The Beginner's Guide To Keyword Research For Ecommerce

If you're new to the world of ecommerce or online marketing in general, you've likely heard about search engine optimization (SEO). In a world where the majority of online traffic stems from a string of text typed into a search box, search engine optimization can be a deciding factor in the fate of your business.

SEO encompasses many tactics but the underlying principal is that you're helping Google and other search engines better understand what your ecommerce site is about and what it sells. This in return increases your visibility by increasing the chance search engines will list your site in the search results when potential customers are looking for the products you sell. 

One of the foundational tactics of SEO is keyword research. Keyword research is the simple art of better understanding the terminology your potential customers are using to find the products you're selling, then matching your website and marketing terminology. 

In this article we'll cover the basics of keyword research for ecommerce. The ultimate goal is to build a relevant list of keywords that you can refer back to and use as you build and optimize your site, write your product descriptions and craft your blog posts.

Over time, you'll help search engines better understand what your site is about so they can better match your store as a result for relevant search terms, leading in increased traffic and sales. 

Why Keyword Research Is Important

Every time someone does a search, the search engine must decide which handful of results to display from hundreds of thousands of possible pages. It's up to the search engine algorithms to determine the best and most relevant matches for every single search. This is why it's so important to choose your keywords carefully, so that the search engines can match and display your site in the search results to the most relevant keywords searches.
Not only is it important to rank on the first page of a search engine results page for relevant search terms, but it's equally important to rank in the top positions of the first page. To understand how big of difference position can make consider the graph below which shows search result position and average traffic share:

Image Source: Chitika
From the graph we learn that the first page of search results receives over 90% of the traffic share and the first three search results receive over 60% of the traffic. Most significantly, the difference between position ten (first page) and position 11 (second page) means a decrease in traffic from that particular search term by over 100%.
In short, the closer you are to the top of Google for relevant search terms the more traffic (and potential sales) you'll receive. Depending on the search term and the volume of searches per month being made for that search term, the difference in just a few positions can represent significant revenue loss in the long term. 

Understanding Keywords

Before you jump into doing keyword research for your online store, there are a few basic terms you'll come across that are important to know and understand.
These terms include: 
Keywords - A keyword(s), in the context of search engine optimization, is a particular word or phrase describing the content of a web page or site. Keywords act as shortcuts to sum up the content of a page or site. Keywords are part of a web page’s metadata that helps search engines match a page to an appropriate search query.
Longtail Keywords - Longtail keywords are simply keywords that contain three or more words. Longtail keywords are important (hence them having their own name) because they make up over 70% of online searches according to SEOMoz and also tend to convert better as they catch people further along in the buying cycle. Someone searching for "hair extensions" is likely in the early information gathering stage, however, someone searching for "20 inch brown hair extensions price" is likely further along the buying cycle and much closer to purchasing.
Search Volume (Avg. Monthly Searches) - Search volume is usually measured in average monthly searches. This is the total number of searches each month for each particular search phrase (keyword). Ideally you're looking for the keywords with the highest search volume. Ranking highly for search terms with higher search volumes means more potential traffic and conversion potential for you and your store.
Unfortunately, there is not a magic number that represents the perfect search volume for everyone. What constitutes the “right” search volume is going to be different for every site.
Competition - Search volume isn't the only thing you need to consider. Competition is equally, if not more important. There's no point in trying to rank for keywords you have no chance of ranking for. Competition refers to the difficulty of ranking for each particular keyword. In an ideal situation, your chosen keywords would have high search volume and low competition, however, these gold nuggets are difficult to find and will require some hard work, patience and maybe a little luck to find.
Keep in mind that the competition in Google's Keyword Planner Tool refers to paid advertising competitiveness of keywords rather than organic search competition, however, this is many times representative of the organic search competition as well. 

Brainstorming Your Initial List

Now that you understand why keyword research is important and some of the basic terminology, it's time to do your own keyword research. To begin, you'll need to brainstorm an initial list of search terms you believe your customers would search for to find your shop and the products you sell. Just grab a pen and paper and begin making a list of search terms you would use. At a minimum your brainstormed list of each keyword should be two words but you'll want to think of longtail keywords as well, up to four to five words or even more. 

The more words you brainstorm upfront, the more you'll have to work with to uncover new search terms so don't give up too easily. Try to build a list with as many relevant keywords as possible.

You may want to ask friends and family for their input as well but avoid asking them directly what they would search for and try to get them in front of a computer and ask them to search for your brand/products. Monitor what they search for and the links they click. This can provide some great, real-world insight into what an average person would search for.

Tools To Expand Your List

After you've done some initial brainstorming, you can consider a few tools to help expand your list. One of the simplest tools is Google's own suggestion feature. To see some of Google's suggestions, simply do a Google search and scroll to the bottom of the page and look at the related suggestions. 

A great tool for help with your brainstorming is Übersuggest. Übersuggest scrapes Google for Google suggestion keywords by taking your keyword and adding every letter of the alphabet from A to Z capturing the most frequently searched permutations.

Don't forget to consider keyword modifiers like “how to” or “where can I” etc. For example, someone may not be looking necessarily for "hair extensions" rather they may be looking for "how to get fuller, longer hair". 

Keyword Research Using The Google Keyword Planner Tool

Now that you have your initial list of brainstormed keywords, you can use these keywords to find more keywords using tools online. There are many tools you can use to conduct your keyword research, paid and free, however, one of the most popular tools for conducting keyword research is Google’s Keyword Planner Tool. The Google Keyword Planner Tool allows you to search for keywords to determine how many searches per month are being made for that term, how much competition there is competing for it and the related search terms.
The related search terms are important because it's going to expose you to other keywords that are similar but may have a greater number of searches, less competition or a combination of both.
To use the Google Keyword Planner Tool, you'll need a Google Adwords account which is free and only take a few minutes to get set up.
Once you have a Google Adwords account you'll need to login to your account and select Tools from the menu at the top, and then select Keyword Planner.
On the next screen, click Search for new keyword and ad group ideas.

Next, enter the keywords you've brainstormed from the previous section, either one at a time or a few at a time by separating each with a comma. We would recommend starting with one at a time to keep things simple.
Double check your settings under Targeting to make sure you're viewing search information that is relevant to you. For example, if you're based and ship to USA and Canada, you should be looking at information results for the USA and Canada.
Under Customize your search and Keyword options, you should turn on Only show ideas closely related to my search terms. This will provide much more relevant keywords, however, if you feel the keywords are too closely related or you wish you expand your search, feel free to try a search with this option turned off.


On the next screen, it will default to the Ad Group Ideas tab. Change that to the tab labelled Keyword Ideas.

The first column will list the original keyword(s) you searched for as well as closely related keywords. The second column shows you the number of searches being performed each month in the geographic area you specified. The third column is the level of competition for each keyword.
It is this information you'll now need to begin sifting through to begin building your keyword list. You can use the Keyword filters on the lefthand side of the screen to only show low and medium competition keywords and filter out the ones that would likely be too difficult to compete for. 

This will leave you with a list of keywords related to your original search that have a low and medium level of competition. As an example, we have colour coded one such query below, the yellow highlighted keywords being medium competition and the green highlighted keywords being low.

With this list you'll want to take the best terms that describe your site, pages and product offering, keeping in mind the search volume and competition, and record them, ideally in a spreadsheet. You'll want to repeat this process for all the brainstormed keywords you came up with.

Refining Your List And Checking It Twice

Now that you've come up with a list of relevant keywords it's time you double check your work. You may have got a little carried away and added in some keywords that were low competition, or high search volume but don't accurately describe your store and offering. In this phase you're going to look at each of your keywords and:
Ask yourself - Is the keyword relevant? If someone searches for that term and lands on an appropriate page on your site, will they find exactly what they are looking for?
Search for the keywords in Google and Bing - You've already looked at the competition strength in Google Keyword Planner but as mentioned prior, those levels represent paid search competition, which doesn't always translate over to organic search. Understanding which websites already rank for your keyword gives you valuable insight into the competition, and also how hard it will be to rank for the given term. If the top results are for major and well established brands, it's going to be more difficult to rank highly for your keyword.
Will all the keyword information you have gathered, you'll now want to really boil your list down. To start, you'll really want to focus on a handful of keywords (5-7) but it's a good idea to keep a bit of a broader list (15-20) to keep your options open and work on long term.

Conclusion

The good news is that after completing your keyword research and slowly implementing your chosen keywords throughout your site, Google should have a better understanding of what your online store is all about so it can better match you to the correct searches.
Keep in mind though that SEO and keyword research is an ongoing process. It takes time and patience to research and implement your keywords and more time for Google to pick up on these changes. Most importantly, over time, SEO changes, search engine algorithms change and the terms your customers use will change so make sure you routinely go over your keyword research to make sure it up-to-date and accurate.
Bonus: For more information on SEO and how to most effectively use your keyword list, check out the Shopify Ecommerce University SEO video series.

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About The Author

Richard Lazazzera is an ecommerce entrepreneur and Content Strategist at Shopify. Get more from Richard on Twitter.
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6 Awesome Content Sources That Take the Stress out of Social Media Sharing

You've been told that in order to build an audience on social media around your brand, you need to be sharing “great content”.
The problem is, you’re busy – and constantly making sure you have interesting stuff lined up to tweet, pin and post can be a challenging and stressful daily task that interrupts your workflow.
But here’s the thing.
Building an audience around your business by creating, curating and sharing great content is important.
It gives you way to provide ongoing value to people outside of the products you sell. It also makes you relevant and gives people a reason to follow you, while providing you with a way to stay in touch with people over time.

Free Reading List: Social Media Marketing Tactics

Want to learn more about how social media can help drive sales? Download our free, curated list of high-impact articles.

The key to effective content curation that builds an audience (and your business) is sharing content that promotes the lifestyle around your products rather than just your products themselves.
It’s how Beardbrand built a $40k per month ecommerce business around the “bearded lifestyle” and how petflow.com created a multi-million dollar pet business powered by cute puppy photos.
So, how do you keep your social streams topped up with compelling stories and links that will attract an audience, without spending the entire day scouring the web?

Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read.

Leo Burnett

To help you out, we've assembled seven awesome resources that take the guesswork out of finding great content—including the site that Buzzfeed sources much of its content from.
It’s time to take the stress out of social media sharing.

Note: make sure to check out our bonus tip at the end to learn how you can schedule your social sharing so it takes up a fraction of your time each day. 

1. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is at the top of this list for a reason:
It enables you to search for relevant content using keywords, and then presents you with the most popular content based on social shares.
Each piece of content is ranked by how widely it was shared on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+. In addition, BuzzSumo lets you filter by date and content type, including interviews, videos, infographics, and more.
For example, lets say you sell baby clothes online, you'd search for "baby":

Buzzsumo will then show you the most popular stories related to your keyword, based on the timeframe and content type you've selected.

You now have a handy list of some of the most popular content on the web from your industry. The top three results in the above screenshot alone have over one million social shares combined in the last month.
It's worth mentioning that you should remember to pay particular attention to content that's performing well on the platforms that your audience uses. In other words, if your potential customers hang out on Pinterest, content that has performed well on Twitter may not be as relevant to you.

2. Reddit

Reddit is a massive entertainment, social networking, and news website which spans all sorts of topics, and is home to much of the internet’s most interesting content, images, videos and everyday comical online occurrences.

Most importantly, however, Reddit is also home to “sub-reddits” – categories dedicated to certain topics and interests.

For example, if your brand revolves around fitness, the /r/fitness sub-reddit is where you’ll want to hang out. For fashion related content, it would be /r/fashion.

You'll find that all major topics will have a main sub-reddit like the two mentioned above, and usually a few smaller off-shoot sub-reddits as well.
To find a sub-reddit for your niche, simply use Reditt’s search feature. Just type a keyword related to your business and Reddit will display related sub-reddits as well as the subscriber count for each:

Next you'll want to head over the sub-reddit of your choice where you can view the most upvoted content from the community there. You can then filter to view the most popular content from the past hour, past 24 hours, past month, past year and all time.

What’s great is that this content has already been proven to resonate with your target audience so chances are it will perform well for you - especially if you aggregate it and package it up in interesting ways.
Hint: this is exactly what Buzzfeed does for much of its viral content:

If you want use this "Buzzfeed technique", start with a piece of content like this:

Then go through the discussion thread and find the most upvoted comments containing fitness machine recommendations:


Now you've got a list of crowd-sourced fitness machine recommendations that you can take and turn into a Buzzfeed style blog post like "10 High-Impact Weight Machines You Should Be Using in Your Workouts".

3. Feedly

Feedly is an RSS news feed aggregator that makes it easy for you to gather and organize content from around the web. In addition to pulling in content from your favorite blogs, you can also use it to bring in top news content from Google News using Google's free Alerts service.
Just head over to Google Alerts, enter your keyword(s), select 'RSS feed' from the 'Deliver to' field and click 'Create Alert'.

Next, copy the RSS feed url of your newly created alert to your clipboard.

Head back to Feedly, click 'Add Content', and paste in your new RSS feed url.

Click '+Feedly' and you're all set.

Now you've got a list articles that you can share and use to position your brand as a go-to news source in your industry.
You can also use Feedly's search feature to discover other popular content sources in your industry:

When you've found a piece of content you like, you can quickly and easily share it to your social accounts right from Feedly:

Spending a little bit of time setting up Feedly with high quality feeds can save you a lot of time when it comes to finding and sharing great content that will resonate with your audience.

4. Medium Collections

Medium is a free blogging platform with plenty of popularity both among everyday bloggers and industry experts. In other words, a lot of people are writing a lot of good content on it.

The homepage is a nice place to pick up the odd story, but you’ll find the most relevant gems within Medium Collections. Here are some of our favourites.

• The Best Thing I Found Online Today
• Tech Humour
• Social Media

To find top content on medium for your area of interest, head over to Medium's search page and start typing your keyword. As you type a list of tags will appear on the right hand side:

Click on the most relevant tag and you'll get a page of results containing Medium's top content from that category:

Make sure you bookmark this page so you can come back to it quickly in the future. You can also find a great list of Medium collections here.

5. Content Gems

Content Gems is a platform dedicated to finding great content for you, so you can focus on other tasks.
The platform reviews 200,000+ news sources, blogs, and social media accounts to bring you the very best content in a daily email. Naturally, you can configure your preferences in order to receive relevant content.

You can sign up for a free account and create a custom dashboard around the topics you're interested in and quickly share any piece of content:

I've found that Content Gems can be good for adding a little variety to your content mix and finding stuff that you don't see everywhere else.

6. Learni.st

Learni.st is a great resource to discover and browse curated content covering tens-of-thousands of topics, ranging from niche area of academics to broad interests such as food, health, sports and entertainment.
Major topics like Business, Crafts, Education, How-to and more each have their own boards. Each board has a series of sub-boards that let you discover more specific content from that category.

Scheduling Your Social Content

Now that you know where to find great content for your social media followers to share, it’s time to streamline the entire process of actually sharing it all in the first place.

Believe it or not, managing multiple social media accounts doesn’t have to be hard. You just need to use the right tools for the job at hand.

I recommend Buffer, an app which make your social media campaigns more manageable across Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest.
Buffer allows you to schedule your social media posts throughout the day and week, helping you to hit those peak times with your best content.


After you configure your settings, a Buffer button will be added to your browser, enabling you to quickly add content to your Buffer queue as and when you see it.
In addition to scheduling, Buffer also has a suggested content feed that offers a curated list of popular content in various categories, selected by Buffer staff. This can be a handy resource if you need something in pinch and don't have time to comb through your other feeds.

Bringing it All Together

While this may seem like a lot to set up, it's really not that bad. If you spend an hour and half gathering your feeds and bookmarking your content sources, you'll have quick and convenient access to great content that you can quickly and easily share across your social accounts.
Take some time at the beginning of the week, or half an hour each morning, to schedule out your content so you don't have to worry about it throughout the day—giving you more time to focus on other important tasks that grow your business.
Just keep in mind, that while scheduling is great, it's not a replacement for genuine, real-time engagement with your audience. You still need to do that :)
However, the above strategies will make your day-to-day social sharing ore manageable and can help position you as a trusted source of great hand-picked content – which is becoming more and more valuable the noisier the web gets.
P.S. Have you signed up for free email updates yet? You'll get fresh ecommerce marketing advice delivered to your inbox as soon as it’s published. Just enter your email below.

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About the Author: Mark Macdonald is an ecommerce entrepreneur and content crafter at Shopify. Get more from Mark on Twitter.

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10 services you can start offering on Fiverr

This took so long to be posted. I actually had to go on break as well.

In my last post, I promised to give you guys 10 services you can start offering on Fiverr that can bring in a minimum of $100 in the next 30days. I also promised to send you a free eBook.
This post will give you everything! There are thousands of gigs on Fiverr, however only a fraction of  them can change your status and improve your standard of living drastically. It will be so difficult for you to start getting orders tho.


Why? Because the more the number of users on Fiverr — especially freelancers — the stiffer the competition.

How do you intend to beat your competitors?
The answer is simple. Just avoid the highly competitive services/gigs!
Truth is, there are many services that you can render on Fiverr, which are offered by only few other freelancers. In fact, these gigs are far easier to handle and deliver than the highly competitive ones.

So, here are 10 in demand Fiverr gigs that are easy to deliver:

1. Blog commenting gig
Many bloggers and webmasters are still getting great SEO results from blog commenting. But rather than spend their time on that, they’d rather hire someone else to do it for them. So, consider creating a gig like, “I will leave 20 comments linked to your blog on other people’s blogs”.
Similarly, bloggers people don’t just want to see “No comments” on their blogs, and they’re ready to hire you to leave relevant comments on their posts. You’ll make money from such bloggers by creating a Fiverr gig like, “I will leave 5 comments on your blog daily for 5 days”.

2. Video testimonial gig
With consumers attaching more credibility to video testimonials, there is booming demand for video testimonials by buyers. And Fiverr is one of the places these buyers/businesses turn to, to get cheap video testimonial done for them.
So consider creating a gig like, “I will make a 2 minute video testimonial for $5”. All you have to do for each buyer is to read and speak out the lines/content/script you’re been provided with. It’s that simple. And you don’t even need a digital camera if your smartphone has a good camera.
A smart way to make extra cash with this gig is to write the script yourself or promise full HD video quality, which might require using a camcorder.

3. E-book or video delivery gig
If you have created — or have purchased full rights to sell — an information-packed e-book or video on any subject that many people are yearning to learn, you can sell it as a gig on Fiverr. All you have to do is create a gig that promises to teach the buyer what the e-book or video contains.
For example, if you’ve created or have resell rights to en e-book or video that teaches how to lose 20 pounds of extra weight in one week, simply create a gig like, “I will teach you how to lose 20 pounds in one week.” This type of gig is very easy and quick to deliver, since all you have to do is forward the download link to the buyer.
However, note that it is unethical and illegal to sell an e-book that you have no rights to sell.

4. Social Media Promotion
Most brands realize the importance of social media in marketing, so they’re willing to pay people to assist them with their social media marketing campaigns.
Buyers on Fiverr are prepared to pay you to get them Facebook likes, to grow their Twitter following and help them out with various aspect of their social media marketing.
You don’t need any technical skills to do this – all you need is the ability to use social media sites.

5. Virtual assistance
If you have absolutely no experience of qualifications or skills or anything, and cannot seem to find anything to resell on Fiverr, try this. List your gig for being someone’s virtual assistant for 20 minutes for example.
There are lots of people out there who needs someone to make calls or send email on their behalf. This type of work is pretty easy and will likely lead to more work if the employer likes your work ethic.

6. Audio/video transcription gig
If your ears are keen enough to pick every detail from audio and video recordings, then this might just be the perfect gig for you. All you have to do is create a gig like, “I will transcribe your audio or video recording.” This gig is easy to deliver, since it only entails listening to the recording provided and typing the words out in written text. However, you will have to specify in your gigs description, the maximum length of the recording you’re willing to transcribe for $5. Then you can charge extra for anything longer than that.

Bear in mind, too, that running this type of gig will consume lots of data, since you will have to download audio and video recordings, which are usually large files.

7. WordPress blog installation and setup gig
As easy as the whole process might seem, many bloggers are just too busy or lazy to set up their new WordPress blogs themselves. They’d rather hire someone to handle that for them. And that opens a huge door of opportunities for those who have mastered how to install a new WordPress blog and get it ready for blogging.
Even if you don’t know how to install and set up a WordPress blog, you can learn it in just one or two days. And you can start making money by doing that for other people on Fiverr.

8. Proofreading or editing gig
If you’re a stickler for perfect grammar and have zero tolerance for grammatical, punctuation, spelling, style, and consistency errors in any piece of writing, then you’ll make a great proofreader or editor. And one of the best ways to make money from this skill is to create a gig like, “I will proofread or edit your document.”
Be sure to specify the maximum word length of the document you’re willing to proofread or edit for $5. Anything longer than that can attract an extra charge.
Please note that you must have a good grasp of English grammar to create a gig like this. If you don’t have keen eye for errors or are not sure, don’t bother creating a proofreading/
editing gig — or else, your clients will “kill” you with terrible reviews.

9. Social media promotion gig
If you have a massive social media following, such a Facebook page or Twitter handle with 100,000+ followers, then you have a money spinner! There are many clients who come on Fiverr, looking to pay people like you to just promote their products or services on your social media account.
Suggested: How to Make Money on Fiverr: A Beginners' Guide
To get noticed by prospective clients, all you have to do is create a gig like, “I will promote your business to my 120k+ Twitter followers.” It goes without saying that a gig like this is very easy to deliver.
Even if you don’t have a massive social media following, why not buy a Facebook account with 100k+ fans or a Twitter account with at least 50,000 real followers?


10. Product review gig
When it comes to winning the hearts of customers, product reviews are far more effective than short testimonials. This explains why business owners visit Fiverr in search of product review gigs. If you’re a very good writer, then you can make money consistently by creating a gig like, “I will write a 500-word product review.”

So, if you really want to start making a decent income from Fiverr as soon as possible, consider creating any of these 10 gigs.
The easiest way to make good money on fiverr is to render services that won’t take much of your time.

Before taking on any gig, it is advisable that you do an estimation of the time it would take you to deliver it. If it would take much of your time, you can always ignore it and choose other gigs that will require less time to complete.

Take note that on Fiverr, if you can get many tasks done within a short period, you would be able to do more; the more the volume the higher your earnings.
Here is the link to download your free book:

This free book is one of my best Fiverr courses I bought that helped me earn more money on Fiverr over and over again.
What gigs are you presently offering on Fiverr? Do you know of any gig that should have made this link? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment. And don’t forget to add your friends to this awesome post. Do well to drop comment if you have any question(s) to ask or suggestion(s) to add.

Regards.
Author: J. A Òlòríré

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How To Show Related Posts With Thumbnails In WordPress Sidebar

There are lots of related posts plugins for WordPress that make it easy for you to show related content to users that read your blog posts, which somehow increases the number of pages people visit on your website and also reduces your site bounce rate. In this post, I want to share with you, how to show related posts with thumbnails in WordPress sidebar.
To get started, you need to install the “Related Posts by Taxonomy” WordPress plugin.

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The plugin helps you to increase your readers’ engagement by adding related posts in the sidebar or after post content with a widget or shortcode. The related posts widget for WordPress can be configured to display thumbnails or just links in a list format and you can set it to display related posts by category, tag etc.
Once you install the plugin on your WordPress site, navigate to “Appearance” > “Widgets” and drag the “related posts by taxonomy” widget to the sidebar.
Thereafter,

• set the number of related posts to show
• select the taxonomy e.g tags or categories
• select “Post thumbnails” as display format
• select display image size – medium image size option recommended
• set “number of image columns” – 1 recommended
• select “Link image captions to posts” so that the post titles can be linked
• select “Display this widget on single post pages only” to hide it from homepage and archives.
• click SAVE.

That’s all you need to do to add related posts with thumbnails to WordPress sidebar. View your blog and you should see the related posts been displayed.

Note

• You can use css to change the font size, remove underline and to hide it from displaying on mobile. You can check the css codes I used here.
• You can also make it to display list of related posts below your posts on WordPress. Click here for the trick.

Have fun!

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How to Send Promotional and Transactional Emails That Convert

We all know email marketing is still a powerful strategy, no matter how many clickbait headlines we read telling us the exact opposite.
But email is changing, it’s always changing.
How do you deal with promotional emails? Transactional emails? Is there even a difference? Seasonal emails (ahem, Black Friday Cyber Monday)? What’s the deal with deliverability and spam folders?
Above all, you want to send emails that are optimized and primed to convert. This is your guide to doing just that.

Free Ebook: How to Grow Your Ecommerce Business with Email Marketing

Whether you're just getting started or dreaming up your next big campaign, this email marketing guide will provide you with insights and ideas to help your business grow.

First, what are promotional emails and transactional emails?

There are two core categories of ecommerce emails: promotional and transactional.
Promotional emails are designed to raise awareness for a specific, you guessed it, promotion. So, for example, a Black Friday Cyber Monday email, a Father’s Day gift guide email, a summer savings email, a limited time only discount email, etc.

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Transactional emails are more functional in nature. Welcome emails, reminders and notifications, receipts, order shipped emails, etc. all fall within this category.

Both promotional and transactional emails serve their own unique purpose, but they perform differently. According to IBM Marketing Cloud:

• Transactional emails generate roughly twice the open rates of non-transactional emails.
• Transactional emails have a median click through rate of 4.8%, exactly three times higher than the 1.6% non-transactional messages generate.

You can see the hard data here:

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The mean unique open rate is 47.1% for transactional emails. For non-transactional emails, that number falls to just 21.6%. A big reason for this drastic difference? Transactional emails are not just expected, they’re anticipated.
They’re functional, right? They serve a genuine purpose, they don’t set off an internal spam filters in the brain.
Not only are transactional emails being opened more, they’re being clicked through from more as well:

Image Source

The mean unique click through rate is 8.8% for transactional emails. For non-transactional emails, that number falls to just 3.3%.
Open and click through rates are good indicators of interest, but they’re very top of the funnel. What really matters to ecommerce entrepreneurs is the money, right? Well, transactional emails outperform promotional emails there as well, according to an older study from Experian:

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Does this mean that promotional emails are useless? Of course not, but I’m willing to bet they’re the first type of ecommerce email you think of, despite being objectively less impactful than transactional emails.
The point here is that there is a definitive difference between these two categories, meaning the way you approach each has to be carefully planned and deliberate.

The Crash Course on Email Deliverability

Before we dive into optimizing your promotional and transactional emails, it’s vital to understand the importance of deliverability. Why? Let’s look at the data:

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According to IBM Marketing Cloud, the mean global hard bounce rate is 0.47%.
A hard bounce is an email that’s returned to the sender because of an invalid address. This often happens with time as people change personal email addresses, switch jobs, etc. That’s why list health and maintenance is so key.
If the email does make it to your intended recipient, they have the option to report the email as spam. This will likely impact your ability to land in that particular recipient’s inbox (vs. spam), but it will also impact your overall deliverability.
Here’s how complaint rate shakes out by country:

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The average global complaint rate is lower at just 0.03%. This also varies by industry, of course. For example, the average for retail and ecommerce is lower at just 0.02%.
Spam and abuse buttons are often only clicked when the unsubscribe link is not clearly marked or when the unsubscription process isn’t easy to complete. (I’m looking at you multi-step unsubscribe processes.)
Unfortunately, hiding your unsubscribe link or making it difficult to unsubscribe won’t do you any favors.
As you can see, unsubscribing is a more popular option:

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Now, these numbers seem super insignificant, but the potential impact is huge. Let’s say you have a list of 1 million leads. If you improve your unsubscription rate by just 0.13%, you’ll save 1,300 subscribers per email you send.
It’s worth noting that transactional emails are more likely to be delivered than promotional emails. They’re functional and anticipated, after all. Consider how many deals and discount emails end up in your spam folder vs. receipts and shipping emails.

When should you send email for optimal deliverability?

This is always a common question. When should you send email? When should you tweet? Post to Facebook? Publish an article?
Unfortunately, there are no easy answers.
Your email list is different from every other email list, so relying on averages and best practices won’t work. You’ll just have to test different days and times for yourself.

How can you avoid spam filters?

Spam filters are fairly straightforward. There is a long list of factors that emails are scored on. If the email’s score gets too high, it’s flagged as spam by the email server.
Unfortunately, every server is different and constantly changing. So what’s marked as spam on one server might not be marked as spam on another server. Plus, that long list of factors I mentioned? Always evolving and almost never publicly published.
As a general rule though, you’ll want to avoid:

• Being too “salesy” with all caps, exclamation marks and trigger words like “free”.
• Big images with very little text because many spam filters don’t recognize images.
• Emailing old email lists that you haven’t properly maintained over the years.

How can you avoid human spam filters?

Human spam filters are even more complex because predicting the mind is quite difficult. I can’t tell you exactly what made someone click that spam or abuse button. No one can.
But there are some general rules. You’ll want to avoid:

• Buying lists or sending emails without explicit permission.
• Being vague about when you’ll email, how often you’ll email or what type of content you’ll email.
• Sending the same email to everyone all the time.
• Hiding the unsubscribe option or making the process unnecessarily difficult.
• Leaving unengaged, inactive leads or customers on your list. (Though, you can try a reactivation campaign.)
• Leaving the, “Why am I receiving this email?” question unanswered for too long. Context is everything when it comes to email.

According to MailChimp, most email service providers (ESPs) think that 0.1% complaint rate is a “reasonable threshold”. So, that means for every 1,000 emails you send, no more than 1 person marks it as spam or abuse. However, they are often more strict than that.
Take this stuff seriously, even if the numbers themselves seem small and secondary to shiny vanity metrics like open rate and click through rate.

Seasonal Deliverability

With BFCM and the holidays quickly approaching, you might be wondering how deliverability will change. It’s safe to assume, after all, that the number of emails sent will increase around shopping holidays.
The hard bounce rate for retail and ecommerce is actually lower during the holidays than the non-holiday period:

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Increased frequency means increased hard bounces overall, but the faster holiday email cadence pushes down the per-send rate.
The complaint rate decrease during the holiday season is much smaller, but still present:

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Again, the increased send frequency is pushing the per-send rate down, but the overall number of complaints is still up. Also, people simply expect more emails around BFCM and other major shopping holidays, making them more tolerant and less likely to slam the spam button.
To avoid ruining the relationship long-term during the holiday season, you might consider offering an option to snooze or limit emails for those who simply aren’t interested.
Now let’s look at open and click through rate data:

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Holiday unique open rate is decreased, which is not surprising given the heavier competition and increased frequency. Though the per-send rate is decreased, note that overall opens will increase during the holiday season.
It’s a similar situation for the non-holiday vs. holiday unique click through rates:

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So, yes, deliverability and engagement metrics will fluctuate, but be sure to do the math and look beyond the per-send averages.

The Crash Course on Email Segmentation

What happens when the email arrives as intended? It slid by the spam filters and landed right in the inbox. How do you get the recipient to open the email, click through to your store and actually purchase something?
That’s a tall order, but email segmentation definitely comes into play. Email segmentation is the art and science of sending the right email to the right person at the right time for the right reason.
So, instead of sending everyone who has ever purchased from you the same email, Email A, you might send customers who’ve purchased men’s clothing Email B and customers who’ve purchased women’s clothing Email C. Email B and C are segmented because they are only being sent to a small segment of your list.
Why try email segmentation? Because all leads and customers are not created equal. And according to MailChimp, you’ll reap some big rewards:

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This doesn’t address revenue per email, but you can imagine the impact.
Talia Wolf of GetUplift.co explains:

Talia Wolf, GetUplift.co

"So how does segmenting your audience and knowing who they are drive those amazing uplifts in your emails? Simple. Knowing your readers allows you to:

1. Use the language your audience is familiar with
2. Use the tone of voice they feel comfortable with
3. Tell stories they will resonate and connect with
4. Highlight what matters to them
5. And segment your audience within your email platform

To do all that you must know your reader, I mean, really know them."

How do you go about segmenting? First of all, Jimmy Daly recommends starting sooner rather than later:

Jimmy Daly, Swipe File

"Try to segment as early as possible, ideally when the person signs up or subscribes. You can ask for information in a form, or use a tool like Clearbit to pull data on them. Even the smallest piece of information can make for dramatically better emails. Then, use their click data and other information you collect to further segment. The more refined the segment, the better."

You can do this using your email marketing tool, manual customer behavior monitoring, one-click segmentation (i.e. a two to five option click survey after joining the list), your email signup form or a combination of the options.
Here are just a few segmentation ideas:

• Average order value
• Purchase frequency
• Product category
• Items in cart
• Items on wishlist
• Products recently browsed
• Age
• Gender
• Geographic location
• Previous purchases

The list goes on and on. If you can dream it up, you can use it to segment. The best segments will be those designed specifically for your store and funnel. No two stores are exactly alike, after all.
Raphael Paulin-Daigle of SplitBase suggests starting small and avoiding over-complication:

Raphael Paulin-Daigle, SplitBase

"Alright, you’ve now heard a lot about different types of segments and how various segmentation methods work. And, of course, the more complicated your system, the sexier it looks – at least from an outside perspective.

But I do need to warn you: the more segments you create, the more work you’ll make for yourself, so don’t rush it!

Remember, segmenting for the sake of segmenting is useless; you should keep the number of segments you have proportionate to the size of your email list, and always scale slowly.

It’s better to perfect what you already have than to add to an imperfect system.

Creating additional segments too early is not just useless, it can overload a delicate system."

The Anatomy of an Optimized Email

The Preview

Think of the email preview as your first impression. Here’s an example:

There are three elements at play here:

• From Name: “BestBuy Web Support”, in this example. Your options are basically your company name (Shopify), your first and last name (Shanelle Mullin), or your first name and your company name (Shanelle at Shopify).

• Subject: “BESTBUY.ca Shipping Notice Email - Order #570920179”, in this example. You want to pique interest, but maintain a high level of clarity. It’s a delicate balance. You also want to keep it short and sweet as your subject will get cut off on mobile and, yes, even desktop. Finally, touch on either a pain point or desire. The number of emails being sent is multiplying quickly; you won’t stand out with promotional lingo.

• Copy: “BestBuy Canada Order Status My Account Customer Service Order Statu”, in this example. If the subject is your headline, think of this copy as your subheadline. This is where you should establish context, but make sure you relate back to the subject. Of course, you’re also short on characters in this space, so choose your words carefully.

The Copy

Now we’re getting to the heart of the email. The main copy is essentially the body of your email. Here’s an example:

A few things to keep in mind for promotional emails:

• Value Proposition: what value does your email offer recipients? You need to make that value clear as quickly as possible. If it’s not a great value that your visitors or customers would be legitimately excited to redeem, don’t send the email.

• Language: conduct qualitative research to uncover words and phrases your visitors and customers use. Then, repeat those words and phrases back to them in your copy. Also, always use the active voice, which means the subject does an action to an object.

And transactional emails:

• Take Ownership: often, transactional emails get left to developers to write and design. They wind up reading a lot like the BestBuy email copy above. (And it gets so much worse. Have you ever read a receipt email from an airline? Yikes.) Take ownership over transactional emails instead of leaving copy (and design, for that matter) to IT.

• Prioritize: transactional emails serve a purpose. Make sure that function or purpose is clear and definitively prioritized. Tastefully add additional calls to action after the core message has been articulated.

The Design

Time to make the email look nice! Here’s an example:

A few things to keep in mind for both promotional and transactional emails:

• Quality Assurance: your emails are going to be opened on a wide variety of devices using a wide variety of email apps and web browsers. It’s important that you ensure your emails display properly in all apps/browsers and on all devices. That’s a big ask, I know. But I promise someone somewhere is trying to open your email on a device you consider prehistoric. Start by reviewing your email analytics to find the most common apps/browsers and devices.

• Visual Hierarchy: visual hierarchy is how prominent something is visually. So, for example, the “Item(s)shipped” table moves the shipped product info higher up the visual hierarchy. If the table were a contrasting color, for example, it would move even higher up the visual hierarchy. Be sure you’ve really thought about your visual hierarchy and that you’re giving the right elements the most prominence.

Talia from GetUplift.co has a few additional pieces of advice for designing your emails:

Talia Wolf, GetUplift.co

"A few rules for using images within your email:

1. Avoid using them as background. Most email clients do not support that, and it won’t show up at all in their inbox.
2. QA on mobile – most people read emails on their mobile phone.
3. Align images to the left for easy reading.
4. For call to action buttons, make sure to use a contrasting color, place whitespace around it and make it appear clickable – people need to understand it’s a button."

The Call to Action

Finally, we get to your most wanted action, to the ask. Here’s an example:

Since this is a transactional email, the call to action is simply to track my shipped items.
A few things to keep in mind for promotional emails:

• Clarity: be very clear about what the next step is. It should be apparent at all times. Don’t leave people guessing, don’t dilute the email with too many competing calls to action.

• Expectations: what will happen when the recipient clicks your call to action? This should be crystal clear. Make sure expectation matches reality. So, for example, don’t promote a BFCM sale on t-shirts and send people to your homepage.

• Patience: don’t rush the call to action. With promotional emails, marketers tend to have this sense of urgency. You have time. Set the context for why you’re emailing, present your value, offer a simple next step. It’s not about making sure your call to action is above the fold or stuffed in there as many times as possible.

And transactional emails:

• Relevancy: when you add an additional call to action to a transactional email, you want to make sure it’s relevant. For example, a receipt email might have a “People who purchased this also purchased…” call to action. Don’t throw in a call to action for the sake of it. Think it through, make sure it’s relevant to the original purpose of the email.

The Extras

Don’t be afraid to consider other channels that might help extend the impact of your email marketing efforts. For example, Facebook Ads.
Facebook conducted an experiment with Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Together, they targeted 565,000 email subscribers with both email and Facebook ads. They sent an email and then matched those emails to Facebook users using Facebook Custom Audiences.
Here are the high-level results:

• 18% only opened the email.
• 16% both opened the email and saw the Facebook ad.
• 27% only saw the Facebook ad.

Pretty incredible, right? They were able to reach more email subscribers via Facebook than email.
It gets better, though:

• When reached with Facebook Ads, email-openers were 22% more likely to purchase.
• Facebook ads extended email campaign reach by 77% with News Feed ads.

The moral of the story? Sometimes email optimization means going beyond email, so consider other channels as well.

4 Email Critiques You Can Learn From

Sometimes the best way to learn is to look at real life examples. What are companies getting right? What are companies getting wrong? What can you learn from them?
Let’s find out.

1. Penguin Random House

Here’s a holiday promotional email from Penguin Random House:

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This is a cute idea, but what stands out here is the red “CONTACT THE HOTLINE” call to action. In the top corner, you’ll also see the preview copy is “Thoughtful Book Recommendations for You and Yours”. What’s thoughtful about the recommendations? Why is each penguin recommending each book to me?
Finally, no one actually wants to spend five minutes flipping back and forth between your email and your site to review your product recommendations.

2. Good F*cking Design Advice

Here’s a Black Friday Cyber Monday promotional email from Good F*cking Design Advice:

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Talk about getting straight to the value. It’s crystal clear here. “Cyber Monday sale 25% off all products.” The background copy is still legible and on-brand, adding more substance to the email for GFDA loyalists and advocates.

3. Ontario SPCA

Here’s a simple transactional email from Ontario SPCA:

There are some obvious formatting issues here, particularly around the “Yours sincerely,” area. This email has a basic design and doesn’t read too robot-y, but there’s no true call to action. In this case, you might want to link through to the gift service centre to encourage people to increase their donation. Or maybe you want people to tweet about their donation.
The subject of this email also indicates that the donation is being put to work:

But the copy of the email doesn’t elaborate, which is a missed opportunity to demonstrate the value of the Ontario SPCA as soon as possible.

4. Nintendo

Here’s a simple transactional email from Nintendo:

This is what you think of when you think of developer-crafted transactional emails. Plain text, just the facts, long footer filled with corporate info.
This receipt for a digital purchase could’ve been an excellent opportunity to promote similar to related games in the online Nintendo store. After all, Nintendo knows which games their customers have played and for how long.
Or since it’s a first purchase scenario, they could add a coupon code to save, say, 5% on the next digital purchase.

How to A/B Test Emails Properly

What’s a good open rate? What’s a good click through rate? What’s a good revenue per email? These are the wrong questions. “Good” is anything better than you had the day, week, month before. The only benchmarks that really matter are your own.
For example, here is some year-over-year top of funnel data from SendGrid:

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MailChimp also offers some ecommerce-specific benchmarks:

• Open: 16.75%
• Click: 2.32%
• Soft Bounce: 0.30%
• Hard Bounce: 0.24%
• Abuse: 0.02%
• Unsub: 0.23%

There’s really no shortage of averages and benchmarks from email marketing tools (and beyond):

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What will you do with this information? It’s fun to read, sure, but you won’t actually use those numbers. The only thing that matters is that your numbers are improving. Forget the rest!
Talia has some advice for diving into the world of A/B testing and going beyond the basics:

Talia Wolf, GetUplift.co

"The most common practice for A/B testing is subject lines, which is good but it’s not enough.

If you want to create emails that convert, whether sales emails, newsletter or even onboarding emails, you have to run meaningful tests that can help you optimize each email you send.

Before running your tests, a few things to consider:

1. Every test should have a goal—know what you’re going to test and why.
2. Try to steer away from testing more than two variants per email.
3. Determine the results of the test according to action (clicks) rather than open rate.
4. Try to have a minimum of 1,500 people on each variable to get conclusive results.
5. Keep testing the same thing over and over. There aren’t any guarantees the same strategy will work over and over again just because it worked once."

A few things to keep in mind when A/B testing emails:

1. Deception: A/B testing is built into most email marketing tools, making it incredibly accessible. Still, you need to brush up on your statistics and understand factors like sample pollution to get valid results. Don’t rely on the tool to do this for you, most are calling tests improperly despite appearances.
2. Pollution: be sure to test only one thing at a time. The more things you test at once, the more conflicts. The result? Distorted, unreliable data and unclear learnings.
3. Insights: as a rule, if the insight you pulled from an A/B test only applies to the email you just sent, you’ve lost. Your tests should be designed to give you (a) insights to make a decision right now and (b) insights to make decisions for future emails. It’s not about finding a winner, it’s about understanding why the winner won.
4. Transactional Differences: many email service providers treat transactional testing differently. It might just be more complex than A/B testing a promotional email or completely unavailable. Check with your transactional email service provider beforehand because you will want A/B testing to be somewhat straightforward.
5. Revenue: your goal is to make money, right? Then it’s important to measure close to the money. How much revenue do your emails generate for you? Focus on the bottom of the funnel metrics to guide you vs. opens and clicks. For example, Cheetah Digital found that while unique click rates declined by 6.7% from Q2 2016 to Q2 2017, revenue per email remained the same. If you were making decisions based on click rate, you’d be very misinformed.

Conclusion

Email is alive and well, but sending optimized promotional and transactional emails is no small feat. This can’t be a set it and forget it system if you want emails that convert and actually generate revenue.
Fortunately, you’re now armed with the information you need to go forth and rule inboxes.
If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below. I’m happy to help! Oh, and let me which ecommerce companies you think are doing email marketing really, really well.

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