After putting in place a well-developed marketing plan and generating traffic to your landing page or website, the next step is to turn your online prospects into customers. Improving your online conversion rate is a two-part process.

Improve targeted traffic

Before you make changes to the conversion tools on your website or landing page, it’s important to improve the quality and/or relevance of your in-bound traffic. Attracting the right people to your website is critical to increasing conversions at a lower cost. Begin by evaluating your lead sources and determine the alignment of your prospects with your product.

You can determine what traffic is best aligned with your products and services by carefully analyzing your Google Adwords campaigns. With the proper conversion tracking in place, it’s easy to determine which keywords are generating sales (as opposed to generating clicks alone). Focus on expanding your top converting keywords and driving truly interested prospects to your landing pages.

Take advantage of conversion tools

Once you’ve begun to attract the right prospects, you need to focus on converting them. The fastest way to improve conversion is through testing various landing pages. If you have the technology to rotate landing pages (a process we call “split testing”), then you can learn quickly what page has the highest conversion rate. If you are limited to testing one page at a time, run each landing page for a week and measure the results. Your data won’t be as accurate but it can certainly point you in the right direction.

Another method for improving on-site conversions is to use an automated touch program. With this technique, you can use an auto-responder that gives site visitors an opportunity to reconnect with your business.

One example would be an abandoned shopping cart campaign. If users begin the purchase process (and have given you their email) but fail to complete the process, an auto-responder can be used to send an email message within minutes or hours, inviting them back to complete the purchase – perhaps with a discount or other incentive. You can use email best practices to enhance conversion, and touch visitors numerous times to move them through the purchase decision process.

In addition to targeting visitors who have started a purchase, you can also use an auto-responder for visitors who sign up to receive valuable information from your website. Perhaps they sign up for your newsletter, free lessons, or a whitepaper. Once a person has registered, the auto responder goes to work, sending appropriate emails at set intervals. The result is a communications channel that was previously unavailable to you. Work on improving conversion of your automated touch program by testing both the content and the timing of messages.

By using the techniques of better targeting, improving landing page conversion rates, and using auto-responders you can significantly enhance the performance of your online marketing campaigns. Plan your programs carefully, measure performance and make appropriate adjustments. Over time, your results just might surprise you.

When you launch a new E-commerce web site above all else there is one thing you need to be ready to face: Customers.

That might sound like a “Duh-uh” comment, but not every E-commerce operator is as prepared as they should be when their new store goes online and the first order (or ten or fifty orders) appears in their control panel. Turning those early orders into happy customers sometimes proves an unexpected challenge for even experienced retail business people.

Preparing a new online store for operation demands a lot of attention. If you’re not organized in advance, small details can be left undone. And it only takes a couple of small details to add up to a bigger problem.

Orders aren’t secrets

Does everyone in your organization who you plan to have ‘in the loop’ have the appropriate access to your store’s control panel? For single-person operations it’s not a big deal, but in a larger business all of the people involved need to be able to see their part of the puzzle. For general site security, it’s not a good idea to distribute the main administrative login credentials to everybody – so the people who will be responsible for processing and fulfilling orders (and any other store-related functions) need to have separate login accounts that allow them access only to the functions they need.

A quick note: If third-party sources like drop-shippers or fulfillment services are critical to your operation, DO NOT depend entirely upon store-generated e-mails to deliver order information to them. If possible, they should have their own console access to the information they need and a protocol in place for regular account service. If that can’t be arranged, you should at the very least follow up by phone call to check on a summary of all orders placed each day.

Plan for the best

Are the items you have for sale actually ready to be sold? Do you (or your fulfillment partner) have your products in stock and do you have procedures in place for shipping? You and your staff need to be prepared for orders, just like a retail business has to be ready when the first customer walks through the door.

Take a moment to think about what would happen if you got 100 orders on your first day online. You’re tempted to think “that would be a great problem to have” – but I’ll point out that it IS a problem if you’re not prepared. If you can’t process orders accurately and ship products quickly, customer enthusiasm (and orders) might drain away before you know it – and then you’ll have a long haul to regain their confidence.

Get coordinated

Ideally, your site’s E-commerce engine will have features designed to interact with the systems you use for inventory management and customer care. Very expensive solutions may have some of these systems built in, but that’s atypical. E-commerce programmers tend to concentrate on E-commerce, and build in the common data interfaces that you need to exchange information with ‘off line’ programs dedicated to inventory, bookkeeping and marketing.

If you run a retail business in addition to an E-commerce site, then coordinating customer information becomes a more critical process. Centralizing contact information and purchase histories can be very helpful in the development of successful online marketing campaigns.

What would you do if the computer system storing your customer records or sales information suffered a hard drive failure or other catastrophic event that caused it to lose all of its stored data? Would your business be able to continue operating? Could you continue to market, advertise and fulfill orders?

With the growing value of data as a money-making asset, today’s businesses must face the challenge of protecting and maintaining their important information in the most efficient, cost-effective manner possible. To meet this challenge, business owners need to carefully define their business requirements and recovery objectives and then decide on the right backup and recovery technologies to deploy.

Here is a quick look at some important statistics gathered from a variety of information technology industry studies:

• 25% of all personal computer users suffer from data loss each year.
• 70% of small business firms that experience a major data loss go out of business within one year.
• 15% of all laptop computers are either stolen or suffer hard drive failures.
• Data recovery and productivity loss due to data loss cost US businesses nearly $12 billion in 2008.
• 96% of all business workstations are not configured for any kind of data backup.

Make no mistake about it: If your small business depends on data to make money, you need to have in place a system of regular data backups. Maintaining consistent, verified backups may add a little to the cost of ownership for your data systems, but in the long run failure to keep your data properly backed up can expose your business to even higher costs. Consider the following…

According to the National Computer Security Association, on average it takes:

• 19 days and $17,000 to recreate just 20 MB of lost sales/marketing data
• 21 days and $19,000 to recreate 20 MB of lost accounting data
• 42 days and $98,000 to recreate 20 MB of lost engineering data.

Data backups aren’t necessarily expensive – especially compared to the costs associated with data recovery and lost productivity. The catch is that there’s no such thing as a “one size fits all”  solution that can work for every business in every circumstance.

If you need help creating a backup plan for your business – or if you have questions or concerns about your current backup plans – please feel free to contact the data management experts at DataOne Networks (www.dataonenetworks.com).

How important to the success of your E-commerce site is your choice of hosting service? Pause for a moment and consider: Without reliable and secure web hosting, you don’t have an E-commerce site in the first place.

The standard talking points of uptime and cost aren’t entirely unimportant to your site’s hosting equation, obviously. Server uptime is a central consideration – but technology has progressed to the point that almost any service that manages to stay in business can claim impressive uptime statistics. Even more important to an E-commerce operation is the host’s error rate and error handling process.

E-commerce stores seldom ‘crash’ these days – but if they’re improperly (or inattentively) hosted, they may throw critical errors that prevent your customers from completing their transactions. An experienced E-commerce host should have a very low error rate, and should also have a process in place for flagging errors when they do occur so that their technical staff can quickly run them down and correct them.

The simplest way to avoid a slew of technical issues is to select a service that has experience in hosting other stores that run the same E-commerce engine as yours. That insures that their hosting supports both your store’s chosen development language (such as ASP or PHP) and any specific server-side components that your E-commerce engine may require.

It’s a mistake that’s more common than you think. I am frequently contacted by customers AFTER they have signed up for some sort of hosting account – and more often than not, it’s a hosting account that won’t support much in the way of E-commerce and doesn’t offer advanced security features. Essentially, they’ve wasted their money because the hosting they’ve paid for won’t work for their business.

Be careful out there

Security is an equally important concern. Ideally, your hosting company will be in compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard – a security protocol that establishes hosting requirements for network security mechanisms, data handling and storage and the handling of security certificates and encryption. All but the very smallest E-commerce stores should be hosted in an environment that maintains store data on a separate database server isolated from the actual ‘web’ server that is open to traffic from the Internet. This arrangement makes it very difficult for any type of security intrusion to gain access to your customer information or any other sensitive business information in your store’s databases.

A quick side note: You should NEVER maintain customer credit-card information or other sensitive personal data (like Social Security numbers) in your store’s databases. Even in the most secure hosting environment this is an enormous financial liability for your business, and it’s a business practice that needlessly exposes your customers to identity theft and/or financial fraud. In fact, hosting companies that adhere to the requirements of the PCIDSS won’t allow retention of such sensitive information on their servers.

The personal touch

Finally, one of the biggest differences between ‘budget’ hosting and a full-service hosting company is the level of support that they provide. Your E-commerce site is a money-making operation, and you should select a host that treats your company’s bottom line as a priority. With a good hosting partner you shouldn’t need a lot of technical intervention, but when you do you should be able to contact a technician personally in order to get your questions resolved. A good E-commerce hosting partner will also have procedures in place to monitor your site for errors and correct them quickly when they occur.

More than anything else, when you pay for a ‘premium’ hosting partner most of what you’re paying for is that personal level of service. Since the difference in cost between budget and full-service hosting is frequently less than $60-$70 a month, that seems like sort of a business no-brainer to me.

One of the big advantages to a stand-alone E-commerce solution is that a skilled developer can completely customize both the design and the programming to suit your specific business requirements. No two businesses are run exactly the same way. This means that they frequently have demands that simply can’t be satisfied within the limits of a one-size-fits-all solution. An E-commerce project has the highest chance for success when it can be adapted to your existing business practices, instead of requiring that your business practices adapt to your web site.

With a stand-alone E-commerce web site you’re generally letting yourself in for more work. A LOT more work. That’s why stand-alone sites truly aren’t a suitable solution for every small business. If you plan a very small online inventory and can be satisfied with minimal-to-basic marketing tools, then a hosted solution may be the best route to take.

More may not always be better

A stand-alone site will give you more tools and deeper resources, but none of that comes without a price tag. The differences in capabilities between hosted and stand-alone solutions can be substantial and so can the differences in their project costs. In fact, just the licensing expense for a good stand-alone E-commerce engine will usually outstrip the amount a small business can expect to pay for the complete setup of a hosted solution. By the time you add in custom design costs, programming modifications, SEO work and a few other project line-items, you’re likely looking at a significantly higher initial investment.

A stand-alone solution may also appear daunting to you if you run a business with limited personnel and/or time resources. A custom, stand-alone E-commerce project begins life as pretty much a blank slate. As the project progresses you work with your developer to fill in the slate’s open spaces with your business vision and their E-commerce experience. This takes time, thought and communications – which may be something you don’t have much opportunity to spare from running your day-to-day operation.

Most E-commerce engines are designed to include powerful tools intended for dedicated E-commerce, so they also carry a higher learning curve and require more time to manage to their full capability. No doubt, one of the primary reasons for the failure of many E-commerce sites is the inability of the site owner to commit the appropriate amount of time and effort to the store’s management and upkeep.

But frequently, more IS better

However, none of that is to say that even the smallest business can’t realize the maximum return from a stand-alone E-commerce site. Many very successful E-commerce sites are operated by one- or two-person businesses.

Stand-alone E-commerce solutions are entirely open-ended. There are no restrictions placed on the size of your store’s inventory, the amount of traffic you receive or the number of customer accounts you maintain. The company that hosts your E-commerce site may have several different service rates that scale according to the server resources you demand (i.e. more disk space for images or more bandwidth for higher traffic), but those service fee differences are generally negligible until your site begins to attract traffic of epic proportions – at which point you won’t be a ‘small’ business, anyway.

A good stand-alone E-commerce engine is designed with powerful marketing and customer-loyalty tools built-in. It’s also built around industry-standard database technology that is open to custom programming and interfaces with common CRM and marketing applications. The database belongs entirely to your business – it’s not built on some shared data platform – and you have complete control over how your customer data is handled for marketing, privacy and security.

Stand-alone E-commerce sites offer better search visibility and are more open to search engine optimization than hosted solutions. For a business with serious marketing ambition, that’s enough of a deciding factor on it’s own merit. If your site can’t be found easily through search, all of your other marketing efforts aren’t likely to make up the difference. Your store’s customer base is built from your site traffic, and the best way to drive traffic is through search results.

The beginning of a new year is always a good time to devote a little bit of thought to how you want to improve your business and productivity technology in the months ahead. You don’t really need to come up with a set of Technology New Year’s Resolutions, mainly because resolutions are, by rule, made to be broken. But wouldn’t it help to have a simple plan for making a few improvements or easy changes that can lead to safer, more productive computing for your business in 2013?

I don’t mean major tech projects like installing a new office network or buying a fleet of new desktops for the staff. Budget-intensive initiatives like those need to be part of your fiscal planning process. There are plenty of inexpensive — even free — things that you can do within your existing infrastructure to improve the impact of technology on your business’ bottom line. Here are a couple of examples.

Anti-Virus Checkup

Ideally, you should have an annual anti-virus update already on your busy business calendar — assuming, of course, that you have anti-virus software installed on every machine. If you don’t have anti-virus software in place, or you don’t regularly renew software and update virus definitions, there’s no time to waste. The start of a new year is a great time to start new security habits.

Your anti-virus checkup now needs to include software for your Mac computers, mobile computing devices and smart phones as well. Android devices received the most attention from malware in 2012, according to this report  from Kaspersky Lab, but other mobile operating systems were also the targets of malicious code.

Password Refresh

Network login, office email, web-based CRM, Gmail account, Dropbox, Twitter, phone apps, iCloud, Facebook, Steam, Pinterest, online banking, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Pandora, Xbox Live, AOL. Just to name a few. How many different user accounts do you have that require a password to login? More importantly, on how many of those sites and applications do you use the same username and password? Maybe it’s time to spread around some updated passwords to help protect your most valuable digital information from hacking.

As you can discover with only a little bit of reading, the online, cloud-powered, password-protected digital ecosystem we build around ourselves is inter-related as never before. A determined hacker who gains access to just one of your important accounts can use that access to basically destroy your digital existence  —  everything from emptying your bank account to bricking your smartphone. Maintaining an armada of unique, strong passwords across all of your logins isn’t the easiest thing to do (and even that won’t provide complete protection), but when the alternative is the risk of seeing all of your accounts blown up, it just might be worth the effort.

When a small business owner makes the decision to enter into the world of E-commerce, the first decision that confronts them is usually whether they need to build a stand-alone E-commerce web site or sign-on with a hosted application provider like Magento or BigCommerce.

Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages. What the small business owner has to decide is which method of online selling will provide the most value and return on investment. Today I’ll take a closer look at the plus and minus columns for online storefronts based on hosted applications.

The immediate advantage: Easy startup

Likely the first thing that will get you to take a closer look at a hosted E-commerce solution is the initial cost to get started. Typically, hosted E-commerce that’s aimed at the small business market will have a fairly low startup cost compared to the expense of developing a custom E-commerce web site.

Depending on the provider (and the cost), the startup fee will either give you access to a set of design templates that you can roughly customize through some sort of setup ‘wizard’ or it may buy you some time (usually a few hours) to work with an account specialist who can customize the store template for you.

Additional elements of the setup (including product entry) are typically wizard-driven, which means you don’t need any specialized knowledge of development languages like HTML in order to get your store running. You may need some patience to work step-by-step through multiple setup routines, but otherwise there’s no rocket science involved.

Hosted applications also offer simpler and less expensive payment options. Most of them will process payments for you, which means you don’t have to purchase a security certificate or sign up for a payment gateway account. In some cases you may not even need a merchant banking account.

The monthly bill

Of course, those payment services aren’t free. Hosted application providers charge a higher monthly fee than you’ll pay for almost any stand-alone hosting. Your essentially renting an E-commerce engine and a payment platform. Also be aware that some providers charge you a small percentage of your store sales in addition to their monthly fee, while others may have an escalating fee structure that’s based on either your sales volume or the scope of your store inventory.

It’s a moderate plus that your store is automatically updated with the newest features as the provider develops them – although the flip side is that you have no choice to opt-out of application upgrades that you think may not benefit your business.

Although it’s largely an aesthetic issue, the heavily template-driven nature of hosted applications makes your site design difficult (if not impossible) to customize in any large measure. That’s not to say all stores based on a specific application look alike, but if you want a unique design or specific ‘look’ then hosted E-commerce may not be the best solution.

Competitive disadvantages

To my way of thinking, the biggest disadvantage is that hosted E-commerce applications don’t provide you with all of the tools you need to give your site a competitive edge in the very crowded Internet marketplace.

Most hosted applications provide search visibility that’s mediocre at best, and they don’t give you many options for enhancing the site’s search optimization. In some cases you may be able to pay the application provider (or a skilled developer) for additional search engine optimization – but a good stand-alone E-commerce engine should have a lot of useful SEO tools built-in that you can make use of yourself.

In addition, hosted applications offer fairly limited sets of marketing tools and are usually difficult to interface with external CRM or marketing software suites. Some offer ‘advanced’ marketing features for an additional fee but – again – these are all features that should be included in the basic functionality of any good stand-alone E-commerce engine. Stand-alone sites that are built around industry-standard SQL databases are typically very open to a variety of data interchanges, while hosted application sites generally use more proprietary data structures that aren’t as open (or aren’t open at all) to advanced development work.

Translating your E-commerce idea from concept into reality requires an investment of time, money and resource. For the small-business entrepreneur, a first-time E-commerce project can generate a few unpleasant budget surprises.

Some of your project’s budget elements may be self-evident, but a few are less obvious. An experienced and reputable E-commerce developer should work through a complete ‘first year’ budget with you before your project begins. In addition to the one-time development costs associated with getting your site built, tested and functioning properly there are continuing costs that should figure into your long-term calculations of profitability.

Here are six of the primary budget elements you need to consider when planning your E-commerce project:

1. Web site design and development. This is the most obvious budget element, and often it’s the only cost item many people are thinking about when they ask “How much will my E-commerce site cost?” Naturally, the development cost of your project will depend upon the scope and complexity of your site. The development cost should also include the cost of your E-commerce engine.

(Please note that I don’t use the term ‘shopping cart software’. If you want your online store to be successful in today’s competitive marketplace, your selected E-commerce application should be much more than a simple ‘shopping cart’. It should include tools that allow you to manage customer loyalty functions, maintain customer relations and share information with all of your online marketing programs.)

2. Photography and other artwork. Your company’s logo and the photos used on your various pages are important pieces of your web site’s graphic appeal. If your company doesn’t yet have a logo, you should strongly consider making the investment in having one created as part of your overall marketing plan.

In addition, note that the photos and images used on your site aren’t necessarily ‘free’. In order to avoid legal issues, most development companies will only use images that are either original images (photos or graphics) provided by the customer or images licensed for a fee from graphic services. If you’re not planning to take your own product photography, then you either need to arrange for approved use of images provided by a manufacturer/distributor or budget to acquire original product images from a professional photographer.

3. Data entry and data management. How many products are you selling online, and who’s going to enter product information into your E-commerce database? While most developers will provide data entry services at additional cost, many will offer you the option of entering production information into your E-commerce database yourself in order to reduce project cost. Entering your own product information is a good way to learn the ropes of your site’s management console, but it can be a bit time-consuming – so be prepared. If your product information is available in an organized electronic format (such as a database or an Excel spreadsheet), your developer may also offer programming services to import the information into your new E-commerce database.

You also need to budget staff time (or developer support time) for continuing maintenance of your product information and customer/sales data. E-commerce engines usually provide you with plenty of tools for maintaining your store; all you have to do is plan for the time you’ll need to keep everything up-to-date.

4. Web site hosting and security. There are a lot of ‘budget hosting’ services that can seem pretty attractive at first blush, but in the world of E-commerce hosting you usually get what you pay for. When your web site IS your business, you need uptime, service and data security and you would do well to pay a premium to get them. Inexpensive hosting services may have good uptime records in general, but E-commerce applications can be pretty demanding. Your best bet is to find a hosting company that successfully hosts other sites running the same E-commerce engine which also offers ‘real’ technical support people (not just a ‘trouble ticket’ system) who are easy to reach. Technical experience and personalized support usually come at a premium hosting rate, but when your business is at stake it’s the only option that makes sense.

5. Web site maintenance and updates. While your E-commerce engine should provide you with the tools you need to manage your products, customer data and marketing you still need to budget for ongoing support from your developer. E-commerce applications are often updated to provide new features and improved security, and those updates typically need to be applied by a knowledgable developer. A continuing partnership with your developer is also useful in maintaining your site’s overall security and in managing your site’s long-term search engine appeal.

6. Marketing. Traffic to your new web site is not going to magically materialize. Search the Internet and you’ll find millions (if not billions) of words devoted to online marketing, but strangely enough marketing is the budget element most frequently overlooked when a business plans a new E-commerce project. There are dozens of marketing options avaialable but they all carry a cost, either in time, money or both. Your E-commerce developer should work with you to develop a marketing plan for your site – just be prepared to devote additional resources to the task of attracting customers to your online store.

Soon after you decide to add E-commerce to your small business, you may find yourself suffering from a touch of sensory overload. There are a lot of E-commerce engines, shopping cart systems and hosted storefronts vying for your attention. How do you sort through all of that to find the solution that best suits your business?

Finding the best solution is largely a matter of asking the right questions. Today I’m going to arm you with a few good questions – along with some related ‘thinking points’ – that should help you sort through all of the information and make the best possible decision. Here are five key considerations:

1. Does the E-commerce engine you’re looking at provide a first-rate shopping experience? This is the first question to ask because it’s all about your customers. The people who do business with you should be your most important concern when you start to compare E-commerce solutions. Put simply: If your web site doesn’t deliver an excellent shopping experience to your customers, nothing else will matter. Regardless of the rest of your grand business scheme, if your customers can’t find what they want, see it in detail and pay for it without pulling their hair out – chances are your site will be a flop from day one.

2. Is system management as straightforward as possible? You and your staff shouldn’t have to battle your E-commerce engine just to perform the daily tasks of online business. Not so many years ago, affordable shopping carts for small business included only very basic functions. They couldn’t track inventory, couldn’t manage quantity discounts, couldn’t handle multiple product options – some didn’t even organize products by categories. The industry has come a long way in a short time, however, so systems that provide full store management capability are now the standard.

3. Is the E-commerce engine flexible enough to accommodate changing requirements as your business grows? Right now you may only want to sell 10 items. But what happens in six months when you want to expand your online inventory to 500 items, include apparel items with multiple size and color options and offer a series of downloadable e-books about how to grow better garden vegetables? In that case, you’ll need to make sure your system can handle complex option sets and paid digital downloads. Otherwise, you may face additional development expenses just to add fairly common features to your web site.

4. Are you getting more than ‘just’ a shopping cart? This is a theme that I’ve knocked around before. It’s not so much that your E-commerce engine should have every conceivable business and marketing feature built in – but it should be able to share your valuable customer data with whatever CRM, accounting or marketing software you want to use. In addition, it should include customer loyalty tools that help you build a solid base of repeat buyers.

5. Do your business plan and your budget fit together? This question is more about controlling your own expectations than anything else. In the world of E-commerce, you usually get what you pay for. If you want your site to display a large inventory, sell customized boxes of widgets, feature separate pricing for retail and wholesale customers, give your customers reward points, perform well in the search engines, offer multiple levels of quantity discounts and ship from three different warehouses – well, you need to realize that all of those things aren’t happening on a shoestring budget. Ask questions and be a realist as you develop your business plan and your project budget side-by-side and it’s much more likely that you’ll be happy with your new E-commerce web site.

Just to prove that no aspect of online technology can sit still for any longer than a 7-year-old, last week Google launched an updated version of what it previously called its “Rich Snippet Test Tool”. As part of the deal, it’s gotten a new name — the Structured Data Testing Tool . The page is a great deal more sparse than the previous version because all of the help content has been moved to a separate page.

The testing tool continues to support markup for rich snippet search results, but now pulls out authorship markup elements as well. Note that authorship markup is a separate element from a web article’s provenance, or creative history. Establishing and maintaining a web pages’ provenance is still a hot topic amongst semantics experts, hopefully to be resolved at some point in the future.

According to Google, in addition to the more spartan page layout the new version of the testing tool:

• Improves how rich snippets are displayed to better match how they’ll appear in actual search results listings
• Is now available in languages other than English to help webmasters in non-English speaking areas produce better structured data markup

The new tool’s “cut and paste” code window now enforces a limit of 1500 characters, which is an aggravation to some developers. While the tool includes a URL interface that allows an entire page to tested, the cut and paste window is handy in cases where the page in question may not be hosted on a public web server — for example, pages that are being produced “offline” by a web developer on his local network’s web server.