Marketing to people who have already visited your site is one of the fastest, easiest and least expensive ways to increase your sales.

Studies show that when customers return to your website, their conversion rates improve by more than 13%!

Increase your sales by taking advantage of the consumers who have already shown an interest in your site.

Email Marketing is:

• Effective – You can reach your existing customer base as well as prospective customers.  You will be communicating with people who have already demonstrated their interest by joining your mailing list. It increases the lifetime value of your customers.
• Affordable – the cost of an email marketing campaign is quite low, especially when compared with more traditional advertising methods.  In addition, studies have consistently demonstrated that it is much cheaper to retain a customer than to gain a new one.

(more…)

Out of the box, the Extension Data field isn’t used for anything, and the Xml packages don’t use this field unless you customize it in, so you may be wondering ‘what does it do?’

The quick answer? Anything you want it to!

This tutorial will show you how to use the Extension Data field to add additional information to your product detail pages. To complete this tutorial, you need access to your site’s Xml Packages folder, and a basic knowledge of HTML.

(more…)

Keeping up with accessibility standards makes your website usable by a much larger audience. It also allows the search engines to accurately assess your site’s content.

There are many steps to maintaining maximum website accessibility, some of which we’ll cover in future posts, but for now let’s start with arguably the most important one: Image ALT Text.

Image ALT text, contained in the ALT attribute of an image, is a written explanation of the image’s message. The text appears when that image cannot be displayed. In some browsers the text also appears as the tooltip. The HTML looks like this:

<img src=”images/vortxlogo.gif” alt=”Vortx” />

Why is ALT text important?

(more…)

In the current economic climate, my mind often drifts to the movies we all see, set in the days of The Great Depression (remember Cinderella Man?) and I focus on the “corner shop” and the community that was built up around it.

Storekeepers watched out for each other, and also looked out for their regular shoppers, hoping that none of them would fall upon hardship and shouting loudly to make the public aware of real bargains. Fraud and petty theft were reduced, strangely enough, and camaraderie and citizenship were values that were celebrated.

All of this is to say that I forecast (hardly inspired, really, since we are already seeing the beginnings of this!) a very real sense of “community” coming to the Web.

Community Will Grow in Two Directions

Store-owners will be happy to drop some of their competitive edge and work together for the good of all.

(more…)

There are two reasons why social media should be part of your marketing strategy:

1. It’s trusted
2. It’s cheap

In part 1 of “How to Create Cheap, Trusted Marketing” we’re going to delve deeper into “It’s trusted” and show you how you can start reaching out to the people who influence social media.

(more…)

When you walk through the mall, think about the sights, sounds, and smells that greet you as you pass by a store.

What makes you want to go in and look around?  That awesome pair of shoes displayed so nicely in the window or a gigantic, red “50% Off” sign?  What turns you off?  Loud music or merchandise piled everywhere without any organization?

Many of the lessons learned in physical stores can be applied online too.

Walk through this checklist of five brick-and-mortar inspired tips and see how your online store measures up.

1. Keep Things Neat and Clean

(more…)

With the release of Google Analytics Event Tracking, users can learn about their customers in ways they previously couldn’t.

The biggest new feature,  from an eCommerce standpoint, is the ability to see what users are adding to their carts.

Adding the new Event Tracking code to the Add to Cart buttons on product pages (which only requires modifying one line of code in many shopping carts like AspDotNetStoreFront) lets us capture the SKU and pass it into the ga.Js trackevent method to be recorded in Google Analytics.

The method looks like this:

_trackEvent(category, action, optional_label, optional_value)

(more…)

In every AspDotNetStorefront site, there is a contact form page that visitors can use to send you a message.

This is set up as a topic, and you can find it by going to www.yourdomain.com/t-contact.aspx.

This page can be modified through the HTML editor just like any other topic by going to Content > Manage Topics in version 8.0 or Misc > Topics in earlier versions.

Here, you can make any changes you like to the layout of the page, but what about modifying the actual email you get in your inbox when the contact form is submitted?

Unfortunately, there’s no HTML editor for that. Luckily, we found a great feature built right into AspDotNetStorefront that allows you to customize the contact form! Without this feature, you’ll still get your contact form results in your inbox, but using this feature will allow you to change the way it’s displayed.

This is especially useful for quoting the original message in an email response to the visitor, but if you don’t want those extra strange form tags to show up. What’s a ‘B1′? Who knows…let’s get rid of it!

This tutorial will show you how to turn this:

Name=Nicole Swan
Phone=541-201-9965
EMail=nicole@vortx.com
Subject=Contact Form Submit Test
S1=This is a test message submitted from the Contact Us page.
B1=Submit

into this:

Name: Nicole Swan
Phone Number: 541-201-9965
Email: nicole@vortx.com
Subject: Contact Form Submit Test
Message: This is a test message submitted from the Contact Us page.

This tutorial requires a basic knowledge of HTML and XML Packages. If you know a little HTML but you’re not familiar with XML Packages, read on! This tutorial will help you get to know them.
(more…)

Branding your business or product is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make.  Great brands go down in history. Bad brands go up in flames.

Kleenex, Q-tips, and Scotch Tape are brands that became household names. Many people say “Kleenex” when they really mean facial tissue because the idea of facial tissue in general has been branded with the name Kleenex.

Kleenex has been the number one selling brand of facial tissue since 1924.
(more…)

Using your computer effectively takes some practice. These tips save me time and headaches each day and I’m sure they’ll do the same for you.

Read through and give these a try – you’ll be surprised at the great tools available and what you can do with them!

Get the Tools:

1. Desktop Search – Google or Microsoft, they’re both good. The second you don’t know where something is, search for it.
2. Application Launcher - Launchers allow you to get to the screen, folder, or application you want without taking your hands off of the keyboard.I use Slickrun. Another launcher that is used around the office is Launchy.There are lots of these applications available for free.  Find one that works for you and set up your browsers, email, business applications, common folders paths and anything you use on a weekly basis. Get comfortable with this app and read the manual or help file.  You should be using it all the time.
3. A New Text Editor – For me, Word is too slow to load and Notepad is too limited in options. I use Notepad2 and I am very happy with it.  I use Textpad as well, but mostly for searching text within a bunch of files.  If you need to search many files in a folder, Textpad is still the best I’ve found. Notepad++ is also a very good alternative to Notepad2.
4. Multiple  Monitors - Ultramon gives you a taskbar on all monitors and helps you manage your windows on multiple screens.

My new favorite browser is Google Chrome.  I like the way it uses space, the flexibility of the tabs, and plenty more.  I also have the latest releases of Firefox and IE7 on my machine.
(more…)