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

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.

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.

1. Ensure unique page metadata - Each page on your site must have relevant metadata based on the keywords you're trying to rank for. To optimize your site for Google, limit the page title to 70 characters and the page description to 140 characters.
   

   Site Title and Description in Google

2. Improve your content - Search engines (Google especially) value good quality content which should be seen as a long-term SEO strategy. Consider adding editorial product reviews, how-to pages and guides to complement your products.
3. Optimize product images - Optimizing images for users means ensuring all images are of high quality and (if possible) including more than one image per product. Optimizing images for search in order to gain organic traffic from Google image search means using the product title as the file name and using alt text.
4. Unify homepage versions - Some e-commerce sites have multiple versions of their homepage which will result in poorer performance. The most common issue is having non www and www versions. To test how many versions of your page exist use a content duplication checker.
5. Improve navigation - The idea behind improving navigation is to keep product pages and category pages close to the main root. This will help search engines find and index the page quicker. Think about keeping your product pages one level from the root, for example www.sitename.com/product-title.html instead of www.sitename.com/category/sub-category/product-title.html
6. Enhance internal linking - Linking smartly between products and categories can help your SEO by giving certain pages more authority. For example, breadcrumbs are useful to link from product pages back to the category page, but also linking from your FAQ section to a product or even between products helps.
7. Improve loading times - The time taken to load a page is important for SEO and for increasing conversion rates. To test how quickly (or not) your pages are loading and to view helpful suggestions use a page analyzer.
8. Add site maps – an HTML site map and XML site maps will help both potential customers and search engines. The XML site map is useful in indicating to the engines which pages are available on the site and to ensure as many as possible get into the index. The HTML site map is used to allow customers to find product and category pages quickly.
9. Improve on-page SEO - Turning the product title into an H1 tag and other sub titles into an H2 or H3 tag will increase the page's SEO potential. Together with image optimization this is known as on-site optimization.
10. Find and fix 404 pages - Error pages resulting from old product pages or badly configured files might have some SEO value and should therefore be fixed. If you're using Google Analytics you can easily find these pages and fix or redirect them to a more appropriate page.
11. Encourage customer reviews - Customer reviews for product pages can help persuade potential customers to make purchases and they can also be very useful for SEO. Because search engines will see fresh content every time they visit the page it will make the product page more important and increase its crawling rate (i.e. how often search engines visit the page).
12. 

    Add This

    Encourage link sharing - One of the most important parts of SEO is building the number of links pointing to inner product pages. If you have many SKUs, a smart strategy is to use your customers to spread the word by encouraging sharing. Embedding a social sharing button such as AddThis or ShareThis will give customers sharing tools which are free and easy to use.
13. Make small changes and test - You shouldn't make huge changes to an established site. By making too many changes at once, you'll find it hard to understand and analyze what has worked and what hasn't. Consider making small changes and always test the outcome before continuing with further changes.

1. Post a recipe that ties into your site's theme. If you sell children's products, make something kid-friendly. If you sell purses, do a couture-purse inspired cake design. Include pictures!
2. Announce an upcoming sale. Even offer a preview exclusively for blog readers, where they can see which products are included at what sale prices via a special link that's only included in the blog. (Note: This tip also works well in email marketing...think RueLaLa.)
3. Introduce a new product line that you've just added. What makes it stand apart, what are the benefits, and which products are the expected best-sellers?
4. Support a cause! Identify a popular movement, and make sure it's one that you believe in. Then describe how you help, whether it's with financial contributions, or efforts like recycling and reusing packing supplies to support a greener planet. Ask your readers to pitch in.
5. Introduce a staff member, your entire web or CSR team, or even make it a series and showcase one employee every week.
6. Write about the pick-and-ship process, what happens after the order is placed.  Our friends at MyCubanStore.com place a video of the process on their invoice page; go purchase a guayabera and see for yourself.
7. Share your celebrations! Show photos of your recent store events, company picnic, or holiday party. This can be a great way to humanize your store.
8. Talk about your website itself, instead of your company and its business. It's a great way to get the some visibility and link love from the tech community. PlumberSurplus.com has made their entire blog about this!
9. Demonstrate a product with a video. Show its uses, how it works, or the process of assembling the product, such as how Zappos demonstrates their knife sharpener.
10. Roll out the red carpet! See if you can find any way to include Hollywood. Internet surfers love celebrities; take a look at any recent list of "most popular search terms" if you don't believe me. Has one of your products been worn by Suri or carried by Angelina? Brag about it, even if they didn't buy it from you. Just don't lie and claim they did,
11. Make a list (and check it twice). Much like this one, blog posts that are bulleted or numbered lists are easy to scan and popular with readers. Make a list of your best selling products (and why), or your top tips for surviving the holidays, or 5 ways to choose the perfect Christmas gift...you get the idea.
12. Think travel! During the holidays or summer you find a lot of people traveling. So pick a place you've been to recently, show pictures, and describe the location and some fun activities. Incorporate your products wherever possible - apparel for the locale, luggage for the trip, toys and books for the free time, or a digital camera for the memories you'll make.
13. Launch a contest. Create or find a great prize and give people one entry per day throughout the contest. Once they enter the first time, email them daily (with their permission) and remind them to come back, and after they enter show them some stuff to buy.
14. Give a quick office tour so your customers can visualize what it's like to work there. And if you break new ground, show the process of creating your new workspace, from demolition to the finished result. Everyone loves a great "flip" video!
15. Showcase products around a particular theme, such as A Girl Needs Pink at 1928 Jewelry.
16. Write generically for SHOPPERS. What challenges do all shoppers face? Think of topics like comparing prices, avoiding shipping hassles during the holidays, handling returns, shipping internationally...some topics are universal no matter what products you sell.
17. Answer a question your customer service team received by phone or email on your blog for others to read. Keep the caller/emailer anonymous, though it might be a nice touch to use the first name only (if you get permission first, that is).
18. Share your corporate values, ideals, or culture. If this is all you talk about, it's boring. But sprinkling it in with more people-oriented content lets your readers know what you stand for.
19. Focus a post on parents or the family as a whole. Offer ideas for together time or family fitness. It's ok to work your products in, but you don't have to - this is a great value proposition on its own. And parents make up a large portion of online shoppers, so lots of readers will find it relevant to their lives.
20. Go back to the early days of your company and tell its history. Did it start out in your garage? Do you have a picture of packages stacked up in your driveway? A video of you removing a batch of your famous pretzels from the oven in your kitchen? Share your grass-roots beginnings.
21. Incorporate the arts. Feature works from a local artist or write a review of the currently-running show at the community theater. Position your company as a patron of the arts.
22. Run a poll. There are several plug-ins for major blog platforms, as well as third-party polls, and it's a good way to encourage participation from your readers. Publish the results as you go along so there's something of interest to see along the way.
23. Offer up a great craft or DIY tip, like Free People's homemade terrarium ornament idea.
24. Offer a free download - a desktop wallpaper image or a printable coloring page for kids are a couple of popular ideas.
25. Offer a coupon, of course! It's great to reward your blog readers with a tangible benefit - real savings off the products in your store.
26. Do you attend trade shows or other industry events? Include a diary of your travel and activities along with photos.
27. Happy New Year! These are easy to do and schedule for a future date: just wish your customers a pleasant day for every major holiday of the year. Short and sweet is fine; customers don't expect you to be blogging that day anyway.
28. Identify what your customers care about, and blog on those topics. Patagonia discusses wildlife and the environment, while Etnies has videos from extreme sports events as well as competition results.
29. Online retailers want to make money; shoppers want to save money (even while spending it). Offer tips on how to save money by shopping online. Some ideas are to purchase multiple products from the same retailer to save on shipping costs, to sign up for the newsletter to receive coupons and discount codes, or to provide bulk discounts to groups that purchase together (clubs, schools, mommy groups, etc).
30. Make a stupidly funny video. Or maybe not so funny? You decide.

Amazon Customer Experience Performance Metrics

Order Defect Rate

Pre-Fulfillment Cancellation Rate

Late Shipment Rate

Post Ship-Confirm Refund Rate

Performance Targets

Amazon Metrics and Targets

The target rates are:

• Order defect rate: < 1%
• Pre-fulfillment cancel rate: < 2.5%
• Late ship rate: < 5%

What difference does it make?

The Add a Product Tool

Amazon's Add a Product Tool

Seller Desktop

Amazon Seller Desktop

Upload Products via a Flat File

Moving to True Automation

Amazon Product Page

Customers can add products into the shopping cart through multiple paths. One of those paths is by using the Add to Shopping Cart button (in the "Ready to Buy" box, or the "Buy Box"). One merchant "wins" the Buy Box. There are multiple factors that we take into account when we select the winner of the Buy box these can include Price, Availability, Volume, Refunds, Customer Feedback and A-to-Z guarantee claims. You can take steps to increase your chances of winning the Buy Box.

1. Focus on your pricing. The ability to win the buy box is based on the combination of the product price and the shipping price. Simply lowering your price for the product and raising shipping costs to cover the difference won't help you win the box.
2. Make sure you keep the item in stock! If you are out of stock, you can't win the buy box.
3. Maintain good customer feedback. This is mainly your basic customer service considerations. Ship quickly, keep your customer informed of the status, make sure you ship the correct item, and don't accidentally list a product as in-stock if it's not.

Most online businesses set up email lists of some sort, then proceed to just send out emails. This document will show you, from the perspective of the person RECEIVING the emails, what mistakes many people make. Avoid these mistakes to ramp up your email list to profitability.

1. Putting an unsubscribe link at the bottom of your email. Why is that bad? When a subscriber wants to change their email address, what do they do? If you expect someone to unsubscribe one email address, then go back to your site and resubscribe with another, that's expecting a lot. The best thing to do is have "Manage your subscription" link that takes them to a page that they can unsubscribe, change their email address, and even change which lists they subscribe to. Then, have an "Quick Unsubscribe" link next to that.

   Another thought here - I have signed up as a member of forums, and then gotten emails. When I wanted to change the email address or unsubscribe, I clicked on "Change subscription info" and it asked me to sign in to the forum first. If I don't remember the forum login info I used when I created my account, I simply CAN'T get in to change my email address or unsubscribe. So, of course, I just report the emails as spam. I've had this happen at least four times that I can think of.

2. Making too much information required upon sign up. You only need their email address. You might want their first name, so you can personalize their email, but even this should be optional. Don't require postal address, last name, and especially phone number. Requiring a phone number will cut your signups by at least 80%. And don't require fields that are silly, like Title (Mr., Mrs., Ms.) or birthday. Why make it hard? Take as an example The Venetian, a casino in Las Vegas. Here's their signup form: https://secure.venetian.com/APPS/EmailSignUp/. It requires birthdate, but they have to for age verification. But it requires Title! I clicked submit without my Title, and it gave me an error message. So the first thing I get in my email relationship with The Venetian is a beep and popup error message. That's not a good start.

3. Making unsubscribing difficult. Let's look again at The Venetian. In their emails there is an unsubscribe link. It goes here: http://venetian.com/APPS/Unsubscribe/. In order to unsubscribe, I have to enter my email address. If I have multiple email addresses (I have 12), I have to remember which one I used and enter it. So what do I do instead? I hit the Spam button in my email program to make them go to my Spam folder to be deleted. Simple for me, but it also sends a notice to my Spam filter company that The Venetian's emails are spam. Too many of those, and you get banned, especially from AOL, where it’s almost impossible to get removed from a spam list. Instead, make it easy to unsubscribe. Do you really want someone on your list who doesn't want to be? I suggest putting an unsubscribe (or at least Manage Subscription) link at the TOP of every email. It is MUCH better to lose a few subscribers easily, than to get Spam-reported.

4. NOT unsubscribing when someone requests unsubscribing. ProFlowers... If you ever sign up for their emails, expect to be on their list for life. I have unsubscribed at least five times from their lists, and they still keep sending. So I keep reporting them as spammers. Unfortunately, they're so big, and not enough people are reporting them, apparently, that I still keep getting them in my inbox. I absolutely hate ProFlowers now, and will NEVER do business with them again.

5. Sending to people who may not know how they got subscribed. Do you auto-subscribe all customers? Do you have a "free report" that you send people, but don't mention in the signup form that they'll be subscribed to an email newsletter? If you send ongoing emails to these people, you may be a spammer.

   You don't want people to get emails who don't WANT to get emails, do you? So, for customers, in checkout, just say, "as a new customer you will be subscribed to our newsletter. You can unsubscribe at any time." Or, better yet, have a check box in checkout for "Subscribe." Finally, you can have a subscribe form on the Invoice/Receipt page so AFTER they have happily sent you money, they can subscribe.

   If you send to customers without a specific subscription notice/form, I suggest sending them an email invitation to subscribe. You're allowed to do that without it being spam, since they've done business with you. Take the last email newsletter you sent, and, ABOVE it, put a paragraph that says, "As a new customer with XXX, we'd like to invite you to subscribe to our newsletter and receive Special Sale Notices, Coupons, new product info, and more! We promise not to overwhelm you with emails, and you can unsubscribe at any time." Have a link to subscribe. Send it only once.

6. Too many emails. I once signed up for TigerDirect emails. It must have been during an experiment, because I got at least one email a day, and sometimes two, for about a week. I finally unsubscribed. It was over a year until I resubscribed, and now they're only about once a week. So, while experimenting with what would happen with overwhelming emails, they lost me for a year. Remember, people get between 20 and 200 emails a day. We're ALL overwhelmed. Why would you want to become a negative contribution to that feeling of being overwhelmed??

   If you have "daily updates," or "new product notices" that might be daily, have multiple levels of subscriptions. Let people decide how frequent they'll get emails. Some people want to know everything right away, especially online shopping addicts. But most don't. Have multiple email lists, "daily, weekly summary, monthly" and let them choose. And NEVER violate the frequency. If I pick monthly, and I get them weekly, I'm gonna spam-report it.

7. Too few emails. Hey, doesn't that sound like the opposite of (6)?? Yep. If I sign up for email newsletters in January, and I don't get anything until May, I probably have forgotten I signed up. At that point, I think it's spam, and, you got it - you're being reported as a spammer.

   Remember, emails don't have to be huge. At a minimum, send a text email at least once a month keeping in touch, with something basic like a special offer, new product notice, or even a "Happy Mother's Day" mention. Check out Hallmark - there's a holiday about every day now, so there's always SOME excuse for an email. If you drop the ball for more than 3 or 4 months, you should probably send another invite to resubscribe. In the very least, at the TOP of your email, in bold, say, "You Subscribed to this List because you wanted xxxxx" to remind them that they did, indeed, subscribe. Keep in mind that, while YOU are obsessed with your business, most people forget you even exist most of the time.

8. No deals or coupons. I sign up for emails from local restaurants a lot. Sometimes, I'll get emails that tell me about new menu items, or encourage me to celebrate a holiday at their restaurant, but NO offer! There's no call to action! Why do I care about Don Pablo's having Cinco de Mayo if it doesn't mean I get 10% off or a free Margarita? After two or three of these email ads, usually all pretty and graphical, I unsubscribe. Why would I want someone to just send me ads? If I liked ads, I wouldn't fast forward through them with Tivo.

9. Too many deals and coupons. I did it again - contradicting my previous point, right? This one really isn't too bad unless you create expectations of discounts. I'll tell you a quick story. A company I worked for started doing email newsletters. In each newsletter was a 10% off coupon that was good for one week. Since it was every time, what do you think happened? Sales disappeared for the three weeks that there was no coupon code. Then, the email would go out and we'd get pummeled with sales at a discount. Customers expected the same 10% discount off everything, and waited to get the code to order. After a bunch of these, there was no turning back - people expected their 10% off coupon code. So, the only solution was to extend the expiration period to the full month, and then accept that our income was reduced by 10%.

   How do you balance (8) and (9)? By offering discounts and deals off specific items or services, changing it each time. Focus on your newest items, or even some of your lesser sellers. Have a clearance every now and then. Change it up, so people don't expect anything in particular in each email, but still they have a reason to stay subscribed.

10. No confirmation emails. When I subscribe to a list, I'm never 100% sure it worked. Too many online scripts are broken. So let people know they succeeded with an email saying so. Tell them on the Success page that they will be receiving an email confirmation. This way, if they don't get one, you might already be in their spam filter and they can white-list you. Tell them how to white-list you.

    Some people say you should "double opt in." This means that your system would send a confirmation email with a special link. If the subscriber does NOT click that link, the subscription has not completed. Some systems will send a second attempt in 24 hours. This is certainly the safest way to avoid spam-reports. However, expect about half the people to not click the link for some reason. If someone doesn't get the confirmation email because of a spam filter, they will simply assume that you just aren't sending any emails. It's up to you whether you want to do this, but it's not necessary in my opinion.

Conclusion. Clean up these mistakes and you’ll increase subscriptions, decrease unsubscribes, and overall have a more positive email relationship with your customers. One final point of advice… I suggest using a service, such as iContact (http://www.chucklasker.com/icontact), instead of sending emails from your own server. Not only are the emails easier to manage, more professional looking, and bounces are taken care of, but you’ll also be better off if people click the Spam button on their email programs. If you’re using your own server, it might get banned easily. But iContact is able to handle the big spam-protection-companies much better. Give them a try with their free trial, I believe you'll find it’s worth the price.

This article was guest-written by Chuck Lasker of MerchantTutorials.com.