Do you have an email marketing list? If you don’t, it’s time you get one.

Okay, So Is Email Marketing Really That Great?

Absolutely! It’s actually one of the most cost effective ways to market your products and services to your customers. Instead of relying on new traffic to convert into customers, you can use your email list to entice repeat customers to do business with you again. MarketingProfs revealed at their Marketing Mixer Webinar in 2012 that those who receive email offers spend – on average – 138% more than people who were not marketed to via email. Additionally, MarketingProfs published an article that same year that reported the average ROI (return on investment) on email marketing was a whopping $40 for every $1 spent!

You Can’t Email Everybody And Their Dog

A lot of people who get email marketing happy email anyone and everyone they can get an email address for. That’s actually called spamming and frankly, you want no part of it. While purchasing huge lists of email addresses may be tempting (look at all those people you could market to!), spamming actually doesn’t work. It has the reverse effect. Very few people will make a purchase if they were spammed to and you will usually spend more time and money if you’re spamming.

So, Who Do You Actually Send An Email To?

Email marketing is most effective when you’re marketing to a smaller list of people who actually care about getting an email from you. Yes, it’s nice to imagine that everyone will actually care about hearing from you, but the truth is harsh. They don’t. When you target your existing network in your email marketing plan, you increase your chances of actually making real sales. A couple things to keep in mind though:

• Make sure you send an unsubscribe link at the end of every email you send. You don’t want to make it difficult for people to get off your list. You actually want the people who don’t want to be on there to get off! Your marketing will be much more effective that way.
• Segment your email lists. You don’t want to market a product that is exclusively for women to both men and women. Guess what will happen then? You’ll get a bunch of men that unsubscribe. Yes, we just said unsubscribing can be a good thing. But not like this. Never like this!

All in all, if you’re not email marketing now, you need to hop on that bandwagon yesterday! Put an opt-in form on your site and get going! You’ll notice that your bottom line increases with every email you send.

Increase Your Visibility With Google+

Google+ allows you to create an individual business page with your location, and it makes it easier for you to get your business to show up on Google Search and Google Maps. Did you know that over 80% of shoppers choose to shop locally? That’s right! If a person conducts a Google search and finds that your business is located near to them, they will likely choose to shop with you over another competitor.

Represent Your Brand

Simply put, Google+ is another way to represent your brand on the web. This doesn’t mean that you have to get rid of your Facebook page, or that you can only have one or the other. Quite the contrary – if you’re going to get your small business active in social media (and you should), then you need to have both a Facebook page and a Google+ page.

Other Bells And Whistles

There are a few other perks that go along with your Google+ page, such as Google Offers and AdWords Express. Both of these apps can be very valuable to your small business and will help increase your presence on the web – which, of course, is where everyone is at these days – including you.

If you don’t have a Google+ page yet, make one. Even if you’re not super active on it, it’s better to have one that represents your small business and helps you connect with your customers through Google than to not have one at all.

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The most frustrating hurdle for the eCommerce shop owner is the problem of the abandoned shopping cart. A customer will arrive at your website and be drawn in by your storefront and your item selection; they spend time browsing what you have available, carefully weighing prices and options; they decide on a number of items to purchase, and click Add to Shopping Cart; and, 70% of time, that is the last you ever see of that customer.

The reasons why carts are abandoned are many and mysterious. Sometimes a customer will use the shopping cart as a glorified comparison device (even if the store offers a comparison interface itself). Sometimes it is simply a version of window shopping products that they never intended, or do not have the funds, to purchase today. But these reasons do not explain such a high figure as 70%, and there are a number of optimizations you can make to increase customer purchase rates once they’ve committed to filling up their cart.

Avoid Confusion
Shopping is a simple, intuitive process for most people: you want an item, you pay for it, and you get the item. But a large portion of the population still finds computers and Internet shopping intimidating, and if your shopping cart and checkout process are not as streamlined as they can possibly be, you might lose them when they decide to take their business elsewhere rather than figure out how to operate your site.

Be sure your buttons and graphics are set up so as not to be confusing to buyers. Make the “check out” button prominently seen on the shopping cart page and take the customer straight to a location where he or she can pay – don’t use an interim page trying to sell them something else. Be absolutely sure the check out button is set far away from the Remove from Cart button, and that the latter is only seen if someone is actually looking for it (you may even want to use just an “X” near the item to signify that this will delete it from your cart with no words at all).

Easy Navigation
The fastest way to frustrate a new user is to make browsing process unintuitive. If a customer is looking for a few specific items but locating them on your site is not simple, they may give up after one or two and head off to a simpler alternative outlet. Your navigation menu should be clear without being intimidating. Sorting options and a robust search bar can simplify the process as well.

While you do not want to confuse the customer, if you have the ability to suggest to them products similar or complementary to what they are buying, do not be afraid to do so on either the product page or in the shopping cart itself. Helping your customer find what they might already want can go a long way to getting them to complete the checkout process.

Secure Shopping
In the modern era, this should go without saying: make sure your customer’s security and financial information is safe. What might not go without saying is that you need to let your customer know that their information is safe. Popular security features that customers might recognize, such as the “VeriSign” logo, can go a long way to making your storefront seem reputable and worth trusting.

Multiple Payment Options
Even if a customer attempts to check out, they might back out in an instant if they cannot pay the way they want. PayPal, while very common, is nevertheless a service that many people are not familiar with or choose to do not do business with. Likewise, a customer might trust PayPal a lot more than they do giving you their credit card information. A diverse list of payment options can provide every customer an avenue for checkout that they are most comfortable with, increasing your checkout rate.

Giving the Customer What They Want
All of these techniques to reduce the abysmal 70% shopping cart abandonment rate boil down to one core tenet: giving the customer what he or she wants. The customer wants a simple and intuitive interface to find the products they need on your website. The customer wants a simple shopping cart page that shows what items they have chosen, their prices, a total, and a very obvious way to check out. The customer wants to know that their information is safe in your hands. And the customer wants to pay the way he or she wants. You will still have some customers abandon their carts – just like you have abandoned products in any retail store – but keeping these techniques in mind can increase your sales and your customer satisfaction significantly.

Common web design mistakes that interfere with usability

Here are some common mistakes which usually every new designer repeats while designing a new website.

*                 If you have prepare your website with full attention, uploaded good web contents, images, videos and much more but if you  fail to create a search box in your website, your all efforts be useless. This is one of the common web design mistakes which most of the new designer do while designing a website. Basically, visitors visit your website to search some thing which they actually needed. After browsing your website, when they cannot search their required contents, they try to search any where else. At this moment, a search box created at clearly visible location can hold the visitors on your website to browse internal pages related to their search. So, don’t miss to create a search box on your website.

*                  Another mistake with the web design by the designer is poor visibility of web contents. Even if you have uploaded best information on your website, page layout and color scheme of page plays an effective role to get visitors attention. With the advancement of technology, people want to get information through digital media instead of reading traditional books. But still they want a web page just like a traditional page. So, try to make the text portion simple and easily readable.

*                 People search through internet to get latest information and prefer to read the posts which are currently uploaded on any website. So, you must always put the latest content on the top. The latest posts should always be clearly visible on home page.

Web Design Mistakes and website navigation issues

*                  Site navigation is another issue which affects the website performance and usability. Websites with difficult navigation often lose visitors even containing best information. Websites difficult to navigate create frustration for visitors. Some easy but useful steps can make the site navigation easy and quick.

*                  Links of website must be easily understandable for visitors.

*                  Dead links also make website navigation complicated: so, all the dead links must be removed timely.

*                  Hyperlinks are created to direct the visitors to a particular topic. So, the hyperlinked text must be relevant to the topic of the hyperlinked.

Miscellaneous Web Design Mistakes

*                  Some websites need especial features to add while designing. Designers who ignore the minor Web Design Mistakes cannot provide the required results for such websites. For example; kids prefer to play online games on websites with background music. So, you must use best and relevant background music in games websites.

*                  As you know that internet is the best source to get instant and exact information on any topic.  Visitors search for their required information by typing keyword in search engine. Some web designer use salesman techniques which cause frustration for visitors. For example creating too much “click here” buttons loses your website credibility. So, only use such buttons on appropriate place when you think that visitor is fully convinced to click on button.

The above mentioned web design mistakes badly interfere with the usability of any website. If you are conscious to avoid these web design mistakes, you can increase the credibility and usability of your website.

E-Commerce Web Design – Relevancy with product

Before designing an E-Commerce Website, nature of the product must be consider that which type of product you are selling. If you are selling luxurious products, your website design must be luxury looking. The design should be able to convey a clear massage to the visitor that where he/she is and what is being marketed there. The main reason for the failure of digital marketing campaign is E-Commerce Web Design, irrelevant to the products which cannot present the clear picture of that particular product.

Significance of E-Commerce Web Design for internal pages

Some people focus on home page design to make it more attractive but they ignore internal pages of E-Commerce Website. This is the common mistake by most of the designers. Internal pages and categories of any website are as much important as home page. If you want to sell multiple products through a single website or you have multiple products with the same category, you need to create multiple pages. Presently, search Engine Optimization is the best source to get visitors to your web pages. So, internal pages design is also important because most of the visitors reach to internal page directly through search engines. If you have ignored the design of internal pages, your optimization is useless. You can get visitors by SEO but your E-Commerce Web Design is again important to inspire them for making a purchase.

E-Commerce Web Design -Significance of images / videos

Images are helpful to present the best picture of any product.  If you have project on clear image of product, it will attract visitors to make purchase. Presently, social media like facebook and twitter prefer the images, which proof the significance of images for digital marketing. Actually, visual sharing of products helps the visitors to make any decision about products. Along with clear images, video presentation regarding products is more helpful to clarify the functioning of any product. If we look on the digital marketing trend of previous few years, we can see that visual campaigns are more effective than text campaigns. So, projection on images and videos must be considered as important part of E-Commerce Web Design.

E-Commerce Web Design – contact us details

After implementing all the above fundamentals, there are some people who still complain for non effectiveness of their E-Commerce websites. Actually, there is a minor but important point which they miss. That is the contact details of your company. It is a trend the most of the companies have their websites with a separate contact us page which usually does not link with other pages where the products are actually available. Such website usually loses their customers. So, E-Commerce Website with contact us button on every page are more beneficial.

This was all about digital marketing and E-Commerce Web Design. Concentrating on the above few essentials, you can launch an effective digital marketing campaign. So, stay with us to know more about E-Commerce Web Design and online marketing tips.

There are two categories of bad links which affect your website and harm you in the form of penalty and decrease of raking. Some bad links are in your control but there are many bad links which you cannot remove. Google Disavow Tool helps you to remove these bad links and save you from penalties.  Disavow toll remove all the bad links, which are out of your control. So, once you have activated Google Disavow Tool, it works automatically to remove bad links whether the links are only concerned with your website or generally for all the Google affiliated websites.

Although Google Disavow Tool is very useful to remove bad links and to keep safe from being penalized but it can also leads to loss of website data if not activated properly. So, if you want to activate this tool, you must be careful and understand the procedure of activation.

How Google Disavow Tool works?

If you are interested in disavowing tool you must keep in mind that this tool is not directly available in Google webmaster tools. First of all you will need to enter your owner account and than enter the disavow link page URL. After entering the URL, you will see a massage which would be regarding bad links. If you think that you must activate Google Disavow Tool, you can continue. Before getting started with disavow tool, you must prepare the list of links which you think as bad and wanted to be removed.

Advantages of Google Disavow Tool

The followings are advantages of Google Disavow Tool for the website owners.

*                Disavowing tool remove bad links automatically that can lead to penalties. So, this tool is helpful to save your revenue and obviously increases your income.

*                As disavowing removes the bad links, so it is useful; to increase your website raking in search engines. Google Disavow Tool is also a source to increase your ranking as well as organic traffic to your website.

*                 Disavowing tool also save your time which you have to waste on analyzing and removing bad links manually. The tool automatically analyzes and removes the links which could be harmful for your website.

Disadvantages of Google Disavow Tool

Google Disavow Tool is more beneficial; however there are some disadvantages of this tool if not activated properly. There are some complaints regarding this tools that it leads to destruction of website data. This happens only with those users who do not know about the usage of the disavow tool. Actually, user cannot activate the tool properly or their bad link list may be false which leads to removal of friendly links as well as data files of website.

So, it is recommended that you must use Google Disavow Tool when you have learned the techniques and procedure of using this tool.