Web Designing , Site Development & E-Commerce

Newsletter Marketing Services

Keep in touch with your customers.

Keep in touch with your prospects.

Educate.

What is Newsletter Marketing?

Newsletter marketing is a form of email marketing that uses electronic mail as a means of communicating a message to your target audience, customers, prospects, and the like.

Reasons to Send Out Newsletters

• Enhance your relationship with previous or present customers and encourage customer loyalty and repeat business

• Email market to your target audience and qualified prospects to get new business

• Email market to previous customers with an irresistible offer and convince them to buy something quickly

• Email market to educate your audience

• Cross promote other companies goods or promote affiliate programs

Newsletter Blasting Options

1. Email Blast with Our In-House Tools
We've had tremendous success blasting with our in-house tools. Using our in-house services will cost less and is time efficient.

2. Email Blast with 3rd Party Services
Research shows that using a 3rd party such as Constant Contact or Email Labs will reduce the chance of your email going into the SPAM box of the reader. However, the opportunity cost and dollar cost of this method vs. using our in-house tools may greatly decrease the ROI (return on investment) of your email blasts. We strongly recommend utilizing our in-house tools as they are cost effective and get the job done just as well.

Email Blast Process

• Newsletter design [HTML vs. Text]

• Design and creation of your message and goals

• Tracking integration

• Testing

• Execution

• Tracking the Results

Whatever your newsletter marketing needs, we can work with you to prepare an email list, design and craft the perfect message, and execute success email marketing and email blast campaign.

Shopping cart basics

Overview

Types of shopping carts

Choice criteria

Overview

Nowadays business needs a rapid realization of your projects and innovations. New ideas take shape with the speed of sound, and if no one have thought of the same things you do, no surprise if in a short while somebody will. In this situation your inspiration and creativity in planning your business means nothing if it takes months to perform all necessary practical steps and start making online sales. So any kind of software which is helpful in saving your time and efforts is more than welcome for those who are willing to organize their own online storefront.

It's a very important part of the whole project to select the shopping cart software. E-commerce business is much different from the traditional "off-line" trading, and your online storefront seems to be the only way to get closer with potential Internet buyers. Professional brand and image is absolutely necessary to attract your future customers. Moreover, another thing worth noticing is that as a store owner you are completely responsible for safety of customers' private data (name, physical address, personal preferences) as well as credit card numbers. Most visitors think twice before they give the credit card data and have to be sure they're dealing with a trustworthy company.

Novices making the first steps in e-commerce are aimed at the way to decrease the starting costs to minimum. Last thing the newcomers are looking forward to is spending thousands of dollars to employ a team of professional developers and make an automated shopping cart system from the ground up. It's not the one and only problem for any kind of businesses, of course; but the point we're making is that any well-thought project requires minimizing the start funds and maximizing the profit.

There's a great number of turn-key or distributed e-commerce solutions with different features ranging widely in design, security, support quality and price as well. Most web hosting services specializing in e-commerce offer their own shopping cart packages, and most of the Web development companies will also gladly make a totally customized goods based exactly on your needs and specifications. All you need to do in this case is to pay your bills and everything else will be done for you with total responsibility (including source code, security and time limits) held by the developers. Still, it's hard to expect that such service will be reasonable for small companies or for those who haven't yet got profitable offline business to gain revenue from.

Luckily, the demand for reasonable, stable and customizable shopping cart software can be satisfied. There are a number of famous open-source e-commerce products with a simple, user-friendly setup, administration and configuration. The question is which one must you decide on?

Merchant service shopping carts

One of the main needs to organize the order processing is to obtain your own merchant account and payment gateway. A merchant account allows you to process credit card transactions. As for payment gateway, it makes possible to perform this operation over a secure connection. There's no problem if you do not own a gateway or a merchant account yourself as it's possible to use the merchant account and the gateway of a merchant service shopping cart (the price in this case increases a little).

Merchant service is fine for the companies who are new in business and do not get a lot of orders. It will store and collect your clients' information and give you with the payment gateway and the merchant account. The weak sides of such an approach are the following: first of all, most of merchant services collect a setup fee around 100 or 200 USD. As for transactions, each one will cost between 40 and 80 cents plus 6-8% of the payment sum. That's quite expensive, especially comparing to the commissions you pay having your own account. Another problem is that your clients' credit card statements will contain the merchant service title but not your company name. There are cases when buyers cancel the charge as they are unable to recognize it.

Merchant service shopping carts are managed through the administration area. After login you are given with the interface to manage goods catalogue (add, remove items and edit their properties), define and change prices and so on. The HTML code generated by the card must then be inserted into the corresponding pages of your site (it could be "Buy" links or buttons near the goods descriptions or anything else). After clicking the link your visitor is redirected to the merchant's site where he is to enter personal data and credit card number.

As mentioned before, this fact indicates to the visitor that you're a small business and some clients would rather leave to some other destination instead of dealing with (and giving CC number to) an unknown company.

So it is often a better deal to obtain your own merchant account and prefer a hosted shopping cart (requiring little or no programming at all) or a fully integrated shopping cart (programming is necessary in most cases).

Hosted shopping carts

The hosted shopping cart seems to be a reasonable deal for the small and medium business with revenues of 1,000 USD/month or more not desiring or not having enough resources to buy and customize a fully integrated shopping cart for their needs. At the same time, these solutions are similar to the merchant services as they also contain an administration area where you have to enter your goods information and insert the generated HTML code into the goods pages of your website.

Still, remember that you'll have to face similar problems with the hosted carts as you would with merchant services. The visitors will be redirected to another site to fill in a form with their CC information. However, some of hosted carts give the configurable user interface so it could look the same way as your corporate sites. Some programming work may be needed still but this way your visitors could be prevented from abandoning the checkout process as the interface and color scheme stays the same.

The most important difference between these two types of shopping carts is that in case of hosted carts you're allowed to use your payment gateway and merchant account so the client's credit cart statement will contain your company title, not the title of merchant service. This can prevent numerous charge backs.

If you’re monthly revenue exceeds 1000 USD then the hosted solution may be more reasonable comparing to the merchant services. Merchant account's monthly fee is generally between 30 and 50 USD, the fee for each transaction varies from 10 to 50 cents plus 3-4% of the payment sum. The shopping cart service will also charge around 20-40 USD/month. At first sight is seems more expensive, but with increasing sales it's cheaper to pay fixed fees monthly rather than to be charged for every transaction.

Fully integrated shopping carts

The fully integrated shopping cart is the best possible decision for those who can afford it. It will have totally configurable user interface and also give you with some extended features that won't be found in other types of shopping cart software. It's possible to make discounts, allow ratings and comments from your visitors, define goods categories and subcategories, and calculate shipping costs without the need to make customer account and much, much more. Integrated carts may need some good programming skills and can be used with merchant account that you own or rent.

The shopping cart you'll select will be the serious point of your online business. The more professional your store looks, the more customers will be attracted and remain your clients for a long time. Search thoroughly before making the final decision.

Choice criteria

Overall costs

Would it be of much expense to get working shopping cart software? Of course, there is some variety of open source goods with the most up-to-date features and distributed absolutely free. But the problem with these "free" shopping carts is that they may need up to many days of setup and not too intuitive in maintenance and configuration.

Hosted or distributed solution?

There are two general choices you should consider while looking for the overall shopping cart solution. The first option is to purchase the cart script, download it and perform the setup and configuration process on your own. The second one is renting an online storefront (a hosted solution) with a very short installation period and a plain and simple configuration. The thing worth noticing with buying the script and making it work on your own is that there's only a single, one-time payment for the registration which is valid for a lifetime, so if you or some of your team has some basic programming skills this solution seems to be preferable. The same price generally has to be paid for a one-year hosted solution.

Supported payment gateways
To accept credit card payments and enable the real-time order processing it's necessary to obtain a payment gateway account. There are various details and many options described in our article "Choosing a payment gateway". Now let's only mention the fact that not all existing shopping cart software gives you with equal possibilities. Please ensure the merchant account you are going to obtain (or already have) is compatible with the selected cart. Most carts support the largest billing companies like PayPal, WorldPay, Authorize.Net, 2Checkout and some others. As for X-Cart and LiteCommerce, there's actually no trouble with that as these goods support the wide range of payment processors. The complete list of supported gateways is available for reference, and the recommended gateways list will make it easier to find a decent billing company for those who is still searching for the high-quality payment service.

Shipping
If you're going to sell physical goods, it would be a good idea to obtain a shopping cart with built-in real-time shipping cost calculation services. This way the site owner is able to define the formulas depending on which the total shipping expenses will be counted and provided to the customer during the checkout process.

Some shopping carts are also compatible with electronic goods such as software files, music, images and documents. To sell goods you should upload the file onto the server and associate goods with this file. When your customer buys electronically distributed goods he will receive an email with the download link and download key.

Support
There are various support programs offered by various companies. In the world of e-commerce solutions technical support is generally granted on a pay-per-incident basis, but a yearly or a monthly support fee is also common. Free support for this kind of goods is a rare case and not always as efficient as desired.

The pay-per-incident system has a substantial benefit over periodical support service. It allows adequately assessing the technical assistance. Moreover, since the points do not expire through time and reasonably low prices are offered it gives you an opportunity to allocate resources (money or support points balance) to get technical support anytime.

Security
The most basic feature necessary to be supported in any shopping cart is SSL (secure socket layer) with 128-bit encryption. As you have a responsibility for the storage and transfer of secure private information of your customers (credit card number, bank account etc), be sure to find out about the security technologies used in the functionality of the shopping cart you've chosen and contact the support department if necessary.

Style
Imagine if all the stores (including yours) looked similar to each other. As that wouldn't do you any good, it seems reasonable to select a cart with the customizable (preferably template-based) layout. This way you may be sure that every aspect of your store's appearance may be suited to your design and style needs and you're able to look believable. One of the most important things to do if you already have a website is to fit both layouts of a corporate site and a storefront to each other (to make a seamless transition for your customers).

Extras

Finally, let's take a look at some of the other features which might be worth considering while looking for the shopping cart that suits all of your needs.

Affiliate program: Brings benefits of "Affiliate marketing" to the promotion campaign of your store so your partners can promote your goods on their websites and get commissions.

Integration with Quick books: Some shopping carts permit direct integration with Quick books. This famous financial software helps simplify everyday office tasks and lets you focus on serving customers in your business.

Newsletters: The ability to maintain your own direct e-mail lists to help your customers stay in touch with the present updates and the latest news of your business.

Taxing: Make taxable or tax-free goods and have the ability to add various global tax options at checkout.

World Languages & Currencies: Language translation for the matters and the interface. Support for world currency might be necessary especially if you're planning to sell worldwide.

How do you develop a web site strategy? You start with the basics and work through the course. The following paragraphs define a simple and easy to follow process for strategic planning. In larger companies strategic planning is usually done by top management. In a small business, however, you should use the people most involved with the business even if they are not management.

• Identify the purpose of your web site (mission statement) - This is the statement that describes why your web site exists, i.e., its basic purpose. The statement must describe what customer needs will be met and with what services. Top-level management must develop and agree on the mission statement and the customer needs that will be addressed and services that will be given. This statement must be revisited annually to insure that the competitive climate has not changed significantly.

• Choose the goals your site should reach if it is to accomplish your mission - Goals are general statements about what you need to accomplish to meet your purpose, or mission, and address major issues facing the organization.

• Identify particular approaches or strategies that must be implemented to reach each goal. Strategies are the methods to the madness. The strategy is how you will reach your goals. Your strategy of choice will be selected based on internal and external capabilities and competitive advantages or disadvantages.

• Identify particular action plans to implement each strategy. Make a plan for each major organizational unit that moves you toward successful completion of your strategy.

• Monitor and update the plan. Measure your movement toward the successful completion of your goals.

This is the basic format for strategic planning. The details will vary for each individual web site based on their goals and the competitive environment. The important point is that the strategy you select must be aligned with your site goals. Your strategy must be the one most likely to enable you to meet those site goals.

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