on OfficeMax's approach to navigation.)

OfficeMax's Former Alphabetical Navigation Bar

Dropdown from OfficeMax's Menu

Multiple Stores

Another approach is to run multiple storefronts. There are several large corporations with multiple brands that do this. For example, take Sears, Kmart, Lands' End, and The Great Indoors. Take a look at the very top of Lands End's website, and you'll see links to their related stores/brands:

Lands' End and Related Stores

The problem with this set of sites is that each one has a separate shopping cart. So if you want to order a shirt from Lands' End, get a lawnmower from Sears, and take advantage of Kmart's blue light specials, then you'll have to place three separate orders.

A better approach is one used by the company that owns The Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, PiperLime, and Athleta:

Shared Shopping Cart from Gap.com, Old Navy, and More

On these sites, a single shopping cart can contain items from each store. Items are marked in the left column with the logo of the appropriate store, which helps maintain brand integrity while offering a great user experience. No matter how many times you switch between the various sites, the shopping cart maintains the items from each one.

This approach isn't just for well-known retailers like these, either. Here's a group of sites that works the same way - including the shared shopping cart - but uses the separate storefronts to help delineate their related but distinct product lines:

4 Stores, 1 Shipping Policy, 1 Cart

The four related stores can be accessed from tabs in the top left, and a graphic to the right of the tabs lets customers know up-front that they can make a single order that includes products from all 4 stores, and that shipping is charged as a single order (instead of one shipping charge from each store).

Undoubtedly, categorization and navigation are essential to all e-commerce sites, but the larger the selection, the more problematic it becomes. I've presented several ways sites tackle this problem; what other examples have you seen? Let us know by leaving a comment.

The last thing your business can afford is public recognition of lapses in privacy and security. But the concerns go far beyond customer perception as well. The emergence and growth of PCI Compliance puts a serious legal and financial burden on companies of all sizes to protect their customers' credit cards and other financial information in an effort to prevent fraud.

If you haven't performed a recent review of your practices relating to both privacy and security, now is a good time. And if you've never really given it much thought, please keep reading and then develop your own plan to maintain your customer's valuable information.

The First Step: An SSL Certificate

An SSL certificate is essential to protect sensitive information as it is transmitted over the internet, such as when a form containing personal or financial information is submitted by a customer. SSL Certificates can be purchased from a number of providers, including Verisign, GeoTrust, Comodo, and many others. The SSL certificate is engaged when the web site is accessed with a URL beginning with "https" instead of "http", encrypting both the request (submission of the form or requesting a web page via a URL) and response (the information that is sent back to the browser).

All sensitive information should be collected and presented on pages served over HTTPS using the SSL certificate. Customers often look to the "lock icon" in the corner of their browser window to ensure that a page asking for this information is secure.

Credit Card Information

The best thing you can do to protect customer's credit card information is to NEVER store it in the first place. If your website uses a real-time payment gateway such as Authorize.net or Payflow, the customer's credit card is passed through to the gateway, and charged or authorized for the sale, and typically doesn't need to be stored on your server at all. Instead, reference or transaction numbers are stored in your system so that transactions can be reviewed and pre-authorizations can be captured. If your site or database gets compromised, there are no raw credit card numbers and expiration dates that can be stolen.

If you can't use a real-time gateway for any reason, make sure you download the payment data over a secure connection (https over a browser, or sFTP instead or regular FTP). Then delete it from your web server as quickly as possible, as well as removing it from your local systems, once the payment has been processed. If you make efforts to delete the data regularly, then a breach of your web site will expose as few credit card numbers as possible (those that have been provided since you last deleted data).

The one thing you should never store in any capacity is the CVV number, also known by other acronyms including CVC, CVV2, and CID. This is the 3- or 4-digit number on the front or back of credit cards, separate from the actual credit card number, that is not embossed or raised and therefore doesn't show up on a credit card imprint. Credit card companies such as VISA and MasterCard pose significant fines on merchants who violate the mandate to not store the CVV code, even if a breach has not occurred. You may also lose the ability to process credit card transactions in the future.

Customer Names and Addresses

Although not as fraught with concerns as issues with payment data, protecting customers identifying information, especially their home address, is still of ultimate importance. Customers often don't want other people finding out their full names or their home address, or even their employer, due to concerns about identity theft. (The more information a potential identity thief collects, the more likely he can impersonate the victim).

All pages that refer to a customer's account, full name, and address should be served over HTTPs, so that the SSL certificate encrypts the data being transmitted. Other pages such as order history are also recommended for SSL protection, especially if your products are sensitive - think medical supplies, prescriptions, adult items, etc.

You should also test your site's account creation, log-in, and forgotten password functions. Make sure there are no security holes in these processes.

Think Carefully about Open-Source Software

Open-source shopping carts are growing in popularity, due to the low cost (often free) and the typically large developer/user communities surrounding them. However, in the case of software whose source code is available to the public, it's often much easier for hackers to find and exploit holes. Wordpress, arguably the most widely-used blogging platform, has had to issue numerous updates to patch security holes and bugs that were found by hackers. Shopping cart software is no less prone to problems, and the results of losing customers' credit card numbers can be much worse than having your blog replaced by a defaced page (porn or not!)

Additionally, open-source software is often not subjected to the same compliance issues as software that is funded by sales instead of being free. For example, even Magento's Community Version, the current golden child of the open-source shopping cart market, won't be PA-DSS compliant...so unless you purchase the Enterprise Edition (which is not free!) you won't meet this required standard.

Shared Information

Another area of your site to review includes searchable areas like gift registries, wishlists, and other kinds of customer lists (such as those Amazon allows customers to create and share). For example, when a person searches your gift registry, does your site return too much information about matching records? If you display first and last name, city, and state, it could be too much information to maintain customers' privacy. Limit the information to as little as possible, while still allowing gift shoppers to recognize the person they are shopping for.

Limit Employee Access

You should also limit your employee's access to customer and payment information only to those people who need to access it to perform their jobs. Employees come and go, sometimes under contentious circumstances. When an employee leaves the company, delete his or her account or change its password so that the former employee can no longer access the information. Also, encourage (or enforce) employees to use strong passwords and to periodically change them to protect their accounts from unauthorized access.

Many shopping carts and accounting systems allow you to configure user accounts to access only certain parts of the application. Often, you can allow your web developers, customer service representatives, and other employees to access the necessary parts of your system without giving them access to customer records and payment details.

Application Integration and Data Sharing

When sharing data between your cart and other applications (such as accounting systems, CRM systems, even a mailing list application), don't transfer more data than necessary. Your mailing list doesn't need the customer's credit card information - not even the last four digits. So why bother? If it's not needed, don't keep it there. Don't download data you don't need into Excel and keep it on your hard drive either. And be very careful to make sure you don't email credit card information to anyone! It's surprising how many retailers and developers aren't conditioned or informed about the risks of emailing sensitive data.

Review Your Database

Look at how your shopping cart stores customer records and allows forgotten passwords to be retrieved. Are your customers' passwords encrypted before being stored in your database? Are passwords mailed in plain-text, where anyone with a packet sniffer can intercept them? Or do you email the customer a password reset link sent instead? Can site administrators see the old password or just reset it to a new one?

Communicate the Good

Finally, it's also good to spell out the details of how you maintain customer privacy in a detailed Privacy Policy on your site. Most sites link to their privacy policy from their footer. But also consider hitting the highlights in a few bullet points in a more conspicuous place, perhaps on the view cart page, or the page where customers enter their credit card number. Add a "View our Complete Privacy Policy" link below it for customers who want to read all the nitty-gritty details.

The larger and more visible your company grows, the more important it becomes for you to deal with these issues BEFORE you a breach occurs. When it makes sense financially to do so, consider online services such as McAfee Secure or ControlScan, and later, consider hiring a company that specializes in website and computer security services. The peace of mind, and lack of future problems, will likely make it worth every penny.

Provide "Breadcrumbs"

Many shopping carts don't provide a single-page checkout, and the jury is still out on whether they are more user-friendly than checkout processes that span multiple pages. If your checkout process includes more than one page, make it simpler by reminding your customer where they are in the overall process with a clear graphic. Think of it as the sign near the entrance to your local shopping mall with the "You are Here" pointer, except it's a map for your website. As an added bonus, you can also reinforce the concept of security with your choice of words and graphics in the image.

Checkout Breadcrumbs

Ask for as Much Information as You Need...

...but not a single field more. A customer's sense of dread increases dramatically with every field you add to a form on a page. For some, it's just a matter of the time it takes to type in all their information; for others, their worry about identity theft and fraud grows with each piece of information they need to provide. Even if your shopping cart software has a default field, you likely don't need to use it. For example, if you don't use a customer's fax number for anything, why ask for it? Most e-commerce communications are handled by email and phone, not fax, so many companies can omit this field. If you only ship within your own country, don't ask customers to choose a country. Simply put a small statement at the bottom that reminds people of your policy, instead of a dropdown with a single country in it. (Or even worse, a dropdown filled with countries that generate an error when the form is submitted!)

Required and Optional Fields

A corollary to the above rule: don't make a field required unless it needs to be. Visually, the customer address forms need to have an indicator that shows which fields are required and which ones are optional, and they need to align well vertically. The most common indicator is an asterisk. However, if every field is required, don't put an asterisk by each one. A single statement at the top that says "All fields are required" will suffice and clear some of the visual clutter - and customer confusion over why every field has the asterisk.

Customer Address Form

Scrub Addresses

Scrubbing addresses is becoming more widespread on e-commerce sites. The idea is that there's a layer of technology on the back-end that takes the addresses (especially the shipping address) and compares it against a known set of addresses, such as the US Postal Service address database, and returns a scrubbed address - one that has been verified as a real address, and formatted according to carrier preferences.

This concept has a number of benefits. First, it can reduce address-correction fees with your shipping carriers (UPS, FedEx, and the postal service). Second, it can reduce costs associated with returned packages due to undeliverable addresses. Third, it can improve the accuracy of sales tax calculations in destination-based tax states. The USPS provides this service, but under very limited circumstances (for example, you must be an active USPS shipper). Our own AccurateTax service offers address scrubbing as a stand-alone service or as part of our sales tax solutions. And there are other options for various carts.

Use Trust Marks

Recognized trust marks are a simple way to remind customers of the protection you place on their personal information and payment details. Trust marks come in a variety of forms. The simplest one to include, that usually doesn't add any additional cost to your overhead, is the security badge offered as part of your SSL certificate. All of the major SSL certificate providers offer such badges - you've likely seen Verisign, GeoTrust, Thawte, and other security badges on major e-commerce sites.

A second form of trust marks includes those from companies that scan your site for security holes and PCI violations. These became well-known several years ago when the HackerSafe logo become prominent, and MarketingSherpa reported amazing increases in conversion rates for PetCo when displaying the logo in the site's header. Today, HackerSafe has become McafeeSecure and is still a leader in this type of service. While the McafeeSecure logo can still be seen on many e-commerce sites, they've been joined by a number of competitors, including ControlScan and Shopper Safe.

On checkout pages, particularly the page where customers enter their credit card details, it's especially important to show it high on the page. On our redesign, we grouped the trust marks into a bar along with the customer service phone number and provided it near the top of every page in the checkout process for consistency.

We'll be exploring other trust marks in an upcoming article.

Trust Marks

Indicate Processing and Shipping Times

Customers want to know when they will receive their order. In most cases, this depends on two factors:

1. Processing time: how long it takes your warehouse to pack the order for shipment, and
2. Shipping time: how long it takes the package to reach the destination.

Explain both to the customer as early as possible in the checkout process, and repeat the information as needed and in the confirmation email.

Shipping Times

Provide a Printable Receipt

A printable invoice or receipt is necessary because a) emails don't always reach their destination, and b) customers don't always remember their orders. Offering customers the ability to print a black-and-white, bare bones receipt once their order is complete allows them to get hard copy proof that they did indeed order X, Y, and Z from you. It also helps them find discrepancies and call to have them corrected earlier in the process.

Printable Receipt

Send an Automatic Receipt by Email

You should automatically send a receipt by email immediately after the order is placed. Some customers won't use the printable receipt, but will expect the emailed receipt to arrive in their inbox within a minute or two of the order being completed. The email should provide a copy of the billing and shipping addresses, the cart contents (including any discounts, tax, and shipping charges), and a phone number to call in case of errors. If you can't send out an email immediately, state the expected delay time boldly somewhere on your web-based receipt page.

Use the Receipt Page for Merchandising and Engagement

The receipt page is an often-overlooked place to ask the customer for additional sales, feedback, and participation. Here are a few ideas to include on your receipt page:

• Link to your Facebook page
• Link to your Twitter account
• A form to sign up for your email newsletter or paper catalog
• The chance to add a popular accessory to their order
• An offer to upgrade their shipping for a special price

What about you?

Have you tried any of these already on your site or your customers' stores? What kind of difference did you see? In our particular case, we've noted a 1.5% improvement in conversion rates inside the funnel since implementing many of these changes, and we still have two pages left to tackle (the login page and the receipt page) - not to mention the receipt email itself! Leave your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.

Me and Big Jason Henderson

In January I was lucky enough to attend the Marketing Sherpa Email Summit in Miami for absolutely nothing. Quite literally, all I paid for was gas for the drive down, parking, and my hotel room. I was the lucky winner of a free ticket to the summit itself, the pre-workshop the day before, a VIP party, dinner in South Beach, the Gala dinner and party poolside...pretty much everything the event had to offer. And for this wonderful package I have to offer a belated but truly heartfelt thank you to Jason Henderson of Big Marketing, Erick Mott and the team at Lyris, and Todd Lebo and everyone else from Marketing Sherpa. All were tons of fun to hang out with and I learned a lot at the conference that I was able to bring back and put into action. So I wanted to share the top forty takeaways from my two-and-a-half-day jaunt down I-95 to Miami.

Me and the Lyris Team

1. "Adequecy is the enemy of excellence." Dr. Flint McGlaughlin of Marketing Experiments
2. On email signup forms, consider the offer - are you just offering the newsletter? Gee. Wow. What's the incentive in signing up for a newsletter? Instead, offer something useful.
3. Use specific statements of quantity, not vague statements of quality.
4. Your copy should focus on what the customer gets from your company, not what your company gets from the customer.
5. Your call-to-action should communicate value.
6. Don't offer a conclusion about your company. Offer hard facts that lead the reader to an inevitable conclusion.
7. Use images to create value. If the hero shot or smiley-faced girl doesn't communicate anything of value, replace it with something that does - and use it to guide the customer's eyes.
8. Every button should make a promise, should tell you what you're going to get.
9. "Free" is good. "Completely free" is better. "Fully-functioning, completely free" is even better.
10. Link to your privacy policy on your signup form. (It can open in a popup window.)
11. There is no one optimal sending frequency - it differs for everyone. TEST.
12. Address the consumer's needs and how you can fix those needs.
13. The only goal of your email is a click from the recipient, not a sale. The landing page leads to the sale.
14. It's important to know how few of your repeat customers are responsible for what percentage of your sales. For example, 12% of Coke customers are responsible for 80% of its sales.
15. Customer retention is both relegated to the back office, and in and of itself fragmented/diluted. Joseph Jaffe, Author of Flip the Funnel
16. When it comes to social media, people don't want to talk to shoes, but shoes keep trying to talk to people!
17. Lead nurturing is a relevant and consistent dialog with viable potential customers regardless of their timing to buy.
18. In B2B it's important to focus on lead nurturing - 80% of marketing leads wind up lost, ignored, or discarded.
19. Existing site traffic is full of potential subscribers, so optimize your best entry paths (look at your analytics) and lead them to your subscription forms.
20. Segment your lists for more effective email marketing - "batch and blast" is the past.
21. In B2B marketing, the name of the sender affects open rates twice as much as the subject of the email.
22. In social media, your audience is made up of three groups - silent majority, vocal minority, social authority. The latter has the highest ability to spread your word.
23. Connect with subscribers wherever they are - this is the intersection of social and email.
24. Enable campaigns with social sharing buttons - 89% who use it say it effectively extends their reach to new markets. Sergio Balegno of Marketing Sherpa
25. Turn your fans into an outside sales force.
26. Before you send out your newsletter, send out tweet asking people to subscribe.
27. Track who is sharing to segment the vocal minority or social authority from the silent majority.
28. Email is about sending your site to people. Dela Quist of Alchemy Worx.
29. Traffic is expensive - eyeballs cost money.
30. Consider affiliates, co-brand deals, licensing, natural search, paid search, tv press, sponsorships, list rental, and opt in email...of these, opt-in email is by far the cheapest.
31. Strike up a co-registration deal with someone in a similar but not competing market. The best co-reg deals are barter/trade and don't cost you (or the other company) anything.
32. For many companies, double opt-in subscriptions are really overkill...how hard is it, really, to just unsubscribe? (Don't take this as advice from me, it's a paraphrased quote!) However, double-optin is preferred for co-reg, sweeps, and 3rd-party leads.
33. Make sure your email has value, not just relevance.
34. Sources of opt-in names can be newsletter offers, customer service call-ins, trade events, tele-prospecting.
35. Make emails easy to forward to a friend. Then ask your subscribers to do so!
36. Best placement for email signup forms is top left or right, "above the fold", and on every page of your site.
37. Use benefit-oriented language in your signup form.
38. Make sure there's at least one form field and not just a button, because people are used to seeing form fields and that field is the widget that their eyes are used to associating with signing up for something.
39. Tell people how often the emails will come when they sign up.
40. 

    Cricket Lollipop

    And finally, even kids don't want to eat lollipops with dead crickets in them, even if they are a novel idea. Thanks anyway, Bamboo Cricket, at least I can guarantee I won't forget your name!

Note: Cricket lollipop photo courtesy of Offbeat Treats.

$1000 for Haiti - Affiliate.Com T-Shirt

Affiliate.com is running a great contest with these awesome t-shirts they gave away at Affiliate Summit recently. I wasn't lucky enough to attend (being busy with the Email Summit in Miami in January and about to head off to the Miva Merchant conference tomorrow), but Tom Wozniak at Affiliate.com was nice enough to send me one in the mail (along with anyone else who emailed and asked). And the person with the most creative blog posts wins the contest - the prize being $1000 in case, and a $1000 cash donation in that person's name to the American Red Cross Haiti Relief Fund. It's a win-win...at worst I get a great t-shirt, and at best I get cash and Haiti gets $1000 no matter what!

This got me to thinking about all the things online retailers have been doing to show their support for relief efforts following the tragic earthquake in Haiti on January 12. One of the first ones I noticed was when my favorite members-only sites, Rue La La, closed its boutiques for almost 24 hours. In a quote from their facebook page:

Rue La La joins the rest of the world in grieving the tremendous losses to the people of Haiti. Out of respect for those who have lost loved ones, their shelter, and life's basic necessities in this tragedy, we cannot stand by while relief efforts are underway without taking action. We are halting our Boutiques from now until Saturday at 8AM ET. We ask that instead you take this time - as we are - to make a donation to the American Red Cross Haiti Relief and Development Effort.

Then, this weekend, as I was on a mad hunt for children's soccer cleats for my daughter (which they apparently do not carry anywhere in the entire county), I discovered fairly prominent "Donate to Haiti" graphics near the top of all pages on both Foot Locker's and Champs Sport's websites.

Footer Locker Support for Haiti

Champs Support for Haiti

When you click on the links, the following page describes how the company (Champs is owned by Footlocker Inc.) has made a cash and footwear/apparel donation to Haiti and how you can too. There's even an easy way to send a text message that will make a $10 donation that simply gets charged on your next cell phone bill.

Melissa Joy Manning is another site I came across last week for a different post. She is donating 10% of all first quarter proceeds to benefit Haiti through the Red Cross. I like the fact that this company's donations are long-lived...it didn't just last a week or two, but an entire three months.

If you prefer to show your support openly, how about a To Haiti with Love t-shirt? They can be found at a number of retailers online and off. Theory is one (also in mens).

To Haiti with Love T-Shirt

Are you a retailer supporting Haiti? Or a shopper whose favorite store is making in-kind donations or other efforts? Let us know about it by leaving a comment.

No MMUI Please!

Miva Merchant ships with a default look-and-feel called MMUI - the Miva Merchant User Interface. It's there because it HAS to have SOMETHING, right? But it was never meant for public consumption...the developers always assumed people would replace it with an actual design. But many retailers didn't replace it - either they didn't have the skills, they were cheap, they were lazy, they didn't know better, or whatever - but lots of stores used it. And have been since year 19-whatever. Miva Merchant has since released a built-in CSS skin that is better, but still very basic, and yet this MMUI (see image, right, under the big red X) is still around on the web. You've probably seen it and groaned.

So I wanted to take this chance and showcase a bit of what CAN be done with Miva Merchant. Although I'd been planning this for a couple of weeks, in a timely coincidence, Chuck over at Merchant Tutorials posted about common Miva Merchant myths and the very first one is that the cart is limited in it's look and feel. Let's debunk that right now.

1. Green Tree Coffee & Tea

Green Tree Coffee & Tea

2. smallfri.com Birth Announcements

smallfri.com Birth Announcements

3. DJ Shadow

DJ Shadow

4. California Caviar

California Caviar

5. Mad Cat Toys

Mad Cat Toys

6. Bee Global

Bee Global Candle Studio

7. Mezzetta

Mezzetta Mediterranean Food

8. Rusty's Off-Road Products

Rusty's Off Road Products

9. Arcadia Publishing

Arcadia Publishing

10. Michael's Finer Meats and Seafoods

Michael's Finer Meats and Seafoods

One small caveat just for the sake of transparency: Mad Cat Toys is out of our clients at NetBlazon. But the design is completely the work of the owner, Dale Carlson of Propaganza...we just did the backend programming. So I'm not sneaking in a self-backpat or anything. Also, thanks to Scott from Sebenza for pointing us in the direction of Michael's Meats, a site I hadn't seen before.

Got any other examples of truly beautifully-designed Miva Merchant websites? Post them in the comments below!