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Social commerce is estimated to reach $30 Billion (yes, that’s Billion with a ‘B’) in the next 5 years. How is that possible?

Facebook Commerce is more than just Liking product pages. There are 7 dimensions driving Facebook Commerce that make up the “F-Commerce Ecosphere,” as shared by Janice Diner, founding partner of Horizon Studios, a social media consultancy at the Meshwest conference this week in Vancouver, BC.

The F-Commerce Ecosphere

Commerce Inside Facebook.com

F-stores

Since the first in-Facebook retail transaction in 2009, many e-businesses have launched their own Shop tabs on their Facebook Pages that either redirect to their website or support real-money shopping right on the Page.

Facebook Ads and Sponsored Stories

Ads and Sponsored Stories are advertising options, messages appear in the sidebar and in the News Feed.

Facebook Credits

Facebook Credits is a virtual currency redeemable for digital goods (like games, movies and paid apps) and virtual goods inside games (extra lives, character enhancements, etc). Facebook Credits can be used for micropayments inside mobile apps.

Considering Zynga sells 38,000 virtual items every second, this stuff is pretty popular with consumers. In 2010, Zynga’s virtual goods revenue topped 575 Million. The virtual goods insdustry is expected to total 1.2 Billion this year.

Facebook Credits gift cards can be purchased online or in supermarket checkout aisles, or can even be earned as loyalty incentives. Through the Shopkick mobile app, customers can earn rewards points for store check-ins, similar to Foursquare.

Move over Netflix, Credits can be redeemed for movie rentals too.

Open Graph Facebook Commerce

Facebook Mobile Platform

Facebooks mobile apps allow status updates on-the-go that push to Notifications, Requests, Timeline and News Feed, which may be shopping related.

Facebook Open Graph Beta

Open Graph 2.0 will move beyond the “Like,” “Share” and “Recommend” buttons to incorporate a new set of “verbs and nouns” like “I Like,” “I Want,” or “I Bought.” These actions can be pushed through Timeline, Newsfeed and Ticker. (Stay tuned).

So, “John Doe Likes this” could become “John Doe hearts iPhone 4S.”

Of course, let’s not forget Facebook Connect and its many ecommerce applications, covered in detail in this post.

Facebook Social Plugins

Plug ins allow users to perform Facebook functions on your site. Think “Like,” “Share” and “Recommend” buttons, fan widgets and comment boxes.

Facebook Places and Location Tab

Did you know Facebook is stealthily cataloginging physical location data for every Facebook business Page? This data can be integrated online and in-store via the mobile experience. For example, Walmart uses one’s zipcode to personalize its Page with offers, new products and special events.

Another amazing (and a bit creepy) use for location info is Ticketmaster’s Interactive Seat Map, which lets you locate where your friends are sitting in a theater.

While I’d be hesitant to say anyone’s making a mint off selling physical goods through Facebook, many brands have found it an important space to connect with fans. (See how I avoided saying “engage” there?) There’s a lot of opportunity to play around with social marketing, even if you don’t use all aspects of the ecosystem. It’s an interesting animal to watch, we’ll see what 2012 brings in terms of innovation and opportunity with Facebook commerce.

If you’d like to play with the full presentation deck, check it out below:

Looking for help with ecommerce strategy? Contact the Elastic Path Research & Strategy team at consulting@elasticpath.com to learn how our ecommerce strategy services can improve your business results.

We recorded the following video live at meshwest in Vancouver on December 5. Meshwest is a one-day event about what’s next online for marketers, entrepreneurs, the media and citizens.

Linda sat down with Mathew Ingram, a co-founder of the meshwest conference and a senior writer at GigaOm.com, one of the leading technology blog networks in the US. He writes about the evolution of media and content and all that involves, including social media, Google, and the web in general.

As the sound in the video is a bit iffy, here is a summary of the conversation:

How are tablets changing consumer behavior?

Tablets are changing the way people consume media. Certainly the way I consume media. I’ve always been a voracious reader – newspapers, magazine and books. Now I virtually read nothing in printed format.

Ali Davar from Zite, the iPad magazine that learns from your reading preferences, talks about how reading on the tablet is a much better experience than reading on a computer. The fact that you touch the device – swiping, pinching, zooming – instead of using a mouse makes reading a tactile thing, as it always has been with printed newspapers and magazines. This changes the way you think about the media you are consuming. You are no longer passively sitting there but are interacting with the content. To me, this is the single biggest shift with digital content. It allows interactivity. Whether it’s comments on a newspaper story or blog, or Twitter or Facebook, the fact that a reader can interact with me and I can interact with them around the content that I’m writing is a huge transformation.

How about an example of a publisher that’s done a great job integrating or exploiting social media?

Everyone is experimenting right now. One of my favorite examples is The Guardian which is very forward thinking when it comes to digital. They are owned by a trust and therefore not driven as much by returns as public companies are. The Guardian is more interested if their content is reaching readers and they are embracing content from non-journalists. They have an open blog network, Comment is free, where anyone can contribute:

And last year they launched an open API, a programming interface for their content. They are effectively saying ‘We don’t care if you use our content. Build it into your service and either license it from us or give us a share of the ad revenue’.

Most media companies are still more concerned about control. ‘How do I keep all my content to myself? How do I force people to come to my website?’ The Guardian is more interested in using digital technologies to distribute content and then monetize it, rather than corralling people into silos. It’s a reversal in how you think about what you’re doing.

Is citizen journalism a threat to ‘traditional’ media?

Definitely. ‘Traditional’ media companies have always thought of themselves as the creators of content. Journalists were the only ones with a channel to reach people through or with video cameras to create content. But now anyone can do it.

The guy who was live tweeting the raid on Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan was a programmer who happened to hear a helicopter. For about an hour he was the single best news source about that event. He was a journalist for an hour. And Twitter, smart phones, and the Internet are what made him a journalist.

Either you see the value in that or you see it as a threat. You can’t do both. Companies that see the value of that and adapt are going to be better off and further ahead than those who don’t.

So subscribing to traditional media is becoming more like joining a community?

Theoretically. Smart newspapers are thinking of it that way. The editor-in-chief of The Guardian, for example, talks about what he calls the ‘mutualized’ newspaper.

It’s no longer us, the journalists, simply delivering content to you. It’s a regional back-and-forth process of determining what is news. What do we care about and what don’t we care about. Again, at The Guardian you can now see all the stories being worked on by journalists. And if you know something about one of those stories you can reach out to that journalist and help them. We need to think about what we do differently. Rather than dictating the news, it’s about co-creation.

Do you think in the future that you’ll be able to purchase single pieces of content rather than a whole newspaper?

We’re already part of the way there. People are reading individual articles recommended in Twitter, or that show up in a Facebook stream or in an aggregator, for example Pulse or Flipboard.

Let’s face it, people never read the whole newspaper anyway. They’ve always customized their news. Now it’s just a lot easier to read only the things that you are interested in.

And if you’re not taking advantage of this shift, it’s going to take advantage of you and harm your business. An editor friend of mine says that he now thinks that the way people come to the news is as if you’d taken a newspaper and ripped it up into individual articles and thrown them into the wind. Who’s going to find which piece? What are they going to do with it afterwards? How are they going to find another one? People don’t come in the front door. They come in from different places and might not even know the name of the publication. It’s a fundamental change in the way information is created and flows which has widespread implications. It’s hard to wrap your head around that if you’ve always packaged up the news and delivered it as a bundle.

Unfortunately the whole advertising model is based on that packaged model. A newspaper bundles up all their eyeballs and claims that a million people read all their stories. While no one believes that’s true, advertisers then pay based on the number of eyeballs. They are looking for a mass audience but that’s not the way information works anymore.

Is technology driving our behavior, or have we slowly changed our behavior and new gadgets are just coming along to support it?

It’s a little bit of both and feeds on itself. The type of information consumption that we’re talking about really wasn’t that possible previously. I tried to customize my own content before by subscribing to 15 different magazines and 5 different newspapers, and watching 11 cable channels. Now various services let you consume just what you are interesting in. And tablets make content consumption so convenient, reinforcing this behavior.

I’m sure there are new products coming along that are going to accelerate the shift to personalized content delivery. For example, I’ve seen delivery mechanisms that are built into your bathroom mirror (for instance, the Cybertecture Mirror). Or a heads-up display while driving. Or on your glasses or contact lens.

A lot of exciting things to look forward to in the future – Thank you Mathew!

Looking for help with digital commerce?

A recently released Forrester report provides tactics for selecting digital ecommerce solutions and looks at some of the key platforms available in the market today. Get your free copy of Market Overview – Digital Commerce Solutions 2011 here.

Search Engine Optimization can be a mysterious field. Every other SEO guru has a different opinion about what tips, tricks or incantations cause your website to rank highly and cause conversions. These tips and tricks can be incredibly useful, and can certainly cause serious increases in your website’s traffic. What these lists don’t mention, however, is that SEO tricks alone do not make a website perform well. SEO tips, tricks and techniques should be icing on the cake.

The backbone of SEO is a well designed and well written website. A well designed website is intuitive and easy to use, and is fashioned to allow search engines to easily spider your site. This means that no pages are forgotten about or lost in space, and visitors to your site can easily navigate to their intended destination. No amount of SEO is going to help your conversion rate if people can’t find what they’re looking for.

Well written copy also performs two basic functions: it provides important keywords, specifically keywords that help make long tail keywords, and it’s the primary source of communicating to your customers. Well written copy is a wealth of information for both search engines and visitors to your site. It allows search engines to determine what your site is all about, while giving important information about your company and your services to visitors.

This might seem a straightforward topic, but often times companies will pour money into SEO projects only to see drastic increases in website traffic that never converts, often due to web designers knowing little about SEO. Without a solid foundation, SEO will unlikely be able to help you reach your goals. Luckily, SEO specialists understand this. If you see phenomenal website traffic for qualified keywords, but not the conversion rates you’d like, it might be worth contacting an SEO company that conducts usability testing. They can help determine why your site is underperforming and can suggest ways to improve your website that dovetail with your current SEO strategies.

SEO Basics: Conversions Rely on Content & Usability is a post from: Google Analytics, SEO, Social Media and PPC blog

In our neverending quest to increase conversion rates and revenue, we often focus on web design and offers, and overlook the power of customer reviews. There are many benefits of reviews, not only to your customers, but also to your merchandising and purchasing team. But attracting reviews is a challenge — even Amazon’s average sales-to-reviews ratio is 1300 to 1. Do you know what percentage of customers ‘convert’ to review contributors? What can you do to attract more reviews?

The benefits of customer reviews

1. More content. Customer reviews reveal insights about the product that do not appear in the manufacturer’s description or even your own copywriting. This is very important in online shopping, as there is not a salesperson on hand to discuss the product. This allows customers to research their purchase more thoroughly, with honest opinions. The more review content you have, the less likely the visitor will turn elsewhere (like Amazon or a competitor) to find this information.

2. Trust. Consumer surveys consistently show that people prefer shopping on sites that show customer reviews because it reduces their risk of purchasing a bad product. Emarketer found that consumer reviews are trusted nearly 12 times more than manufacturers’ descriptions. Consumers actively seek out sites that offer a wealth of reviews. 81% of consumers consider the availability of customer reviews to be “very important,” according to iPerceptions.

Even negative reviews create warm fuzzies about the merchant – it shows transparency and honesty. Research by Forrester has shown that after reading a negative review, 26% continue to shop for the product anyway.

3. Product discovery. You’ve heard of the “paradox of choice,” the more results you offer, the lower conversion. Sort by star rating is a powerful tool for shoppers to make informed decisions with minimal effort.

4. SEO. When reviews are added to a page, they use “customer speak” that other customers also type into search engine (including misspellings and specific problem/solutions, e.g. “socks good for diabetics.”) Make sure your review solution does not use frames that are not crawled by search engines. It can also help your internal site search for synonyms and misspellings you may have missed if you include them in your index.

5. Feedback. Reading customers’ reviews help you to understand what customers like/dislike about products and how they use them, to decide whether to restock items or discontinue products, and what to merchandise as featured products on home pages and in email campaigns (e.g “customer favorites”). If you’re thin on content, read reviews from other sellers that carry the same products.

6. Backup. If a product is really poorly made, reach out to your supplier and use customer reviews as evidence that the product is shoddy.

How to attract more customer reviews

1. Get more out of givers

Gift givers, that is. For many businesses, the holiday season is the high season, which means a big opportunity to reach out post-purchase and ask for customer reviews.
While gift givers may be reluctant to review items they never took out of the box, they can provide feedback on certain categories (apparel, jewelry, etc), or review your company/service.

Tip: Always include a photo of and link to the product(s) purchased in the email.

2. Test offers vs. altruism

It’s all about the ask. It’s a no-brainer that e-tailers reach out to customers post-purchase and request reviews, but very few are actually doing it. So doing it is the first step, and testing incentives to submit reviews is the second.

Why test incentives?

You could offer a dollar or percentage discount, but you risk a “schill review” in exchange for the discount. You want authentic reviews. One way to get around this is to offer a “chance to win” a really great product or gift certificate.

But, do customers need to get something to give something? Research says no.
90% of consumers surveyed by Baaarvoice say they write reviews to help others make better buying decisions, and more than 70% want to help companies improve the products they build and carry. So appeal to the do-gooder in your customer in your request, mention how they can help other shoppers and help you improve your product line to keep satisfying customers like them.

The key to conversion is to understand what motivates your customer. Split test an altruistic appeal vs. discount/chance-to-win incentive to see what gets the best results.

3. Optimize review usability

If you want more checkouts – remove the required registration, right? Why not smash the barriers to writing customer reviews as well? Altrec bakes name and email fields into the review submission form, making the process nearly frictionless.

Another idea is to give reviewers tips on what makes a good review:

Finally, ask them to rate specific attributes. Often customers are not thinking about every attribute when writing a review, but can offer good feedback when reminded about them. Delightful Deliveries does this very well.

4. Place calls to action on product pages

Why wait for a purchase? Ask shoppers to review products on product pages themselves. Some site browsers will own items they did not buy from you, or even experience them in a store (this sweater fits tight, try a size larger, etc).

The Macy’s example incentivizes it’s product page request. Again, you could test this vs. a blurb about how kind and wonderful of a person one is if they leave a review.

5. Grab feedback in-store

I’ve never seen this done, but why not create a mobile app where customers can join, come into the store, experience products and write reviews through the app to earn points redeemable for real products or other perks? The app could link to product review forms via QR codes.

Make it a new year resolution to grow your CRO – Customer Review Optimization!

Looking for help with ecommerce strategy? Contact the Elastic Path Research & Strategy team at consulting@elasticpath.com to learn how our ecommerce strategy services can improve your business results.

Just a note to our beloved subscribers, we recently refreshed the look of GetElastic.com and with it came a few hiccups including a glitch in our feed that sent out a blank message to email subscribers and a truncated post to our RSS followers. If you missed our Ecommerce Link Digest for November on Friday you can view it here, and while you’re at it, check out the new look!

Thank you for your patience and we will be back to regularly scheduled programming Tuesday.

November was a big month for online retail, with Cyber Monday emerging as the highest day for online shopping, new records set for mobile commerce and the introduction of Google+ pages for businesses and brands. (I’ve also seen more facial hair around Vancouver than during the Stanley Cup playoffs). But here at Get Elastic, the [...]

If you’ve been to one of our Google Analytics trainings, you may have heard me say this: tracking visitors from one domain to another is a huge pain in the neck. Whenever someone goes from domain1.com to domain2.com, you have to take their cookie data and pass it over to the second domain via the URL. If you don’t, the visitor generates a new visit and their referral data gets jacked up.

Normally, this is a tedious, manual procedure. After making a minor change to your Google Analytics Tracking Code, you then have to modify every link on domain1.com that takes a person to domain2.com. If you have a few links, no big deal. But what if you have thousands of them?

We’ve posted before about automating the cross-domain tracking process, but a lot has happened since then. Namely, Google Analytics has a sexy new asynchronous tracking code. So we finally got around to creating a script that automatically links domains using the new code syntax.

Not only that, but it tracks outbound link clicks and downloads, all automatically. We’re pretty proud of it, and since it’s so darn useful to us, we figured we’d share it with you. Give it a try and let us know how it works for you!

Step 1: Modify Your Google Analytics Tracking Code

First, you’ll need to make sure that your Google Analytics Tracking Code is set up to allow for cross-domain tracking. The _setDomainName and _setAllowLinker methods are required for this to work:

var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-Y']);
_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'domain1.com']);
_gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker', true]);

Make sure that _setDomainName is set to the second-level domain that the tracking code resides on.

Step 2: Download and Modify the Script

Click here to download the script, then modify the domains and file types you’d like to track.

If I wanted to track the domains lunametrics.com and lunametricsstore.com, I’d modify line 5 to read:

var domains=["lunametrics.com", "lunametricsstore.com"];

And if I wanted to automatically track downloads for PowerPoint presentations, I’d add .ppt to the list on line 6:

var fileTypes=[".doc", ".xls", ".exe", ".zip", ".pdf", ".mov", ".mp3", ".ppt"];

Step 3: Upload Script and Include on Pages

Upload the xdomain.js file to your web server and then reference it on all pages of your site. Place the reference below your Google Analytics Tracking Code:

<script src="/path/to/xdomain.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Step 4: Test It!

To make sure the script is working, click on one of the links that takes a visitor from one domain to the other. Check the URL that displays in your browser location field after the new page loads. You should see a string of information in the query string:

You can also view your cookies (I use Firebug and Firecookie). Check out __utmb. The number after the first period is the pageview count. If cross-domain tracking isn’t configured properly, then it will reset when you hit the secondary domain.

__utmz should also maintain the proper referral. If you visit your primary domain directly and then move to your secondary domain, __utmz should still reflect this:

Conclusion

Hopefully this helps you set up cross-domain tracking (and outbound link tracking and file download tracking) on your site easily, without a lot of headaches.

The code is supplied as-is. We’ve tested it internally, but it’s your responsibility to make sure it works on your own sites. And if you notice anything that doesn’t seem to be working, you’re free to correct the code. Just let us know about any improvements you make! Either way, please keep in touch and let us know how you’re using it.

Automatic Cross Domain Tracking Revisited is a post from: Google Analytics, SEO, Social Media and PPC blog

Words matter. It’s proven that your choice of verbiage can dramatically impact your email open rates, paid search click through rates and landing page conversions. Marketers spend thousands of hours and dollars testing and tweaking text to find out what performs the best. It’s easy with the wealth of testing tools available for your campaigns, but what about organic SEO?

Title tags are not just important for ranking, but also for click through. We can expect the majority of searchers to click on the top result, and possibly top few results when searching for information. But for commercial searches, it takes a bit more effort to figure select a search result that’s relevant to the search intent (i.e. an ecommerce site, not a Wikipedia or blog article) and attractive (a familiar domain, a reasonable offer). Your title tag, like your PPC headline, is your small space to shine. But unfortunately, we’re left to make a gut-feel decision on what title tag is best.

Testing title tags: the problems

SERPs (search engine result pages) introduce many uncontrollable variables, such as Google’s penchant for showing different flavors of results, in different areas on the page, for different keyword searches. For example, a search for ‘riding boots’ shows Google Product Search results that can divert a customer from organic listings, star ratings that draw attention to search ads, and brand links to help users narrow their searches.

Notice how the singular “riding boot” and plural “riding boots” show the same page results, but slightly different related Stores results, and omits Product Search results.

If you’re really observant, you’ll notice the related Stores options are different too. Testing is difficult because you have no way of knowing how often these elements are shown or how they may be skewing your results.

Not only that, but search positions are always in flux, and vary depending on the exact keyword phrase queried, the user’s geolocation, whether the user is logged into a Google account (personalized to search history), the “freshness” of results at any given time, and perhaps even involves estimated page load speed and activities of one’s social graph.

And did you know that search engines sometimes override your HTML and create their own title for you based on content on your page or what it thinks your page is about?

Finally, the biggest hurdle is that even with Google’s own Website Optimizer tool, you cannot tell Google to show one title tag 50% of the time and another the rest. Google will only index your control page. Test versions are served after the referral, if applicable. This makes A/B testing individual pages’ title tags impossible. The only testing you *could* do is in aggregate.

Testing title tags: the workaround

Get Elastic reader Sander Daniels’ team at Thumbtack.com found a workaround to A/B testing title tags in aggregate, described in this case study. Using a home-grown testing platform in its ecommerce back end, the test ran for 7 days, Thumbtack split its URLs into 3 buckets, each containing thousands of URLs. The buckets consisted of a control and 2 challenging formats.

Control: Looking for the best [Service] in [City Name]?
Challenger A: Get Free Quotes Today From [Service] In [City Name]
Challenger B: [Service] in [City Name] – Get Free Quotes Today

To control for the uncontrollables in search, Thumbtack used the ratio of visits to its experimental titles compared to visits to pages in its control group. Rankings were also monitored, and there was no significant change during the test period. The test ran for 7 days, resulting in a 20-30% drop in traffic to its test groups. Traffic rebounded (for the most part) after reverting to the original title tags.

What to test in ecommerce title tags

If you’re bold enough to try a similar experiment (and have the technical judo chops), here are a few hypotheses you could explore:

Remember, to make it work:

Looking for help with ecommerce strategy? Contact the Elastic Path Research & Strategy team at consulting@elasticpath.com to learn how our ecommerce strategy services can improve your business results.

Link building is tough. You wander through hundreds of websites, carefully dodging bad neighborhoods and figuring out to get past the gate and into the high profile communities.  You try to make new friends, but the webmasters and gatekeepers won’t give you the time of day. If only you already had a large group of friends in high places – folks who would be more than happy to vouch for you via link, folks whose hyper-linking votes of confidence  really boosts your credibility to the search engines that be.

Well, chances are that you have more friends than you realize. They can and will help your SEO endeavors, and you’ve probably been ignoring many of them. Your web friends are your entire group of stakeholders – every person, group, or organization who has a stake in your organizations success.

At LunaMetrics, we’ve found that the relationships our clients have built over the years produce great backlinks. Stakeholder backlinks typically are often hard to duplicate, carry solid authority, exist in neighborhoods with small numbers of external links, and are genuine votes of confidence.  We’ve also found that these relationships aren’t always translated online into links, but they often do with just a little help.

Introducing… the Stakeholder Backlink Audit

Helping current relationships bear linkable fruit online has become such an important part of our link-building methodology that we’ve formalized the process into a method we’ve dubbed the Stakeholder Backlink Audit.

The Stakeholder Backlink Audit is a tool for ensuring your website is receiving as many links as possible from those parties who may have an interest in your organization’s success, and may be willing to link to your site. It is a systematic and thorough method of maximizing link love from all the relationships your organization has built.

The Stakeholder Backlink Audit has 3 steps: 1) List stakeholders 2) Review their websites 3) Request links. We’ll walk you through the process using a make believe company – a restaurant chain called Pittsburgh Premier Pizza.  We’ll also show you how to make a mean audit form.

Stakeholder Backlink Audit Step 1 – List stakeholders

First we need to take inventory. We recommend that you list on a spreadsheet every person or organization your organization has built a relationship with that you’d want as a referral source. This requires some help from your client or coworkers. Leave out any organizations you wouldn’t want to ask for a link from, and leave out any business relationships you want to keep private. Don’t worry yet about adding a bunch of details, checking the website, or checking for links. This step is simply all about building a nice long list of names, and being as thorough as possible. We’ll pare it down later.

You’ll want to build a sheet and pass it around the office. Your coworkers may have relationships you are totally unaware. We use an Excel form for this. We find it helpful to break down the stakeholders into categories, as it makes the process more manageable and makes it easier to think of names.

The various stakeholder groups you’ll encounter in your link building efforts include business partners, customers, associations, sponsorees, and alma maters. Let’s take a closer look at these stakeholder groups:

Business Partners – Includes suppliers, subcontractors, distributors, resellers and other partners.

• Tips: Leave out any business relationships you want to keep private! This is often a huge category, and you may want to break it down into subcategories.
• Some ways they link – Company’s often show where their products can be found or boast of reputable clients or brand names. They may name drop during case studies, testimonials, blog articles, or out of goodwill. Perhaps you are the best homebuilder in Pittsburgh, and your partners are more than happy to link to you because you’re so awesome (but maybe they just need a little reminder).
• Examples: McDonald’s Mushroom Farm; Pittsburgh Printing Press; SolarStats SEO

Customers

• Tip: This is also a good way to identify raving happy customers that may also write a review or testimonial.
• Ways they link – Businesses might list suppliers or recommend other businesses; some consumers blog about everything.
• Examples: Gourmet Gil the restaurant reviewer; Carnegie Mellon Mel, who writes for his university’s newspaper

Associations – Includes any association, organization, or business community you are a member of.

• Some ways they link – Member directories; news; pages covering events/exhibitions you participate in.
• Examples: Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce; Western PA BBBs; PA Restaurant Association;  Association of Pittsburgh Pizza Makers

Sponsorees – Any nonprofits and organizations you support and/or donate to.

• Tip: Time is money – so if you volunteer, that counts too.
• Some ways they link – “Sponsored by ______”; list of donors; Press Releases; donation announcements; event announcements.
• Examples:  Southside Little League; Pittsburgh Food Bank

Alma Maters – Schools your organizations employees graduated from.

• Tips: Good way to get the elusive “.edu” links.  Make special note if you have top executives that graduated from the school or if an employee remains highly active within the school (regular guest speaker, active in alumni association, etc…)
• Ways they link – Many schools have alumni business listings, alumni profiles, and success stories.
• Examples:  http://www.business.pitt.edu/alumni/news  http://www.upj.pitt.edu/19150 http://www.b-link.bucknell.edu/s/754/start-template.aspx?sid=754&gid=1&pgid=1284

I like to give each category of stakeholders a worksheet in the Excel workbook. Then I ask the client to provide stakeholder names and a very short description, and pass the workbook around the office until it is as full as possible.

Stakeholder Backlink Audit Step 2 – Review their websites

Now that we’ve built our list, it’s time to figure out which stakeholders we need to get in touch with and where the backlinks can go.

First you’ll need to see if you have a backlink. There are several methods of doing this, and I personally haven’t found a method I’m fully satisfied with. I’ll check domains in an Excel report of current backlinks and then I might do a Google Advanced Search for a client’s brand names in certain stakeholder sites. I pull the client backlink reports using Majestic SEO (via Raven Tools) and SeoMoz (Open Site Explorer) – these aren’t complete but will find majority of links and most of the important ones.

If there is a backlink, see if it would make sense to try to get more links or improve the current link with better placement or anchor text.

If there is no backlink, decide if it’s worth going for (expect many stakeholders not to link out as policy – sometimes you may not want to bother). If so, how are you going to make the link request and who is responsible for it? Often it’s best that the link request is made by the individual with the closest relationship to the stakeholder. Also, like with all link-building, it’s common that you may have to work for the link, so note how.

When you’ve finished reviewing websites, your Excel audit form will look something like this:

Stakeholder Backlink Audit Step 3 – Request those links

By now, you’ve checked all the stakeholders sites for backlinks and you have an idea of how you’re going to go about getting those links. Again, like with all-link building there is going to be rejection, you will have plenty of waiting, and you may have to perform additional work for the links. You may need to write testimonials, fill out submission forms, hunt down webmasters, submit specially formatted logos, guest blog, write news snippets, and who knows what else.

Being as organized and systematic as possible will lower your work load – you could use the Excel form with comments to track and organize your requests or you can you a backlink manager tool (I use Raven Tools which has a neat browser tool). And always remember the golden rule – treat your stakeholders well if you want them to do the same to you.

It is work, but when you complete your Stakeholder Backlink Audit you will have added some quality, hard-to-duplicate, natural backlinks to your growing link profile.

We recommend that every website perform this backlink audit at least once. Let us know how it works out for you or if you have any comments!

Link Building Tip: Maximizing Link Love from Stakeholders is a post from: Google Analytics, SEO, Social Media and PPC blog

Inactive email subscribers. The ones that you mail, mail and mail again for months or years, and never an open, never a click. Removing them can help your sender reputation, as too many inactives can be a flag to ISPs and hurt your overall delivery percentage. But cutting them off prematurely could mean lost future revenue. What should you do?

The rules of engagement

ISPs track both positive and negative engagement activities which can impact your deliverability.

Positive engagement

Negative engagement

Source: Responsys Email Engagement Study, 2011

Measuring clicks is the most accurate way to determine engagement, as open rates are not fully accurate due to image suppression and preview panes. And clicking something suggests the content was interesting enough to spur action. (Another reason why you should never send a retail email that doesn’t have a clearly clickable call to action).

Notice that clicking an unsubscribe link appears on neither list, so it’s a better idea to make it easy for a user to unsubscribe than to minimize this call to action in hopes nobody opts out. If anything, the click to your unsubscribe page or “update your preferences” is a sign of positive engagement – even if that subscriber ultimately drops off.

Inactive subscribers defined

We see there are a number of signals that indicate an uninterested subscriber, but how long they have gone cold is important, yet variable. ISPs will tolerate 18-24 months of inactivity, but your own analytics may reveal a tighter window. Segmenting the disengaged from the engaged and testing frequency, offers and time of day along with a re-engagement campaign can help you determine the tipping point.

“In tests that we’ve done with clients, the vast majority of reactivated subscribers were inactive for less than 18 months,” says Responsys’ research report, which includes a case study where the optimal engagement window was half that, at 9 months.

Also note, there’s a difference between an inactive email subscriber and an inactive customer or “lapsed buyer.”

Are inactives unvaluable?

The Smart Insights Digital Marketing recently posted an article by Dela Quist of Alchemy Worx, who offered 5 reasons why an email subscriber might be inactive.

1. They want your email, but haven’t needed your product for a while.
2. You’re receiving false negatives – your email is optimized to be read with image blocking on, so some subscribers could be opening it without you knowing.
3. The subscriber doesn’t want your email, but doesn’t care enough to unsubscribe.
4. Email address churn – the subscriber no longer uses or rarely checks that email address.
5. They don’t see your email because it goes into the junk folder.

By far the largest group is the first one – we call these people the unemotionally subscribed. They will happily ignore your emails until they’re ready to buy, because it’s easier than unsubscribing and having to remember your URL or Google you later.

We’ve gathered plenty of evidence on this group and demonstrated that while they might not read an email, they’re still a very important customer base. For example:

• One of our clients generated $120,000 from subscribers who had not opened or clicked on the previous 25 to 40 emails.
• Another saw 14% of revenue generated by subscribers who did not open or click a single email.”

Common marketing advice would have been to delete those subscribers after a year’s inactivity. But by retaining unemotionally subscribed addresses, the client brought in a significant amount of additional revenue.

Inactive subscribers can become customers, so the answer is to make efforts to reengage the subscriber before removing them.

Reengagement strategies

Reduce frequency

Responsys recently completed a 3+ year experiment, subscribing to 100 retail email lists using fictional personas. Testers opened and clicked regularly for a period and then stopped. After 40 months, 31% were still mailing at full-throttle frequency, while 23% reduced frequency, 14% had stopped, and the remaining 32% stopped mailing after reducing frequency.

Sending inactives email less often reduces your overall negative engagement scores with your ISP. It also allows you to see if engagement improves among this segment simply by appearing in their inbox less.

Don’t wait until subscribers are inactive for 18 months – by then, chances are you’ve already lost them. 3, 6 or 9 month windows are a good place to start. Your goal is to re-engage them and move them back in your actives file.

Mix up the content

So you’ve reduced frequency, but how do you determine which campaigns to send and which to suppress? These are a few of Responsys’ tips:

1. Send only your best offers and deals.
2. Send exclusive offers to this segment.
3. Test different subject lines (with trigger words like “come back” or “we miss you”)

If reengagement doesn’t work, remove the subscriber after 24 months (your ISP’s threshold). You may lose some “false negatives” that never turned their images on, but if they haven’t clicked, you’re better off cutting them loose.

Additional tips to protect sender reputation

Build up your positive engagement signals, and reduce your negatives with these best practices:

1. Have a clear call to action in every email. And make your links / buttons / banners look clickable. I’ve said it before, and again, and now I’m saying it…again.

2. Send welcome emails that ask customers to update preferences and add your sender name to their address books / safe lists. (Hey, while you’re add it, why not segment out subscribers who don’t engage with your welcome email and keep these items prominent until they do?)

3. Design for images off, with enough teaser text that subscribers are motivated to turn their images on, and ultimately, click something.

4. Test headlines and always be closing testing better headlines! Learn what wins an open and what gets ignored, on average, over time, and to various segements.

5. Segment!!!!! Yes, I’m yelling. Find useful ways to better target offers so that your campaigns are as relevant as possible. I’ll get you started…segment by geography and exclude non-US residents and do not send them Turkey Day mailings in November.

6. User test creative to find out what compels people to scroll. It’s a sign of engagement.

7. Clicks are the most important engagement signal. Did I mention make things look clickable? Even if you’re only directing people to visit you at a physical store, give them something to click and ask them to click it. How about social sharing links if you’re stuck for ideas?

8. Research shows people often misuse the report spam button, simply to indicate they are not interested in a particluar email (even if they opted in to your list!). First, allow subscribers to provide feedback on their interest level in your campaign:

Second, make your unsubscribe link uber-prominent (at the top of the page and the bottom) so the no-longer-interested can stop mailings without hurting your sender rep.

9. Have a preference center, and periodically include a call-to-update in your campaigns. There’s pros and cons to asking for preferences upon sign up – the extra questions may reduce your conversion rate, but it gives you much better targeting afterward. Someone who takes the effort to fill out a longer form is more likely to want to hear from you anyway.

10. Pick your sender name with care. Nondescript ones like “nobody” or XYZ are not going to stand out when users scan their inboxes. And don’t switch your sender name frivolously. You’ll mess up the “safe” lists of your existing subscribers and potentially confuse them to boot.

Looking for help with ecommerce strategy? Contact the Elastic Path Research & Strategy team at consulting@elasticpath.com to learn how our ecommerce strategy services can improve your business results.