Before you spend another cent on social media campaigns, hit send on your next email campaign or pay for Google Adwords - read on!

1. Make it easy for them to get into your store and to see what you have on offer

• Don't forget to group items together - make sure people can easily grab the rest of the outfit
• If the item has a spare part, a widget, an add on - make sure that your customers can Add to Cart with one click!

6. If you are discounting - have a real discount! 

• Today's online shopper is very savvy and also suffers from 'Discount Fatigue'. So if you are having a sale  - don't tinker with discounts.
• Go the whole way or bundle items to add value.

Are you making the most of your email marketing? While it's convenient to just have one or two large mailing lists, you're potentially losing out on conversions by bombarding your audience with communication that may not apply to them.

For example, we have a number of clients with eCommerce websites, and a number of clients without. If we're advertising eCommerce-only services to the clients without that feature, they'll eventually just automatically assume that our communication is no use to them and our campaigns will go straight into the trash.

To avoid this, the most successful email marketers use targeted lists to ensure that the audience they're reaching will actually have a use for the product. With Business Catalyst you can achieve this in two ways; by multiple mailing lists, or via custom reports.

Mailing Lists

Custom Reports

Excluding Lists or Reports

We are often asked by clients what is the best way to layout your information in a newsletter

Because of the nature of mail programs, it is best and easiest to use a table to layout out your content.

We tend to create a template that tops and tails the style for the newsletter and then you have flexibility within the centre.

Important things to note

1. Your table should be set to be 100% - your overall template width will already be set to be 600px. This is standard email marketing practice

2. Plan your content first so that you know how many rows and columns you will need before you start.

3. Don't speak about more than 3 things. I know that sometimes you need to speak about more items, but try and keep to this rule.

4. Find an image for each item if possible - the more visually appealing the better to draw in the clickers.

5. Drop images into a cell, to enable better linking and positioning within your newsletter

A good example

Listed below is a table layout that is a good start, we have coloured the cells so that yo can see a good starting point.

One of the most laborious and time-intensive parts of Email Marketing is keeping your lists clean. If you don't clean your hard (or permanent) bounces from your mailing lists, you end up just sending to addresses that don't exist - wasting your email credits and screwing up your campaign statistics.

To help with this, Adobe have released a new feature that will automatically remove the hard bounces from your mailing lists and unsubscribe the contact. This has been introduced for two main reasons:

1. To improve deliverability of email campaigns across the board
2. To reduce the amount of email credits used and wasted by hard bounces

Responsive Web Design is the latest buzzword in the web design & development community, but what is it exactly?

To put it simply, Responsive Web Design is an approach used when developing a website that ensures it scales onto any device that is used to view it and responds to the users behaviour.

The central idea of Responsive Web Design is that a website can use the same HTML/CSS/Javascript to serve a number of different devices with varying screen sizes/resolutions and automatically adjust to fit correctly. For example if you've ever browsed the web on a mobile device or tablet you will have noticed that when viewing some websites they appear tiny and you have to zoom in to read the content. Responsive Web Design aims to conquer this by ultimately using the available space and scaling content to fit.

How is this achieved?

Responsive Web Design uses a number of techniques to adjust and adapt to the screen size/resolution of the devices that are being used:

• CSS Media Queries: Media Queries allow multiple layouts to be built within the same HTML document by selectively serving CSS Styles/Stylesheets based on the features of the device that is being used to view it. These features may include window/screen size, orientation and available colour output range. Basically it allows a layout to be specifically tailored to a range of devices without having to modify the HTML content behind it.

• Flexible Layouts: When developing the HTML for a Responsive site Flexible Layouts are normally used to structure the elements of a page into modular components. This separation allows for independent scaling and movement of the components and the content within them. Using CSS Media Queries the layout of these components can be adjusted to fit the screen size of the device being used to view a website. Commonly on Desktop browsers page components are positioned into multiple columns sitting next to each other, whereas Tablet and Mobile device layouts would adjust the page components to stack on top of each other.

• Responsive Images: Responsive Images are used in conjunction with CSS Media Queries and a Fluid Grid Layout, they scale and move automatically according to the layout that a device is using. This allows one version of an image to be used in multiple layouts, no extra loading is required. These are most commonly controlled through the "max-width : 100%" CSS rule.

Benefits of Responsive Web Design

• Responsive Web Design negates the need for separate device templates and content duplication, one set of HTML/CSS/Javascript can be used to serve multiple layouts to devices and switch accordingly.

• A website is not locked down to a specific screen resolution, rather it shifts and adapts to the screen that it is being viewed at.

• No messy redirects are needed to switch between desktop and device layouts.

• Improved SEO; your desktop/device content is served from the same URL.

• Enhanced User Experience as the layout of a website has been tailored to suit the viewer.

Leveraging Device Features

The User Experience of a website can also be improved by utilising the native features of the users device in conjunction with Responsive Web Design. These features differ per device, the most common are listed below:

• Phone: Utilising the phone feature of a device allows a user to dial a specified number straight from a website's content, no application switching necessary.

• Email: Similarly to the phone feature, the email feature of a device allows a user to click a specified email address in content of a website, this will normally then open the email client of the device to send a new email to the specified email address.

• Map: If you want to point a user to an address within a website the map feature can be used, this allows a link to be inserted into the website content and when it is clicked the devices default mapping program will open and show the provided address.

• Location: The location function allows a device's browser to detect and find the geographic location of a user. This is particularly useful in providing proximity based searches.

Useful Links

• Responsive Web Design Interactive Guide
• Media Queries - A collection of responsive websites.

A common client question is how do I find good keywords? It is no good focussing on a phrase that no one actually searches on!

But first what are keywords?

Keywords are answers to your customers questions.

Google Ranks pages and not websites

Spy on your Competitors

Research 

KeywordEye

This tool defaults to Google UK since it’s developed by a UK team, so if you’re using it in the AU, you’ll have to change it to Google AU. 

KeywordSpy

Keyword Spy allows you to quite literally “spy” on keywords. Great for competitor research.

SEMRush

This tool is also a paid tool with a free option.

How can I tell where make page comes now?

Before embarking on keyword research, it is a good idea to determine where your landing page is currently situated in google. This way you can see how any changes you make will improve page position.

As part of their commitment to the Business Catalyst product, Adobe is continually releasing updates and enchancements to make the software better. The update that was rolled out last night is one of the biggest, and most exciting, we've seen.

What does it mean for you?

I am not implying that you are a dummy - but sometimes in our haste to focus on our real jobs - we can forget some basics. 

1. Focus on what your website and each page is all about

Seems obvious doesn't it - but sometimes we can forget the KISS principle and just forget the key message. 

Picture in your mind a website for a bakery. We might have a page that takes about the history of our bakery, a page of easy to follow recipes, a page of awarding winning cakes and an order form to buy some. We might also have a series of pages that focus on our specialties - our sourdough, our chocolate cake and our chocolate chip cookies. 

So we shouldn't spend too much time talking about our new ovens - no one cares about that!

2. The page’s filename and path — the URL — is very important.

Get keywords in there. Don’t waste this space. You might have something like this: http://www.yourdomain.com/award-winning-chocolate-cake-recipes. 

It doesn't matter if it seems long to you - be reasonable, but the Googlebots can still read all of it.

If you have named your page http://www.yourdomain.com/ourawards - people looking for award winning chocolate cake recipes might have a hard time finding you.

The page’s <TITLE></TITLE> tags are also very important. 

You should make sure you include your keywords, like this: <TITLE>Award Winning Chocolate Cake Recipes - Step by Step Guide</TITLE>.

You need a different one for each page - they must be unique.

3. The description tag is important, though not always for search-results placement; 

The description tag is where you can control the snippet of page text that appears in Google search results. This can often be the key reason someone clicks on your site and not someone elses. So stay on message.

<META NAME="description" CONTENT="The Bakery - your go to destination for award winning chocolate cake recipes, help and ideas. Follow our easy to follow videos">

4. Keywords - but not as you know it

Despite what you may have heard, the KEYWORDS meta tag holds little value; search engines either ignore it or give it very little weight.  You should think of keywords more in context of being the "key words" that are in your page content and form the basis of your clients search criteria.

Put your keywords in Heading Styles

This tells Google to pay attention to this text - it is important, it also tells your viewers to pay attention to!

Wherever possible, use text links.

Search engines read the anchor text in the links to find out what the page the link points to is about. If you need lots of links in your site, use good keywords in those links. We like to use this alot in our footer area for the websites we build.

Repeat your keywords . . . but not too much. 

If you want a page to rank well for chocolate cake, then it also needs to appear a few times throughout the body text. Be careful not to overdo it - it needs to make sense.

Draw attention to keywords in your body text. Make them bold; put them in bulleted lists, or make them italic.

Here’s the ideal optimized page:(and they are all in a bulleted list!)

• You used the keywords in the filename
• . . . and in the <TITLE></TITLE> tags
• . . . and in the DESCRIPTION meta tag
• . . . and in the page’s first <H1> tag
• . . . and perhaps in some subheadings
• . . . and multiple times throughout the body of the page
• You have the keywords in links, elsewhere in your site, pointing to the page.
• You have the keywords in links, on other websites, pointing to the page.

Did you know that correct use of images can help your website rank further up the food chain?

Yes - those little Googlebots 'read' everything on your page - including all the information about your images.

Below are 4 simple steps to make sure your images are working best from a search engine optimization perspective.

1. Use the ALT TEXT TAG.

The ALT TEXT TAG is a field that allows you to label your image and allows the Googlebots to 'see' what your image is. 

If for example you are a baker and have a website with a recipe for Chocolate Cake, you might drop a picture of a Chocolate Cake on your page. 

The ALT Text TAG ( found by using your right mouse button on the image inside your CMS in Adobe Business Catalyst) is where you type in Award Winning Chocolate Cake for example.

2. Optimise your image for the web

Don't forget to resize your image.

This means to use image editing software to control both the physical size of your image and the file size of your image. 

Images that are slow to download will have a negative impact on your site in terms of how Google will rank the page.

3. Give your image a good file name

Make sure you save your image with a description that matches the image. 

My example above of the chocolate cake would work best with an image called award-winning-chocolate-cake.jpg and not DSC00056.jpg which indicates it has come straight from your digital camera!

4. Drop a caption on the page

We are drawn by our very nature to look at images before reading text. So whilst you have people immediately drawn to your image - give them something meaningful to read below/above or beside it as well.

Whilst I have no stats on this, a well chosen and captioned image on a page, could help reduce bounces. 

SEO - it can be a piece of cake