Hi everyone. Just a quick update. As our sales and support teams continue to grow, they are now wholly located in our Austin, TX office. As a result, all calls and emails now go directly to our US office while we continue to focus on engineering in our Sydney office. Our London office has also been closed, effective this week.

If you’ve stored our Sydney or London phone numbers anywhere, please make sure you update them to use our Austin, TX office number instead which is +1 800 939-5570.

We’ve made these changes because we now have enough staff in our Austin, TX office to handle calls in most timezones around the world and we’re confident a single, united sales and support team will provide you with better service. We can also handle calls from most timezones around the world.

Just a quick update to let you know that Interspire Email Marketer 6.1 is currently under development and will be coming soon (no release date yet).

Version 6.1 will be a maintenance release which addresses outstanding issues as documented in our bug tracking system. All issues of “minor” status or higher will be addressed. Feel free to follow along with progress as time is logged by our engineering team and as burn down charts are updated in real time (we use Agile SCRUM).

I’ll keep you posted on our progress as we get closer to having all outstanding issues marked as complete.

Length: 14:43
Overview: A step-by-step guide to using social media tools to build relationships with customers that offer value to both you and them.

Description: In this, episode 3 of my podcast, I talk about our over-arching social media strategy which we use to keep in constant communication with our customers. Topics include using Twitter as a support intermediary, using Facebook as a feedback loop, building a community with a focus on continual improvement and idea generation and how to turn negative feedback into a motivation tool. I also touch on the upcoming Interspire Shopping Cart/BigCommerce 5.6 and 6 releases at the end of the podcast.

Like this podcast? Share it on FaceBook or Twitter.

We had a few rough months but finally managed to get everything back in order and feedback from customers has been mostly positive. For example, here’s a chart from a support survey we sent out in January:

In the last two months we’ve specifically focused on improving these ratings – we of course want to provide exceptional technical support to every single customer. As part of our ongoing pursuit of perfection, today we’ve changed the support feedback loop which has, up until now, been two simple (automated) links at the bottom of every reply from our support team:

Did you find this reply helpful? Yes/No

You could click on yes or no and that “vote” would go into our system. Not really efficient and it didn’t really provide the metrics we needed to make informed decisions. That was until today, however.

With the on boarding of our new support manager, Richard Long (who previously grew and managed support teams at IBM and Vignette) almost complete (we’re still hiring and have 14 new positions open), we’ve been strategizing together to workout the metrics which a) Richard will use to manage the performance of our support teams and b) I will use to measure his performance as a support manager.

The first thing Richard has put in place is a new support satisfaction survey which is automatically linked to at the bottom of every reply sent from our support engineers. It asks the following important questions:

• Who was the primary person that dealt with the issue you submitted?
• How would you rate this person on technical knowledge
• How would you rate this person on professionalism
• How would you rate this person on time to resolution
• How would you rate this person on communication skills
• How would you rate this person on understanding of the issue
• How would you rate this person on personality
• How would you rate this person on willingness to help
• Were you satisfied with the overall progress of the issue?
• Overall, how would you rate our support?

The survey responses will allow Richard to assess our current strengths and weaknesses in regards to technical support and is the first of several dozen changes being made to our support system moving forward. It will also allow him to open a dialog with customers who wish to provide their name, email and/or phone for a follow up chat on their survey responses – both good and bad.

We have 28 team members who use our centralized support system most days and we handle hundreds of tickets each day, so we should have some good feedback from customers in a matter of a few weeks.

Richard will take this feedback and use it to methodically improve our support systems over time, including staff training, response accuracy, problem identification, scope of support and much more. It’s our goal to get 100% of customers responding with “very happy” to the questions above and I definitely think this is an achievable goal within a few short months, considering we’re not too far off at the moment.

Richard’s past experience managing large teams and providing top-down support to both small and enterprise-level clients will definitely speed things up and I wanted to take this opportunity to publicly welcome him to the team. We put our short list of candidates through several rounds of interviews and Richard came out the clear winner.

Keep an eye on the blog for future updates on how we progress towards our goal.

Description: In this, episode 2 of the Interspire podcast, I take a look at some of the strategies we’ve developed over the last 6 years to identify the best candidates during the interview process. At the surface level you might think it’s easy to recruit based on a candidates past experience, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I’ll also touch on identifying your market and formulating a business plan that focuses specifically on one geographic region only and I’ll discuss my reasoning for that approach in the context of how we launched BigCommerce.

Like this podcast? Share it on FaceBook or Twitter.

Introduction

Last week I posted the upcoming BigCommerce 6 feature list on the BigCommerce blog, so today we’ll look at the features coming up in Interspire Shopping Cart 6.

While some of the features are the same, other features only lend themselves to the BigCommerce product (such as setting DNS records) and as such aren’t discussed here.

Our Thoughts About the E-Commerce Space

There are 1,0001 pieces of software which will let you setup an online store. That’s not the difficult part though. The difficult part is getting people to your online store once it’s built – and this is the part of the equation that almost everybody forgets. We know that as much as you’d like to be an SEO guru AND a search engine marketing guru AND a copywriting guru AND a direct mail guru AND a customer retention guru, you just don’t have the time – you’re too busy running your business.

Knowing this (from our various customer surveys), we took a step back and asked ourselves:

“What can we do to make it easier for our clients to sell more products through their Interspire-powered online stores?”

The answer was simple. Allow me to show it to you in a diagram:

The answer is to become the center of your e-commerce platform while building integrations into the key marketing components any successful e-commerce business uses (including ourselves) to win more customers, which boils down to multi-channel retailing.

Imagine if you could add a product to your Interspire-powered online store and have it automatically (and instantly) listed on eBay, Amazon Marketplace, Shopzilla, Yahoo Shopping, Bizrate, Google AdWords and of course Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines.

Instead of getting the traffic just from people coming to your online store, you could leverage the tens of millions of people already browsing some of the biggest shopping and auction sites in the world.

Now, you can already do this with other platforms. If you have $500,000 to spend and two years to wait. But these guys ignore the small and medium sized businesses of the world and focus on the Fortune 100 – of which you and I are, of course, not members.

Our multi-channel retailing idea is coming to Interspire Shopping Cart, starting with version 6 in the middle of the year.

The Interspire Shopping Cart Version 6 Feature List

Here’s the list of features you can expect as part of Interspire Shopping Cart version 6 around the middle of the year:

Disclaimer: The features listed below may be changed at any time so please don’t plan or build your business around them. While we will do our best to include every feature, one or more may not make it into the final release. The middle of the year is also an extremely rough release date estimate and can (and probably will) change.

• eBay selling integration – As identified in a survey we sent out in late 2009, the biggest problem for merchants is attracting new customers to their online store affordably. eBay selling integration will allow merchants to “push” some or all of their products to eBay, which would then appear in eBay search results and listings. You will then be able to process orders received via eBay just as you would those through your store. This will give you access to the tens of millions of people who shop on eBay every month at little to no cost.
  
   
• Dropshipping and multiple warehouse support – Dropshipping will allow you to sell online without having to stock inventory or ship orders. When dropshipping is enabled, each product is assigned to a particular supplier whose details (including email address) are stored. When an order is placed, an email is sent to the supplier of each product in the order. The email includes the customer’s address, product, quantity, etc. The supplier then ships the item to the customer on behalf of the merchant, who typically pays each of their suppliers at the end of the month.

  In addition to dropshipping support, multiple warehouse support will allow larger e-commerce vendors to use our software. If you imagine an online retailer like Amazon who has at least 6 warehouses across North America, their apparel might be inventoried in one warehouse while their books in another, their appliances in another, etc. With multiple warehouse support, each product is assigned to a particular warehouse (and shelf location) so when a picking slip is printed for an order, it will include warehouse and shelf location details for each item in the order, making it easier and faster for the warehouse clerks to get an order into “ready to ship” stage or to split the order over multiple shipments if need be (which we already support).
  

   
• Shopping comparison export – Sites like Nextag, Yahoo Shopping, PriceWatch, PriceScan, Shopzilla, Pricegrabber, Shopping.com, MySimon and Bizrate allow people to compare prices amongst different online retailers – and these sites are used by tens of millions of people every week prior to buying online. They are, of course, an excellent source of traffic for online retailers, who can list their products on these comparison shopping sites for free. They only pay when someone clicks a link for one of their products, similar to Google AdWords.
  These comparison shopping sites typically require the store owner to import (or auto-sync) a simple XML file containing the details of the products they want to list. Along with eBay selling integration this is a fantastic way to drive hundreds or even thousands of new shoppers to a  merchant’s online store for around 50 cents per click.
  
   
• Pre-order/Back order support – Imagine for a minute that you sell books online. Your customers are waiting for the latest Twilight book and because you know stocks from suppliers will be limited upon release, you setup the ability to pre-order the book on your website before it comes out. You accept 1,000 pre-orders for the book (which might be all your supplier will send when it’s released) and when it’s released, you simply look up these orders and ship the books.
   
  Back order support allows you to continue selling a particular product even when its inventory dips below zero. You’ll be able to display a message to shoppers showing an estimated date when they will receive new stock and/or when their order will ship. When the new stock arrives, you can look up all back orders and ship them as usual, reducing your inventory count in the process. This is incredibly useful for merchants who experience seasonal variations in purchases or for those who under estimate demand.
  
   
• Printable shipping labels – FedEx, UPS and USPS all have their own branded, specifically designed shipping labels which make it easy for the shipping carrier to route the package to its destination electronically, simply by scanning a barcode on the shipping label. These labels are easy for us to design using the publicly available API’s through UPS Online Tools, Endicia (USPS), etc. You will be able to easily print a shipping label for an order through your label printer, place it on the box and have the shipping company do the rest. This can save 2-3 hours a day if you’re shipping a sufficient quantity of orders.
   
• iPad/iPhone template – As we all know, mobile is hot. People love to browse prices and products on their phones but why not let them buy right from their phones as well? The iPad/iPhone template will make it easy for merchants to sell to customers when they’re on the go, and if they enable one or more API-based payment gateways then the customer wont ever have to leave their store.
   
  
• Picnik.com image editing – Think of picnik.com as an online version of Photoshop but with fewer bells and whistles. It’s free and is an excellent tool for making quick and simple image edits such as resizing, red eye removal, etc. From the control panel you will be able to edit any image simply by clicking on it. The image will be loaded into Picnik.com and changes will be pushed back to their store in real time.
   
• 301 redirect support * - When switching to Interspire Shopping Cart (which hundreds of merchants do every month), the last thing a merchant wants to see is his hard-fought search engine rankings go down the drain. 301 redirect support will allow you to “tell” Google about your new store and will preserve their search engine rankings as they switch platforms.
   
• “Down for maintenance” page * – Self explanatory. You can take their store down for maintenance and show a customized message during the process.
   
• Improvements to the tax calculations and settings – Includes support for per-product tax rates, multiple tax rates per product, etc.
   
• Being able to set the starting order number * – No one wants to see “Your order number is 1″. This will allow you to set the starting order number when you open their “virtual doors” for business.
   
• “Customers who viewed this product also viewed” panel - A great online merchandising feature which will drive more page views in your store, which will result in more sales.
   
• Match up the import/export data formats – Right now they’re not the same which is time consuming for bulk editing.
   
• Various reported bugs and quirks – As listed in our tracker.

* These features will be included in a minor 5.6 release in or around April 2010 because they’ve been asked for the most and are easier to build while our engineering team continue the focus on version 6 concurrently.

Conclusion

Our goal with this release is to really step up our multi-channel retailing support. Of course it’s dead simple to setup your online store with Interspire Shopping Cart 6 but you’ve told us that’s not the problem. The problem is getting people to your store once it’s ready to go, and that’s how version 6 will help you – significantly.

Remember that multi-channel retailing really doesn’t cost that much extra to use as a business owner. For example, to list on eBay it’s just a few bucks. On shopping comparison sites such as Shopzilla and Bizrate you only pay when a shopper clicks on one of your product lists and arrives at your store, and even then it’s only around 20-50 cents a click for a targeted, i’m-ready-to-buy-right-now shopper.

As mentioned earlier, Interspire Shopping Cart 6 will be slightly different to BigCommerce 6 in terms of featureset, however our goal remains the same: to provide you and your clients (if you’re a designer) with the most innovative e-commerce platform available which will allow you to sell more online, streamline your business processes and reduce your staff requirements through the automation of common or mundane tasks.

We’ll keep you posted with regular updates as we continue to build out this monumental release.

Length: 26:40
Overview: A look into the strategies we’ve used to grow our various email lists to over 250,000 people.

Description: In this, our first podcast in a series of many, I discuss the specific strategies we’ve used over the last 6 years to build our list of contacts to over 250,000 people. I talk about the design ideas behind our newsletters as well as how to write content which allows you to relate to your subscribers. I’ll also share a few tricks relating to email compatibility, buyer psychology and company positioning.

Like this podcast? Share it on FaceBook or Twitter.

A big thank all of our beta testers for their contribution towards testing  and we’re looking forward to getting 5.5 into your hands because it’s one of our biggest updates yet. All existing clients will of course be emailed next week when the release is available for download. We will also post to our blog and update the Interspire Shopping Cart section of our website with new features, etc.

Hi everyone. It was only a few weeks ago we released the beta for Interspire Email Marketer 6 (of which the final version has since been pushed live and upgraded to by thousands of clients in just over 3 weeks) and today I’m writing to let you know that we’ve just added Interspire Shopping Cart 5.5 beta to the client area for all clients to download and test.

As I mentioned last week, this is an incredible major release with features such as full Google Website Optimizer integration (beyond just basic “Add to Cart” button testing which a few of our competitors offer), SuperZoom photo zoom, upload an unlimited number of images per product, photo carousel, YouTube search and embed, QuickBooks two way sync, accept payments live when taking phone orders and much, much more. As with every release, our goal is to give you more features to help you sell more and make running your online store easier and more efficient.

To get started just login to the client area
and follow the orange notice on the main page. We’re looking at a 1-2
week public beta period before release because the product is already
quite stable after our 8 week internal testing cycle.

The beta
is encoded with ionCube so you’ll need to make sure your web server has
the free ionCube loaders installed. Also the beta doesn’t require a
license key. Complete details
are included in the client area and bugs can be reported directly from the application.

In late 2008 we launched the Interspire Ideas Lab, which is a digg-style voting system for new features across our various products. I launched our ideas lab for a few different reasons:

• Up until that point we didn’t have a unified system for collecting your feedback – we were using the forum, support tickets, old emails and even logging phone calls on paper (yikes!)
   
• We wanted our clients to help champion our product development efforts. Sure dozens of our own team members use our products every day across our 3 offices, but I believe a good software company doesn’t simply build the features it thinks its clients need. It can be tricky to build the right features at the right time, and I felt it best to build features based on your needs ahead of our own.
   
• Our goal from day one has been to turn each of our products into the market leader in their respective fields while also improving the product at a fast enough rate to give our clients even more value than was included in their initial purchase.
   
• I knew being transparent and requesting (and actually implementing) new features and ideas from clients would become a competitive advantage for us. After all, how many companies actually do it? There are so many great tools available that it’s almost inexcusable for any company not to.

Of course the ideas lab is now an integral part of our day-to-day operations and is used by thousands of clients every week to both submit new ideas and vote on existing ones. I’ve collected some interesting statistics from the ideas lab and so far we’ve had:

• 1,370 ideas submitted
• 858 registered users
• 4,750 voters
• 12,287 votes
• 2,844 comments
• 69 ideas implemented

You Spoke, We Listened and Made Major Changes

Your votes and ideas, without a doubt, have changed our entire company. The two biggest changes we’ve made as a direct result of your feedback this year involve our maintenance policy (which went from having 3 months of maintenance free to 12 months and includes free upgrades) and publishing our product roadmaps at http://track.interspire.com (along with our public bug tracking and development system so you can see exactly what’s being worked on, when a release is due, etc)

On top of the company-wide changes that affect every single client in a positive way, we’ve also implemented dozens of feature requests too. These have been evident in Interspire Email Marketer 5, 5.5 and 6 which was released last week, as well as Interspire Website Publisher 5, Interspire Shopping Cart 5.0 and 5.5 which is being released shortly.

Why We’re Shifting to Full Transparency

The ideas lab was the first pillar of our company wide transparency strategy, which gives you an “insiders” look into most aspects of how we run the company, how our teams work and how we build our software.

It was followed up by changes to our maintenance, upgrade and support policies as well as making our private bug tracking and release management system public just a few short months ago.

On Friday I met with our support engineering team and we’re in the
early stages of planning the next pillar of our transparency strategy – we’re changing our support systems to be easier, faster and more relevant for you. If you’ve posted a support ticket in the last few weeks keep an eye on your inbox this week because you’ll be receiving a survey. We want to know your thoughts on our support systems. Sure we’ve dramatically improved our response times and feedback quality lately based on some changes we’ve made, but we know we can go further.

I was inspired to turn Interspire into a fully transparent company initially based on simple requests from clients to see our product roadmaps, which got me thinking “if clients can benefit from seeing our product roadmaps, what would happen if they could see EVERYTHING – both the good and the bad – that goes into running a software company with close to 50,000 clients, 35 employees and 3 offices?“

I knew from personal experience that I liked to buy from companies that had nothing to hide – even if it meant they were brave enough to air their dirty laundry. The best example of completely transparent companies to me are Virgin, followed by SalesForce, Dell and Starbucks.

These companies ask for – and use – ideas from clients and customers because they understand their own success is tied directly to their success of their clients, and as I mentioned in my points at the start of this blog any company not asking for – and using – customer feedback deserves to go out of business.

For example, take a look at MyStarBucksIdeas.com – it runs on the SalesForce ideas platform (we use UserVoice) and lets millions of Starbucks customers post their ideas and vote on ideas submitted by fellow coffee drinkers around the globe.

Being a software company in the e-commerce space, our success being determined by yours probably applies more than most other companies – if your online store doesn’t make sales, or your email campaign bombs, or your staff don’t use your knowledge base, or your website doesn’t get any visitors then we suffer along with you because you’re less likely to recommend our products or purchase more licenses.

It’s in our best interest to treat your feedback and ideas like gold (which we do). It’s in our best interest to show you how we’re progressing on a product release so you can plan your marketing and business processes ahead of time. It’s in our best interest to educate you on industry best practices, tips and tricks we’ve learned over the last 6 years building a 7 figure software company. It’s in our best interest to tell you when we stuff up because you’d find out anyway. Again, it all comes back to us being as transparent as possible with you.

Watch this space because I’ll be posting more details on our shift to becoming a fully transparent coming over the coming weeks and months.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on transparency and how our changes have impacted your business in the last 12 months or so. I’m on Twitter if you’d like to send me a tweet. You can also email me – mitch@interspire – with your feedback.

This is one of the biggest product releases we’ve ever worked on, and includes:

• Google Website Optimizer Integration – Easily test
  different versions of on-page elements such as the “Add to Cart”
  button, home page promotional banner, product images, descriptions and
  more to see which results in more orders.
  
  
• Image Thumbnails, Zoom and Custom Sizes – We know
  from your feedback that images are the most important part of your
  online store, so we’ve added the ability to display thumbnails on the
  product page. There’s also image zoom on rollover and custom
  (configurable) image sizes for different sections of your online store.
   
• YouTube Search and Embed – Search for videos on
  YouTube right from your “Add a Product” page and have them display in a
  beautiful video player on your product pages. Easily find (or upload)
  video reviews for products you sell, add them to your product page and
  watch your order rate increase.
   
• QuickBooks and StoneEdge Two Way Sync – Easily
  sync your orders, products, customers and more to/from Intuit
  QuickBooks or StoneEdge Order Manager with just a few clicks.
   
• Change the Store’s Header Graphic – You can make
  changes to the existing header graphic in your store’s design or even
  download a plain version of the header graphic to modify as required.
   
• Auto-Generated HTML and XML Sitemaps – The HTML
  sitemap will allow the search engines to crawl and index all pages in
  your online store, while the XML sitemap can be submitted using Google
  Webmaster Tools to get more details on crawling/indexing problems which
  you can then correct to improve how your online store ranks in the
  search engines.
   
• Search Products, Categories, Brands, News and Web Pages
  – Your customers will be able to search more than just products in your
  store. They can search categories and brands by name and even content
  in news items and web pages you’ve created. Search results are
  separated into easily-accessible tabs and are fully configurable.
   
• Accept and Process Payments When Taking a Phone Order
  – You’ll be able to take payment then-and-there when adding a phone
  order through your store’s control panel. No more processing payments
  manually after you take the order.
   
• More Varied Store Designs – We’ve crafted over 15
  additional store designs for a wide range of industries, bringing the
  total of over 60 store designs available to all store
  owners absolutely free.
  
  
• Embed Videos Into Product Descriptions – Just
  paste in a link from YouTube, Vimeo, Metacafe or Megavideo and we’ll
  automatically create the HTML code and add the video to your product’s
  description.
   
• Photo Gallery – All uploaded images are accessible
  from the new photo gallery, so if you want to use the same photos for
  multiple products you only have to upload them once. You can even use
  photos that have already been uploaded to other websites.
   
• An AddThis Button on Product Pages – Take
  advantage of product recommendations with the AddThis button. In one
  click shoppers can easily share a link to a product in your store with
  their friends via email, Twitter, FaceBook and dozens of other social
  media services.
   
• Abandoned Order Report – See a list of all
  incomplete orders along with shopper details so you can follow up and
  see why they didn’t complete their order. You can choose how many days
  these orders remain in your store’s control panel before they’re
  removed.
   
• Sales Tax Report - Easily create a sales tax
  report filtered by date range which you can export into Microsoft Excel
  for further processing or to send directly to your accountant.
   
• Various Improvements – Along with new features
  we’ve also improved existing functionality. A complete list of
  improvements will be included with the change log upon release.

As we get closer to the release we’re continually posting useful
information and sneak peek screenshots of new features on Twitter, so
make sure you follow us and don’t miss out!

Snuggie Blanket Official Store, powered of course by Interspire Shopping Cart.

Built, as always, based on your feature requests, we’ve just pushed the final version of Interspire Email Marketer 6 live. This is hands down our best release yet and includes two major features which really do turn the product into an all-in-one communications platform, which is our tagline for version 6 – they are surveys and dynamic content blocks (a feature you’d typically only find in $10,000+ enterprise email marketing software).

Interspire Email Marketer 6 now has everything a small-to-medium business needs to effectively communicate and close more sales with their prospects and customers, including email marketing, autoresponders, surveys and contact management with calendar integration.

It’s been a long time coming but we’ve finally realized our vision for the product since it was first released in 2004 as a basic email marketing tool.

A lot has changed at Interspire since we first started development on the product, including increasing the size of our team by a factor of 9x, selling in over 100 countries and attracting some of the biggest companies in the world (Cisco, Xerox, Virgin and HP to name a few) as Interspire Email Marketer clients, but we’ve fulfilled our goals with this release and we really hope you’ll like it as much as we do.

The two main features of this release are:

• Surveys and feedback forms: We’ve built a great drag & drop survey designer which makes it easy to create customized surveys quickly. We looked at all of the survey tools on the market and used our own experience with these tools from the consumer point of view to come up with what we think is an easier way to create a survey.

  Once you’ve created your survey you can link to it inside your email campaign or autoresponder and your subscribers can fill in their responses. The responses can be viewed as a report, browsed individually and exported for further processing in Microsoft Excel.
   

• Dynamic content blocks: Custom fields allow you to personalize your campaigns but dynamic content blocks take that one step further. Dynamic content blocks allow you to personalize a section of your email message based on custom field values. For example, if the subscriber’s hobby is golf, you can show a golf ball. If it’s hockey, you can show a hockey stick, etc.

  This feature has typically only been available in enterprise-level email marketing platforms up until now – you won’t find it in any of our competitors and when used properly it’s an excellent way to boost the readership and click-thru rates of your email campaigns.

You can learn more about Interspire Email Marketer 6 and try the demo here.

Existing customers can upgrade for free (assuming you have a valid maintenance plan) from the client area. Just click the “Download Products” link on the left and then the “Upgrade” link next to your copy of Interspire Email Marketer.

For a narrated walk through of the new features in Interspire Email Marketer, see this video which I recorded last week.

Update: Interspire Email Marketer 6 has been released. Learn more and try the demo here.

Hi everyone. Instead of a closed test we’ve decided to make Interspire Email Marketer 6 beta available to all existing clients, regardless of which product(s) you own.

To get started just login to the client area and follow the orange notice on the main page. We’re looking at a 1-2 week public beta period before release because the product is already quite stable after our 6 week internal testing cycle.

The beta is encoded with ionCube so you’ll need to make sure your web server has the free ionCube loaders installed. Also the beta doesn’t require a license key and expires on the 3rd of December 2009. Complete details are included in the client area and bugs can be reported directly from the application.

Around 75 web designers and business owners attended the meetup,
curious to learn more about BigCommerce and mingle with our Austin
team. Chris did an excellent job running the BigCommerce demo/Q&A
stand and was overwhelmed with questions, interest and lots of
“ooooohhs” and “ahhhhhhs” as he showed what BigCommerce can do –
specifically how easy it is for web designers to roll out completely
customized and fully functional stores for their clients quickly.

Lee, Dave, Scott, Travis, Amanda, Ryan, Luke, Brian and Caroline
entertained guests and answered questions about BigCommerce (and our new partner program)
while everyone enjoyed complimentary food and drink. I’ve included some
pictures below that were taken on the night. A big thank you to
everyone who attended, and we look forward to working with you through
the BigCommerce partner program to grow your business!

#gallery-1 {
margin: auto;
}
#gallery-1 .gallery-item {
float: left;
margin-top: 10px;
text-align: center;
width: 33%; }
#gallery-1 img {
border: 2px solid #cfcfcf;
}
#gallery-1 .gallery-caption {
margin-left: 0;
}

Update: Interspire Email Marketer 6 has been released. Learn more and try the demo here.

Hi everyone. We’re extremely close to completing Interspire Email Marketer 6, which includes surveys, dynamic content and user groups, so I thought I’d put together a video showing you the new features in action. Just click the image above to watch the 12 minute video. It’s a Quicktime video so if you have iTunes installed you shouldn’t have any problems watching it.

As we wrap up our internal testing on Interspire Email Marketer 6 we’re also looking for existing clients who would like a first look at the new features while participating in our closed beta program.

Please email iem6beta@interspire.com if you’re interested – you’ll need to include your existing Interspire Email Marketer order number as part of the email. We’re looking for around 20 beta testers.

As I mention in the video, we’re hoping to have Interspire Email Marketer 6 released in no longer than 2 weeks time. It will of course be a free upgrade for existing customers with a valid maintenance period.

Thanks and I hope you enjoy the video!

Have you ever wanted to flex your sys admin muscle and take control of
the systems powering an entire company? If you answered YES! then we
have the perfect job for you…

Here’s why:

Interspire is a leader in the ecommerce,
knowledge management and email marketing spaces, with over 40,000
clients and growing. We develop software that businesses and
organizations of all sizes rely on every day, including NASA, Virgin,
Yale, Kraft, MediaTemple, SoftLayer and more.

Here at Interspire you’ll enjoy:

• The opportunity to build, install and support a variety of servers – where your daily tasks will vary each day
• A great salary package commensurate with your skills and experience
• Extend your knowledge of open-source frameworks and technologies
• The opportunity to work in a great company alongside other Linux System Administrators and Web/IT professionals
• A relaxed and supportive work culture
• Ongoing professional development and potential career
  advancement as well as the chance to work in a dynamic evolving company
  that is well respected within the industry.

Other perks you’ll love:

• All day access to a kitchen stocked full of free food and soda
• Work with like-minded people and managers with technical backgrounds
• Regular outings to celebrate company milestones and holidays
• The knowledge you’re working to build something big
• Excellent career path for the right candidate

To be a perfect fit for this role you will need the following skills/attributes:

• Linux (Debian) experience
• MySQL database administration experience
• Experience configuring and maintaining Apache
• LDAP experience
• Postfix configuration and maintenance
• Configuration and troubleshooting of DNS, routing and connectivity issues
• Version control (svn, git)
• Experience with iptables firewalls
• Understanding of caching, load balancing, and high availability
• Demonstrate a good understanding of server security issues and web protocols
• Shell scripting
• A security-first attitude
• Demonstrate skills for proactively identifying and resolving potential problems
• A “can do” attitude and professional work practices
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• The ability and experience to work well independently as well as part of a project team
• You can take control of a technical situation and resolve it quickly and professionally

The following skills/attributes are also highly desirable but not required:

• VMWare Vsphere and/or Citrix XenServer
• VPNS (pptp and openvpn)
• NFS
• MemCache / Redis or other key value stores
• Samba
• Various other mail servers
• Google Apps
• Plesk
• SNMP / Nagios / Cacti
• RSync
• Puppet
• Java / Tomcat
• Alternative webservers (lighttpd, nginx)
• Bind and PowerDNS
• Windows server 2008 (active directory)

If you think you’re right for this role, please send your resume and application letter to careers [AT] interspire [DOT] com. This is a full time role based in our Austin, Texas office.

Up until today you had to visit BigCommerce.com to see BigCommerce pricing and compare plans, but I’m happy to tell you that we’ve just integrated the BigCommerce pricing tightly into the Interspire website as well. You can compare plans side-by-side and even sign up.

For all the designers our there: we’ve made extensive use of the -moz-border-radius and -webkit-border-radius CSS attributes as part of the design, so if you’re on FireFox, Safari or Chrome the page will appear a little prettier. We’ve also redone the “Compare Editions” page for the licensed version as well.

Hi everyone. It’s been a long time coming but today I’m happy to announce that our bug tracking and agile project management software, codenamed Track (powered by Jira and Greenhopper from fellow Aussies, Atlassian) is now live at http://track.interspire.com and is accessible for browsing by anyone.

We’ve been using Track internally for the last few months to aid in our switch from an adhoc to agile development methodology and so far things have gone well. We’re not all the way there yet, but we’ve made excellent progress on:

• Daily stand ups for each development team
• Improved project planning and estimates
• Closer communication between development and support teams
• Tracking of key performance indicators (KPIs) including time, opened VS closed bugs, etc
• Visibility into stories from team members outside of development
• Assignment and resolution of critical bugs in a timely manner
• Automated generation of changelogs

Up until earlier this year we were developing based on a more adhoc approach, and while this worked OK to a point, it was hard to scale beyond having a handful of developers on each product.

As our engineering teams have continued to grow (especially the Interspire Shopping Cart/BigCommerce development team), we felt moving towards the agile methodology was the best way to maintain our release schedule as well as per-person accountability in a larger team.

At the moment the Interspire Shopping Cart/BigCommerce and Interspire Email Marketer teams are using the agile methodology and as such they’re the main projects represented and visible in Track. We also maintain projects for our internal cross-project libraries such as our template and database libraries and also our Interspire.com website, however these projects are more for reference purposes only.

For now access to Track is read only – bugs should still be submitted through the client area so our support team can verify them and then log the steps for our engineers to replicate them. We may consider opening up Track for public bug submissions early next year.

Opening up Track is part of our ongoing strategy to increase transparency with clients and partners. Simply by visiting Track you can see the status of upcoming releases and even features you’ve requested. You can see time logged per developer, bugs resolved and assigned to be fixed, release dates and more.

We’re in the process of moving our roadmap into Track as well, so keep an eye out for that over the coming weeks. Go ahead and visit http://track.interspire.com if you’d like to see how upcoming releases are progressing, specifically for Interspire Email Marketer 6.0 and Interspire Shopping Cart 5.1.

Any questions or comments are welcome – just leave me a comment below.

You’ll get to meet the Interspire team, see a demo of BigCommerce, learn more about our reseller program, network with like-minded individuals and most importantly have a great time. Oh, and there’s complimentary food and drink too.

The launch event is on Nov 11th from 5pm-7pm at Union Park in Austin, Texas. It costs nothing to attend but spaces are limited, so please click the link below to reserve your spot now:

Click here to learn more or register now!

The launch event costs nothing to attend but spaces are limited, so please click the link below to reserve your spot now:

Click here to learn more or register now!

Hi everyone. Today I want to share with you some details on how we design features and user interfaces for our products, specifically Interspire Shopping Cart. I’m going to show you how we designed the new product image features we’re currently working on. They were based on your feedback from the Ideas Lab and forum so I think you’ll be quite impressed…

Mocking Up With Mockup

We design all of our prototypes using both the desktop (Adobe Air) and web-based versions of Balsamiq Mockup – an excellent freemium user interface design tool we’ve been using for quite a while now. It includes a series of pre-draw UI components which you can drag onto a canvas and customize as required. You can then export the mockup to an XML file for later or a PNG file to print/further edit in Photoshop.

Prototyping New Image Features

We’ve just finished the UI prototype for images in Interspire Shopping Cart which will give store owners the ability to:

• Upload an unlimited number of images
• Use different images on the home/category/search page and product page
• Set alt text for each image
• Re-order images using drag & drop
• Zoom images to see a larger version
• Choose images from their computer, web or server
• Show a larger version of an image on the product’s page

The entire UI prototype was created in Balsamiq Mockup over the series of a few days and a few meetings between our various in-house teams (product managers and developers) using feedback from hundreds of customers we’ve spoken to about the way they want to use images in their online stores.

First up we’ve designed a new settings tab for images, which you can see below:

Then we designed the new “Images & Videos” tab when adding/editing products:

Here you can see there are three ways to add an image to a product:

1. Upload an image
2. Use an image from the web
3. Choose an image from the server

When you click the “Upload an Image” option you will be able to upload multiple images from your computer in one go because we make use of a flash-based image uploader.

When you click the “Use Image from Web” option you can upload up to five separate images like so:

When you click the “Choose from Gallery” option you can browse the folders on your server to choose one or more images, like so:

When you’ve uploaded your images you can then set their description (alt text) and choose which images will be shown both throughout the store and on the product page:

Conclusion

Of course Balsamiq Mockup just gives us the rough UI prototypes – we take these and apply our own design principles and styles to keep the UI consistent with the rest of the application, but it’s a great way to create UI’s quickly using nothing more than your web browser.

I’ll post more information about the new features we’re working on (including a neat way to find and add YouTube videos to your product pages, accepting payments online in real time when adding a phone order, storewide and per product/web page/category Google Website Optimizer tests, sales tax reporting, two way QuickBooks sync and dozens of new store designs + fixes) in the next few weeks, but for now the entire team is hard at work putting everything they have into the upcoming release which we hope you’ll love.

Talk soon.

Early next week we’ll be launching a new and improved version of our maintenance policy, which will make it easier and more affordable to use Interspire software for your upcoming projects.

If you’re a web designer or agency then our new maintenance policy makes it extremely easy to pass costs onto your client, especially since there will no longer be any charges to upgrade your client’s software when we push out a new release. Combine this will the fact that all new purchases will now include 12 months of free maintenance instead of 3 months, and we think you’ll be happy with the changes we’re bringing in.

We wanted you to be the first to hear of the changes we’ll be making to our maintenance policy as of Monday, 14th September 2009 (5 days from now):

- All new purchases will include 12 months (instead of the current 3 months) of maintenance free of charge, which includes unlimited technical support AND product upgrades.

- As an existing customer, ALL previous purchases you’ve made (as at Monday 14th September 2009) will receive an extra 9 months (or 270 days to be exact) of maintenance at absolutely no charge to help you transition to our new upgrade policy.

- There will no longer be a differentiation between updates (currently used to describe bug fixes) and upgrades (currently used to describe new feature releases). These will be one and the same and you will always have access to the latest release of the products you’ve purchased from the client area without having to pay an upgrade fee, as long as your maintenance period is valid.

- If your maintenance period expires you will have the option to renew it for an additional 12 months at 50% of the current purchase price for the license you own. Extending your maintenance period gives you an extra 12 months of unlimited technical support and access to upgrades as they’re released.

On Monday, 14th September 2009 we will be releasing a change to our client area which will automatically upgrade your previous orders to the latest available release for all products you’ve purchased. This will be of no cost to you and will allow you to upgrade to the latest release *if you choose to* (this is optional).

If you’re running an outdated release of any Interspire product and you want to keep the old zip file and license key we STRONGLY suggest you download a backup copy of the product zip and license key from the Interspire client area before Monday, 14th September 2009.

To do this, just login to our client area at http://www.interspire.com/clienarea/ and click on the “Download Products” link to download the zip file. Then click the “License Keys” link to retrieve your license key. Paste it into a text file and save it on your computer.

Please keep in mind that ALL orders you’ve placed will receive an extra 9 months (or 270 days to be exact) of maintenance added to them at absolutely no charge when our new upgrade policy is rolled out on Monday, 14th September 2009.

In the meantime we encourage you to continue ordering from our website because all orders you place until our new upgrade policy is implemented (on Monday 14th September 2009) will automatically receive an extra 9 months of maintenance free, as described above. This is our way of saying thanks to you for being an Interspire client – we really appreciate your business and your continued feedback – both good and bad.

As at Monday 14th September 2009 any orders you place will automatically kick over to our new maintenance policy as described above, meaning things become easier and more affordable for you, our valued client.

If you have any questions please give us a call or send us an email. You can find our details at http://www.interspire.com/contact/

Thanks,

Eddie Machaalani and Mitchell Harper
Interspire Co-Founders
eddie[at]interspire[dot]com
mitch[at]interspire[dot]com

Armed with his iPhone 3GS, I decided to test its video capabilities and record a quick impromptu Q&A session about Bone Suckin’s online store at BuyBoneSuckin.com, powered by Interspire Shopping Cart. To say Patrick is happy with his new online store is an understatement (his first month of online sales was astronomical).

When I asked him what he like’s best about Interspire Shopping Cart, here’s what he said:

“I’d have to say exporting the orders to our system. Something that used to take 3 or 4 hours (up to 10 or 15 people hours per day) now takes 2 seconds. And I really mean that. I can train anybody on that and I have 4-5 people trained to do it because it’s only a couple of clicks.

It takes everything off me so I can focus on selling to wholesale and retail customers. With our shipping we now have zero errors – and that’s the first time we’ve ever had that.”

Click play on the video above to see the entire interview. The sound quality isn’t as good as I’d liked, so you might want to turn your speakers up just a little more than normal.

If you’re ever in Sydney or Austin and would like to meet the team or have a chat about our products, feel free to stop by between 9am and 6pm Monday to Friday. We’ve always got a video camera of some sort on hand and it’s a great way to get some promotion for your business (our website attracts hundreds of thousands of unique visitors per month).

Like most things it’s actually fairly easy to implement – it just
takes a bit of knowledge, patience and the willingness to get dirty
with HTML. When it comes to getting started, there’s the basics like
making proper use of heading tags, giving images alt tags, making sure
your keywords come up near the top of the page, etc. All of these
contribute and warrant their own posts, but today I want to talk about
keyword density.

Keyword density is a fancy way to measure the number of times the
keyword/keywords you’re trying to rank for in the search engines
appears as part of the content of a web page. For example, if I was
trying to rank for pizza and the entire contents of my web page was I like pizza because pizza tastes good, then my keyword density would be 28% (pizza appears twice in a total of seven words and 2 divided by 7 multiplied by 100 is 28.57%)

Using a tool such as Aaron Wall’s excellent (and free) keyword density analyzer,
you can type in the location of a page on your website and see how
you’re currently doing in terms of keyword optimization. Let’s take a
look at the keyword density of Zappos.com and see if we can find some
relationship between keyword density and SEO rank:

We can see that their first 3 keywords are:

• shoe (4.17%)
• shoes (3.23%)
• zappos (2.56%)

… and if we do a search on Google for any of these 3 keywords, of
course Zappos.com is the first result. Now keyword density isn’t the
only factor at work here – it’s just one of many. Zappos.com are
extremely well known and have built up a lot of good will with
customers, but keyword density helped them rank well in the early days.
Zappos’s top 3 keywords have a density rank from 2.56% up to 4.17%, so
what should you aim for?

2.5% – 5% is a good rule of thumb. If you’d like to see the keyword density of your competitors, then just use the keyword density analyzer
and type in the location of their website. Generally you should focus
on the home page if they sell one product/product category, or on the
particular product’s page if they’re an eCommerce retailer with
different products like Amazon.

Determining which actual keywords you want to rank for is also
important. Generally if you’re just starting out in an extremely
competitive space (such as selling shoes online or even ecommerce
software ) then you’ll want to move further down the longtail of search.
This means that instead of focusing on the #1 keyword which will drive
1 million visitors to your site, instead focus on the #20 keyword which
will drive 5,000 – and then work your way up one at a time.

Google’s keyword tool
is a great place to start. Just type in the most popular keywords
relating to what you’re trying to rank for, and then sort the list by
local search volume. Sticking with the Zappos.com example, here’s what
I get when I type in shoes:

You can see that shoes gets searched for over 100 million
times in a month, which would be incredibly difficult (if not
impossible) to rank for. Instead, cast your eyes all the way to the
bottom of the list:

The phrase expensive shoes gets 27,100 searches per month and is a lot more targeted than the generic shoes keyword. If you look at the SERPs for expensive shoes, you’ll notice that none are explicitly targeting the term in their page titles or descriptions:

Most results are also more editorially focused, meaning they are
once-off posts which are generally easy to displace in the SERPs
because:

• No one is making sure they stay in the top of the SERPs
• Their website’s aren’t explicitly focused on expensive shoes

So in this brief example, I would start out trying to rank on the front page of Google for expensive shoes.
If I did this research before I bought my domain name, I might even
register expensive-shoes-new-york.com or something similar to further
boost my chances.

When it comes to building keywords into your page content, the #1 rule is to not sacrafice the readability of your content. Going back to our expensive shoes example, instead of using

We make it easy to buy expensive shoes online because when you buy expensive shoes online you should choose Acme

… as our META description, we’d use something like

Expensive shoes don’t have to cost the world! Get all
of your favorite expensive shoe brands including DKNY, Versace and
Armani at up to 50% off!

This sentence has context and the supporting keywords tell the
search engines more about our website (in this case, the brands we
sell).

For a more general overview of keyword placement, you’ll want to include your keywords in these parts of your document:

• The title tag of the page
• META description (this is used by Google to show a summary of your website in the SERPs)
• META keywords (arguable as they’re generally no longer used/factored in by all of the major search engines)
• Header tags, especially the <h1> tag which should be as close to the top of the document as possible
• Alt tags for images, such as <img src=”image.jpg” alt=”Your keywords here” />
• Any text that has a style emphasis, such as a <strong> (bold) or <em> (italic tag)

When you’re adding keywords to your web page’s title tag, keep keyword proximity
in mind as it seems to play a big role in Google determining which
positions your website should rank for. I say seems to, because no one
really knows exactly how Google calculates relevance – we can only
speculate, test and re-test.

Anyway, that’s just a quick look at one of many strategies you can
use to outrank your competition in the search results. I’ll discuss
other techniques in future blog posts, but if you have any questions
please feel free to leave them as a comment.

Interspire Website Publisher version 5.1 has just been released and now lets you create more than just content-driven websites.
You can now create calendars and events, customizable feedback forms,
photo galleries and multi-level dropdown navigation menus in just a few
minutes.

Calendars and Events

Create
events (including recurring events) in one click and then position a
calendar widget as part of content on a page or in a single location on
your website. Sharing upcoming events couldn’t be easier, and you can
even limit which staff members can update your calendar.

Customizable Feedback Forms

Use
the drag-and-drop editor to create customizable forms which you can add
anywhere on your website. Feedback can be emailed and is saved in the
control panel for further analysis and exporting to Microsoft Excel.
You can also create “admin only” form fields which only you and your
staff can see and modify.

Photo Galleries

Batch
upload dozens or even thousands of photos at once, optionally give them
a title and description and then display the photo galleries on your
website in whichever way you like. You can list all recent galleries,
display slideshows or link to a gallery, either from within a page or
from anywhere on your website.

Multi-Level Dropdown Menus

Make
your navigation menus come alive with multi-level displaying of links.
You can now set “parent” items for content and build horizontal or
vertical multi-level menus in just a few seconds from your website’s
control panel.

Watch the Overview Video

Click here to see the new features in action in a short video overview.
 

How to Upgrade

Interspire Website Publisher 5.1 is a free upgrade for existing customers. To upgrade, just login to the client area and click the “Downloads” page. The upgrade guide will assist you in upgrading an existing website.

How to Buy

Interspire Website Publisher is available for immediate purchase from our website. To get started, go to the pricing page to see pricing or the compare editions page to compare the standard and enterprise editions.

Click the video above to take an 8 minute sneak peek at the upcoming features in Interspire Website Publisher 5.1, which include feedback forms, photo galleries, a calendar and dropdown/fly out menus up to 3 levels deep. The beta will be available for existing customers by the end of the week so keep an eye on your inbox!

Introduction

Over the past few months our development team has been working on the agency edition
of Interspire Email Marketer, and today I’m proud to announce that the
product is available for purchase. The agency
edition was developed for web designers and developers, advertising and
marketing agencies, interactive and creative agencies and freelancers
who want to provide either DIY or fully managed email marketing
services to their clients.

If you’re an agency with 10 or more clients, then you’ll find the agency edition of Interspire Email Marketer can help increase your service offerings while providing valuable email marketing services to your clients.

What’s so different about the agency edition?

The main difference
between the regular edition and the agency edition is that as an agency
you can offer an unlimited number of free trial accounts to your
clients. If they like the product and come on board, you can then
charge them whatever you like and pay a low monthly fee per
active user (we don’t impose any email sending fees). There’s no charge for creating free trial accounts, which can be done through the control panel or via the updated XML API.

For qualified agencies there’s no upfront cost either, meaning there’s no risk from a financial point of view. Agency clients will also have unlimited free phone/email support during US business hours and free upgrades.

Benefits for digital agencies

The benefits are listed below. You can find out more, download the datasheet and request more information from the email marketing software for agencies section of our web site or by watching the video overview.

• No initial outlay. For
  qualified agencies it’s free to get started – you simply pay a low
  monthly fee per active user account, meaning we only get paid when you
  do.

• No per email fees. You
  decide how many emails your clients can send per month and can then
  bill them accordingly. You will never be charged any per email fees and
  you can easily set your own email limits for clients through the
  control panel or XML API.

• Free trial accounts.
  Offer an unlimited number of fully functional free trial accounts to
  your clients which can be upgraded to a regular account at any time.
  You only pay for regular accounts. It costs you nothing to offer free
  trial accounts.

• Multi-tenant architecture.
  Each user has their own lists, autoresponders, contacts, etc, as well
  as their own permissions (which you can configure) and email templates.
  One user can never see another user’s data.

• Set your own pricing and plans.
  Create different pricing and plans to accommodate your clients. With
  the click of a mouse you can easily enable or disable specific features
  (such as autoresponders and triggers) for each client.

• 100% white label software.
  It takes just 2 minutes to white label the software from the “Private
  Label Settings” page. Upload your own logo, add your own “powered by”
  text to the application and optionally at the bottom of all emails to
  send more clients your way. Even the built-in user guide and 500+ help
  articles are white labelled.

• Unlimited priority support by phone and email.
  Benefit from the best technical support in the industry. Interspire
  Email Marketer agency edition customers have access to their own
  priority technical support phone number and email address.

• Free upgrades and new features.
  Interspire Email Marketer agency edition customers enjoy free upgrades
  as they’re released and are invited to beta test new releases before
  anyone else. 

How to get started with the agency edition

The request more information form is a great place to start. You can also download the product brochure (PDF) or call us to learn more. The product is currently being rolled out to agencies across North America, Europe and also the Asia Pacific region.

Learn more about Interspire Email Marketer agency edition

We’ve just pushed up the production version of Interspire Email Marketer 5.7. As well as fixing bugs (see the changelog for details) we’ve also managed to include two cool new features which will be useful to digital agencies, both of which are described below.

Activity Notification Emails (As Shown Above)

As an administrator you now have the option to enable activity notifications on a per-user basis. What’s an activity notice you ask? Good question. An activity notice allows you to receive an email when one of two things happens:

• When a user sends to a large list over X contacts
• When a user imports more than X contacts in a single import

Of course “X” can be set to whichever number you like. You can also customize the email you’ll receive with various custom fields that tell you more about the email being sent or the contacts being imported.

Private Label Settings

You spoke and we listened. It’s now dead simple to private label everything in the control panel from the new Settings -> Private Label Settings page – and it takes about 60 seconds. There’s no editing PHP files and no messing with FTP.

You can customize everything from the footer’s “powered by” text to the logo and even the favicon and default email footer text. If you’re always installing and private labeling then this will be a big time saver for you.

How to Upgrade

Existing Interspire Email Marketer customers can download the 5.7 release right now from the client area. Just follow the upgrade guide and you’re good to go. If you have any questions feel free to give us a call or send an email from our contact page.

So what does this mean to you? Put simply, we can now help you with everything you need to sell online – software, design services and accepting credit cards. Integrating Interspire Secure Payment Gateway into your store is a simple process. After applying and being approved, it takes just seconds to begin accepting credit cards online.

As per the setup instructions page, it’s simply a matter of going to the Settings -> Checkout Settings page in your store’s control panel and filling in the new form with your merchant account details:

That’s all you need to do to accept credit cards from your Interspire-powered online store. I’ve also published the press release below:

PayLeap is an innovative online payment processing solution. The company proudly announces its partnership with Interspire, a leading on-premise and SaaS provider of e-commerce software to over 35,000 customers worldwide.

(PRWEB) June 22, 2009 — PayLeap is proud to announce its partnership with Interspire, a leading provider of ecommerce software with North American headquarters in Austin, Texas and offices in Sydney, Australia and London, England. Interspire has achieved a Preferred Reseller Status with PayLeap, offering the PayLeap solution to clients across the U.S. and world.

PayLeap has now provided Interspire with a branded payment portal, found on a personalized URL. Interspire’s merchant clients are directed to a payment platform “powered by PayLeap” to process online payments, but the portal is branded to match Interspire’s online presence, enhancing the user’s confidence and comfort. Users get the robust security of the PayLeap solution, without a distracting departure from the Interspire experience.

“By offering our ecommerce software bundled with the excellent payment processing system offered by PayLeap, our customers can now enjoy a whole product solution without having to deal with 3 or 4 separate vendors – it’s a big time saver for them” said Mitchell Harper, Interspire co-founder and Chief Product Officer.

PayLeap provides a vital service for software developers like Interspire. The company bundles merchant account and payment processing services for software developers to integrate or resell to their merchant clients. By combining both services into one secure payment platform, PayLeap lowers overhead costs and simplifies billing for developers. Meanwhile, the solution’s customizable formatting and easy integration give developers an ease of use that is beneficial for their merchant and ecommerce clients. PayLeap manages all customer service and support, making their solution a one stop shop for developers and merchants alike.

About PayLeap

Priding itself on service, the PayLeap mission is to be an outstanding corporate citizen in the electronic payments industry. Transparency, simplicity and service are the core values of the innovative payment processor. Visit http://www.payleap.com/ to learn more about the PayLeap bundled payment solution.

About Interspire

Interspire is a global leader in web-based e-commerce, content management and email marketing software for over 35,000 businesses, web hosting providers and ISP’s. Interspire’s offices are located in Austin, Texas, Sydney, Australia and London, England. For more information please call 1800 939 5570 or visit: http://www.interspire.com.

Interspire was featured in Austin’s only newspaper, the Austin American Statesman on Monday. In the article Eddie discusses why they chose Austin over San Francisco, as well as how Austin is different from Sydney, where Interspire’s headquarters are located.

Take a look at the article and help spread the word! 

The Internet is the perfect platform for businesses which sell one thing and sell it really well.  Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson calls this concept the longtail.  Instead of going after everyone, pick a specific niche as your market and focus on giving that niche everything you’ve got – a great product, great customer service and great support.

One such business using the longtail concept and Interspire Shopping Cart to sell into what some would consider a crowded niche is HoodiePeople.com. By focusing on youthful hoodies from brands such as Zoo York, Marc Ecko, Atticus, and Harajuku Lovers, Hoodie People built both an audience and decent search engine rankings to boot. 

I caught up with Hoodie People owner Hasan Luongo to discuss what it takes to be a successful online store owner in a niche market.  Here’s what he had to say...

As
a small bootstrapped started we knew we needed to hit a niche.  Tee
shirts are the #1 selling apparel category online and hoodies are very
similar with higher price points and gross margins.  Hoodies are very
popular and are represented across almost every lifestyle fashion
category such as surf/skate, urban, casual, athletic, even couture. We
also really like hoodies which is important.

We
reviewed a lot of top retail sites and included some key design
elements from them.  Overall we wanted the homepage design to grab the
customers attention then give them very clear and easy navigation. We
started with a simple Interspire theme and tweaked it to our liking. We
are also in process of a implementing a bunch of U/I changes that will
hopefully make it easier to navigate – the site is a constant work in
progress.

It’s all
SEO – we use a lot of images and wanted to make sure everything was
getting indexed.  Anchor tags get indexed well in search and are easy
to do.  We were excited to discover that we broke through page one of Google search results for “hoodies” last week.

In
terms of engagement we spend a fair amount of time identifying people
with related interests on social networks and inviting them. We also
participate a lot and push out a lot of content across these social
sites.  In terms of traffic, Facebook in the 4th top referrer of traffic,
and Twitter is 6th.

The web is social and we really wanted our
customers to see a human face in our business.  Conversions are not
huge from these sites but awareness is key for a startup and we will
continue to work hard to produce interesting content and engage with
people across key social sites.

Right
now we are really in fall prep mode but next year we will likely add
limited edition t-shirts to the product mix so we don’t face the
seasonal crunch.  We also think hoodies are a key item for summer
adventures (beach, travel, bbq’s etc.) and sales have held fairly
steady going into summer.

Finally, why did you choose Interspire’s Shopping Cart?

One of the main reasons we selected Interspire was that it
gives us source code access so we can continue to customize design and
layout as the business evolves.  What we have been most surprised with
is the built in SEO functions, which have allowed us to quickly and
consistently rank highly in our key search terms.

Hasan, thanks for taking the time to speak with me and congratulations on breaking the first page of Google!

Learn more about HoodiePeople.com and Interspire Shopping Cart

Visit HoodiePeople.com to see Hasan’s web site or learn more about Interspire’s online e-commerce solution, Interspire Shopping Cart, including video tour, online demo and features overview.

As a somewhat shy female in a male dominated field, I needed something catchy so people would actually remember me instead of toss my card in the trash. Ironically that’s how I landed the gig of community/social media manager for Interspire, but I digress…

I bought a Canon 5D digital SLR camera and decided I would take pictures of people.  After all, it’s hard to come up to someone just to pass them a card. It’s easy to introduce yourself when you have a camera and you can take a nice photo of someone.  I would then post the photos to Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

People could use them as avatars, tag their photos so that other people would know who they were, and get to know people around town. I’d post the Flickr link in my blog along with a summary, so people started to get to know my blog as well.

Sure enough, people started to know who I was and what I did.  Eventually, I established enough of a name that I could throw my own events and hire a professional photographer instead.

I could have set up a Google AdWords campaign or designed fancy business cards that people would remember.  I could have spent thousands of dollars on a meticulously built website or gone to every headhunter in town.  Instead, I actually gave people something they would want and could use, and it cost me a little time and money for something I wanted to buy anyway.  I made them feel important, because they are. You probably aren’t appealing to a tech crowd, but people aren’t all that different.

Your customers are important.  Theoretically, your product helps them achieve a goal.  Instead of pummeling them with messages of how great you are, how can you best express how great you think they are?  After all, selling isn’t about telling people how great you are — it’s about giving them a product or service can help them be great and even your advertising can do that.  That’s why they come to you in the first place.

Here are some basic tips for “advertising people actually want to see”:

1. Figure out who your target audience is.  Perhaps a better term?  Who is my “community”, as you are not only selling but can buy from your customers too.

2. Get to know people and be a participant first.  Whether your offering is a useful blog, a skate ramp for teenage boys, free samples or whatever, if you build it, that doesn’t necessarily mean they will come. People want to get to know that they can trust you and that you aren’t just trying to scam them.   Tap into existing communities rather than always trying to build them from scratch.
3. Always provide value, no matter what form it takes.  When you provide value, people provide money.  It’s never the other way around.

Is an ad useful to an audience? Sometimes, it really is. Just remember that it can be interactive and can take many many forms. If your budget is strapped, get creative and be useful. Be an accessible person rather than some faceless company. You’ll be surprised at what can happen.

There are conversations occurring online right now about your company and in your industry.  What are the best tools for keeping track of what is said about your company or a certain trend either within a day or so or even right now?

1.) Google Alerts has been around a while.  Setting up a Google Alert with your company’s name, your competitors’ names, and potential useful keywords can keep you up to date.  This is a key tool for reputation management as well as tipping you off to key trends in your industry.

2.) Backtype allows you to monitor comments made on a keyword.  If a commenter in a blog post or in Reddit mentions you, you can get it picked up.  Like Google Alerts, you can subscribe to BackType comments via email.

3.) Twitter Search (and other services which use real time data from Twitter)  Unlike Google, Twitter offers real-time search.  You can find out what trends are hot immediately and actually participate in the conversation. 

Subscribe to searches on search.twitter.com, or get even more involved by using a Twitter client like Tweetdeck or a search tool like sideline.yahoo.com to set up real-time searches on certain key terms.

These three tools allow you to monitor exact terms online rather than having to poke around blogs waiting for them to happen.  Join the conversation about terms in your industry, or use them to anticipate trends while they are still hot.

Some SEOs will tell you to pull up Google’s Keyword Tool and scour through the most unused keywords and scatter them through your site.  While including useful keywords is key, Google is simply a tool to connect you to the person who is looking for your website.  It is key to write for the person on the other end of your message rather than writing for a search engine itself.  Customer friendly copy is SEO friendly copy already.

Think I’m naive?  Follow the logic…

1.) Stock descriptions aren’t useful to people, so Google punishes them.  Say, for example, that you are selling ski jackets.  You may think that clean code is good enough for your site to get indexed, and that a stock description is okay.  However, there is a big chance that another site is selling the same product and has the same stock description.  So if a customer has a question about this jacket, they will go from site to site looking for their answer.  This person will either not buy or will require your salespeople’s time, and therefore your money, to make a decision.  So not only have you used duplicate content, you’re risking not closing a sale when you can as well.

Although Google does not always catch duplicate content, it’s a no-no for this reason.

2.) Answer questions with your site to pick up keywords.  Don’t just use keywords from a tool.  Think of your website as a salesperson that never sleeps.  When your website answers any question a person would have about a product or service, the chance of closing the sale is higher.  That person knows the who, the what, the where, the when, etc.  Guess what?  When you answer all of these questions with your product descriptions or website copy, you will have the keywords that someone is typing in to get to your site.

Keyword tools are great, but only lazy copywriters depend on them.

3.) People-friendly text gets linked to.  Bot-friendly text does not.  Off-page SEO is incredibly underrated, particularly because it has become more important in recent years.  If you are pulling stock descriptions or merely plugging in keywords from a tool into a paragraph, you aren’t thinking of the person on the receiving end.  Blogs and other websites are always looking for useful information for their readers.  They won’t link to you if your website uses stock descriptions or bland copy. 

Google’s PageRank system doesn’t acknowledge sites that aren’t linked to, so just kiss your search engine results goodbye.

4.) Improve your copy now.  The sooner you get rid of stock descriptions or bland copy that tells people nothing, the more useful your website is to people.  Google rewards content that it can index over and over again.  It means your website isn’t just something fly-by-night.

So in essence, design and write for people instead of Google, and Google will connect the dots on its own.  That’s it’s whole purpose.  If it didn’t do it well, people would start using something else and Google would lose ad revenue from AdWords.

A good rule of thumb is to listen to what people ask on the phone or in person about your business, and then include that information on your website.  So not only will you have useful keywords on your site, you’ll cut your phone time in half. You can then spend that time building your business, spending time with your friends, or doing nothing.

My background is in ecommerce and internet marketing and it is something I am very passionate about.  If you’d like to see my credentials, please check out my ClaimID profile. You can also follow me on Twitter, @michellegreer

I was excited to work for Interspire because they create products that make it easy for small businesses to succeed.  As a consumer, I like doing business with small businesses and try to do so as much as possible.  Why are small businesses the wave of the future? Here’s what I think:

1.) Less bureacracy.  Have you ever been transfered from phone rep to phone rep in a big company, only to have your problem go unsolved?  Small businesses answer to the customer, not to a group of shareholders.

2.) More accountability.  It’s easy to pass the buck when you are the low man on the totem poll at a big company.  After all, you legitimately can’t do anything to fix some of the catch-all policies meant to protect the company.  People at small companies can be empowered to make decisions on a case-by-case basis, which would be too hard at a large company.

3.) More specialization.  Are you passionate about mid-century modern art?  Sunglasses?  Wind turbines?  Large companies cannot support themselves picking such a niche.  Small companies can, so they can get better and better at what they do in their knowledge and processes.

4.) More pride.  Are you a cog in a wheel at a large company?  At a small company, every member of the team matters.  This translates to better performance and results.

5.) More diversity.  People aren’t all the same.  Why should the goods and services they consume also be the same?  By not needing to accomodate everyone in order to stay profitable, the consumer wins.

What are your thoughts on dealing with small businesses versus large, multi-national corporations? Feel free to leave a comment or send me a tweet.  I’ll be blogging here quite freuently, so if there are topics you would like to see covered in the blog, please let me know.

We’ve just released version 5.6 of Interspire Email Marketer, our email marketing software. Version 5.6 is a free update for existing customers with valid maintenance and can be downloaded from the client area.

Although this is a minor update, it includes quite a few new and exciting features:

• An image manager which is separate from the WYSIWYG editor. The image manager makes it easy to manage all of your images in the one place. You can batch upload multiple images at once, edit, rename and delete, etc. The slick upload interface can easily hand hundreds of images at once

• 32 new email templates, which match those found in Interspire Shopping Cart – now your email marketing promotions can match the look and feel of your online store!
• The bounce processing wizard has been redesigned to be a LOT easier to use. It’s now a clear, step-by-step wizard and mail server settings can be auto detected
• The WYSIWYG editor has been replaced with TinyMCE, which is much more stable. Functions such as unlimited undo/redo and copy/paste are now a lot more reliable
• There’s a new dashboard with useful metrics (such as overall list activity and per-campaign reports), campaigns filtered by status, etc
• Your subscribers can confirm their unsubscribe request when they click an unsubscribe link in an email instead of being removed straight away
• For partners/agencies, you can now force a spam check on an email before send and not send if it fails (this is a per-user setting)
• For partners/agencies, you can now force double opt-in subscription verification when creating a website form (this is a per-user setting)
• For partners/agencies, autoresponder credits now count towards the monthly credit limit and you can automatically send “low credit” reminder emails to users when they hit certain thresholds (as defined by you from the Settings -> Email Credit Settings page)
• For partners/agencies, see created, last logged in and pending (delete/inactive) date on the view users page and sort by them
• For partners/agencies, there’s now a link on the view users page to automatically login as that user
• For upgrading, the new Tools -> Check Database wizard will run tests to make sure database indexes exist, tables are not corrupt, etc

As I’m sure you’ll agree, it’s quite a significant update! If you’re an existing Interspire Email Marketer customer with a valid maintenance period, you can download version 5.6 right now from the client area. Our upgrade instructions will step you through the process.

New customers can learn more about Interspire Email Marketer and also purchase online.

After working with our design team for a few weeks, the official store of Wayne Gretzky (the world’s most popular Hockey player – or the Michael Jordan of Hockey, as we like to call him) is now live, and is of course powered by Interspire Shopping Cart!

Wayne’s store features canvas prints and memorabilia items such as caps, signed photos and jerseys. You’ll also find information about the Wayne Gretzky Foundation, which benefits from a portion of profits made through the online store.

You can take a look at the store and purchase some memorabilia at http://www.gretzky.com/shop/

The biggest upgrade ever released for Interspire Shopping Cart is finally here. Interspire Shopping Cart 5.0 took 6 months to develop and includes a whopping list of new features, including discount rules, custom form fields, terms and conditions during checkout, re-ordering, add multiple items to the cart and delivery/event dates!

Learn About the New Features

Visit the What’s New? page to learn about new features, view screenshots and more. Each feature is explained in detail and the video tour shows the new features in action.

Existing Customers: How to Upgrade

Existing customers running Interspire Shopping Cart 4.0.x or below can upgrade to Interspire Shopping Cart 5.0 at a special discounted price here. Upgrade instructions are listed on the developer network. Please note that the beta release of version 5.0 cannot be upgraded.

All existing customers will also receive an upgrade email shortly detailing their options. Please note that you are still entitled to maintenance releases of version 4.x if you decide not to upgrade to version 5.0.

New Customers: Try the Demo and Buy

Before you purchase Interspire Shopping Cart you might like to take the online demo for a test drive. Pricing is available online and you can buy directly from our website for immediate download.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us using the phone numbers at the top of the page. You can also email us or submit your questions from our contact page.

You can learn more about our design customization services if you’re looking for a way to make a BIG first impression on visitors and stand out from the thousands of boring web sites designs your competitors are more than likely using. A new website design can significantly boost your conversion rate, too.

JunkFunk.com

JunkFunk.com sells cool t-shirts, designer lifestyle gifts and streetwear clothing. They wanted a design that really matched the vibe of their brand, and as you can see from the screenshot above, their website definintely has an edge to it.

Beloved.net.au

Beloved Boutique sell a range of fashion accessories and clothes from various smaller boutiques around Australia. They wanted a site that was fast to load which would keep the visitor’s attention on their products.

StyleModa.com

Style Moda sells clothing and accessories from well-known retail brands including Ed Hardy, Diesel and Replay. Just like their image, they wanted a website design which was edgy and in your face. Did it work? You be the judge.

EverythingX.com.au

The “freestyle lifestyle”, which includes extreme sports, surfing, skateboarding, etc is well represented on the EverythingX website. With the help of our design team they chose a rough and gritty design which really “speaks” to their target audience – mainly younger makes who are involved in extreme sports.

SugaraySupplements.com.au

Those with tough workout routines (myself included) understand the body’s need for additional supplementation, such as protein powder and various minerals. Sugaray Supplements new web site and vibrant color scheme really do entice visitors to navigate the site and then of course take action and place an order.

Looking to Increase the Conversion Rate of Your Online Store?

Just like we did with Interspire.com last year, overhauling your website’s design can give you an extreme increase in conversion rates.

We offer a full range of design and customization services and our design team can work with you to create a stunning web site design which will significantly increase your conversion rate.

Our design services page has more information on the packages we offer, and you can even ask our design team any questions you have before getting started.

With the recent successful launch of Interspire Website Publisher our design team has gone full speed ahead designing new templates and themes which will be released shortly.

A preview of some new templates is shown below – they will be available directly for download into your web site from your Interspire Website Publisher control panel shortly. They will also be included with our next minor update.

In my last blog post, which detailed the features in the upcoming release of Interspire Shopping Cart 5.0, I mentioned we’re working on a new and improved dashboard for the control panel. As you can see from the screenshot above, it’s now complete, and I thought I’d take a few minutes to run you through it…

The “Let’s Get Started” and “What’s Next?” Panels

First up we have the “Let’s Get Started” panel. As you click through each “To Do” item when setting up your store initially, it will automatically be crossed off the list. When you’ve completed all actions, you’ll see the “What’s Next” panel as shown above.

The “What’s Next” panel makes it easy to manage orders, add a product, and get one-click access to everything in your store – from orders to products, categories and customers.

Recent Orders

Along the bottom left of the dashboard you’ll see a list of your recent orders. With one click you can easily switch to pending, complete or refunded orders – without reloading the page, of course.

Store Snapshot

The store snapshot shows the 4 most important KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for an online store over two comparative periods:

• Revenue
• New Orders
• Visitors
• Conversion Rate

The great thing about these KPIs is that you can see how your store is performing over time. For example, did you have a better conversion rate for March over February? The store snapshot will tell you.

7 Day Order Breakdown

Finally, you can see a revenue-based order breakdown for the last 7 days. This allows you to quickly see at a glance how your store has performed over the last 7 days, in terms of revenue per day.

Version 5.0 Is Close to Release

So far the 5.0 beta release has received extremely positive feedback from the thousands of existing customers who’ve been testing it, and we’re anticipating the final release shortly.

As always, we will email existing customers and post to our blog when 5.0 is ready to go.

Hi everyone. Today I want to show you some of the incredible new features coming in the 5.0 release of Interspire Shopping Cart in a few weeks time. It’s a big release and was built from your feedback on the Ideas Lab.

We will be making a beta release available to all existing customers shortly as well. There’s more information on the beta release at the end of this post.

Let’s take a look at the myriad of new features:

Discount Rules

Discount rules allow you to run automated store-wide promotions and special offers, such as “Buy One, Get One Free”, “Get $10 off When You Spend Over $100″ or “Buy 5 Items and Get Free Shipping”.

The discount rules system is extremely flexible and optionally you can stack rules on top of each other so they run in sequence, applying multiple discounts for one order. You can of course disable rule stacking too.

When a customer’s shopping cart triggers the rule, they see a message at the top of their cart, like so:

Discount rules can also be setup to expire after a certain number of uses (so you can run campaigns such as “Get $10 off your order – for the first 100 people only”) and/or after a certain date (great for Valentines day or holiday sales):

Form Fields

Custom form fields allow you to create as many new fields as you like to display on forms which your shoppers fill out, such as when registering for a new account or when creating a new address in their address book.

You can create the following field types:

• Checkboxes
• Date fields
• Multi-line text fields
• Numbers only fields
• Password fields
• Radio buttons
• Text fields
• Pick lists

The custom form field data appears in the customer’s profile both from their “My Account” page and in your store’s control panel. You can also re-arrange the appearance of the form fields using drag and drop.

Form fields were designed specifically for our European customers who need to collect VAT and birthday information for tax purposes, and also for marketing. You can now, for example, ask customers how they found you as they’re placing their order.

Terms of Service Agreement

One of the biggest feature requests was the ability to make customers agree to terms and conditions during the checkout process. We designed this feature so you could type in your own terms and conditions or link to an existing page on your website:

Of course it’s a simple implementation in your store, and the customer has to tick the checkbox to signify their acceptance of your terms and conditions, but here’s how it looks:

Tabs for Product Details

Another highly requested feature was tabs on the product pages. As you can see from the screenshot above, we’ve added them in. You can switch between tabs instantly (no page reloading) and they can also be disabled from the control panel if you’d prefer everything to show in a single view.

Re-Ordering Products

Once a customer has placed an order, they can now re-order those same items from their “My Account” section. All previously selected information, such as variations and configurable fields are persisted and the items are added straight to their cart.

They can choose which items to re-order (as in the screenshot) above, or they can re-order everything, as shown below:

Export Templates

We are well aware that Interspire Shopping Cart, for a lot of customers, is just one part of the machine they use to run their business. Like them, you probably use one of the popular accounting packages to manage your books.

The problem is that there are so many accounting and order management systems. Instead of trying to support all of them natively, we decided to build an extremely flexible export template system which works with all of the popular systems.

As you can see in the screenshot, you simply choose the order of the fields in the export, and what you want to export. You also have control over things like date formats, binary fields, delimeters, etc, as you can see here:

By default Interspire Shopping Cart 5.0 has integrated support for Intuit QuickBooks and also native export support to MYOB and Peachtree, but it takes just a few minutes to create your own export template for whichever account and/or order management system you use, including StoneEdge.

List View for Products

This is the feature we codenamed “product listings like Woolies” during development – for lack of a better name. If you’re Australian and shop online with Woolworths you’ll understand why.

Basically instead of having to click through to view a product and add it to your cart, you can now add multiple items to your cart at once from any category page.

You just type in (or choose from a dropdown, depending on your settings) the quantity to buy and hit the “Add to Cart” button:

Delivery/Event Dates

If you sell (or are planning to sell) flowers, concert tickets, etc online then this feature was built specifically for you. Each product now has its own delivery/event date, which customers choose when buying the product.

For example, if you want to s
ell tickets to a gig you’re performing between specific dates, you can do that. When the customer comes to add the product to their cart, they are asked to choose a date:

You can specify date limitations, including:

• Start date, i.e. you must choose a date on or after this date
• Date range, i.e. you must choose a date on or between two specific dates
• End date, i.e. you must choose a date on or before this date

A New Dashboard

Although not included in the beta, a new dashboard will be included in the final 5.0 release. It looks like this:

There are also a few other features, including:

• The Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing addons (currently $149 each) are included free in all editions
• The ability to choose if FedEx rates are based on account or list rate
• The ability to give customer groups a $ discount and fixed product price as well as a % discount
• Additional payment gateway support for PayPal Express, QuickBooks Merchant Services, Secure Trading, OGone and IWSmile
• It’s now optional to upload an image for a product
• The default “no image” for a product can be uploaded

Existing Customers: Recieve Access to the Beta Release

Existing Interspire Shopping Cart customers will be sent an email in the next few days with details on how to access the beta release of version 5.

The beta release is strictly for testing purposes only, and cannot be used to upgrade an existing store as it does not include the upgrade components which will be in the final release.

We will send you complete information explaining everything in the email shortly.

How Much Will the Upgrade Cost?

As per our upgrade policy, upgrading to Interspire Shopping Cart 5.0 is free for existing customers if you’ve purchased within the last 60 days. If not, you will be able to upgrade for 50% of the retail price for the edition you’ve purchased.

We will of course notify all existing customers when 5.0 is officially released.

When Will 5.0 Be Released?

Version 5 has been in test mode internally for the last few months, and we’re expecting a smooth beta testing period of around 2-3 weeks, after which time the new version will be officially released.

This will be our biggest release yet, and we’re excited to hear your feedback.

If you have any questions about the version 5 release, please contact us via phone or email – we’ll be more than happy to assist in any way we can.

Today we’re officially launching Interspire Website Publisher 5.0 – the latest version of our content management software designed to allow small businesses to easily setup a content-driven website in under an hour.

Unlike previous versions which were purely focused on setting up an article or blog-driven website, version 5.0 can be used to setup any of the following types of content-driven websites:

Business websites Corporate intranets Online article directories

Online magazines Community websites Websites for schools and uni’s

Blogs and personal websites Video-driven websites Social media websites

The product was in development for close to a year and has been designed from the ground to accomodate the needs of both web designers and small business owners, specifically:

• It’s very easy for non-technical people to use
• It’s extensible and built on an open source platform
• Existing designs can be integrated quickly
• Each website template contains just one HTML file
• The drag and drop editor allows for on-the-fly layout customization
• Custom content types can be created to match business requirements
• And of course, the product can be 100% private labeled

There are too many new features to name, but here’s a few of the more popular ones:

• Create your own custom content types
• Full SEO optimization and options
• Permissions right down to the individual item level
• Multiple user and group support
• Threaded comments system
• Create flexible menus/lists and add them to any section of the website
• Includes dozens of professionally designed website templates
• Google Analytics/YouTube/Twitter support
• Create lead capture forms and add them to your website

To learn more, take a look at the website, try the online demo, view screenshots or watch the video tour.

How to Upgrade from Previous Versions

We will be sending an email to all existing customers with instructions on how to upgrade from Interspire Website Publisher 4.5 and earlier within the next few days.

How to Purchase

You can see pricing and buy online here. All purchases include a 60 day refund guarantee. If you have any questions please feel free to call or email us. Details can be found on the contact page.

The virtual mall edition of Interspire Shopping Cart is now available for purchase from our website. Here’s the official blurb from the virtual shopping mall software section of our web site (now live):

Interspire Shopping Cart Multi Vendor edition allows multiple vendors to sell online through a single storefront.
Each vendor has their own profile, web pages and featured products, can
add their own products, process orders and refunds, and more.

Shoppers can purchase from multiple vendors in a single transaction
and can even specify multiple shipping addresses for items in their
order. Vendors can create, distribute and track coupon codes and gift
certifies, create promotional banners and more.

Interspire Shopping Cart Multi Vendor edition is the only virtual mall software
on the market which can handle hundreds of vendors, hundreds of
thousands of products and millions of customers from one integrated
system.

The virtual mall edition of Interspire Shopping Cart includes support for up to 200 vendors and can be purchased from our website for $3,995 USD – which includes 3 months of free technical support. For more information please see the product brochure, features or try the online demo. You can also contact us with any questions.

Continuing on from my last blog post which showed a quick overview of features in the upcoming release of Interspire Website Publisher 5.0, today I thought I’d share a few screenshots of how user groups are created – mainly focusing on the extremely flexible permissions system with allow and deny permissions for anything and everything in the control panel.

Obvious the first step to create a new user group is to choose the option from the “User Accounts” menu:

Clicking the “Create a Group…” button from the main groups page…

…takes me to the “Create a Group” screen:

After I give the group a name, I can click the “Add Permission…” button to setup permissions for users in this group. Doing so brings up the following dialog box:

This is where the power lies in the new permissions system of version 5. I have full allow/deny permissions over everything, right down to the granular level of a specific item (such as a specific blog post or media release).

If I wanted to deny users in this group access to anything except being able to edit 2 particular blog posts, I would add the following two permissions:

First, deny access to everything

Then, allow edit access to just 2 specific blog posts which I’ve selected

Of course I can keep adding different permissions for this group for as long as I like. I’ve setup a few custom content types: blogs, press releases, photos, etc, and here are the permissions I’ve set for those items:

Red = Deny – users do not have permission
Green = Allow – users do have permission

You can see there’s also a little edit icon next to each permission so you can make changes if required:

So that’s a quick overview of groups in the upcoming release of Interspire Website Publisher 5.0 – as you can see they’re not only powerful in terms of permissions but also very easy (and fun) to configure!

**PHP/MySQL Technical Support Whiz for Fast Growing Web 2.0 Software Company** (Austin)

We’re looking for a LAMP and WAMP guru to provide email-based technical support to customers from our Austin, Texas office. If you’re passionate about PHP, MySQL, Linux, MTA’s and have excellent communication skills then we need you!

Required Skills:

- 5+ years of HTML, CSS and JavaScript experience (expert level)

- 3+ years of PHP and MySQL experience (expert level)

- 2+ years experience with Linux system administration

- 2+ years experience with Windows system administration

- Excellent communication skills

- Excellent problem solving skills

- Ability to “go the extra mile” to help customers

- Fast typing speed

Position Responsibilities:

- Provide email-based technical support to customers on a daily basis

- Liaise with our development team to report and log bugs

- Troubleshoot technical problems remotely using FTP/SSH

- Provide a rapid response time to all technical support inquiries

- Ability to learn quickly and use knowledge to solve problems efficiently

- Achieve customer satisfaction through fast, accurate replies and fixes to problems

- Escalate unresolved issues as required, maintain ownership of issues through to resolution

How to Apply:

To apply for this position please send your resume and cover letter to jobs [AT] interspire dot com with the subject line “Application for PHP/MySQL Technical Support Role”.

About Interspire:

Interspire is a global leader in e-commerce, content management and email marketing software for business owners, digital agencies and ISP’s.

Over 20,000 businesses and Fortune 500 companies (including Virgin,
Dell and Shell) rely on Interspire solutions to start online stores,
launch content-driven web sites, and profit from email marketing.

• Location: Austin
• Compensation: Excellent for the right candidate
• Principals only. Recruiters, please don’t contact this job poster.
• Please, no phone calls about this job!
• Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

Most of the core engine has been rebuilt from the ground up, the entire system is modular and if you thought design mode was great you’ll love the new features we have that allow you to create and position items on your website.

Content Types

Content types allow you to create your own forms with configurable fields. Of course there are built-in content types such as articles, blogs and news, but you can use the drag and drop designer to create as many content types as you like, each with their own tabs, field groups and fields.

Creating Content

You can choose from one of the built-in content types (which are of course fully customizable) or you can create your own. In the screenshot above I’m creating a new blog post from the “blog” content type I created above. Notice the fields and tabs are exactly the same?

If you look closely you’ll notice that we’re now using TinyMCE as our default WYSIWYG editor. After testing all of the commercial and open source WYSIWYG editors we felt that TinyMCE had the best performance, the best support for customizations, undo/redo, etc.

Uploading and Managing Images

The built-in image manager is separate from the WYSIWYG editor and includes a nifty flash component which allows you to upload multiple images at once. As you can see above, images are listed in grid format and can easily be renamed just by clicking on the name.

Menus and Lists

Menus and lists allow you to easily create a group of items (such as a list of web pages or recent press releases) and position them anywhere on your website. You can choose one of the default positions (such as “on the left of my website”) or you can customize the exact location of the menu/list using the new and improved design mode.

In this example I’ve created a list which contains the 10 latest blog posts. I’ve also created another list which contains the top 20 most recent posts from an RSS feed:

Design Mode

Now that I have two lists, I can use design mode to place them on my web site. In the example above I’m editing the layout of my home page. I’ve selected a 3 column layout for the home page but I can just as easily change it to a 1 or 2 column layout.

Notice the list of available “blocks” down the left of the page? I can simply drag and drop them onto any page on my website. If a specific section of my site is locked (notice the padlocks in the screenshot) then it will inherit the layout of the master template, which is also editable.

Modules

As I mentioned earlier, everything in the upcoming release is modular. As you can see above, the modules section allows you to toggle and configure specific modules such as podcasts and attachments. You can even write your own modules if you know PHP.

New Templates

Of course along with a new release there are new templates. The new templates only contain 1 HTML file – no more panels or snippets. Anyone can customize an existing website design to work with the new version in about 20 minutes. If you’re a designer then I’m sure you’ll appreciate this.

Conclusion

So there you have it – a quick overview of what to expect in the upcoming release of Interspire Website Publisher 5.0. Of course I’ve only skimmed the surface with the features I’ve mentioned above, and we will be releasing a sneak peek video in a few weeks to show off the other new features. We’re in final testing stages at the moment and we’re hoping to have a release for you soon.

This article was originally published on FreelanceSwitch but I decided to republish it on our blog because a lot of our readers are freelancers too.

As an employer with over 30 staff at Interspire, most of the time when I need something done I can call on a staff member in the office and they will take care of it for me. However, sometimes I need the skills of an experienced freelancer for one-off jobs, such as writing a user guide or putting together a product overview video in Flash. In these situations I turn to freelancers on eLance, oDesk or Guru.com.

After posting a job ad, the responses start to come in within a few hours. 95% of the time the candidates have no idea how to reply to the job ad and will either send over:

• The same old copy-paste reply which they use for every job ad
• A vague reply in which they don’t sell themselves to me

Having been on both sides of the fence – as an employer now, and as a freelancer about 5 years ago – I’ve come to learn what makes a great response to a job ad on a freelance site such as those listed above, and I thought I’d give you a few pointers in this article to help you win any and all freelance jobs you apply for.

1. What’s in it for me, the employer?

If you’re replying to my job ad for a freelancer, you need to sell me on your skills and the benefits of hiring you. The best way to do this is with a short list of bullet points, such as:

• Expert technical writer whose written for Microsoft and eBay
• Fully dedicated to your project with a keen eye for detail
• 100% money back guarantee if not satisfied for any reason
• Fast turn around time

In the example above let’s assume I’m a freelancer trying to win a freelance job relating to technical writing. First up I “name dropped” Microsoft and eBay. As an employer this would get me thinking “wow, this guy’s written for Microsoft and eBay. He must be good, I’ll keep reading.”

Next, you’re telling me that you’re a harder worker and you’re SO confident in your work that you’ll give me my money back if I’m not happy. That eliminates all risk for me from the get go.

Finally, you’ve guaranteed me a fast turn around time, which I like because I have 100 other things to worry about and don’t have time to micro manage you.

2. Does your subject line get my attention?

When I post a job for a freelancer, 99 times out of 100 the subject line will be something like “Re: Technical writer position”. If I have 85 emails in my inbox then that wont get my attention.

Be creative with in the subject line of your email and do whatever it takes to get the attention of the person who posted the job. Here are some good examples that have worked on me:

• “You will NOT find a better technical writer than me. Guaranteed.”
• “Delete your post on eLance – read my resume to find out why”
• “I’ve worked with 2 of your closest competitors”
• “I am an expert at using your product and can write your user guide with my eyes closed.”

Compare the subject lines above to this:

    Re: Technical writer position

… and you can see what a huge difference just the subject line can make.

3. Are you a real person?

You’d be surprised how many candidates don’t include contact details in their reply to a freelance position. Just because you work from home it doesn’t mean your only communication methods should be email and IM.

Employers want to know you’re a “real” person, so to get the ball rolling and have a better chance of winning the job, try ending your email with something like this:

“I’m located in Los Angeles, California, and am able to begin working on your job right away. Please feel free to call me on 555 0199 to discuss the project any time. I look forward to hearing from you.”

Even if the person who posted the job is comfortable dealing with you via email, just showing you have an open line of communication can make a world of difference when it comes to winning a freelance job. You’d be surprised by how many offshore freelancers pose as being from North America.

I hope these 3 quick tips have given you a few ideas on what you can do to win more freelance jobs in the future. If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment below!

Generally keeping it as simple as possible is the best way to go. Be sure your email campaign is easy-to-read and scan, use basic blue links that are easy to recognize and always make it easy for people to unsubscribe. There are many design tips and tricks that affect click-throughs and we’ll cover them in future posts.

For now take a quick look at the video above which demonstrate the “Create an Email Campaign” wizard in Interspire Email Marketer 5.5.

When you’re ready to use email as part of your marketing and communications plans, it’s necessary to have web-based HTML email software at your ready, such as Interspire Email Marketer 5.5.

There are many reasons to upgrade away from a home-based system such as Outlook, whether you’re connecting with ten people or 10,000. One of the obvious benefits is quick and useful analytics.

Tracking and metrics are probably the reasons most small businesses initially investigate email marketing software solutions. With the recent release of Interspire Email Marketer 5.5, you can quickly and easily view, scan, and compare results of your emails for open rates, click-throughs, bounces, forwards, unsubscribes, and more.

The statistics are easy to find, export, and use for your marketing efforts. Version 5.5 also has a basic built-in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, so contact history (both automated, such as emails sent and links clicked – and manual, phone calls, meetings, etc) can be logged and viewed just by clicking the plus icon beside each contact on your list.

If you’re using Outlook, Entourage, Mac Mail, or some other home-based system, you’re not going to get the results you need as an email marketer. These home email programs are a waste of time and resources for a business. You need to track whose opening, reading, and clicking through your email.

This really defines the power of email marketing and it’s the only way to truly integrate email into your professional marketing campaigns, to learn what works and what doesn’t. It’s also fun, to watch in near real time who reads your email and which links attract their attention.

Today there are numerous online stock-photo houses with constant open calls for submissions, mostly from amateur photographers, with free or inexpensive royalty-free photos. Now creative commons licensing and photo sharing sites are shaping the new direction of the industry. Facebook’s stats page claims 700 million photos are uploaded monthly. Yahoo’s photo-hosting giant, flickr, along with Photobucket, account for millions of new photos each day.

Of course, great quantities of family snapshots don’t equate to usable photos for commercial work. The new challenges are how to navigate and mine these vast archives for stellar, licenseable work. Armed with a little patience, a few tricks, practice and experience, you shouldn’t have to sacrifice too much in the way of quality artwork. Of course, this depends on your needs, search terms, and standards.

Armed with a little know-how, you don’t have to sacrifice much in the way of quality for free or extremely inexpensive artwork. Here’s a video tutorial with some tips on how to navigate and mine great artwork and photography in flickr. Many of the same concepts can be applied to any of the sites.

How to mine flickr and stock-photo houses for improved artwork

Corbis and Getty are still the 800lb gorillas in the industry. They own many of the inexpensive stock photo houses and have various deals with flickr and others. They still hold rights on much of the world’s adored and famous snapshots—Einstein sticking out his tongue, for instance. Corbis owns it, along with the rights to about 100 million more superb photos plugged into an easy-to-search, intelligent database.

If you have the budget to purchase exclusive rights-managed images, you’ll discover amazing work on both Corbis and Getty ranging from a few hundred bucks to upwards of $10,000. If you’ve ever flipped the bill for a professional photo shoot, these prices might seem reasonable. For the rest of us trying to illustrate ads and marketing materials, these new stock options are extraordinary.

Basic Photo Licensing Terms and Where to Find Them Online
Whatever source you use online for your artwork, be sure to double-check the licensing agreement. This is one reason Google Images is a bad choice for commercial work. The licensing information is nonexistent or challenging to locate. Also, their keyword search capabilities’ liberal interpretations retrieve all sorts of junk. When you’re using sites like Wikimedia or flickr, it’s often easy to navigate away from the free creative commons area. Be sure to check each photo’s license agreement carefully, especially for your commercial usage.

• Rights Managed. These account for your pricy online options from professional photographers, often equating to better selections. Prices usually start around fifty bucks for the least amount of rights. Actual prices are set or negotiated based on usage. In both Corbis and Getty, you can select a photo and then see pricing by ticking off various options: print versus online, regional versus global, how long you will use the artwork, and so forth.

• Royalty Free. Many stock photo houses also have or specialize in royalty free images, providing a wondrous array of inexpensive options. Prices are set based on the size of the download, often starting at $1 for a small jpeg perfect for online use. Basically, you may use the artwork however you’d like for illustrative purposes—except for resale on merchandise—for a limited time, like 1 month or 3 months. You might choose which to use based on your search criteria. The collections vary and have focuses. The sites also have different models for joining and paying in attempt to differentiate themselves.
stock.xchng
Fotolia
ShutterStock
Dreamstime
iStockPhoto

• Public Domain. Amazing free artwork to use anyway you want. In the U.S., public domain applies on materials published or produced at least 85 years ago. Outside the U.S., the laws differ. If your search terms bring up classic artwork, architecture, historic figures, life-back-when ideas, old book covers or children’s illustrations from yore, check out these sites that collect public domain work. You’ll find a goldmine of options.
Wikimedia Commons
flickr commons
Burningwell

• Creative Commons. With public sharing sites comes creative commons licensing. Many of the professional photographers contributing to Flickr graciously share some of the work under creative commons. You can use these photos for free with certain stipulations. In all cases, one stipulation is attribution—so you must show the artist’s byline with the photo. There are six versions of the license. In Attribution-NoDerivs, you cannot Photoshop or manipulate the artwork in any way. In Attribution-NonCommercial License, you cannot use the work for commercial purposes. Check out Flickr’s creative commons page http://flickr.com/creativecommons/ for easy to follow explanations of rights and usage.

How to find the best work and shorten your search time
Hunting for photos to match an ad or article can be exhausting. Searching for the right shot is the bane of designers for ad agencies, the publishing industry, marketing and the blogosphere. It can take a roomful of designers an entire day or more scouring online to find the perfect photo. But it doesn’t have to.

To really improve your odds, you need to invest some time initially on these sites as an active member, bookmarking artists and artwork that you like and might use in the future. All these free and affordable sites have sharing and online community features. Here are a few quick tips to keep in mind:

• Try searching based on groups and tags in community sharing sites to find the best shots quickly, like this tag  in flickr for shots with at least 10 people marked in their favorites. Take a look at the video tutorial to learn more.
• Join the site to access all of its searching, sharing, and bookmarking features.
• Use community features. Sometimes other people have done the searching already. Sites often have shared light boxes, for “the 100 best island photos” for example.
• Always use the advance search functions. Use broad search topics at first, then search within results.
• Bookmark photos for safekeeping and develop a library of photos for future use.
• On the community sites, develop relationships with photographers you like. Subscribe to their RSS feed and receive new updates on their photo streams.
• Often you just need to change your search term. Try searching rights managed work for picture ideas. Look under the tags for the photos for additional search terms. Often something unexpected and spectacular happens that can change the art direction of a piece.
• Be patient and try another approach with a different search term.

I’d love to hear your tips and tricks for scouring the Web to find affordable, stellar artwork. Please share your thoughts on stock photography. Are you struggling to find great material that’s affordable? If so, I hope this post helps.

We’ve added customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities that can have a tremendous impact for sales, service, segmentation, and other marketing plans. Now beside each contact in your email list, you can manually or automatically include CRM information from any correspondence, such as phone calls, emails, and meetings.

Just by expanding the information beneath a contact’s name, you can easily scan a complete history of correspondence with that contact. You can see all the email campaigns, autoresponders, and trigger emails sent to the contact (these events are logged automatically every time you send a campaign), along with metrics, such as opens and click-throughs for that individual contact.

For many large businesses, CRM systems are essential, but often require an extraordinary investment; and still many of these systems don’t fully integrate all the elements and metrics of email campaigns for eCommerce sites and other online businesses. With Interspire Email Marketer 5.5, you have the basic CRM tools needed to track and enhance the individual customer experience.

Keep in mind, if you have Interspire Email Marketer version 5.0 or above with a valid support contract, version 5.5 is a free upgrade that adds tremendous value. More video tutorials on 5.5’s new features are coming shortly. If there are elements you’d like to see covered, please drop us a comment.

After 6 months of development and testing I’m pleased to announce the immediate release of Interspire Email Marketer 5.5. The new release includes a number of advanced features (such as split testing, triggers and automatic event logging) and was designed to give you the tools you need to automate more of your email marketing efforts.

What’s New in Interspire Email Marketer 5.5?

This is a major upgrade which includes many advanced marketing features, all designed to make you more money while reducing the workload associated with becoming a better email marketer. New features include:

• Split testing – Choose 2 or more emails to send to a sample of your list. The winning email (based on open rate or click rate, your choice) is sent to the rest of your list automatically after a predetermined period of time.

• Triggers – Create recurring birthday emails, move/remove contacts to/from multiple lists based on if they’ve opened your email or clicked on a specific link and lots more.
• Event logging – Manually log events such as phone calls and meetings. Automatic event logging creates an event for a contact when they receive an email/autoresponder, open an email or click a link so you or your team have full visibility into their actions at all times, making you a more informed salesperson.
• Recent activity log – Your recently accessed items (contacts, lists, campaigns, etc) are always available across the top of the screen making it easier to get back to where you left off.
• Contact list grouping – Use folders and drag-and-drop to sort and organize your contact lists into manageable groups. Ideal for email marketers with dozens or hundreds of lists.
• 20 new built-in email templates – There are new designs and also designs that match the look and feel of your Interspire Shopping Cart-powered online store. Now your store and email campaigns can share the same consistent branding.

How Can I Upgrade?

Interspire Email Marketer 5.5 is free for customers running 5.0 or later with a valid support contract. You can see step-by-step instructions on how to upgrade here.

If you’re still running SendStudio then you can upgrade as well. We’re offering all SendStudio customers a 50% discount. See the upgrade pricing page for more information.

Where Can I Learn More?

The What’s New video is a great place to start – you can see new features being demonstrated in a real life scenario. The features and screenshots pages also contain details on new features as well. Finally, the online demo is a great way to experience the new features first hand.

How Can I Purchase as a New Customer?

To buy online and download Interspire Email Marketer 5.5 immediately, please see the pricing page.

What If I Have Any Questions?

Our sales team are always happy to answer any questions you might have. Please see our contact page for email and phone numbers for our US, UK and Australian offices. You can also leave a comment below and either myself or another team member will be happy to assist you.

Of course as your user eduction manager, I’m here to extol the many virtues of the new version. With Interspire Email Marketer 5.5, my job is easy – there simply is not a comparable email software program on the market providing this array of features without spending upwards of 5 figures…

The new features of 5.5 are awesome, powerful and easy to use. I’ll be here to share updates and tutorials throughout the week. Today I wanted to share this tutorial on trigger emails as a followup to our post on triggers from about two weeks ago. We explained triggers, but used screen shots to showcase the possibilites in the new software. Now you can see 5.5 in action.

If you follow Interspire cofounder Mitchell Harper on Twitter, you already knew we entered soft launch mode this week. Here in this video tutorial, Mitchell shares how easy it is to create trigger emails in Interspire Email Marketer 5.5.

Triggers often encourage a better response rate than regular email campaigns. They can create a true sense of
connection and urgency through highly personalized, segmented emails, sent automatically based on a special event—birthdays, holidays, news events, or buying history. Also,
triggers can be used to add people to new, segmented lists based on
their actions, perhaps clicking a link in your email. For more information on triggers, see this previous post.

Triggers are just one of the new features available in Interspire Email Marketer 5.5. This version is free all customers running 5.0 or above with a valid support contract. We’ll cover more of 5.5′s new features throughout the week, once the official launch post goes up on the blog in just hours from now.

Creating promotional banners in your Interspire Shopping Cart store is simple. The video above will show you how it’s done. You create promotional banners for your store using the control
panel of Interspire Shopping Cart. Simply go to the “promotions” tab and choose “view banners” in the drop down menu. To create a new
banner, click the “create a new banner” button and follow the simple steps.

Once completed, you can have the banner displayed
on the home page, a specific category, for a specific brand, and
in the search results. Choose the option that best suits your promotional needs. You also can choose whether your banner will appear on the top or bottom of the pages.

This is just one simple method for encouraging visitors to take action. Following the tutorial, it should only take a few minutes to set up. Test different messages on various pages and see if it encourages a rise in sales. Sometimes the simplest solutions are the most effective. And please drop a comment to tell us how it’s working out.

Our preoccupation with staying “hyper-connected” (as Twitter named it) and the technology that it fosters are helping blur the lines of our personal and professional lives. While some non-tweeting voices of an older generation have argued that such online technologies interfere with “true” connection, Twitter fans prove these judgments are an anachronism. We are in fact more communicative and tighter than ever, globally linked in dozens of online communities, spreading Internet meme faster than sociologists can record.

Twitter is among the fastest growing social networks. About 3 million times each day, the 140-character limit “tweet” attracts some percentage of Twitter’s 200,000 weekly users. According to TechCrunch, Twitter has 1 million total users. And Popacular.com runs a GigaTweet counter, claiming over a billion tweets and counting since Twitter launched in 2006.

The marketing masthead opportunities on Twitter are obvious. You can share headlines and updates about your products and services to your followers; devotees who want to be plugged into your up-to-the-moment tweets through pretty much whatever Web or mobile technology suits them. But Twitter also offers an accepted medium for professionals to be more personable, more vulnerable, exposing something genuine about their workaday lives and their humanity in juicy bite-sized tidbits.

I might tweet at work, then go home and tweet under the same login. “In Heathrow, waiting. Flight delay. Burrito juice dripping down arm.” Why does one care? Tweets in this case can have a compound effect, exposing aspects of daily life that become extraordinary for the very fact that the information is prosaic. “Finally boarding. Seat 24d in back. Headed home to AU. Miss my dog, Flounder.” Followers register a sense of connection by comparison—and here’s exactly what I’m doing now. You can get what Twitter cofounder Evan Williams calls “ambient awareness.” For me, it’s the same feeling as when I move from email to instant messaging. I feel as though I’m behind the scenes, with you while you’re typing.

Social media technology keeps blurring and redefining communication lines: how, when and why we connect, social contracts for proper etiquette, the speed and quantity of responses. With each innovation comes a new set of expectations for continuous sharing of news, thoughts, ideas and often banal, daily information that keeps listeners apprised and up to the second. Once adopted by enough people in enough social situations, businesses follow suit, adapting their plans to tryout a new tool and marketing channel. So it was with IM, blogging, YouTube… and now Twitter. It’s free, simple, cool, fun, informative, useful and for many, an extraordinary way to never unplug. And it’s addictive—like intravenous networking drugs for a growing percentage of bloggers.

Twitter might not stay free for marketers for long. Mr. Williams replied to Fast Company’s question earlier this year: “When and how will Twitter start making money?”

“If people are using Twitter for commercial purposes—and a lot of people already are—then we won’t feel bad about charging those people. It will take some experimenting to figure out exactly what the model is. Fundamentally, we’re working on building the value right now. We think the value is in the network and the value is in ease of communication. We can tap into that value and extract revenue in many different ways.“

Even if you’re not gung-ho about micro-blogging throughout your day, sharing updates from your blog, PR department, product team or services offers an additional, free option for loyal fans and customers to receive information and stay in touch. You can find us at twitter.com/interspire. In this case, micro-blogging blog posts, there’s an acceptable Twitter community format: simply the title of the blog post followed by a link to the full blog post. To ensure we stay inside the 140-character limit, we use tinyurl.com to convert long URL paths to aptly named tiny ones. You can also use TweetBurner to shorten the URL and cut & paste it into your tweet.

This is one of the numerous Twitter “mashups”—that is, Twitter mashed together with other applications. Some of these make strides toward superior usability for marketers and other professionals on Twitter. Here are a few of the twenty or so out there, with many more percolating.

TwitBlogs for macro blogging
TwitPic for photo sharing over Twitter
SplitTweet if you have multiple Twitter accounts in your company
TweetDeck for managing and following tweets to manage your tweets in bite sized chunks
TweetStats to track your analytics and stats
Mail2Twitter to Tweet from any email enabled mobile device
TwitterCounter is a widget you can add to your macro blog to show how followers you have
TwitBin is one of eight or so Firefox plugins for Twitter. This one allows you to send and receive tweets.
TwitterCal lets you connect your Twitter account to your Google Calendar

There’s no lack of information pointing the way to Twitter as an outstanding marketing channel. It’s a great method for staying additionally connected. If you blog regularly or offer RSS feeds, if your active in other online social networks like FaceBook or MySpace, there’s no reason not to add Twitter as another point of connection. Simply creating an account may not pave the road to 10,000 followers overnight, but with the cost at zero and the time needed so minuscule, it’s worth a try. You might just discover that tweeting is addictive.

For more news and stats on Twitter, check out this blog: twitterfacts.blogspot.com. For business background, CrunchBase has a decent Twitter company profile.

Okay, I’m off to tweet about it.

Gary in the UK asks: “Typically our open rate for various email campaigns is between 5% and 8%, which seems very low. We have low spam scores and interesting offers even when viewed without images. We also include the person’s first name in both the header and the email. Is such a low open rate typical? How can we improve open rates?”

Thanks for your query, Gary. You’ll have to define a good open rate for your industry and audience, but I think most email marketing professionals would agree that 5 to 8 percent is extremely low. The only circumstances that I’d expect numbers like this is with a giant list of busy professionals who received your email on Saturday morning as the third one you sent out this week.

Calculating and comparing open rates leads to much debate among email marketers. One issue is that the metric is just inaccurate due to a number of factors: text-only emails don’t register as opens; downloaded POP account emails read offline don’t register as opens; and of course, open doesn’t mean that your offer was examined and considered.

How open rates are calculated can also lead to confusion when applying industry standards. With Interspire Email Marketer, for instance, you can toggle between opens and unique opens. Without this feature, the open rate in some analytics may be affected; a person may reopen the same email multiple times. 

Rather than spending too much time comparing your open rate to industry standards, I recommend viewing it in conjunction with your click-throughs and conversions. A low open rate is fine if it’s resulting in higher sales.

Even as an imperfect metric, I think the open rate is valuable. Certainly, if you’re selling sponsorships or ads in your email campaigns, your advertisers will be interested in your open rates. I like it as a general barometer of success for my own email campaigns. I also enjoy watching the opens climb and seeing who is opening my emails. Here are seven considerations for improving your email open rates, with some surefire methods for success.

Seven Ways to Improve Open Rates and Weigh Metric Expectations

Segment your list. A first name in the header is great, but there’s no substitution for a specialized offer based on the audience’s specific interests. If you’ve been collecting enough information on your audience, be sure to use this for segmentation. It’s also interesting to note that statistically, as an email list grows by the thousands, the open rate diminishes. If you have a large list with many thousands of emails, create different offers through segmentation and you’ll watch your open rates increase.

Set metric expectations for your audience. Your audience will obviously affect your open rates so some research is required to determine averages and expectations for your circumstances. For instance, if you’re sending an email marketing campaign to C-level executives in corporations, the open rates are bound to be pretty low. These are busy professionals. Of those who opened emails in this case, I’d expect the conversion rate to be high because they are decision makers.

Send emails midweek. Most email marketers report that Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or even Thursdays offer the best open rates. The only way to know which day and time works best is to test campaigns on your list.

Slow your frequency to increase open rates. How often did you send an offer to this list? Frequency is one of the most important considerations for email marketing. During holiday campaigns in November and December, for instance, as your email frequency increases—as you hit the same list with offers—open rates will drop as unsubscribes rise. These metrics are connected and always should be considered together.

Engage readers with a relevant offer. Relevancy, along with frequency and audience, is one of the cardinal rules of email marketing. Your offer must be relevant to your audience. In terms of open rates, relevancy is connected to your subject and from lines. Your email header is obviously a crucial, determining factor for your open rate. Check out this previous post on Five Steps to Improve Your Email Subject Lines. You also can improve relevancy by segmenting your list. Try including previous purchase history, special offers, discounts, and the like, in your subject line.

Consider the season and economy. With a combination of online hunting for statistics in your industry and tracking results for your email campaigns over a year or more, you will have a better gauge to determine if your open rate is reasonable. For instance,  in the current economy, eMarketer.com recently shared statistics showing open rates down across all industries.

Test your offers. In my experience, the best way to increase the open rate is to test the email offer. Interspire Email Marketer makes this easy. You can send out multiple versions of the same email with different subject lines to samplings of your list. You can then quickly determine which offer has the best open rate.

Keep in mind, as a metric, open rates only tell part of the story. You’ll need to judge your open rates in connection with all the other metrics you’re collecting: the conversion rate being the most important if you’re looking for immediate sales.

I hope this answer was helpful. If you have some additional ideas for Gary to improve open rates, please leave a comment. And share your questions for future topics. We’ll pick some of the best questions to explore.

Depending on the topic, your question will be answered by me, by Mitchell Harper (Interspire cofounder) or by a member from our product development and marketing teams. I encourage you to challenge us with your technical and marketing questions, especially connected to Interspire products and ecommerce/email marketing.

Offering additional impetus for the timeliness of the topic: this week marks the five-year anniversary of the president making the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act official. It boasted overwhelming approval by the U.S. congress after six years of debate, creating the first federal law regulating spam. Many U.S. states already had anti-spam laws. In some cases the state laws were more stringent, though overruled by the federal version.

The CAN SPAM law went into effect January 1, 2004. Here’s a quick rundown of the law’s main provisions to keep in mind while sending out your email marketing campaigns. I’m not a lawyer, obviously, but following these recommendations should keep you clear of the 100 known SPAM operators list.

• Header information must be correct and legitimate. Your email’s “from” and “to” lines must be accurate, including the originating domain name, and identify the person who initiated the email.
• The subject line cannot mislead your email recipients about the content within the email.
• Your email recipients must have an opt-out method and it must be clear, easy to follow, and it must work to end any commercial messages.
• The opt-out option must be available to recipients for at least 30 days after they receive your commercial email.
• Opt-out requests must be handled within 10 business days.
• It’s illegal for you to sell or share opt-out email addresses.
• If your list is not double-opt in, your email must be identified as an advertisement and include a valid bricks-and-mortar postal address.
• Don’t harvest emails and don’t use automated means to create email addresses.
• If you share an email address with a third party, you must give the recipient “clear and conspicuous notice at the time the consent was communicated”.

The law also distinguished commercial emails from transactional emails, if the purpose of the email is to “facilitate, complete, or confirm”. Earlier this year, in May, the Federal Trade Commission updated the law. Here are their four new provisions, cut and pasted directly from the FTC Web site:

1. an e-mail recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her e-mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any steps other than sending a reply e-mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page to opt out of receiving future e-mail from a sender;
2. the definition of “sender” was modified to make it easier to determine which of multiple parties advertising in a single e-mail message is responsible for complying with the Act’s opt-out requirements;
3. a “sender” of commercial e-mail can include an accurately-registered post office box or private mailbox established under United States Postal Service regulations to satisfy the Act’s requirement that a commercial e-mail display a “valid physical postal address”; and
4. a definition of the term “person” was added to clarify that CAN-SPAM’s obligations are not limited to natural persons.

Keep in mind, CAN SPAM law is intended for the U.S., so email in other countries would be governed differently. The European Union, for instance, has a set of standards, but the actual laws are different throughout Europe.

At the time when Bush signed the original CAN SPAM law, in December 2003, many critics said it would do little or nothing to lessen the amount of spam. The joke by pundits at the time was that CAN was a verb allowing permission. It appears the critics were correct. But proponents of the federal law still say it helps send a powerful warning message to spammers through a nationwide legal standard.

If you’re just starting out with email campaigns, adhering to legal standards might seem overwhelming. In this case there’s no substitute for chatting with your legal team. But for many simple email campaigns, just using the features of software like Interspire Email Marketer can help ensure you’re covered for opt-out mechanisms and ensuring your header information is correct.

Well, I hope this post acts as a nice reminder for everyone. Now it’s back to my inbox for some continued spam cleanup.

Less Is More
If there’s an editorial calendar for email marketers, this time of year
is surely dedicated to retailers entering the Silly Season. Each year
the questions are similar: When should I begin the holiday emails? How
often should they go out? How many emails are too many emails for my
list? How can I better engage readers in the inbox?

Inline with the holiday season and the general sense of abundance
for lucky, healthy, wealthy shoppers, email marketers tend to succumb
to the “more is better” philosophy. But I’m here to remind: too much of
a good thing is most certainly not a good thing. Not when it comes to
your email marketing efforts.

So here are three quick tips that can help put a cap on your email
marketing recipes while not diminishing your appetite for increased
click through and conversion rates.

• Send less. More email doesn’t equate to more sales. Don’t hit your list with too many offers, especially for loyal customers. Be cautionary with the number of emails you
send to each subscriber. Be sure each email counts. If you want to do
more of something, increase the connection of a cohesive marketing
campaign that runs throughout the season. Provide a special incentive
to look forward to the next email.

• Offer less. This might be slightly controversial, but
direct marketers know the regular phenomenon that a modest offer often
encourages more responses. Provide small incentives like free shipping, gift cards,
coupons, small giveaways, online to offline layaways. If you want to do
more of something, increase the perceived value of your offers without
increasing your costs. Be sure the offer directly ties into relevancy
with your list. You may also consider increasing your redemption
campaigns for your gift cards after the holidays.

• Say less. Keep your offer focused. If your selling a
product, sure a picture of the product has been proven to increase
conversion rates. But that doesn’t mean showing every product will
work. Keep your email simple. If you want to do more of something,
increase the hook you use to engage your readers and increase brand
awareness with beautiful holiday designs.

I’d love to hear your comments on the topic of holiday email campaigns. I saw one report online
recently that suggested October 28th last year was the day, on average,
that most retailers began their email marketing onslaught for the
holidays. This seems like a reasonable benchmark. When did you begin your
holiday email campaigns? Are you doing everything you can, more or less?

The marketing gurus are legion who use over saturation as a gateway to methodologies and techniques that can help you attract eyes, to engage viewers, to standout in the crowd. But sometimes to be noticeable all that’s needed are new tactics and improved creative execution. Sometimes, I believe, this journey can begin with a tagline.

Companies can spend millions to find the new catch phrase that will be attractive, memorable, sales effective, and raise brand awareness. But it seems many decision makers just want a tagline as a matter of course. Unfortunately for audiences, the competitive bar is not raised that high for most industries, evidenced by the many horrendous company taglines. Certainly, creative leadership is not insurmountable with a decent team that’s given the time to allow great work to percolate.

The tagline can be interesting as a sneak peek into a company’s style, their corporate culture, their desperation, their knowledge of consumers, and level of ease with transparency. The tagline represents their product, service, or company.

Developing a stellar tagline is an art form apparently not easily mastered. Today I’m perusing a few magazines from our lounge: I have a copy of The Atlantic and Esquire—marketing vehicles of choice to connect with audiences everywhere. Let’s take a look at a few taglines.

Topping my list of bad ideas is from a car company: “Advance.” That’s it. “Advance.” It’s all caps on the page with a period, because that’s important. Doesn’t this punctuation stop me from advancement? If you don’t know which automobile giant this is selling, then perhaps I’ve proved my point.

Oh, the masters of the single word tagline. You’re so cool with the quick call to action, but there is zero connection to anything deeply meaningful or interesting or memorable. It lacks a unique position—even a lifestyle connection, which is commonly used to sell the short punchy tagline. This is a word not a tagline and it could be used with 10,000 products. I can almost hear the board of directors approving this line, chatting over the blackboards from their ad partner.

Interestingly, this was the one ad that appeared in both magazines. They hit me twice. And still, I had to find the page again to remind myself which car company used this tagline. No wonder ad frequency must be so high to encourage sales. Well, let’s move on, or as they say: advance…

Equally horrible to me is one pharmaceutical company’s tagline: “working for a healthier world”. The problem here is that, quite frankly, we just don’t believe you Mr. Pharmaceutical Giant. The fact that you have to put this PR message in your tagline is proof enough that I’m right. Rather than this bit of text helping to legitimize the company, I feel more alienated. This tagline reads like propaganda. May I suggest: “working for a healthier profit.” Let’s not forget the trademark symbol. This is a must for the legal team, because companies everywhere will surely jump to steal this mediocre bit of copy. Well, at least there are the words healthy and world, which say something about this company’s offerings.

Other taglines I found riffling the pages of these two magazines are just plain boring. Here’s one example from an American car manufacturer: “Inspiration Comes Standard”? Does it? It doesn’t come automatically? Oh, I get it. Like when you buy a car and some things are part of the standard package. Now that’s clever. I’m inspired. No wonder U.S. auto sales are doing so well with great taglines like this one.

Another lackluster example comes from a gas company: “Energy to serve your world”. That’s about as uninteresting and utilitarian as I can imagine and smacks to me of a line that was successful in testing for the simple fact that it didn’t offend anyone. I’ve seen this happen often, when the marketing department must kowtow to the PR, Strategic Communications, HR, or legal departments. The effect: a line of copy that will neither impress nor offend, so it seems okay.

On the next page in my magazine is this forgettable tagline from an airline manufacturer: “We never forget who we’re working for”? But I’ve already forgotten what you said. Don’t you guys make planes? Of course, the art direction of the ad and the picture speak nothing about this tagline, so there’s a problematic disconnect here.

All in all, I’m tired of the one-liners, the slick talk, and the wannabe cool catchy phrases. I believe there are many people who would agree. “Just do it” has been done. Why try to do it again? Mammoth budgets and creative directors from large agencies didn’t seem to help many companies develop memorable taglines. Without these resources on hand, may I suggest we keep the tagline simple and offer a direct explanation of your product or service or style. To me you’ll be cooler still for your retro nod from the days of long-form copywriting written by artists who understood how to draw in readers, then trusted that people would actually read and enjoy the ad.

Sometimes taglines, as in headlines, can just effectively and succinctly relay the unique selling propositions. Here are three taglines I liked from the same magazines. Calvin Klein Eternity: “The timeless fragrance for men”. Don Julio Tequila: “Taste the Mexico you don’t know”. Haggar: “Gentlemen’s Supply Company”. In all three instances, I’m told what, who, where, why. While this might lack the memorable, lifestyle, brand power of “Just do it,” these taglines are hard workers and express enough in the single line to allow the ad’s creative execution to have more leeway.

All in all, I’m perusing these magazine ads and I’m underwhelmed and I’m reminded of a passage from Ogilvy on Advertising. Ogilvy argues: “Trademarks are an anachronism… In the olden days, before people could read, manufacturers used trademarks…Many companies, unaware that consumers are no longer illiterate, still use graphic symbols to identify their brands… and proclaim ‘this is only an advertisement.’ Readership of the advertisement is reduced.”

Perhaps to help rectify this situation, we added the tagline rather than removing the logo. But a bad or useless tagline just adds to the noise and clutter. It’s a disservice to these companies and to readers. My reaction as writer and marketing professional is sighing disgust; as reader I’m mildly annoyed while trying to find the next article.

I’ve asked Mitch (cofounder of Interspire) to join me in sharing some of his favorite reads too. If you have marketing books you’d recommend, new or classic, feel free to leave a comment below.

So here they are, in no particular order:

Marketing Warfare by Al Ries and Jack Trout (recommended by Mitchell Harper, cofounder of Interspire)

An oldie but a goodie. The premise of this book is to go after your competitors as if you’re conducting a military campaign. It talks about going after the market leader in a particular space and using all of your resources to do it. This book provides an interesting twist on more modern day marketing tactics and is a fascinating read, complete with examples of companies who’ve successfully implemented the tactics outlined in the book.

The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly by David Meerman Scott (recommended by Mitchell Harper, cofounder of Interspire)

This book focuses on how a company can use social media marketing (such as blogs, podcasting and other viral marketing methods) to increase brand awareness and traffic to their website. Although basic in some areas, it’s a good read if you’re just starting out online or haven’t yet looked into social media marketing as part of your marketing mix.

Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers by Seth Godin (recommended by me)

This is the 1999 new classic that propelled Godin from his VP office at Yahoo! to rock-star marketer status. His message will surely remain timely for years to come: People are bombarded by too many messages. If you want to make a real connection, you need to get permission through an exchange known to many through direct marketing tactics—giveaways, discounts, contests, surveys. He offers great examples from the likes of American Express, Amazon, American Airlines, and more. The book is informative and fun to read. Godin’s style is what you want in a your hired marketing gun: the right mix of brash confidence and shrewd advice.

Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin (recommended by Mitchell Harper, cofounder of Interspire)

We have two by Godin in our little list. This book talks about why making your business different by being remarkable in one or more areas is so important – because most of your competitors wont do it. By being remarkable you get a competitive advantage, more referrals and more repeat buyers.

iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business by Jeffrey S. Young and Willian L. Simon (recommended by Mitchell Harper, cofounder of Interspire)

This book talks about the rise and fall of Steve Jobs at the helm of Apple, then NeXT, then Pixar and back to Apple again. It details his almost obsessive fascination with making technology beautiful and usable and after reading this it’s not hard to see why the iPhone is now the best selling mobile phone in the world and why the Mac is gobbling up a larger share of the desktop computer market every year.

The Culture Code by Clotaire Rapaille (recommended by me)

Marketing consultant and psychoanalyst Rapaille is on retainer with a good percentage of the Fortune 50. He’s helped launch and redefine some of the best-known brands in the world through his own methodology for truly understanding what drives an audience to purchase or use a product based on their cultural understanding. In this book he shares his methodology and experience with phenomenal marketing stories. I was hooked on page one.

The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier (recommended by me)

For a number of years I’ve shared this book with colleagues and clients. If policing your brand is part of your working routine, I highly recommend taking a peek at this one. Neumeier understands brand; but even more relevant, he understands how to explain the principles to bridge the gap of strategic execution and creative, tactical development. He offers quick, simple, witty, powerful messages that drive home the nuances of brand development far beyond just logo and tagline.

The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management by Peter F. Drucker (recommended by me)

The subtitle says it all. I believe this is one of the best survey books on business management available. Certainly Drucker was one of the best business management minds in the 20th century. If you’re a fan of his work, you’ll
love this book. It was published as a Collins Business Essentials and just came out in paperback this year. It starts with articles from 60 years ago and spans much of the last 50 years, but so many of the classic business theories are just as powerful and true today, especially when Drucker is the one sharing the ideas with his intellect and laser insights.

Of course now we have more than 100 TV channels, satellite radio, the Internet… In his Annals of Communication column for The New Yorker, Ken Auletta reports: “Today, it would take a hundred and twenty-five CBS, NBC, or ABC ads to reach the percentage of viewers that three network ads once reached.”

But with the Web, especially Google and Yahoo, you can spend as little as $5 and get instant access to millions of people searching the Web right now for your products and services. That’s amazing! And it has been proven effective for countless businesses creating eCommerce heavyweights who maintain a leadership position in their marketplace.

Two-click advertising for your Interspire Shopping Cart store

If you own Interspire Shopping Cart, you can easily connect with Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google AdWords to create ads automatically. Here’s a video tutorial to show you how this works with Yahoo! Search Marketing.

This feature can generate and export text ads for any product in your store. It’s an addon for $195. I usually let our sales team do the promotions, but I think this a great value. It’s almost mandatory for anyone with numerous products, high sales volumes and decent online ad budgets connected to Y!SM or AdWords. Once you see how easy it is to use and the time you’ll save managing and creating ads, the feature quickly pays for itself.

Yahoo! Search Marketing vs. Google AdWords

Most people I talk to will swear by Google as their PPC ad network of choice because Google boasts something in the neighborhood of 80 percent of the world’s search engine traffic. That’s staggering! But Yahoo! (according to Yahoo! and Alexa ranking) is the most visited Web site in the world, with 47 million people a day and 2.4 billion searches a month. That’s not shabby and in some cases, depending on your products and services, Yahoo can be the better solution.

Many folks report more traffic, faster, using Google AdWords. However you’ll have to test both for your keywords, products and services to determine which has the better audience for your needs. Of course, faster traffic doesn’t always equate to a higher conversion rate. I recommend that you try both. It doesn’t cost much to test the waters.

Other than traffic and sales stats, there are numerous similarities and small but significant differences in Google and Yahoo that require some homework. On the plus side, they both provide the services e-marketers need like pay per click traffic, support for A/B split testing, conversion tracking, separate display and destination URLs, click fraud protection, and more.

If you’re not familiar with either Y!SM or AdWords, and you have an online store, I suggest you increase your PPC (that’s pay per click) ad IQ quickly. Both sites do a good job initiating new folks to their systems. PPC ads are worth it! Drop a comment to let us know your experiences with Y!SM, AdWords, and the Interspire Shopping Cart addon.

Among the array of new features that are going to excite and delight many of you—like contact assignment rules, list grouping or manual (phone call, meeting, etc) and automatic (received an email/autoresponder/trigger) event logging—you’ll also discover powerful, new trigger email features.

If you’re not familiar with trigger emails, they are aptly named. Trigger emails help you send highly personalized, segmented emails automatically to a recipient based on a specialized event. Common triggers are birthdays, holidays, news events, or buying history. Also, triggers can be used to add people to new, segmented lists based on their actions, perhaps clicking a link in your email or by simply opening the email.

Interspire Email Marketer 5.5 will make this job easy, with many additional powerful tools that help automate your sales efforts using triggers. Let’s take a look at some screenshots.

In the screenshot below we can see how easy it is to set up a trigger email based on a
birthday. Why not send a discount coupon with a special Happy Birthday
note? You may also choose to change the “on” to “before” or “after” and
specify a number of hours or days before or after the birthday to send
the email.

We can also use triggers to create an action within the software, such as adding contacts to additional mailing lists. In the screenshot below we can see how to setup a trigger that will send a contact an email (in this case our “December Newsletter” campaign) and add them to a new mailing list as soon as they open our email campaign.

In the final screenshot below we see how we can setup a trigger that will add a lead to two new contact lists and remove them from the list they’re currently on. In this case, it happens based on the recipient clicking a link inside an email campaign.

It’s pretty easy to see how effective mining triggers can be for your email marketing efforts. Triggers are a phenomenally easy way to automate basic tasks and generate new leads for your sales people. For example, if a recipient clicks a link in your email about a new product, you could set up a trigger to add that person to a new list called “hot leads” for your sales team.

Triggers are usually more specialized than your regular email campaigns and that’s what makes them so powerful. They can create a real sense of connection and urgency for your recipient to open, read and respond.

To learn more about what’s in store when Interspire Email Marketer 5.5 is released shortly, check out our previous post on split testing. After the release we’ll talk more about new features and post video tutorials.

So maybe you’ve tried some email marketing tactics that didn’t work.
Or maybe you’re doing a little preventative research before you launch
a campaign. Today’s topic will help you sidestep the biggie, beginner’s
blunders. As you’ll see, there’s plenty of overlap in these mistakes.
They work together for success, but can also combine to equal certain
doom for your campaign.

1. Wrong list. The right audience is paramount. It seems
quite obvious, but also presupposes knowledge of your target reader. If
you have slowly developed your own list through a double opt in
subscription on your Web site, congratulations. You should have this
list issue pretty well dialed. It’s when you start renting lists that
this becomes a major issue. You can use magazines’ list rentals and the
information they provide on their audience as your barometer for all
list procurement. Based on direct mail metrics, the list is said to
account for 40% of your success rate. That’s pretty significant. If
you’re out list shopping, be cautious, metrics driven, demand more
information, and test the waters.

2. Irrelevant content. Once you’re pretty sure you have the
right audience, it makes sense that you need the right content.
Relevancy takes into account content, creative, audience, timing. This
doesn’t require higher calculus to figure out, but does support of lot
of marketing strategy development. It is said to account for another
40% of your success rate. Readers will only respond to information that
is important to them and engaging enough to consider. Of course, this
is always easier said than it is to actually accomplish.

3. Poor creative execution. Even with the correct list and
great content, your message will be lost without reasonably
professional creative development. This includes “from” and subject
lines, graphic treatments, artwork, photos, logos, colors, fonts,
formatting, as well as spelling, grammar, and the amount of
information. Traditionally, creative is said to account for the last
part of the 40-40-20 percent rule of your success rate, though I tend
to believe it’s far more important, intricate and subtle. With all the
sales drumming and information bombardment nowadays, how are you going
to attract your audience? Is your email engaging? Is the offer and its
layout intriguing? Do you offer a reason to learn more?

4. No call to action nor landing page. Now that I’ve opened
your email and I’m reading it because the artwork and offer are quite
interesting, you need to give me a reason to click, a purpose to learn
more, a sense of urgency to act, a hook to take the plunge. Any
combination of: “call today,” “act now,” “learn more,” “sale ends
Friday,” will usually do the trick, depending on your sales style and
needs. Once I do click on the link, I want the landing page on your Web
site to be just as relevant. It should continue with stellar content
and creative to bring me closer to browsing, shopping, finalizing the
sale, or sharing information.

5. Ill timed frequency and delivery. Readers can only
tolerate receiving so many marketing emails from you each month. It’s necessary to know
where you must draw the line before you cross it. Readers who feel
badgered will unsubscribe from your list. Be cautious and nurture your
list. Make each email matter. And when you do hit the send button, do
it on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, sometimes Thursdays. Statistics show
these are the best times of the week. The good news here is that timing
and frequency are completely flexible, testable, and easy to change.
Start tracking when you send your emails and how often, then watch to
see how these affect your success rate.

6. Dearth of strategy and campaign. Successful email
marketing requires forethought, planning and a budget to continue with
a campaign. The same holds true for advertising in any medium. A single
insertion ad in the local newspaper, for instance, is nearly a complete
waste of money. However, an ongoing media buy in several local and
regional publications along with radio, Web and outdoor is a powerful
combination. The trick is to hit your audience with the right message
more than once, without violating email frequency expectations. For
example, if you have a yearly event, you can email pre-show to elicit
excitement, during the show with news, and post-show with pictures and
commentary. To do it well requires some thoughts around a campaign that
ties into the event.

7. Opaque to transparency. The work necessary to appear
transparent is part and parcel in the email marketing gig, especially
for a list that you rent. Your audience needs to trust that you’re not
hiding online viruses or worse. Interestingly, the same elements that
can help alleviate these concerns are also helpful for improving click
through rates. Here’s another area where writing superior “from” and
subject lines becomes essential to your success. It’s also helpful to
include a signature with contact information and make it super simple
to manage subscription accounts and to unsubscribe.

Seven common mistakes. We’ll file this under basic, though
these bad habits are still rampant among the expert class. Surely there
are more, such as harboring the wrong expectations or using home email
systems for bulk mail delivery. But these seven will suffice for now.
It’s enough to keep any email marketer busy for some time. Good luck!
And please let us know how it goes.

Based on, and built around feedback from some of our larger customers, we launched Interspire Knowledge Manager 5.0 back in October. It offers advanced enterprise-grade tools to help reduce customer support emails, reduce costs associated with staff training, enable organization-wide content sharing and more. This is robust, fully-featured knowledge management software that’s powerful and easy to use.

Now I’m pleased to announce the release of Interspire Knowledge Manager 5.1 with some key updates. Here are some of the new features:

• Enjoy Oracle database support (9i and above) for our new “Oracle” edition
• Login security settings to limit invalid login attempts and implement a lock timeout period
• Discover a streamlined homepage focused on getting started quickly
• Set permissions for viewing knowledge base statistics

This valuable update is free if you already have Interspire Knowledge Manager 5.0 and a valid maintenance period. Simply login to the client area to download your free update. Here’s our upgrade guide to help. If you have an older version or your maintenance period has expired, you can visit the upgrade pricing page to learn more about upgrading.

New customers looking to get started can try the online demo or see pricing.

Why We Built the New Oracle Edition

It doesn’t take more than a handful of workers before every organization discovers the challenge of sharing information between employees, departments and offices. Hence the proliferation of Intranet sites and knowledge management systems, to streamline project management, share companywide updates, and so on.

Most mid-level systems we found were too expensive, too expansive without integrating well, or they were just plain difficult to use, requiring a training and management team. Based on this research we decided to integrate Interspire Knowledge Manager 5.1 with the Oracle database, the defacto RDBMS for mid-level and enterprise organizations.

The new Oracle edition builds on the enterprise-grade features already found in Interspire Knowledge Manager 5.0 while offering robust solutions for companies of all sizes. You’ll discover Oracle/MS SQL/MySQL support, active directory integration, workflow, history, versioning, wiki-style quick add and editing options and a lot more.

To learn more about Interspire Knowledge Manager, take a look at the features page. It offers a conscice snapshot of what the software can do for your organization. We also have a great video tour, an online demo and answers to common questions.

What’s it take to create the perfect subject line? My first response is usually a copywriter. Not just for the single line of poetry that is the subject line—but how it connects to your campaign and reveals the content. If writing your subject line is the last step you undertake before sending your email, that’s fine and not unlike magazine covers. But too often I think “last step” is metaphoric for harried, slapdash work.

Peter Hyoguchi, CEO of Strike.TV, says: “It takes a professional writer to monetize this medium… Without a writer, this medium is a trinket, it’s just a mechanism. And you cannot monetize a trinket. This medium was built for storytelling and it was built for professional storytelling.” Well said, Mr Hyoguchi. He’s referring to the Web in general, but email falls into the mix.

Before jumping into the subject of subject lines with our five steps, let’s take a moment to consider the job of the subject line. You want your recipient to open your email. You might argue that open rates are not as important nor directly representative of the conversation rate–it’s an analytical debate for the metric minded. For our needs, the open rate leads to the sale. That is, you can’t have the success metrics without the recipient opening your email. But to convert viewers, your subject line needs to be straightforward and truly representative of the content. This segues nicely into our first step.

Step 1: Keep it simple and informative

Make a simple statement. You have about 50 character spaces. Explain what’s inside your email. Tell don’t sell. And that’s it folks. If the offer is bad, rewriting it to sound good is not effective. This is where open rates and conversion rates are out of whack. But if you make a simple, direct statement about a solid bit of news or offer… Of course, simplicity is sometimes not so simple.

If you try for heavy sales messaging and the ad lingo to match, you won’t discover much success. For direct mail, banks and credit card companies have mastered the art of the plain white envelope with a single statement: “Account information enclosed.” This style connected with a recognized business name has been proven effective time and time again. The same is true for your email campaigns and the “from” and “subject” lines and how they work together.

It’s instructive to consider the emails that are the most popular with the highest open rates. These would be emails forwarded from friends, family, and colleagues; and business or transactional replies, such as a Welcome to the Online Community confirmation. If the recipient knows your company, trusts you, there’s surely more impetus to keep it simple. When the “from” and “subject” lines work together, the most popular email subject lines with the highest open rates tend to be things like: “Our upcoming events schedule,” or “We’re throwing a party.”

Step 2: Write with audience and long-term marketing goals in mind

Don’t write your subject lines with sales-heavy messages. Here’s a little about email’s direct-mail heritage. It’s a cautionary tale, interesting and informative, for writers to have a little background in the art of direct sales. Traditionally for direct mail marketers, a good copywriter was analogous to a salesperson who could type. The goal was always unflinchingly direct—improve ROI with short-term sales tactics. So direct mail copywriters became the arbiters and experts of junk mail and their writing typifies a sideshow barker—”But, wait! There’s more! What would you expect to pay for these additional steak knives?”

Spam-style Email marketers followed suit, adopting tactics with FREE always capitalized and unadulterated punctuation abuse with far too many exclamation points!!!! In other words, the marketing channel became a sales channel with heavy sales messaging. The result was spam. In fact, too much capitalization and bad punctuation in the subject line can send your email directly to most spam filters.
While marketing delivery vehicles change, this fundamental question remains: Should marketing support and be subservient to sales, or vice versa? IMHO: the job of marketing is to make sales unnecessary. Nowhere does this seem truer than in an email subject line. So, my advice: don’t write your subject lines with sales-heavy messages.

Step 3: Segment and personalize your messages

Obviously knowing who the folks are on your list and knowing what they want to receive is an extraordinary bit of IQ for your marketing efforts. Ideally, you want to personalize your subject lines based on the segment. This is a powerful approach. Try including the recipient’s name and referencing things like purchasing history, previous Web visits, or products that connect to their preferences.

This is especially important when considering the type of email that your recipient signed up to receive. The email and therefore the subject line should be consistent with their subscription. Is the content of the email relevant to this member? If someone expects an email newsletter but receives a coupon offer that you’ve decided to email to your entire list, you’ll watch your open and unsubscribe rates climb together. On the other hand, if you have segmented your list properly and offer several subscription options, people who signed up for coupons should see a simple, promotional message like: 20% Off Coupon Inside. This offer connected to a “from” line that’s recognized will work well for you. For promotional emails, you can segment your list further depending on your products and services – for instance: cowboy boots and cologne are for men, or for women as a gift sales effort.

Step 4: Inject a sense of urgency

Each subject has a verb. Use a verb and call to action, especially with deadlines to impart a fast approaching date. Engage your reader with a hook. Keep in mind, the job of your subject line is just to encourage a recipient to want to open to learn more. That’s it. You don’t have to give away the entire story.

Deadlines, dollars, and strong verbs will help you impart that sense of urgency. “Order today for 20% off” or “Act Fast for Your Chance to Win”. As mentioned above, these promotional messages are only truly effective if the “from” line is recognized and the recipient wants to shop or consider your product or service. If you have an email newsletter, see step one: keep it simple. Just write the name of the newsletter and the issue number. Their desire to read your newsletter should provide enough urgency for successful campaigns.

Step 5. Test your subject lines

Of course, the discussion on your subject line approach and creative opinions change dramatically with testing. There’s a reason TV Guide will print as many as 24 different covers. Ideally, you should test s
ubject lines on a segment of your list. See what works. But pay close attention to all the metrics, not just open rates. Examine what’s happening once folks open the email to truly determine the value of your subject lines and to see how the messages play for various segments from your list.

That’s a wrap for this post. I know we’ll return to the topic of subject lines in the future. For now I think these five steps are a good launching pad for subject line considerations. I hope they work out for you. Drop us a comment and share your subject line success stories.

Lo, it reemerged a few days ago, along with a huge rise in spam reports. According to some experts quoted by Krebs, the web hosting firm McColo “hosted machines that controlled the flow of 75 percent of the world’s spam.” Is that possible? Can one company be responsible for so much spam? The Washington Post followed up on this question with this aptly named article: How Does So Much Spam Come From One Place?

Hormel Foods’ SPiced hAM notwithstanding, it’s pretty hilarious that Monty Python’s skit is responsible for the origin of the name. The relentless Viking call: “Spam, Spam, Spam” that drones on to drown all communication. But after this bit of odd hilarity, there’s nothing funny about spam.

Thanks to spam and the spamming spammers who send garbage along with phishing expeditions, en masse to lists from infected computers everywhere, no one is laughing. But it’s not just the annoyance of spam in my inbox, which is bad enough. I’d love to lock up these greedy, abusive, email gangsters for the stunt of destroying one of the greatest marketing vehicles known to man. 

Short of that: I’ll just rant here about it instead.

Spammers created gigantic reliability hurdles. Imagine, in the U.S., something like 80 percent of the workforce has email. People are opening, reading, wanting more, and we can deliver it with segmented, personalized information. Only, when we do our customers consider it like a strange brown wrapped package that arrived by snail mail during the anthrax scare.

How endemic is spam? The problem is so bad that when researching stats, the reports talk about averages per second and totals from the past 24 hours per country, and the totals are still in the millions, with leading categories of messages reported, like medications versus porn. These numbers are hard to verify, as they come in from various watchdog organizations and email clients who track such things, but taken as a whole it’s informative. The message is this: even if we could kill the email scourge of firms like McColo, the imprint will loom large on people’s experience of junk email.

The question for me: what can we do to help raise the reputation of email as a legitimate marketing vehicle? For one thing, we can support improved technology, regulation and best practices in areas like filters, identity authentication systems, tracking reputations of ISPs, feedback from postmaster pages, watch groups and so forth. These all compliment our efforts, accounting for far better success rates and deliverability in general.

As individuals, one powerful, real weapon to fight spam is simple, thoughtful transparency. Given the holiday season and spirit, I didn’t want to rant without offering some ideas for giving. So here are some ways to implement transparency practices in your email marketing campaigns.

• Make sure all the CAN SPAM basics are accounted for and truly easy to follow for such things as unsubscribing. Likewise, make your from name in the email something easily recognizable and be sure the subject line is attractive while not misleading. It’s also helpful to include a signature with contact information, so each email is from an individual who can be reached.
   
• Provide explicit explanation of your permissions and privacy policies. If you plan to use your customer’s email for list rental, just say so. Be cautious not to misinform your audience, nor misrepresent information hiding as advertising or name captures for sponsors.
   
• Generally communicate with your audience in a manner that’s direct, honest, and easy to read without heavy PR or marketing and jargon. This issue is more prevalent in industries clouded by misinformation, such as financial planning and investing, insurance, manufacturing, or many business to business sellers. In this case you have the specter of email and the industry to contend with in reaching your audience.
   
• Ask for feedback from your customers on their experiences of your service or products, then share these experiences – the good, the bad, and the ugly – with your customer base.

Here’s the big Q: do you want to just sell something, or do you want to engage your audience in a conversation? Now you can be hailed for understanding the community connection with Web 2.0 sensibility.

I’d love to hear your experiences with spam as email marketers and what actions you’re taking. Please drop a comment or a little rant of your own.

By most accounts, 2008 is a good season for online retail. Some of the stats depend on the type of products sold. Video game sales are up dramatically, while clothing and toys are down. But on average, online sales is expected to grow some 10 percent over last year in the U.S., this according to eMarketer, who provides stats on such things.

Here’s a graph they published on iab.net:

Another 2008 holiday sales study by Forrester Research projects a 12 percent spike online, compared to just two percent for bricks and mortar spaces. This all sounds lovely for our eCommerce efforts. But financial industry stats are one thing.

You know better than anyone whether the 2008 season is silly or sad when it comes to your online sales. To help out, just in time for the holidays, here are seven ways to maximize your online sales potential this season. If your sales are lagging, implementing these techniques can help you join this trend of better than 10 percent growth over 2007.

1. Make the shopping experience hassle free

Increased traffic with the holiday season is a perfect time to update your Web site. You want to ensure that your shoppers experience a site that is easy to navigate and user-friendly. Some ideas to make things a bit friendlier: large, clear images to showcase products; improved search functions, with options like best-selling, and featured items; video tutorials explaining how to use and why to buy those big ticket items; detailed FAQs; product reviews.

If you use Interspire Shopping Cart, be sure to take advantage of all elements that the software has to offer. There are some powerful options that will positively affect sales, available with the tick of box. For instance discount coupon codes and the flexible banner promotions system, as well as free shipping (which you can limit to selected cities/states/countries).

Using these simple options with help your visitors find the products they want most and encourage them to buy. So too, set up categories and provide the option to easily view popular brands or to shop based on a price range.

Security can also play a role in the hassle-free experience. This may no longer be a priority consideration for online shoppers visiting brand name retailers, but it’s always a buying concern at smaller online stores. Be sure to beef up security on all customer checkout pages. How? Grab yourself an SSL certificate from Verisign.

Basically, hassle-free is a promise that’s not always so hassle-free to keep. When investigating your site for potential issues, be sure to double check things like how error messages appear, or the experience of the final checkout. If a visitor needs to register or sign in, how does this affect the current sale? Inspect every link and consider it from your shoppers’ perspective.

2. Consider the design, look and feel of the shopping experience

Design is paramount. Packaging sells, and it’s tightly woven into the hassle-free experience mentioned above. Your site may boast phenomenal backend functionality, but without the nice site design, you’re going to lose sales.

This can be due to buyer frustration with an outdated, clunky system, or their concerns about credibility. Just as important, the store design affects the perceived value of your products. As retailers, it’s the constant consideration, to amp the perceived value.

All other things being equal, shoppers will buy the product that’s wrapped with service as well as ambiance. Online, this is all about the design and how it connects to the usability of the site.

Design is a special consideration during the holiday season when more people are searching online for gift ideas. If you’re losing traffic or if you have a high bounce-rate, you might consider a design face lift. Update your product pictures and be sure they showcase and amplify the perceived value.

Showing images of people using the products is also proven effective to increase sales. So too, visitors want to see pictures of people or a design that they can relate to, based on the demographics for the product.

If your site design is already topnotch and user feedback has been as positive as the sales results, you might consider temporary holiday artwork. Dressing up the site with seasonal bling and marginalia can also improve your sales odds.

3. Increase the frequency of your email campaigns

With email being inexpensive and extremely effective, it’s okay to increase the number of emails you send out during the holiday season. This will meet customer expectations, and while you can’t avoid some folks on your list viewing your emails as annoying, many of your customers will appreciate an email that includes a coupon code or promo offer.

Obviously the best-case scenario for these emails is to segment your list based on customers shopping experience and history. You can send out personalized emails with special offers depending on the customers’ demographics or loyalty or status as repeat customer.

One good way is to load up plenty of emails to launch over the next month with the help of an autoresponder. It’s easy to share coupon codes with prospects and customers via email too.

4. Up sell, cross sell, and suggest some more

The largest online retailer in the world, Amazon.com, has proven the power of online suggestive selling. “People who purchased this item also purchased…” It’s extraordinarily powerful and can improve sales figures immediately. Including the suggestive selling features again at the end of the sales process, after your shopper has committed to the larger sale, is truly simple and ingenious. As a shopper, I already have my credit card in hand, I’ve already committed to the sale. Now: “Would you like fries with that?”

5. Offer incentives such as free shipping

Sometimes it’s helpful to be reminded of the macro business view; in this case, to keep in mind why so many people are shopping online. What are the driving factors? Simplicity and savings are high on the list. Online browsing is the ideal scenario for frugal shoppers, to perform quick price-comparisons.

According to the 2008 eHoliday Study, conducted by Shopzilla, 80 percent of online retailers are offering free shipping this holiday season, usually connected to some sort of disclaimer. This might be a minimum purchase order or a sale deadline.

Whether or not you provide free shipping, be sure your fulfillment and shipping information is clear, concise, and user-friendly. Provide price comparisons for different delivery options and provide tracking numbers.

6. Showcase community connections

There are a handful of social shopping sites like Etsy  and Kaboodle that have proven the trend. People like to reach for their wallets, especially when encouraged to do so by like-minded individuals or online friend
s. It just feels better when you know someone else took the plunge and they are using the product.

A quote from Time Magazine online: “In fact, brands are noticing that online communities have more buying persuasion power than store sales clerks. And they’re forming more partnerships with social sites now that traffic numbers are at an all-time high. In October 2007, Kaboodle had nearly 3 million unique monthly visitors. By October 2008, it tripled that number to 10.8 million and also logged its highest numbers for revenue, traffic and registered users.”

Keeping this in mind, it can be extraordinarily effective to inject some of that Web 2.0 community flavor into the shopping experience of your site. Some ideas: include customer reviews; allow commenting and rating of products; showcase a customer service pro as a personal connection in case of shopping questions or concerns; create a members’ only section with special discounts or other valuable offers.

7. Increase ad promos and the presence of gift giving, gift cards, and good deals

As mentioned above, regarding the macro-view: why are people turning to the Internet in droves for shopping? It begins with hunting for gift ideas and ends with finding bargains. While everyone wants to save money on gas this year in particle in the U.S., we all want to avoid the long shopping lines, the stress of frantic shoppers, the parking problems, the crowded stores, and so on.

With the increase of Web traffic and folks on search engines, this is a good time to consider increasing your online ad budget. It’s always a challenge for marketing decisions, to find the right mix and balance.

Many online retailers are feeling the crunch, cutting inventories and staff to reduce costs. Nonetheless, attracting folks to your store and then retaining them with gift cards and great offers is a surefire method for ROI.

Final thoughts

Of course it’s easy to throw out numerous suggestions with a simple looking holiday wish list. It’s quite another thing to implement all these changes quickly and efficiently in time for your holiday shoppers. If you own and use Interspire Shopping Cart and Interspire Email Marketer, many of these suggestions are quick and simple to initiate. I hope they work for you.

Happy Holidays!

Different email clients will affect the way your email appears. To best deal with this, I recommend Interspire Email Marketer. We’ve developed plenty of beautiful, premade templates that have been tested for most common inboxes. And we’ve made testing your own emails easy. You can see how your email will look in Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo and more, along with tips on how to fix the source code.

With Interspire Email Marketer, it’s as simple as hitting the Email Client Compatibility button. Here’s a tutorial on how it works.

In general, the rule of email and client compatibility is to keep things simple.  This includes fonts, graphics, and code. Limit your email to just two fonts with nothing too outlandish. Use font tags and inline formatting instead of stylesheets – this ensures your email is compatible with even the oldest email clients, and also with web-based email clients which don’t load stylesheet information in the email.

Ultimately, to avoid spam filters and embarrassment, you need to test your campaign. Here’s a simple, surefire way to find a little quality control: Set up email accounts at Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail and send yourself the email. If it’s sent directly to the spam filter or if it looks messy, you know you have some work to do.

If you want to go beyond the built-in inbox preview in Interspire Email Marketer and get real live screenshots of how your email will look in all of the major email clients, give LitmusApp.com a try. It’s cheap and very effective.

Tuesday night, November 4th, in the USA was a stream of
endless news broadcasts. CNN, MSNBC, NPR, CSPAN, Headline News, on- and
offline, newsrooms, local events, stage productions—CNN used holograms, unbelievable!

Of course, here at Interspire we watched the candidates’
email campaigns. After receiving dozens of them in just as many days…
In terms of email marketing, the McCain crew did more than other
candidates in the past, but they didn’t hold a candle to the daily
Obama email onslaught.

Let’s see if Obama’s email marketing strategies foretold anything
about the outcome of the election. In some cases, the Obama camp
ignored all the tradition email marketing rules; at least the standard
steps to follow to ensure results, ROI, conversion success. Yet we must
pay attention to his tactics, because now we have our next US President
elect who raised hundreds of millions of dollars.

This from Forbes Magazine about Obama: “The presidential campaign’s fundraising
champion has brought in more than $605 million. He is raising private
money for his general election… He raised a record-shattering $150
million in September. “ As for McCain, Forbes reported: “He raised more
than $160 million before having to stop to accept the $84 million in
public money for the fall.”

How did Obama do it? According to some reports from his camp,
upwards of 90 percent of the money they received was donated in $100
increments. How does one get six million people to pay $100 each? Among
the most powerful and viral tools in their war chest: email.

That and a lot of donate buttons.

This was the donate button waiting in my inbox each day, direct from
the Obama Camp.  Of course, the emails all contained their share of
numerous “donate now” text links. In fact, none of the emails were HTML
design heavy; just basic text with pictures attached. The “last chance
to donate” button often helped reinforce other graphics. Most of them
had a deadline attached, a chance to win something, or a gift offer
like a car magnet. “You can also receive an Obama-Biden T-shirt with a
donation of $30 or more,” read one headline.

Subscribing to the Obama email campaign unleashed a torrent of
emails. I received one everyday from all different members of the Obama
team. They assessed me as a loyal member of the Democratic Party. This
community connection was apparently enough to break the success
theories of standard email marketing, like frequency. But they sure
made the content relevant. It was clear, concise, and each email could
afford to concentrate on one powerful message—there would be another
one tomorrow. It was obviously the power of an autoresponder at work,
loaded with valuable content.

But who was sending these emails? As email marketers we’re taught
that the “from” line should be consistent as an issue of trust,
credibility and white lists from SPAM filters. It’s been proven, this
consistency builds brand equity and increases open rates. And yet, here
I received dozens of emails from seemingly everyone on the Obama team,
often from names I never knew. Of course the email reply address was
always the same: info@barackobama.com. Inconsistent names became part
of the consistent messaging.

Luckily, Barack emailed me directly on occasion. His subject lines
shared sentiments like: “It’s in your hands, Jeff”. Personalizing the
subject line? Why not? I subscribed to the newsletter and so by this
virtue, I’m supposed to be onboard as an agent of change for the
Democratic Party. Barack also wrote to ask me poignant questions in
subject lines like: “Will you join me on election night?” You, bet!

Vice president elect Joe Biden emailed with “My Wife” as one of his
subject lines. The email began, “Jeff –“. All the emails always
began with my first name (a level of personalization the McCain emails
generally ignored.) Joe wrote: “My wife Jill is an extraordinary
woman.” Thanks, Joe. I feel more connected to the community already.
The funny thing is that I’m not being sarcastic. He included this image
of his wife that obviously links to a video clip:

I’m a huge fan of this technique, of placing a graphic
that appears like a video clip, to send you to the launch page. Can you see the arrow over
Jill’s nose? But don’t take my word for it: test it! And who doesn’t
want to click on Jill’s face to get started?

Of course, the new First Lady, Michelle Obama, emailed, too. Among
her subject lines:  “What Barack needs.” Still other unknown names from
the camp emailed with subject lines filled with news or important
updates. They all relayed messages simply and directly, explaining the
topic of the email or directing a call to action. “Obama campaign
finances.” “Jeff, Washington needs you.” “FW: BREAKING: Latest
numbers.”

Once I had been receiving emails for awhile and trusted the style
and flow of them, I discovered more direct call to action emails with
subject lines to match: “ Forward this email.” Normally, this is a
subject line disaster. Instead, here, it reinforced community
involvement. That is really the power driving this email campaign.
There’s a sense of community development.

Often these messages had video grabs like the one of Jill above.

Obviously a lot of money went into marketing and launching an extraordinary community effort. A peek at Barack’s Web site
suggests the powerful savvy team of marketing geniuses at work. And yet
here they are, pumping out daily emails with basic text links and
graphics. As one of the subheads reads: “See what this movement is all
about, then make your first donation of $5 or more before it’s too late
to make a difference.”

Whether you’re into politics or not, you’ve got to commend him for such a well executed marketing campaign.

We just updated and evolved our Interspire affiliate program, offering more money and more support. So I thought this was a good time to share thoughts around affiliate programs and what makes them so lucrative. It’s such a powerful way to bring in some extra monthly income—or in marketing parlance: a proven method to monetize your Web site.

Online, Amazon.com and others have helped make affiliate marketing programs a Web standard for the better part of a decade. The basic idea from our side is to tap into the voices of multiple communities, to encourage additional sales, to enlist viral activity and word-of-mouth growth. People who use and love our products are the best salespeople, sharing their thoughts with family and friends and coworkers. As incentive to encourage you and your Web presence to be a mouthpiece for our products, we offer financial compensation. In effect, you become a commissioned salesperson for the products when you help us generate sales.

It’s Simple and When Effective, Quite Lucrative

If you have products or services that you use and love and would freely recommend to others, why not turn this into a Win/Win scenario and make some extra income? Of course, you may not feel the need to be in love with the product in every affiliate program. You might have a highly trafficked Web site or blog and you are looking for ways to increase your monthly revenue. The right affiliate program can offer vertical marketing opportunities, so you can make more money with your same list of folks.

The beautiful part of affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to do much more than direct traffic to a link or an ad on your site. Your affiliate partner does the rest. If the customer buys, you make money. Your job is really to just pick the right affiliate program – that is, the right products and services – for your audience.

How the Money Usually Flows

There are plenty of options out there for affiliate programs. I recommend avoiding those who make bold claims for products or services that you wouldn’t use personally. Certainly avoid any program that costs you money to join. When it comes to payment, here are some basic types of programs to consider, though many variations exist.

• Per sale: If your lead makes a purchase, you make money. This is the most common program and usually offers the highest rate of return. It’s simple, straightforward, commission sales. This is how Amazon does it and this how we do it.
• Per click: If you drive traffic, you make money. Each person who clicks the affiliate link on your site is worth a small sum, whether they purchase anything or not.
• Per lead: For visitors who fill out something, such as a membership form or a survey, you make money.
• Per impression: These programs blur the lines of advertising and affiliate marketing. Essentially, as you rack up page views for something more robust than a link on your site, you can earn money.

These payment arrangements are often tied into a larger program model. For instance, some affiliate programs use the network-marketing concepts of companies like Avon, Tupperware, or Amway. That is, you can make money from your site or from other affiliate marketers that you enlist. These are often called two-tier programs. We offer this style of program here at Interspire, along with a generous Partnership Program.  There are also residual or recursive programs. These are a powerful way to monetize your site over time. The idea here is that people subscribe to a monthly, recurring product or service, and therefore you receive a monthly recurring commission. In some cases, the recursive program just ensures that you will always earn a small percentage of every sale from the new customer.

A Real Win/Win Scenario

If you run a healthy e-commerce business, you might consider creating your own affiliate program or joining an ad network. The tracking and monitoring is fairly automated, but a successful affiliate program requires a bit of work to properly manage, and to offer stellar support to your affiliate marketers. Here at Interspire, we’re lucky to have Michael Curving onboard as our fulltime, dedicated Affiliate Manager.

Understanding why we’d want to have an affiliate program can be informative for anyone considering becoming an affiliate marketer. Of course, the reason we do it and the reason any online business does it is to create a broad-based, viral, sales environment that’s essentially free, since most programs are predominately commission-based sales. The bottom line is simple: it works. It’s great ROI. Here are some reasons:

• You can help us spread the word and bring in additional sales.
• As a commissioned pay-per-sale, we only have to pay when you help us land new customers.
• Even for folks that don’t click, it can be like free advertising, to increase brand awareness, as well as links to our site, which helps SEO and increases our search engine ranking
• It’s been proven to truly impact traffic and results.

Affiliate Program with Interspire

Here are some highlights from our new affiliate program. This information is also good for considerations when comparing affiliate options.

• First off, Interspire offers superb products. We boast excellent service, with high customer satisfaction and very few returns.
• Our affiliate program is free to join and includes outstanding support.
• We pay affiliates 15% commission plus incentives. This is especially attractive when you consider the size and type of products we provide. On some of our big-ticket items, like the high-end version of Knowledge Manager, you could earn over $1,000.
• Cookies for tracking potential customers last for 180 days. This is twice as long as many software and Web hosting affiliate merchants.
• We pay out once per month with a low payment threshold of $25.
• You can customize links and build campaigns to monitor which links are bringing the highest conversions.
• We offer a range of linking options including banner ads, text links, text ads, page peels, customer testimonials, and more.
• With a suite of four products, there are plenty of cross-promotional opportunities.

Getting Started

Analyzing affiliate programs to monetize your site is certainly worth the effort and might be a great way to earn extra income. Becoming an affiliate is pretty easy. At Interspire, you just fill out this small online form to get started. We’ll take a look at your site and connect with you for links and payment.

For many current customers, the decision is easy; when you already use and appreciate a product, naturally you want to share this information with your audience. In a resources section of your site, for instance, you might include a clear explanation of the products and services you use and enjoy and recommend to others. Ultimately, this is the slow, deliberate, lucrative method for bloggers and others involved in Web 2.0 community development sites.

If you have the site traffic and you’re looking to be business savvy about ROI and monetizing opportunities, beco
ming an affiliate marketer might be more of a marketing decision. In this case, you might have in depth questions about stats, hit-per-sale ratios, in depth tracking capabilities, and much more. This is why we are happy to have Michael Curving at the affiliate helm to answer your questions. We also have a FAQ page that’s worth a peek.

I’d love to hear success stories from our affiliate marketers. Please drop a comment and share the news with our community.

• Hundreds of millions of people come to YouTube every month to search, discover and share this content with their friends.
• Around 10 billion videos are viewed monthly online in the U.S. alone.
• On YouTube 13 hours of content are uploaded every minute.
• In France over 120 million hours of video content is watched per month.

The full transcripts are available on TechCrunch. Okay, so there’s a reason Google purchased YouTube for $1.76 billion. In Alexa’s world ranking, YouTube is number three behind Google and Yahoo. The point here is that video is effective, people want more, and the growing expectation for online delivery includes multimedia.

You can increase sales, traffic, loyalty, retention, satisfaction, creativity, innovation, brand awareness—and you can have fun doing it. This is all possible with thoughtfully produced online videos. They are effective across the board for all aspects of your business: for marketing and sales to showcase products or introducing the team, for training and tutorials, for human resources, community development, online tours, and more.

We launched my intro to this blog with a video post and we’ll be adding many video tutorials outlining tips and tricks to use our software. Why did we bother with video? Let’s take a look some basic reasons why video works so well and how you can implement video into your business development and marketing mix.

Your customers want to watch videos

All the figures on YouTube’s popularity notwithstanding, the Pew Internet Survey team shared some interesting figures earlier this year on the increased usage of video sharing sites.

• 48% of internet users have been to video-sharing sites such as YouTube and the daily traffic to such sites on a typical day has doubled in the past year
• Use of video sharing sites among women has increased by 120% since 2006
• 76% of Internet users ages 18-29 watch or download videos online
• 15% of respondents said they had used a video-sharing site “yesterday”– the day before they were contacted for our survey.

What does this mean for us? In short: your customers are hungry for videos. In a world that’s moving at increasing business speeds, videos can help make things easy to view and more memorable than trying to slog through printed pages.

Some of the reasons people love video is obvious. Here are a few:

• By and large, most of us live in a video culture, surrounded by TV and movies. Video keeps viewers interested and highly engaged. Videos with interesting or funny spokespeople or ones with higher production value are captivating to watch.
• For tutorials and training, people usually learn faster watching video clips. You can see the motions, in action, which increases awareness and the ability to stay engaged.
• The viewer can be in control, to stop, pause, start and to watch the video anytime from home or any other computer, 24/7.
• With the ease of with sites like YouTube, you don’t have to worry about maintaining huge video files on your server.
• And of course, the ease to share with others.

You have an opportunity to be viral

People are sharing videos. And they are doing it en masse. There are hundreds of superb examples. The recent U.S. presidential candidates in their bid for the top seat come to mind. Traditionally portrayed as the stodgiest of marketing campaigns—looked to viral online videos to increase voter turnout. According to one New York Times article: “YouTube videos mentioning either Mr. Obama or Mr. McCain have been viewed 2.3 billion times.”

There are so many examples of viral videos that just exploded off the charts. According to some reports, SNL’s Tina Fey’s impression of VP candidate Sarah Palin were viewed more than 50 million times on YouTube. This is especially impressive, to consider that this clip was viewed more online than on TV, and the online version was probably more influential.

Maybe you won’t hit this jackpot. But according to that same PEW survey, “57% of online video viewers share video links with others.” Here are their results for viewers’ actions that can affect the viral status of a video.

There are companies online spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop a viral aspect of their brand that will be noticed by millions of potential customers. OfficeMax’s Elf Yourself and CareerBuilder’s Monk-e-Mail are examples of the more successful bids using Flash and other technologies. Now you can make the same bid for viral attention—with some simple videos. Even if you never hit the highly acclaimed and watched YouTube homepage favorites, you can still reach hundreds or even thousands of additional viewers.

Videos are cost effective to produce

Playing around with audio-visual toys and producing high-end videos is not an inexpensive proposition for a person starting out. But for a business it’s really a nominal expense for the value it provides over time. You certainly don’t need a huge broadcast production ad budget to get started. A few grand $U.S. on equipment and knowledge would put you into an elite league on YouTube.

The basics: camera, sound, lighting, someone who knows how to use them, and some software for post-production work. I’m making online videos with a combination of a small handheld video camera, the built in iSight on my Mac, and iMovie. I wing it with lighting and find quiet, less echoey spots for recording. To record screen-shot tutorial videos, to see where my cursor is going, you might consider Camtasia Studio  for PCs ($300) or ScreenFlow for a Mac ($100). These are essential if your selling software or other technical products that require a manual and some small training. The videos are useful for the sales team, customer service, and to increase traffic to your site for your products.

Obviously we’re not doing anything that’s going to show up on the Academy Awards. Keep it simple and direct and go for the community development aspects—that is, just be honest and helpful and barring that, find a personality to help out.

There are plenty of considerations, and as wit
h most things, you can fall into the Rabbit Hole of niche expertise, to explore a single microphone that’s many thousands of dollars. So too, YouTube experts have emerged with tips and tricks for uploading videos to improve quality or to determine which screen grab from the clip will become the lead picture.

My goal here is to just recommend the power and effectiveness of video and I hope you take an interest, iron out the learning curve, and get started. Surely not all topics lend themselves to easy videos (like this post about using video). You can break things down into tasks for preproduction (script, location, gear) production (lighting, sound, angles) and post-production (adding music, editing scenes, including titles).

Video in Email

Advertisers and teachers have known for centuries that some people learn best with words, others with pictures. Nowadays of course we can include radio, TV, the Web, and a bevy of technologies and devices to the mix. Leading the charge as we march into the 21st century: video. The technology for emailing video is available and it’s pretty cool, but attaching or embedding videos into your emails doesn’t really work:

•    Red flag servers and spam filters
•    Email clients don’t play correctly

Instead use multiple links in your email to a video on your
landing page. In your HTML email, use a picture snapshot that looks
like a video clip, like a screen shot from YouTube. This can improve click-through and conversion rates. And through the video, you’ll appear innovative, accessible, trustworthy, and credible.

Keep the content simple, fun, informative, and about 2 minutes long.
Try an interview, a video tour, or a behind-the-scenes look at your new
product.

Final Thoughts

Here’s a final thought from Chad Hurley: “You gain unprecedented reach and scope to touch new audiences around the world, anywhere and anytime. If you embrace this opportunity, you will evolve your business model and find new channels and opportunities to deepen engagement, discover new viewers and find new, substantial revenue opportunities.”

If you manage a large list, you understand the balance of frequency, relevancy, and audience. Every email counts. Testing is part-in-parcel with the email marketing gig. Every large email campaign is tested based on its subject lines, the offer and sometimes the artwork, to see which performs best based on open or conversation rates. Interspire Email Marketer 5.5 will make this usually challenging task a breeze to run for everyone.

Testing Matters

You can spend countless hours of marketing discussion about red versus blue, or you can test it on a portion of your audience to know without a doubt which works best. The driving power of email as a marketing channel is to track and test emails. Every aspect of the email and its delivery can be monitored and therefore improved over time. The basic idea is to test, to test often, and generally to use the metrics that make email such a powerful marketing tool, offering a compelling ROI ($52 returned for every $1 spent on email marketing, according to the direct marketing association in 2007) and instant gratification.

A Sneak Peek at Split Testing in Action

The value, power and importance of split testing are easy to understand, especially once you see the feature in action. Here are a few screenshots of the feature in the upcoming release of Interspire Email Marketer 5.5 from the software team (after the launch, I’ll walk you through some video tutorials of the system).

Creating a split test in Interspire Email Marketer 5.5

In the screenshot above you simply choose the emails you want to test and then you might run a basic A/B split test — to choose two versions of the same email to send to a sampling of your list. But you don’t have to stop with A and B. You can choose as many emails versions as you like, to test subject lines, headlines, artwork, colors, or the offer. With a large enough list, you could test 10, 20, or 50 versions. Think of the insight you’d get from testing that many variations on such a large sample size.

As email marketers we spend a lot of time sweating over open rates,
click through rates, unsubscribes and the conversion rate. So why not make
them all variables in our split test? Interspire Email Marketer 5.5 is up to the task. In
the second option for the “type of test to run” in the screenshot above, whichever email performs best to a small portion of the list can then be auto-magically sent to the rest of your
list at whatever interval after the inital sample test send you specify.

Metrics In Mind

When performing the A/B split test, whichever version performs better is the winner, and off it goes to the rest of your selected contacts. But, if you’re testing multiple emails for a large list, more rigid standards to define success based on industry averages might be applied.

Viewing statistics for a sent split test in Interspire Email Marketer 5.5

Here are three standards to consider for overall performance of your email campaigns.

• The open rate is essentially just a test of your from name and email address as well as your subject line. Do you have a relevant message for the right audience? Shoot for better than 50 percent and you’ll be doing quite well.
• The click through rate is all about your offer and the delivery. You might test different sales hooks, giveaway offers, the design, or masthead. Look for 15 percent on click throughs and you’ll be beating the average.
• Ultimately, the conversation rate is what matters. Did it work? Did you encourage the action or get the sale? I expect a conversion rate to reach and exceed 5 percent.

More news and video tutorials on Interspire Email Marketer 5.5 to come once we launch the new version next week, including details on other new features such as trigger emails, contact assignment rules, manual (phone, meeting) and automatic (received email campaign, autoresponder, trigger email) event logging and more. Stay tuned.

In the meantime I’d love to hear your comments on split testing or even tweaking email content in general. What have you tried? What worked? What bombed? Leave me a comment below and let’s discuss.

Suggestive selling—the up-sell—is rampant in retail because it works, and if you do it correctly, your shoppers will even appreciate it. Once your customers make the commitment to buy the big-ticket item, you can hit them with add-ons and additional sales. It can increase sales figures and customer loyalty.

Here are some online samples and a tutorial on how easy it is to use suggestive selling with Interspire Shopping Cart. It’s as simple as a toggle switch. This video will show you how.

A few things to note about suggestive selling in Interspire Shopping Cart:

• Recommended products are pulled automatically based on purchases from past customers
• If you’re just opening a new store then recommend products are pulled from the popular products list instead
• It can be disabled from the settings page with one click

The online masters of suggestive selling: Amazon.com. Surely it accounts for a major percentage of their sales success as the world’s largest online retailer, with
$15 billion U.S. in annual sales last year. Amazon employs suggestive selling with all their products, from toys
and furniture to groceries and golf gear. It’s synonymous with their
innovation and service. One of the keys to success is repetition. And what better time than when I’ve already pulled
out my credit card to make payment?

One recent study suggests: “77% of consumers report that they have made additional purchases when
they have encountered personalized product recommendations online. More
than half of consumers say they usually peruse those recommendations
when they are offered.”

The same basic rules apply for offline and online suggestive selling technique:

• The suggestion comes after the main commitment to purchase
• It should relate to the original purchase and add value
• The additional product is less expensive
• Be cautious of the number of up-sells
• Whether it’s your employees or you’re employing Interspire Shopping Cart, make sure they are making the up-sell suggestion.

This is an easy and effective method that will help increase your sales figures. Please drop a comment to share your success stories with suggestive selling and Interspire Shopping Cart.

Hi everyone. Over the last few weeks we’ve been working behind the scenes to relaunch the Interspire blog. Since its inception in April 2004, the blog has been used mainly as a place where we announce new products and upgrades.

Today, however that’s changed. The new blog will focus on helping you get the best out of our products, including video “how to” guides, step-by-step tutorials, tip and tricks, as well as relevant and timely posts about current marketing and ecommerce industry news, trends, events and tools you can use to grow your business.

The new Interspire blog is hosted by Jeff Selin, Interspire’s new user education manager. Jeff has over 15 years of marketing experience working with companies of all sizes, and he’s been with us behind the scenes for the last 3 months helping to plan the relaunch of our blog.

Just like we do with our products, the direction of the blog will be shaped by your feedback, so please feel free to leave your comments and opinions on all blog posts. We’ve ripped out our old commenting system and are now using disqus-powered comments which means you can of course leave the usual text comments, but you can also leave video comments on our blog posts! All you need is a seesmic account which is free.

We’ve also completely redesigned the blog. It now looks more modern and you can be notified of new posts either via email, using your RSS reader or via Twitter. On top of that we’ve setup the InterspireDotCom YouTube channel where all of Jeff’s videos will be syndicated so make sure you check that out.

We’ve got big things planned for the Interspire blog and I hope you’ll take a minute to subscribe either via email or RSS using the options on the right side of the page.

And with that, I’ll hand all future blog posts over to Jeff. Welcome aboard, mate!

Hi everyone. This is just a quick blog post to let you know that we’ve just pushed the latest version of the Interspire Email Marketer user guide live. It explains every part of the application in detail and includes a getting started guide to get up and running quickly. You can download the user guide here.

Interspire partners have access to the private label user guide by logging into the partner portal. It’s available from the “User Guides” page under the “Marketing Tools” section.

As we gear up to launch Interspire Email Marketer
5.5 next week (a free upgrade for existing customers running v5 or
above), I thought it would be a good time to talk about split testing.

Why? Well, Interspire Email Marketer 5.5 will include the
ability to split test different email campaigns to your list (as well
as many other features):

For example, if you have a list segment of 100 contacts you can send
one campaign to 33% of your list, another to the next 33% and another
to the final 33%. You can then see which had higher open/click rates
and send that to your entire list.

Split tests are a great way to test multiple versions of an
email and see which one gets the best response. In the above example, I
might leave the email content identical in all 3 campaigns but just
change the subject line in each to see which gets me the best open
rate.

While we put the finishing touches on version 5.5, I wanted
to talk about another way to do split testing – with your website using
the free website optimizer tool from Google.

What is Google Website Optimizer?

Google website optimizer is a free marketing tool that allows you to perform two types of split tests on your website:

1. A/B split testing – Choose 2 pages on your website to split test. 50% of your visitors will see page A. The other 50% will see page B.

2. Multivariate testing – Allows you to break your web page up into blocks and show different content (in different combinations) for each block.

If you’re new to split testing then make sure you watch this presentation from Google. It explains everything you’ll want to know before reading the rest of this newsletter.

For most people A/B split testing is easy to understand – you might
keep your current home page (which we’ll call “page A”) and create a
new version of it with different header text and colors (which we’ll
call “page B”). A program such as Google website optimizer will show
page A or page B randomly to visitors on your web site and when they
buy from you a conversion will be recorded and it will contain a note
about which home page the customer saw (page A or page B).

With A/B split testing the same visitor will always
see the same page. For example if I came to your website today and saw
page A, when I come back tomorrow I will still see page A. This is
accomplished using a cookie to remember which page I saw the first time
I came to your website.

Multivariate testing seems to confuse a lot of people but
it’s really just a way to test different combinations of content on a
page and see which combination brings the most conversions. If you
image a website as being nothing more than a group of blocks, it will
start to make sense:

Assume each red block above is a piece of content (such as a paragraph
of text, an image, a video, or even all 3 combined), using multivariate
testing I can define different versions of content for each block. For
example in the small red block on the left one version might have an
image. Another version might have a paragraph of text with a thumbnail
image instead, etc.

If I create different versions of content for each block on
the page, I would then use multivariate testing to randomly show
different combinations of content for each block and, based on
conversions, determine which combination of blocks drove more sales on
my website.

After the test period was over (generally anywhere from 1-8
weeks) Google website optimizer would give me a clear winner (through
randomly showing different combinations to my website visitors and
tracking which lead to sales). I can then stop the website optimizer
campaign and show the winning combination on my website all the time.

Why Split Testing?

In marketing,
anything that can be tested should. The layout of your website really
is marketing – showing certain things about your products/services in
certain ways to people that visit your website. Using split testing
(either A/B or multivariate) you can maximize the conversion rate of
your website which leads to more sales, newsletter subscribers, free
trial sign ups, etc.

Consider this: I might think I’ve designed a better looking
or better performing website than you, but we put them head-to-head via
split testing and yours outperforms mine 10:1. Imagine if I’d just gone
ahead and launched the site with my design? I would’ve had only 10% of
the sales!

The only way to find out whether you or I designed the best website is with split testing.

Using Google Website Optimizer

Google Website Optimizer is free and is available when you sign up for a Google AdWords
account. After signing up you don’t actually have to pay to run any
campaigns – just click the “Website Optimizer” link in the “Campaign
Management” tab at the top of the page.

You’ll then be able to setup a new split testing campaign.
You will need to add some code to your website to run and track the
split tests but it’s only basic JavaScript code, so if you know some
HTML and are familiar with an FTP program (such as FileZilla – free) then you should be fine.

Recommendations for an A/B split test

If your website only gets a few hundred visitors a day then I’d
recommend starting with a simple A/B split test which would involve
creating 2 pages on your website – generally you’d use your existing
home page (or landing page) and create a new page containing one or
more visual changes.

Here are some things you could change for page B:

• Change the color of the main headline on your page. Try changing it from black to red.

• If
  you have a large promotional-style image across the top of your page,
  try changing the image from a person to a picture of your
  product/service, or vice-versa.

• Try replacing a few
  paragraphs of text with a few bullet points instead. People prefer to
  skim content instead of reading everything.

• If your web page has a fixed width, try making it fluid (the whole width of the web browser’s window) and vice-versa.
• Change the font you use on your web page from Verdana to Arial or Times New Roman to Helvetica.

Of course these are only a few things you might change, but you get the
idea. To make it easy to determine if the changes make a difference,
only try changing 2-3 things at a time. Then give the split test time
to do its thing (2-3 weeks).

Recommendations for a multivariate split test

Similar to an A/B split test, don’t try testing more than 2-3 things at
once. Also try not to create more than 3 variations of any one section
of your website, otherwise you’ll end up with hundreds of combinations
to test. Try and keep the total number of combinations under 20. So you
might test 3 different things, each with 2 variations.

Remember that even the slightest change can make a big
difference in conversion rate. Instead of completely changing content,
try subtle changes such as font size, style, color and spacing. Try
re-arranging paragraphs of text and try testing with/without a
prominent image on the page.

Finally keep in mind that having a beautiful website
doesn’t necessarily translate into more sales. I’ve tried combinations
on certain areas of our website that made me second guess whether or
not I should run the split test, and they’ve produced some really good
results.

Remember that marketing (and this is marketing) is all about
experimenting for the best result so the more tests you do, the higher
you should be able to get your conversion rate over time.

Conclusion

I hope this newsletter has
helped you understand what split testing is and how you can use it to
improve the conversion rate of your website.

Keep an eye on our blog (RSS feed)
next week as we announce the release of Interspire Email Marketer 5.5
which will include new features such as split testing, trigger emails,
manual and automatic event logging, Google calendar integration,
default custom fields and more!

Of course you can also visit Interspire.com in the meantime to learn about our products, watch videos, read articles (both technical and business focused) and more.

Talk to you soon!

You can see the video here.

What is Interspire Knowledge Manager?

It’s a complete web-based self help and FAQ system which integrates directly
into your Interspire Shopping Cart-powered store. It’s already used by
over 2,000 organizations worldwide (including Virgin, Xerox and
MediaTemple) to reduce their customer support.

Here’s why you need Interspire Knowledge Manager:

• It allows you to create and display a list of common
  questions about your shipping, returns, refund and delivery policies.
  Publishing these builds trust and transparency with your customers making them more likely to complete their transaction.

• It
  reduces the number of pre and post-sales emails and phone calls you
  will receive because it allows customers to find answers to their own
  questions, thus saving you money on customer service staff.

• It simply works.
  You fill out a few fields on your store’s setting page and you
  instantly have a knowledge base integrated into your store. There’s no
  HTML to fiddle with because the products were built to work together.

See How Easy It Is to Integrate

Watch a demo video (7:37)
showing how easily it is to integrate Interspire Knowledge Manager into
your Interspire Shopping Cart-powered store. It takes about 5 minutes
because the products were built to work together.

If you have any questions or would like to schedule a personalized demonstration, please contact us.

The main focus of version 4 was to make it even easier for anyone to sell online, regardless of technical ability. We also wanted to increase the number of different industries which could use Interspire Shopping Cart to sell online. We’ve done that by including features specific to different industries, as shown in the feature list below.

Version 4 is available for purchase from our web site right now and includes the following new features:

• Ability to add/edit orders in the control panel
• Ability to add/edit customers in the control panel
• Support for 20+ new payment gateways (see the list)
• Bulk/quantity discounts on a per-product level
• The ability to mark individual items in an order as shipped one at a time
• Gift wrapping and the ability to choose if individual products support it
• Ability to upload an image and/or type text into a box when adding a product to your cart (for custom t-shirts, etc)
• Line item shipping (option for different shipping addresses for each item in the cart)
• 10 new, industry-specific store templates
• Ability to tag products with keywords and view the tag cloud on the front end
• Product variations can now edited once created and are 5x faster
• RoyalMail shipping integration
• Customers can add a note when placing an order
• Improved QuickBooks support and synching
• Login as a customer from the control panel
• UPS Online tools shipping quotes
• Delayed authorized/capture for Authorize.net and PayPal

New Store Designs

As usual, we’ve also been busy working on new store designs. Version 4 includes 10 new designs, which of course can be downloaded from your store’s control panel after installing/upgrading to version 4:

Software

Gadgets

Fashion (Jewelery)

Skincare

Office

Luggage

Watches

Kitchenware

Nightwear

Shoes

Increased Product Limits

With the release of version 4.0 we’ve also substantially increased the number of products you can add to your store in each edition:

• Starter edition has increased from 50 to 100 products
• Professional edition has increased from 500 to 5,000 products
• Ultimate edition has increased from 100,000 to unlimited products

Existing customers can simply get their new license key from the client area and paste it into the license key field on the Settings -> Store Settings page of their shop’s control panel to immediately increase their product limit!

How to Upgrade

Existing Interspire Shopping Cart customers will receive version 4 as a free upgrade. To upgrade, follow these steps:

1. Download version 4 from the client area
2. Backup your existing store files to your computer using an FTP client
3. Upload the version 4 files over your existing files
4. Go to www.yourstore.com/admin and the upgrade wizard will start
5. Click the “Start Upgrade” button to upgrade your store

Please note: Version 4 includes significant changes to template files.
You *MUST* update your templates files for all new features to function
correctly.

How to Purchase

You can learn more about our e-commerce software on our website and also see pricing or purchase online.

This new version marks a significant step in our product strategy, turning the product from a simple web-based, self-service FAQ system into a fully-featured, enterprise-grade knowledge management tool which can be used to reduce customer support, share company-wide knowledge and reduce staff training costs.

New features in version 5.0 include:

• Microsoft SQL Server support
• Complete workflow support
• Integrated news posting and syndication
• Index and search inside attachments (Word, PowerPoint – XP/2003/3007, PDF, etc)
• Staff contribution reports
• and many more features

You can learn about the new features by watching the product overview tour. Existing customers can upgrade from the upgrade page or from the “Download Products” page in the client area.

If you have any questions or would like to schedule a personalized demo, please contact us.

Today we’ve launched ideas.interspire.com where anyone can post an idea or feature request for any of our products. You can also view existing ideas (which we’ve added to get the ball rolling), vote on them and leave comments.

We already have quite an open dialogue with thousands of customers via the phone, email and forum, but ideas.interspire.com will be the one central place where you can “officially” log your feedback for everyone – both us and our customers and website visitors to see.

The features you request and vote on will be used as the basis of future releases of all of our products, and even the direction we travel in as a company, so feel free to contribute – we really want to hear what’s on your mind.

http://ideas.interspire.com

As we wind up building features for the upcoming release of Interspire Shopping Cart 4.0, I thought I’d take a few minutes to give you a quick overview of some of the new features you can expect with this release. Our aim with version 4.0 is to include new features which we feel will make it even easier to map our shopping cart with your business processes across an even wider range of industries.

We’ve also focused heavily on including support for as many different payment/checkout providers as we can.

Payment Providers

Let’s start with the new payment providers integrated into version 4.0:

• Amazon Flexible Payments
• Amazon.com SimplePay
• Beanstream
• Camtech
• Cardservice International
• ChronoPay API
• ChronoPay Hosted Page
• Cybersource
• E-Xact
• HSBC Secure ePayments
• Innovate Gateway
• MIGS
• MoneyBookers
• MyVirtual merchant
• NetBanx
• Netbilling
• NetRegistry
• NoChex
• Payment Express Pay
• Payment Express Post
• PayPal Payflow Links
• PayPal Website payments pro
• PayLeap
• PayStation
• Plug N Play
• Protx VPS direct
• PSIGate.com
• Quantum Gateway
• Realex
• SecurePay Australia (formerly CamTech)
• USA ePay

New Features

Version 4.0 will be a major upgrade and will be provided free to all existing Interspire Shopping Cart customers. We have managed to include an astounding number of new (and highly requested) featres in the 4.0 release, as shown below:

• Line item shipping (option for different shipping addresses for each item in the cart)
• Ability to tag products with keywords and view the tag cloud on the front end
• Gift wrapping and the ability to choose if individual products support it
• The ability to mark individual items in an order as shipped one at a time
• Product variations can now handle dozens of combnations and have been rewritten to be faster
• Ability to upload an image or type text into a box when adding a product to your cart (for custom t-shirts, etc)
• Ability to add/edit customers in the control panel
• Bulk/quantity discounts on a per-product level
• RoyalMail shipping integration

New Store Templates

Version 4.0 will include a minimum of 5 (we’re aiming for 10) new store templates, all created by our design team. Some screenshots of store templates which have already been built and tested are shown below:

The “Luggage” store template

The “Office” store template

The “Software” store template

Multi-Vendor Edition

To coincide with the version 4.0 launch, we will also be releasing a multi-vendor edition of Interspire Shopping Cart. The multi-vendor edition allows one store to sell products from multiple vendors, and each vendor can manage their own products, inventory, process their own orders, etc.

The multi-vendor edition includes a granular vendor-level permissions system, per-vendor reporting and accounting features, powerful per-vendor shipping zone setup and customization, vendor profiles and more. We will be posting more information regarding the multi-vendor edition as we get closer to the 4.0 release in October. If you have any questions until then please contact Vadim Geller, our enterprise sales manager at vadim.geller@interspire.com

Conclusion

As you can see, version 4.0 is going to be one of our biggest releases yet, and it will cap off what has been a great year for Interspire Shopping Cart. In only 14 months we’ve built, released and continue to refine ecommerce software that blows competing shopping carts out of the water in terms of speed, features and ease-of-use – and that’s not my personal opinion. That comes from the mouths of industry veterans, tech reporters and bloggers who keep posting great reviews both online and offline, and also from the dozens of unsolicited customer testimonials we receive every day.

We’re hoping to launch version 4.0 in October, however because it is such a big release, the date will of course depend on when we finish our testing and when we feel the 4.0 release is up to the usual quality of any new release we make available.

If you have any questions about 4.0 please feel free to leave them below and either myself or someone else will be happy to help.

John Maxwell is an internationally recognized leadership expert, speaker, and author whose books have sold over 16 million copies worldwide.  We’re very pleased, and very impressed that his team chose the leading ecommerce application available today to deliver his  books, CDs, and merchandise to his wide audience.

Below is a screenshot of the JohnMaxwell.com storefront.  Click on the image to get a first hand look at the beautiful design, layout and functionality of Interspire Shopping Cart in a live setting.

The new design was put in place to help communicate Interspire’s new branding and color scheme, as well as to more accurately position Interspire as a modern, fast-moving software company – and also because our old design was due for an extreme makeover.

If you have any feedback about our new website design we’d love to hear it. Please feel free to leave a comment below, and I hope you enjoy the new, slicker Interspire.com web site.

P.S. If the website looks a bit strange, you will need to clear your web browser’s cache. To do that just press Ctrl+F5 together or hold the Ctrl/Option key (Mac) when clicking the refresh icon in your browser.

• Ability to send a note with an order when it’s placed
• Images for categories and brands
• Ability to hide empty categories on the front-end category menu
• Ability to make notes on a customer & order in the control panel
• An option to move the “Add to Cart” panel to the middle of the products page
• Ability to show a quantity box on the add to cart panel
• Bulk order status change from the control panel
• Add the “Add to cart” button to each product on the home page, category pages, etc.
• Unlimited custom fields when adding/editing a product
• The option to choose if tax is based on shipping or billing address
• VCS payment gateway (South Africa)

Existing customers can download the update from the client area. All new customers of course will receive version 3.6 immediately after purchase.

Frequency and subscription

• Never send an email to someone that won’t be expecting to get an email from you. Make sure all your sign ups are clear and are double opt in
• Make sure you regularly (7 or 8 days after every send to allow for delivery attempts to non existent domains) remove emails from your list that are bouncing or you may end up sending to spam traps
• Send a smaller email weekly rather than a large one monthly. This will allow you to keep your list more up to date and will keep your newsletters as something expected to your users and less likely to be marked as spam. Smaller emails are also easier for your customers to skim amongst their other emails.
• Always include an unsubscribe link in your emails
• Test and make sure the unsubscribe link actually works. If the unsubscribe returns an error they may just mark you as junk instead of letting you know it’s broken
• Never try to hide who the email is coming from
• Make sure who the email is coming from is going to be who the subscribers expects it to be coming from
• Make the unsubscribe process easier than the subscribe process

Server Setup

• Ensure your mail server is not an open relay – Wikipedia has some information on what this means and you can test this here.
• Ensure that postmaster@yourdomain.com and abuse@yourdomain.com go to someone that can and will actually do something about complaints
• Make sure your forward and reverse dns for your mail server match up
• Ensure your email server is not listed on any RBL (realtime black lists)
• Setup SPF for you domain so that other people have a harder time pretending to be you. This can also help with Hotmail deliverability (SenderID actually but in most cases it works out to the same thing)
• Setup domainkeys to help with deliverability to Yahoo mail accounts
• Some web mail systems (e.g. Hotmail) base (at least in part) junk filtering on the reputation of your ip address. If you have only just gotten an IP and are getting filtered to the junk then you may need to build up reputation as a legitimate mailer before you stop getting filtered to the junk mail folder
• DKIM will become more important in the future but for now (July 2007) it doesn’t seem to be used by anyone
• Ensure that you send from a domain which actually has MX records setup in DNS and that each mail server listed will accept mail for the domain you are sending from

Email content and design

• A pretty email is nice to look at but the most important thing is getting your information to your subscriber so don’t get too fancy with the design. Lots of design elements will get stripped out by mail clients and Outlook 2007 will display hardly any of them
• Don’t use spam like words and phrases in your email
• If you include a text part (and you should) be sure to have the content of that be a true text representation of the text in the html version
• Don’t include too many images in your email (1-2 per email should suffice) or some filters will flag it
• Don’t use a similar colour for your text as the background it is on (e.g. medium gray text on light gray background) or some filters will see that as trying to hide text
• Don’t use images or send attachments that are too large. 300Kb should be the absolute max size of the email so be sure to make sure the total for images and attachments comes in well under that (adding a file to an email will increase the size by about 30% just in encoding it) so you need to take that into consideration too
• Make sure the content of the email is what the subscriber signed up to receive. Don’t send them emails about sprockets if they only wanted to know about cogs.
• Don’t include a single large image in your email if you can avoid it since this is how most spam nowadays seems to operate

Feedback

• There are several feedback loops and whitelists that you can signup for such as the following which you should use to monitor your complaint rates and make sure you aren’t hitting any spam traps
  • Hotmail JMR loop
  • Hotmail SDNS
  • AOL Feedback loop
  • AOL Whitelist
  • United online feedback loop

Guidelines

• Some mail services publish guidelines that should be adhered to

One of the first steps we’ve taken to make our products more open is the launch today of the Interspire Developer Network. Built by developers, for developers, the Interspire Developer Network:

• Provides API documentation along with examples for our products. Interspire Email Marketer’s API documentation is the first to be published.
   
• Shows partners, designers and developers everything they need to know to private label (here and here) and customize the templates for our products (here and here)
   
• Contains blogs by our developers and a community forum where developers can discuss API integration, design and customization, etc

The two most popular API articles so far are the Interspire Shopping Cart template customization guide and the Interspire Email Marketer API guide. If you’re a developer then please also feel free to leave comments and ask questions at the bottom of articles in the Interspire Developer Network.

This is the first of many initiatives on our “operation integration” checklist for the rest of the year. We will be making some major announcements in the coming months regarding integration and interoperability so stay tuned.

As our existing customers know, we very rarely provide discount coupons so if you’ve been considering purchasing a copy of Interspire Shopping Cart then now would be a great time to do so!

The new store designs cover a wide range of industries and are of course easy to customize with drag and drop design mode as well as the built-in logo editor.

The new store designs are shown below. Click on an image to see the larger version:

Adventure

Arts & Crafts

Body Building

Cosmetics

Flowers

Garden

Gifts

Handbags

Jewelery

Sunglasses

Wine

Interspire Shopping Cart now comes with over 30 professionally crafted store designs and we will of course continue to add more over the coming weeks and months. You can see the complete list of included store designs here.

The case study surveys are short and take just a few minutes to fill out.

If you’re an Interspire Email Marketer customer, please fill out this survey.
If you’re an Interspire Knowledge Manager customer, please fill out this survey.

Based on the responses we will then contact a handful of selected customers for a more in-depth Q&A session which will then be developed into a case study.

Thank you in advance for your help.

• Candles
• Coffee
• Computers
• Copywriting services
• Furniture
• T-shirts
• Toys
• Watches
• Adult products
• Italian foods
• Building supplies

We’ve had many customers send in testimonials telling us that they’re now:

• On the front page of Google
• Running a store that loads extremely fast
• Attracting more visitors
• Processing orders in half the time

… because they’ve switched to Interspire Shopping Cart. We’re currently working on some case studies with our customers and they will be published shortly. If you’d like your store featured in our live stores directory, you can submit it here.

Version 3.5 includes the following features:

• Single page checkout
• Google checkout
• Shipping zones
• Shipping cost estimates
• QuickBooks sync
• Apple iPhone support
• Multi-level categories on the menu
• Copying a product
• Live chat integration
• Public wishlists
• New payment methods (PayPal PayFlo Pro, Rabo iDeal, eSelect Plus Direct Post)
• Developer documentation

Watch this video for a guided tour of the new features in version 3.5.

New Store Designs

Version 3.5 includes three new store designs: outdoor adventure, arts & crafts and jewelery: They can be downloaded into your store from the Store Design > Download Store Designs tab in your store’s control panel.

How to Upgrade

Existing customers can upgrade to version 3.5 for free from the client area – simply follow these instructions to upgrade. If you haven’t yet purchased you can see pricing here.

We are planning to release more features for the Apple iPhone in future versions, including the ability to purchase through an iPhone-specific store design. So far we’ve built the features below, which will be released in the 3.5 upgrade next week:

• Login to your store’s control panel
• View, filter and search orders by keyword/status
• Page through hundreds/thousands of orders
• Change the status of an order (to shipped, awaiting shipping, etc)
• Update and view order tracking numbers
• View and reply to order messages
• Touch “Map this” to load an order’s billing or shipping address into Google Maps on the iPhone
• Touch the customer’s email address to send them an email from your iPhone
• Touch the customer’s phone number to call them from your iPhone

Watch the video below and feel free to leave a comment. The video was recorded in Safari but we will be uploading one recorded using the iPhone emulator shortly.

Because the video was recorded in a smaller canvas than YouTube likes, as soon as it starts playing simply drag the progress bar back to the beginning to fix the incorrect scaling of the video.

Watch the video here.