We know everyone uses Facebook, but how are you using it for your business? If you run an e-commerce business, you know the role social media plays in building your brand and your bottom line. And whether you use Facebook, Twitter, or any of the other unique – and extremely lucrative – social outlets available, you have to have a strategy in place in order to be successful. On today’s show, Mojca Mars tells us how you can navigate the realm of social media and find the right outlets for you. Mojca is a social media consultant who created and spearheads Super Spicy Media (www.superspicymedia.com), a consulting firm that works with clients all over the globe searching for ways to utilize social media correctly.

Using social media correctly is tricky. Your accounts can act as your web page, attracting customers and advertising sales, but there are so many different experiences on each of your social media accounts that it can be hard to find the right way to use it. “The wrong way to use it is just the promotion part. It is not just a promotional tool,” Mojca advises. Instead, she recommends using a combination of media links, including videos, outside articles, and interaction with your own followers to create a kind of brand awareness that makes your business look like a friend rather than a commercial.

Finding the right way to interact with your followers and build your sales will come with a lot of trial and error. Uncovering what works and what doesn’t will take research, but the strategies Mojca designs for business owners guarantee a longevity in the realm of social media. Listening in today, she will tell you:

If you’re looking for a way to fit social media into your larger business plan, Mojca’s insight and strategies will be immensely helpful. Listen to her advice today, and reach out to her on her website at www.superspicymedia.com.

Freelancers are instrumental to your success when it comes to business, but you can waste time, money, and other valuable resources trying to find the perfect freelancer for your project. How do you know where to look for freelancers? And how can you guarantee that they will not only be reliable, but that they’ll also give you the type of quality work you’re paying for? I have Robert Williams on the show today to answer those two very important questions. His website – www.LetsWorskshop.com – connects what he calls “highly-curated freelancers” with established and up-and-coming e-commerce business owners in order to create dream teams of business.

I can’t stress enough how integral freelancers are for hitting your business goals. You may have an idea for site design or marketing that the rest of your team can’t figure out how to implement. Maybe a design firm told you it was impossible. But when you hire a freelancer, you’re hiring an independent entity that thinks outside of the corporate box and brings in a unique skillset that can bring you fantastic changes in design, conversion, and sales that you may not have initially anticipated.

But even with these perks, Robert discusses how stressful finding a freelancer can be. It’s daunting to have an amazing idea and then let someone you’ve never met before do all the work on it. How can you trust them to fulfill your vision, or even complete the work at all? You want to make a return on your investment, and that’s why LetsWorkshop.com does the legwork for you. Robert designed his site to help e-commerce business owners like you and I:

Robert goes through all these useful tips with me today on my show, so listen in and find your own freelance team at www.letsworkshop.com/connect. Any questions? Tweet Robert directly @letsworkshop and open up that direct line of communication.

Have you considered hiring a consulting and design firm lately? As a business owner, you can gain a lot of insight from a consulting firm. Most specifically, an outside perspective can improve your site and your sales by 2-3% per month. That’s what Nick of Draft is capable of, and on today’s podcast he talks about the radical improvements you can make to update your site and your sales.

Nick Disaboto is the founder of Draft Consulting Firm, a company that provides monthly A/B testing and on-going optimization for small businesses and their websites to increase traffic, returns, and sales.  “I plan out a lot of different design changes for your site, regardless of what industry you’re in,” he says. In fact, on his website, he makes it very clear that he is here to work with the small teams and businesses in any field that can benefit from a quantitative assessment of their design. Too often consulting firms focus on the large enterprises and big businesses that pull in upwards of $500,000 a month, leaving out the little guy who could still benefit from A/B testing.

“People are taking a more reasonable perspective,” Nick says of design testing. He discusses how you can prepare for costs, invest properly, and learn to trust you intuition over the numbers. He compares it to taking a stab in the dark with a flashlight. “You can never know if any decision is going to make a difference,” he says. “I continued to be shocked at what fails miserably.” But learning to recognize patterns and see where clients respond positively is part of what he does with the on-going optimization and what we talk about on the show.

If you’re looking to find a balance between software management and customer service, and find new ways to drive your sales through web design and social media, take a listen to the podcast and check out Nick’s site at www.draft.nu.

Today on the show my guest is X Wang, founder of Essence of Email.  This show is all about getting your email marketing in order prior to the start of the holiday season.

The most important thing to do before we get started is to make sure your email list is in good order.  This starts with cleaning out inactive subscribers.  This may be a bit counterintuitive initially, but a clean list will allow for higher deliverability rates, and thus a higher overall conversion rate.  

To reclaim those dormant subscribers, you can place them into a 3-4 email sequence that includes coupons, update to touch base, and then a notification that they will be removed from the list if not engaged.

Now that the list is primed for action, it’s time to put a written plan of action in place.  This takes the emotion and guesswork out of the execution of your plan.  The holiday times will be busy with fulfillment, social media marketing, and promotions, so now is the time to get a good plan in place.

Next up is to properly establish your analytics and metrics tracking.  The details of where you track these metrics isn’t as important as doing it consistently.  This can be done through your email marketing provider or Google Analytics, as long as it’s set up properly ahead of time.

Deliverability comes next.  First you need to know if you have any issues.  There are 3 main things to look at here:

A service like ReturnPath or MailMonitorApp is the best way to do this.  These do incur a minimal cost, but are well worth the investment to ensure that your emails are arriving in customers’ inboxes

Use ‘dummy’ email addresses you own on different email providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.) and include those on upcoming campaigns.  You will have to verify deliverability of these manually though

Segment deliverability list by domain.  Each provider will have different filtering rules, and can be optimized differently if you’re having low deliverability rates on one platform.

After ensuring that all of the sending of emails has been optimized, it’s time to ensure that the flow within your system is streamlined.  How are new subscribers routed?  Are content upgrades being delivered properly?  What happens when customers make a purchase?  Ensuring that these are all set up correctly will be key in ensuring highest possible customer satisfaction.

Autoresponders are they heart of any email marketing program.  There are a few basics to keep in mind that will apply to almost all e-commerce store owners:

Prospect Series - These are targeted for people who are not yet customers but just subscribed

Welcome Email - to include incentive offer

Social Proof Email - this could include social media or testimonial postings

Product Feature Email - this could include reviews and highlighting specific products

Incentive Reminder - give subscribers another chance to use the incentive you offered initially

Post Purchase Series - These are aimed at getting existing customers to return to the store

Welcome Email - Ask customers to take a quick survey, the results of which you can use for segmentation at a later date

Brand Engagement - Building up social media presence, forwarding to a friend, or participating in a blog or forum are all great ways to build engagement

Product Reviews - After delivery of the product, ask customers for a review.  Special incentives can be used during reviews to differentiate from your competitors.

Reorder/CrossSell/ReSell - Exposing customers to different products based on what they purchased initially

Cart Abandonment Series - The highest ROI in your email campaigns

There are typically 1-3 touchpoints:  an hour, a day, and 3-5 days after a cart is abandoned.

Only send an offer email once during this campaign series

This is the first thing most e-commerce consultants will suggest, because it’s the quickest return that store owners will see

One last X recommends ahead of the holidays is to slowly ramp up the frequency with which you send emails.  This increase in frequency has to be balanced between increasing sales with also maintaining lifetime value of subscribers, and minimizing unsubscribes.  

Klavio is X’s preferred email provider for e-commerce store owners because it’s geared specifically towards store owners and has great integrations with shopping cart platforms.

To connect with X, head over to essenceofemail.com or email him directly at [email protected].  

Our guest today is Sid Bharath, he is a entrepreneur, marketing consultant, and writer. He is the marketing manager of the Lemonstand Blog. He also provides marketing consulting on a freelance basis and discusses Growth Hacking on his blog.

Ecommerce providers should care about content and customer relationship. You don’t have to spend a lot of money on advertising. It can be just as simple as creating a blog, or sharing on social media. Evergreen content (not marketing based) will continuously bring new traffic and visitors to your site and product.  Jordan thinks that the best place to start with content creation is tp look at the frequently asked questions.

Sid adds that content doesn’t have to be about the product, but a need or emotion that connects to the product.

Whenever you need to stand out from the competition, you should ask yourself who else uses my product? Examples Sid gives for this point are $1 Shave Club and Harry’s, both are the same services and products, but marketed to different demographics.

The work put into a site and shopping experience will only increase your sales and find you an audience. A beautiful website set up on a budget will get just as much traffic as an expensive site set up.

Sid says to consider if there is an audience with smaller niche sites and purchase your online ads with them. Examples he gives are OKCupid! He says these can cheaper than the bigger platforms like Google Ads or Facebook. Figure out where the audience is and how to reach them where they are, not just blindly buying advertising.

Before Crowdfunding stores created products and launched them and hoped it found a customer base. Now companies can create a product idea and ask their existing audience if it is a desired product. Crowdfunding has changed the face of ecommerce and manufacturing. It has become a safety net to prove to a company and potential partners that a product can and will sale.

Sid’s final point of this interview has to do with the type of technology shoppers are using now and how a company needs to be aware of all the devices and access points their audience uses. Mobile commerce has become a common form of shopping. Many companies don’t put the time into a nice mobile site and lose a part of their audience. So invest in a multi-device sales strategy.

To reach Sid you can visit his personal site www.siddharthbharath.com or you can follow him on Twitter.

Thanks for joining us for today’s show, if you would like to give us a5 star review in iTunes that would be awesome!

Today’s guest is Alex Harris of marketingoptimization.tv . A site offering ‘videocasts’ with topics about lead conversion, digital marketing and other related subjects. He started his career as a traditional designer in designing wall graffiti.  Alex says he practically grew up with a spray paint can in his hand. In 2000, he started out as a website designer as his first job after graduation and it involved directing traffic to a website.

He left a successful job in 2011, as the creative director behind the eDiet.com website for 11 years and hasn’t looked back since then. He is now a successful entrepreneur and president of Alex Designs with 15 plus years of experience doing eCommerce, SAAS and Direct Marketing for several huge companies as a paid consultant. The man has many accomplishments including publishing a book called Small Business Big Money Online.

In this episode we’re going to talk about

How to use Direct Marketing Direct Acquisition Tactics to make more money for your website designs because it now not hard to make a pretty website design but it's actually hard to convert.

What’s happening and what’s going on. Identify trends that are going to heat up for this year 2015.

Building a brand, why it's different now compared to how it was done a few years ago. Why it's a lot easier to sell online nowadays and to know what’s going on in a customer’s mind.

Why selling on Amazon is a great way to advertise an item you are selling. The importance of selling not just a product but also a great customer experience.

Using the Tripwire Analogy but on the internet.

If I were to create a brand that attracts buyers, I’d apply the methods mentioned in here and I am extending this invitation everyone because it works.

If you enjoyed the show today, I’d appreciate a review on iTunes. Thanks!

Today we are talking with a good friend of the show Kurt Elster of Ether Cycle. He is the go-to-guy for Shopify and he has something to share with us, it is a 10 point success plan for online business. It comes from real life experience, and taken from a blog post he wrote about helping a store grow to $90k in 90 days.

Number 1: Setup a Theme

Don’t go with free, pay a little money for it. A lot of times you can start with a simple Premium Theme, then modify it.

When you go to customize a Shopify theme, spend the time and money on a good developer.  Specifically Kurt recommends Out of the Sandbox and Pixel Unit.

Number 2: Optimize Your Site

Continually work to make your site perform better.  A/B testing, conversion rate analysis, and tracking user behavior are all best practices.

When considering design aspects of a site, approach your site as a new customer.  Think about what a first time visitor would want to see and do on your site.

Number 3: Invest in Professional Photos

It not only builds SEO, but it also boosts trust in your brand.  A good example of this is Lemonstand if you want to do this yourself, and do it like a pro.

Using images and product descriptions from manufacturers’ websites means missing out on potential differentiation from your competitors.

Number 4: Use Automated Messages

Start your email list building efforts early.  This is one of the few universal truths in online business.  Once you have begun building the list, start building a relationship with your customers through e-mail.

Specifically for Shopify, Kurt recommends using the Kaviyo email marketing plugin.  

Make the message personalized and relevant to the content at hand.  Take this chance to use the messages to show appreciation and to share more about your brand and your offerings.

Number 5: Use Targeted Ads Based on Previous Visits

This can be done through Google and Facebook.  Anticipate the next item or sale interest.

AdRoll and Perfect Audience are great resources for doing this, along with the built in tools for Facebook ads.

Number 6: Use PPC

Use Google Adwords to find the best customer base to target, but make an effort to be very focused and offer practical deals.

Look-A-Like Audience is a great tool to create a profile similar to your existing customer base that can be great target for your PPC campaigns.

As with most things, you get what you pay for, and it may be a good idea to hire an expert as soon as possible.

Number 7: Use Customer Development

Ask your customers why they buy from you.  This can be done easily by sending surveys and other follow up messages.

A few great examples include: “Who would you recommend this product too?” and “What benefit did you get from this?”  This helps you refine your target audience.

Number 8: Make Changes Based on Customer Development

Make changes to your site, your business model, and your marketing campaigns based on actual customer behavior.

Number 9: Email Marketing to Existing Customers

This is a great way to keep in touch with your customer on an ongoing basis.

Do more, than sale discounts.  If this is the only email you’re sending each month you’re missing a huge chance to continually build your brand and messaging to existing customers.

At a minimum you should be emailing your customer list every 2 weeks, and not always about a sale or with a discount offer.

Number 10: Go buy a boat

Scale your business, reinvest your profits, and grow!

For the original blog post that inspired this list click here. If you have any questions for Kurt visit websiterescues.com or connect on Twitter @kurtinc, or send an email to [email protected].

Thanks for joining us for today’s show, if you would like to give us a 5 star review in iTunes that would be awesome!

Kai Davis of doubleyouraudience.com is an outreach consultant.  He helps ecommerce stores, product creators and experts build an audience, increase traffic and increase sales.  Kai helps owners manage their most valuable relationships so that they can focus on growing their business.  Kai joins me today to discuss how his steps for outreach help ecommerce businesses thrive.

Kai explains that outreach involves building ongoing relationships with your target audience often through the use of bloggers and other initiatives that drive traffic to your site.  Kai gives us a case study where he was able to triple the amount of traffic to a women's apparel company.   The strategy he used involved outreach.  He described in greater detail the steps involved in outreach that you can apply to your ecommerce store or product:

How to find the bloggers who reach your audience  

Developing relationships with those bloggers so their content drives traffic to you

How to use unique discount codes, raffles and contests through your targeted bloggers

The extremely important role of building an email list

How to manage an email list in more effective ways

Kai has a saying that SEO is dead, outreach is where you need to be focusing. He says there are no hidden secrets when it comes to SEO.  Outreach is about building traffic and that will lead to links.  .  

Check out doubleyouraudience.com/l/cart-hook/ for a special offer Kai has put together just for CartHook listeners where you’ll get his content promotion checklist and a 60 minutes Q&A video about the outreach process.  If you have any questions for Kai, drop it off for him at doubleyouraudience.com/ask .  To receive Kai’s weekly newsletter head here, doubleyouraudience.com/newsletter. It’s packed full of tips and tricks.

The use of mobile devices is growing at an incredible rate and that trend is something companies of all sizes need to be prepared to address.   My guest today is Jonathan Stark, a mobile strategy consultant who helps consumer brands make the leap into the post-PC world that their customers are already living in.  

Jonathan explains that a few years ago it was hard to convince people that they needed to move into mobile to better serve their customers.  Recently big companies began to realize they better do something or they would be in trouble.  Traffic coming in from mobile devices is greater than 50 percent.  The desktop has plateaued and mobile is the new platform.  

We talk about something called a mobile retrofit.  It’s basically a band-aid that provides a drastically improved mobile experience by doing a few things.  Jonathan explains what those things are that can make your site more mobile friendly now.

Jonathan talks about how to prepare for changes, which is a bit difficult because the changes are happening very quickly.  He thinks it’s best to be as flexible as you can in all your decisions so you’re prepared for these fast changes.  It’s projected that by 2020 there will be 4 billion smartphones in use globally.  As mobile traffic is increasing at an amazing rate, he says you need to be prepared for that or you’ll be left behind.  Jonathan says bigger companies often look at their peers to see what they’re doing, but it’s the upstarts that are going to dominate them.

Learn more about what Jonathan does and read addtional mobile strategy insights on his website, jonathanstark.com

Taylor Pearson is my guest on this first episode of The CartHook Show.  Taylor is an internet renaissance man who also happens to have a ton of ecommerce experience.  He managed a ecommerce business in the hospitality market which saw over 500 percent growth in just 18 months.  

Taylor and I talk about strategies and tactics to grow your ecommerce business.  Taylor shares his biggest learning experience.  We talk about understanding your target customer base.  We also discuss using newsletters and email to tell the story of your product, rather than just always selling.  

Two things that Taylor sees as important for the e-commerce business person right now are retargeting and autoresponders and we highlight what they will do for the ecommerce professional.    

To find out more about Taylor, check out taylorpearson.me.  Follow him on Twitter @TaylorPearsonMe. Taylor also has a book, The End of Jobs, which deals with his thoughts on how jobs are dying out and entrepreneurship is becoming more accessible than ever.  

If you would leave a five star review for this podcast on iTunes, I sure would appreciate it.