Monthly Archives: April 2015

Pinterest: An Introductory Guide for Marketers

Navigating the choppy waters of a new social networking site can be challenging as a marketer. The latest social media site to have marketers buzzing these days is Pinterest. Experian Hitwise finds Pinterest is the new No. 3 social site on the web (total visitors), just slightly ahead of LinkedIn.

Massive growth and popularity prove Pinterest is a wise avenue for your next marketing dollars. But how can you use it?

Pinterest: A Guide for Marketers

One of the first things you need to understand about Pinterest is what the heck it is. The site is “A content sharing service that allows members to “pin” images, videos and other objects to their pin board.”

Pinterest allows users to create customized themed boards to pin their images, video and other objects to. The board and theme are as creative as the individual and for marketers this can be ripe ground for our talent.

Demographics: Hitwise classifies Pinterest users into three categories:

• Boomers & Boomerangs: Boomers and Boomerangs are a contemporary consumer segment consisting of baby boomer-aged parents and their grown-up children living under the same roof. In these upscale households, most of the parents are in their 50s and early 60s while most of their children are teenagers and young adults in their 20s.
• Babies & Bliss: Babies and Bliss represent the premier lifestyle for large families in America. With a majority of households containing at least five people, this segment is a haven for large broods living in new suburban subdivisions. Parents in this segment tend to be in their 30s and 40s.
• Families Matter Most: A fast-growing segment, Families Matter Most consists of young, middle-class families in suburban locations leading active, family-focused lives. Nine out of 10 households have kids (nearly two-thirds have multiple kids).

As far as gender goes, a large percentage of the users on Pinterest are women. Google Ad planner shows Pinterest with an 80 percent female and 20 percent male demographic, ages primarily 25-44. The site caters to their interests so there’s no surprise there.

Men, however, are slowly migrating to the site and finding interest in their own ways. Sports teams have even created Pinterest boards for their male audience.

The information shared by Hitwise and Google Ad Planner can help marketers to see exactly who makes up the user base on Pinterest and what industries may do well. What marketers should understand here is that women are the core audience right now.

Research shows that women make the online purchasing decisions for roughly 75 percent of American households. This highly coveted demographic can be worthwhile for your marketing dollars. Don’t forget, however, that the site also has its appeal to other demographics as well.

Benefits :  There are many benefits to using this new social networking site for marketing a brand. Just like any other social site, brands stand a chance to reap the rewards of reaching more customers, driving more traffic, and selling more products.

Traffic: According to Shareaholic, Pinterest sent more referral traffic to websites than Twitter did in February this year. The site still doesn’t beat out Stumbleupon as a referral traffic source, but is slowly climbing the ranks becoming a contender. Over the summer, Pinterest became the top social media referrer for MarthaStewart.com and MarthaStewartWedding.com. The site is sending more referral traffic than Facebook and Twitter combined.

Cooking Light magazine’s website shows Pinterest as the second highest traffic referrer behind Google. The most popular topics that seem to drive traffic are in the wedding, arts and crafts, culinary, décor, design, and fashion industries.

Sales: For Etsy store owners, Pinterest has proved to be a boon to their success. The site caters to the creative and interesting, the unique. Users are encouraged to share the prices of items in their pins, by placing a “$” prefix before the price. Attractive prices can certainly garner a click through and potential purchase.

Pinterest recently updated their Terms of Service and took out their pin etiquette statement that requested users not use Pinterest for self-promotion. Concerns about self-serving promotion restrictions are seemingly over.

While we certainly don’t recommend promoting the heck out of your products, adding boards to showcase your products that in turn can help sell them is a good idea.

Reach: If people love your products, there’s a good chance you’ve already debuted on Pinterest. Here’s a trick: Check for yourself by going to pinterest.com/source/yourdomain.com to see the users pinning your photos. You may find that customers pin many photos, have photos that get re-pinned or liked, and even have some Pinterest followers comment on their pins. These are all opportunities a brand’s name is spread and the reach is expanded.

Marketing on Pinterest: Quick Tips

• Legalities: One of the biggest concerns with a site like Pinterest is the copyright and trademark violation liabilities. When you pin content that doesn’t belong to you, you run the risk of infringing on the rights of that content. While some opt to tearfully delete their inspiration boards, others act more cautiously when utilizing the site. Post content you own the rights to or share content from others who own the rights.
• Stay Relevant: Pinning photos that relate to your brand and are organized in the proper board is suggested. Random photos that aren’t relevant to the themes and topics on Pinterest may not fare as well. Stand a chance at getting your pins seen by tailoring them to the topics popular on Pinterest. These popular pins show on category pages that receive many more Pageviews and can result in traffic and expanded reach.
• Optimize: A recent infographic put together by Pinnable business, illustrates the important optimization areas for your images in order to cater to Pinterest. From file naming to description length, each of these areas are important to understand and optimize. Additionally important is optimizing each pin description. Remember to add a call to action when applicable and you can even drop a link.
• Become Pinteresting: Simply adding a few boards and pins to Pinterest aren’t going to cut it. Find ways to create your own niche on the site. Garner a following; get known as the expert in a specific niche or topic on Pinterest by sharing interesting content.
• Hashtags: Pinterest understands hashtags, so use them. Use categories or keywords as hashtags, or even joke around with them to add some humor just like on Twitter.
• Add $: Remember, adding the “$” in front of a price will automatically add the pin to the Gifts section on Pinterest. When applicable, remember to add “$” to your pins.

Summary : Understanding how to use Pinterest and what marketing potential the site offers requires diving in and getting started. Test, measure, and track your efforts. Brainstorm with your team and look for opportunities outside the box. Continually tailor your efforts until you find the groove that works for you.

Best Ways to Increase Traffic to ecommerce Websites

There are several channels online that can really take your ecommerce business to the next level but in order to get into all these channels, you must have a certain advertising/marketing budget to cover the cost. Depending on your niche, the web can be very costly or it can be very affordable, it really depends on how competitive your industry is.

Google Adwords : Google Adwords is the single largest Pay-Per-Click platform in the world. Since Google has the largest network of websites in the world as publishers (and advertisers,) the exposure you can get when launching an Adwords campaign is gigantic. Some of the properties on the web your ads will appear are places such as all comparison shopping websites, Amazon, YouTube and many of the other large sites on the web.

Microsoft Adcenter: With BING doing a huge push to market their search engine and now getting the index also for the Yahoo search engine, its exposure has doubled and it’s a great way to generate traffic on this Pay-Per-Click platform. You ads will appear on BING and YAHOO for your selected keywords.

Comparison Shopping Websites:  People love to do comparison shopping and shop the best price around. Website such as BizRate, Nextag and many others offer a Pay-Per-Click platform to add your products to their database and therefore driving traffic back to your website. These sites can convert really well for you also.

Display Advertising: Placing banners all over the web can surely gain you a large amount of traffic. Granted, while some may think a large advertising budget may be involved, you may want to find a large network with a good Pay-Per-Click cost that can generate a great deal of exposure. Typically, we would recommend display advertising not only to drive traffic but to really brand your brand/website. Some of the largest display channels (may be costly,) are:

1. Performics
2. Google Adwords
3. Advertising.com

YouTube: Some may not really agree or see how YouTube can drive a great deal of traffic to your ecommerce website but it really can. The traffic to YouTube is in the millions daily and videos are being watched every second. If you can create a great deal of product videos and you add a link to the description with your link, it can be highly targeted traffic.

Social Media Marketing: Social media and social communities are huge. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn…..all of these popular social sites can provide you with an effective and free platform to help drive traffic to your dropship products. Use them wisely and you will be well rewarded with increased traffic and sales.

Advertising: There are various ways to advertise. PPC, or Pay Per Click, is one that many entrepreneurs find quite effective. Although PPC isn’t free, sometimes you have to spend money to make money and there is no doubt that it will drive traffic to your dropship business or listings.

Email Marketing: Another very effective way to increase your traffic and if you can write the email marketing newsletters yourself free. Even if you must hire a freelancer to write your email marketing letters, you will still come out ahead provided you have planned out great campaigns and promotions that will drive traffic.

Budget 2012 Effect On Online Shopping Industry & Jewellery In India

Finance Minister of India Pranab Mukherjee has granted a wonderful gift to E-Commerce entrepreneurs by making an important announcement to introduce GST by August 2012 in his Union Budget 2012-13 speech. For e commerce entrepreneurs, this is such a fantastic news as they are expect that with the implementation of the Goods and Service Tax(GST) prices of products sold online will come down.

At present most of the online commerce ventures are working on hub and spoke model and due to variations in tax across states they have set up warehouses in cities with low taxes. These locations are not apt for procurement and delivery of products but with the implementation of GST they can establish large warehouses with in most beneficial and optimal locations.

Every sector of trade is eyeing on the budget and has some expectations with it. If we talk about gems and jewellery sector, the latest news is that in the upcoming budget gems and jewellery exporters have asked for a more simplified tax regime to reduce litigations and motivate investments. An appeal was made by the diamond industry to Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee to implement presumptive tax under which the industry is charged on an average rate of 1-3 percent of their profit margins.

According to Gems and Jewellery Export Promotion Council due to tough competition from countries like Dubai having tax free regime 80% of the diamond industry is earning an average profit of three months. Apart from this, the Council is seeking in reduction of levy on machines from 10% to 5% and import duty on rhodium from 2% to 0% along with ceasing 1% excise duty on branded jewellery.

People from Jewellery trade fraternity have pinned their hopes with upcoming Union Budget 2012-13, hope this budget may live up their expectations to the fullest!

Advantages with the LinkedIn to your Business

LinkedIn is one of the most popular networking websites that is in great demand today. Although it is classified as a social networking website, it is mostly a professional networking website and is a great resource for entrepreneurs as well as job seekers alike. It is different from most other websites in the niche in this respect and has many a great corporate biggies as its members. Basic membership at LinkedIn in free of cost and it offers a detailed profile setup (this is basically a digital resume and it consists of education, skills, website links, work history and many other details) compared to any other social networking website. Networking is very important at LinkedIn and is akin to the Kevin Bacon game (six degrees). It differs in the aspect that it is highly important to a career-oriented individual. Let us what makes LinkedIn so important.

LinkedIn has grown leaps and bounds in the recent past and has been the beacon of the social networking niche. A few figures would illuminate the situation. All figures below are form September-October 2008 and LinkedIn has grown over 200%, if not more since.

• LinkedIn attracted a record 12 million unique visitors in September 2008 which has been pegged at a 200% growth over the previous year.
• LinkedIn is home to over 9 million savvy networkers (networkers who have begun to use social networking before it actually existed) and these networkers have the most connections (an average of 61). These networkers make the most of LinkedIn and are estimated to have an annual income of over $93,500.
• Linked has about 8.5 million senior executives as members and their average annual incomes is in the range of $104,000. These are people who are happy with their power jobs and use LinkedIn to connect to their colleagues. This segment has about 32 connections on an average.
• LinkedIn also has about 6.6 million late adopters who have come later to LinkedIn after a lot of invitations. They are mostly professionals and have an income level of about $88,000 a year with an average of 23 connections each.
• The rest of the users at LinkedIn are categorized as “exploring option” and number about 6.1 million. They are mostly working professionals and are looking for other job options. With an average personal income of $87,500 and about 20 connections, they put the LinkedIn network to good use.

Best ways to use LinkedIn more effectively to your Business

• Fill out your profile completely to earn trust.
• Use widgets to integrate other tools, such as importing your blog entries or Twitter stream into your profile.
• Do market research and gain knowledge with Polls.
• Share survey and poll results with your contacts.
• Answer questions in Questions and Answers: show expertise without a hint of self-promotion.
• Ask questions in Questions and Answers to get a feel for what customers and prospects want or think.
• Publish your LinkedIn URL on all your marketing collateral, including business cards, email signature, email newsletters, web sites and brochures, so prospects learn more about you.
• Grow your network by joining industry and alumni groups related to your business.
• Update your status examples of recent work.
• Link your status updates with your other social media accounts.
• Combine your social media approach: when someone asks a question in Twitter, respond in detail on LinkedIn and link to it from Twitter.
• Use the search feature to find people by company, industry and city.
• Start and manage a group or fan page for your product, brand or business.
• Research your prospects before meeting or contacting them.
• Share useful articles and resources that will be of interest to customers and prospects.
• Don’t turn off your contacts: avoid hard-sell tactics.
• Write honest and valuable recommendations for your contacts.
• Request LinkedIn recommendation from happy customers willing to provide testimonials.
• Post your presentations on your profile using a presentation application.
• Check connections’ locations before traveling so you can meet with those in the city where you’re heading.
• Ask your first-level contacts for introductions to their first-level contacts.
• Interact with LinkedIn on a regular basis to reach those who may not see you on other social media sites.
• Set up to receive LinkedIn messages in your inbox so you can respond right away.
• Link to articles and content posted elsewhere, with a summary of why it’s valuable to add to your credibility.
• List your newsletter subscription information and archives.
• Find experts in your field and invite them as a guest blogger on your blog or speaker at your event.
• Post discounts and package deals.
• Import vCards and contacts from other applications to find more connections.
• Export your contacts into other applications.
• Buy a LinkedIn direct ad that only your target market will see.
• Post job listings to find qualified talent.
• Look for connections related to a job you want.
• Find vendors and contractors through connections.

Google is Preparing to Penalize Sites Which are Overly Optimized

This is an interesting move by Google but not completely off the rocker for them. Last year they clogged results for the co.cc domain because they considered they impure results.
Google plans to target far too improved websites because they want to level the stage for other websites who do not focus on such initiatives. Generally there are websites out there that really focus their initiatives on SEO and not content and those results would achieve greater rankings than websites that don’t focus on SEO.
Google Engineer Matt Cutts explains the following: “We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect.”
So, Sites with heavy SEO are going to get penalize from Google. The changes to the search engine will be coming in the next few months.

Our Opinion:
Now We can see two individual justifications on this matter, the individuals who invested lots of your energy on SEO and the individuals who did not. Genuinely from what we have seen from outcomes on The search engines we are all for this modify because we are sick and exhausted of finding outcomes for websites that make no sense for what we have explored for. The individuals who invested lots of your energy on SEO will likely not enjoy this modify but most of those individuals have taken to weblink deals and search term new spamming on their weblogs and websites. This modify will help websites that may not understand the SEO game but have great content, so we look forward to better outcomes. Who knows exactly what The search engines will be looking for.
Now content is the major factor to achieve the best results. Do you Agree for this ???

40 Changes in Google Search for February

In February month Google have many improvements to celebrate. With 40 changes reported, that marks a new record for our monthly series on search quality. Most of the updates rolled out earlier this month, and a handful are actually rolling out today and tomorrow. We continue to improve many of our systems, including related searches, sitelinks, autocomplete, UI elements, indexing, synonyms, SafeSearch and more. Each individual change is subtle and important, and over time they add up to a radically improved search engine.

Here’s the list for February:

• More coverage for related searches. [launch codename “Fuzhou”] This launch brings in a new data source to help generate the “Searches related to” section, increasing coverage significantly so the feature will appear for more queries. This section contains search queries that can help you refine what you’re searching for.
• Tweak to categorizer for expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “Snippy”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] This improvement adjusts a signal we use to try and identify duplicate snippets. We were applying a categorizer that wasn’t performing well for our expanded sitelinks, so we’ve stopped applying the categorizer in those cases. The result is more relevant sitelinks.
• Less duplication in expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “thanksgiving”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] We’ve adjusted signals to reduce duplication in the snippets for expanded sitelinks. Now we generate relevant snippets based more on the page content and less on the query.
• More consistent thumbnail sizes on results page. We’ve adjusted the thumbnail size for most image content appearing on the results page, providing a more consistent experience across result types, and also across mobile and tablet. The new sizes apply to rich snippet results for recipes and applications, movie posters, shopping results, book results, news results and more.
• More locally relevant predictions in YouTube. [project codename “Suggest”] We’ve improved the ranking for predictions in YouTube to provide more locally relevant queries. For example, for the query [lady gaga in ] performed on the US version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in times square], but for the same search performed on the Indian version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in India].
• More accurate detection of official pages. [launch codename “WRE”] We’ve made an adjustment to how we detect official pages to make more accurate identifications. The result is that many pages that were previously misidentified as official will no longer be.
• Refreshed per-URL country information. [Launch codename “longdew”, project codename “country-id data refresh”] We updated the country associations for URLs to use more recent data.
• Expand the size of our images index in Universal Search. [launch codename “terra”, project codename “Images Universal”] We launched a change to expand the corpus of results for which we show images in Universal Search. This is especially helpful to give more relevant images on a larger set of searches.
• Minor tuning of autocomplete policy algorithms. [project codename “Suggest”] We have a narrow set of policies for autocomplete for offensive and inappropriate terms. This improvement continues to refine the algorithms we use to implement these policies.
• “Site:” query update [launch codename “Semicolon”, project codename “Dice”] This change improves the ranking for queries using the “site:” operator by increasing the diversity of results.
• Improved detection for SafeSearch in Image Search. [launch codename “Michandro”, project codename “SafeSearch”] This change improves our signals for detecting adult content in Image Search, aligning the signals more closely with the signals we use for our other search results.
• Interval based history tracking for indexing. [project codename “Intervals”] This improvement changes the signals we use in document tracking algorithms.
• Improvements to foreign language synonyms. [launch codename “floating context synonyms”, project codename “Synonyms”] This change applies an improvement we previously launched for English to all other languages. The net impact is that you’ll more often find relevant pages that include synonyms for your query terms.
• Disabling two old fresh query classifiers. [launch codename “Mango”, project codename “Freshness”] As search evolves and new signals and classifiers are applied to rank search results, sometimes old algorithms get outdated. This improvement disables two old classifiers related to query freshness.
• More organized search results for Google Korea. [launch codename “smoothieking”, project codename “Sokoban4”] This significant improvement to search in Korea better organizes the search results into sections for news, blogs and homepages.
• Fresher images. [launch codename “tumeric”] We’ve adjusted our signals for surfacing fresh images. Now we can more often surface fresh images when they appear on the web.
• Update to the Google bar. [project codename “Kennedy”] We continue to iterate in our efforts to deliver a beautifully simple experience across Google products, and as part of that this month we made further adjustments to the Google bar. The biggest change is that we’ve replaced the drop-down Google menu in the November redesign with a consistent and expanded set of links running across the top of the page.
• Adding three new languages to classifier related to error pages. [launch codename “PNI”, project codename “Soft404”] We have signals designed to detect crypto 404 pages (also known as “soft 404s”), pages that return valid text to a browser but the text only contain error messages, such as “Page not found.” It’s rare that a user will be looking for such a page, so it’s important we be able to detect them. This change extends a particular classifier to Portuguese, Dutch and Italian.
• Improvements to travel-related searches. [launch codename “nesehorn”] We’ve made improvements to triggering for a variety of flight-related search queries. These changes improve the user experience for our Flight Search feature with users getting more accurate flight results.
• Data refresh for related searches signal. [launch codename “Chicago”, project codename “Related Search”] One of the many signals we look at to generate the “Searches related to” section is the queries users type in succession. If users very often search for [apple] right after [banana], that’s a sign the two might be related. This update refreshes the model we use to generate these refinements, leading to more relevant queries to try.
• International launch of shopping rich snippets. [project codename “rich snippets”]Shopping rich snippets help you more quickly identify which sites are likely to have the most relevant product for your needs, highlighting product prices, availability, ratings and review counts. This month we expanded shopping rich snippets globally (they were previously only available in the US, Japan and Germany).
• Improvements to Korean spelling. This launch improves spelling corrections when the user performs a Korean query in the wrong keyboard mode (also known as an “IME”, or input method editor). Specifically, this change helps users who mistakenly enter Hangul queries in Latin mode or vice-versa.
• Improvements to freshness. [launch codename “iotfreshweb”, project codename “Freshness”] We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.
• Web History in 20 new countries. With Web History, you can browse and search over your search history and webpages you’ve visited. You will also get personalized search results that are more relevant to you, based on what you’ve searched for and which sites you’ve visited in the past. In order to deliver more relevant and personalized search results, we’ve launched Web History in Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Morocco, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Estonia, Kuwait, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Nigeria, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Bosnia and Herzegowina, Azerbaijan, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Republic of Moldova, and Ghana. Web History is turned on only for people who have a Google Account and previously enabled Web History.
• Improved snippets for video channels. Some search results are links to channels with many different videos, whether on mtv.com, Hulu or YouTube. We’ve had a feature for a while now that displays snippets for these results including direct links to the videos in the channel, and this improvement increases quality and expands coverage of these rich “decorated” snippets. We’ve also made some improvements to our backends used to generate the snippets.
• Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.
• Improvements to English spell correction. [launch codename “Kamehameha”] This change improves spelling correction quality in English, especially for rare queries, by making one of our scoring functions more accurate.
• Improvements to coverage of News Universal. [launch codename “final destination”] We’ve fixed a bug that caused News Universal results not to appear in cases when our testing indicates they’d be very useful.
• Consolidation of signals for spiking topics. [launch codename “news deserving score”, project codename “Freshness”] We use a number of signals to detect when a new topic is spiking in popularity. This change consolidates some of the signals so we can rely on signals we can compute in realtime, rather than signals that need to be processed offline. This eliminates redundancy in our systems and helps to ensure we can continue to detect spiking topics as quickly as possible.
• Better triggering for Turkish weather search feature. [launch codename “hava”] We’ve tuned the signals we use to decide when to present Turkish users with the weather search feature. The result is that we’re able to provide our users with the weather forecast right on the results page with more frequency and accuracy.
• Visual refresh to account settings page. We completed a visual refresh of the account settings page, making the page more consistent with the rest of our constantly evolving design.
• Panda update. This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.
• Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.
• SafeSearch update. We have updated how we deal with adult content, making it more accurate and robust. Now, irrelevant adult content is less likely to show up for many queries.
• Spam update. In the process of investigating some potential spam, we found and fixed some weaknesses in our spam protections.
• Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.

QwikCilver starts selling Gift Cards online..!!

QwikCilver is India’s largest provider of stored value card based solutions. Be it Gift Card programs, Loyalty programs, Discount programs for Retailers and service providers, or convenience and operational efficiency programs for Corporate like Campus Cards, Incentives and Benefits Card. They planned to get into direct retailing of Gift cards through the online channel and got in touch with Embitel.

The company’s promoters and directors come with vast experience in technology and hence they knew what they wanted from the beginning itself. They wanted to use a strong but very scalable open-source platform to deploy their portal on. The scope needed a lot of API level integrations, ability to talk to multiple different systems and various new feature additions. This portal is a complete gifting portal and hence has been designed in such way. From its looks, which has taken a lot of brainstorming to arrive at, to the kind of add on products on offer with the main product, everything has been done keeping gifting as the theme. For customer’s convenience, features like eGV (you can buy and print or mail), card balance checking and card top-up facility are provided.

The website went online sometime back and is getting positive traction in the market. While existing features have already stabilized, a lot of new feature development is happening. Since gifting is a social thing, tight integration with Facebook and other social platforms is must to have. We will see something unique on this soon. Keep checkingwww.giftbig.com for latest additions.

SportsNest, a pure play etailer for sporting equipments goes LIVE..!!

SportsNest is a new venture started by Bangalore based entrepreneurs to sell sports equipment online. The site chains the need of a sports equipment portal which can serve all kind of buyers by providing all popular and hard to find sports goods. Embitel got involved from the very beginning of the unique online venture planning to help the ex-sportsperson, the emerging entrepreneurs to support with the right technology guidance and consulting to reach their pre-set goals.

Being an ecommerce pure player their expectations on the site performance was on a greater side. Including that with their plan to have all high end SKUs, videos upload for individual product and considering future expansion a suitable platform was suggested by Embitel and agreed upon to proceed with the development.  To flame their 1^st phase of development, Embitel’s design team had put their full efforts in putting up a highly sales focused website design with integrated social media plugins on Sportsnest.com homepage.

The site is in its beta-live phase but has able to get quite a lot of traction in the market. Instant support was provided on any issues faced and have been solved with immediate attention. Now the portal is highly stable with around 7000 SKUS operating live. We are happy to reach up to their expectations.

Tips for cart abandonment emails

Cart abandonment is a loss of opportunity and loss of sales for ecommerce businesses. What do you do for abandoned carts? You must, if you are not doing anything. Send me my commission for the added sales you will get, if you start acting on the abandoned carts.

Here are few tips and observations;

1. Send email to the cart abandoners. 
   • Send a series of three or more shopping cart abandonment messages, and see upwards of 60% of recovered revenue coming from the second and third mails.
2. Content of the emails;
   • Personalize – Include name of the buyer
   • Product – show the products in the abandoned cart. Include price of these products.
   • Including recommended products in shopping cart abandonment messages will help increase sales and AOV (Average Order Value)
   • A call to action – all the mails must have a visible call to action. e.g. ‘buy now’ ‘checkout now and get 5% off’, ‘take your cart home’
3. Right frequency of emails;
   • Sending the first message one hour after abandonment has the highest conversion rates, but waiting three to six hours results in higher average order value. 
   • The second message should be sent within 24 hours of abandonment.
   • and the third one should be sent within 72 hours of abandonment.
4. Show urgency; 
   • inform that the product is running out, that products in cart will be deleted within so many hours, that the offer will expire soon.
   • Don’t offer any discounts in the first message.
   • Offer incremental discounts in the following mails. Remember, these are time bound discounts.
   • Last message to inform that the cart will be deleted within such time if no action is taken.

Do write back on to inform me the % increase in sales you got after following these practices. Happy emailing!!