I had an opportunity to meet Alex Hunter in person. I was holding an iPad and he saw it for the first time in his life, ironically, here in Croatia. Seth told the same old story, so nothing new happened for people that read his books and watched his talks. Although nothing new was learned, the experience did bring me lots of inspiration, including the inspiration for this blog post. Alex made us think what would happen if there were no new customers in the world and we’d have to use what we already have. Would you treat your customers differently? Why not do it now anyway?

A person that already bought from you and you have a way of establishing communication with this person is extremely valuable. Many online retailers might not realize this. Let’s compare a new customer with existing one.

New customer:

Costs money to be brought. You need some sort of marketing activity to bring this customer to your website.

Is on your website for the first time. This customer isn’t experienced in navigating your website and doesn’t know all the wonders your website contains.

We don’t know if he’s really interested in buying your products. He might be just a casual surfer, or exploring options, comparing prices.

Doesn’t trust you. This customer has no experience with you and isn’t sure if he can give you his money and get a good value in return (or get anything at all).

Doesn’t care about you. This customer has no relationship with you, no story to tell. Not only that this customer doesn’t care about you, but in his eyes you don’t care about this customer either (yet).

When you sum it all up, it takes a wonder for this person to buy anything from you, right? Given a better choice (whatever this customer might define as better), there’s no way this customer will buy from you.

Existing customer:

Knows your website. You can engage him with more call to actions as this customer is more experienced with your layout and knows where to find things he’s looking for.

Knows how you treated him. Let’s hope this is a positive thing in your case. This guy knows exactly what to expect from you.

Has established communication with you. In one way or another, you have made communication between you and this person possible. This means it costs no money (or less money) in marketing budget to bring him back to the website.

Trusts you enough to give you his money. He did it once, he can do it again (if he was satisfied the last time he did it).

You see, your existing customers – if treated right – are the most valuable asset your online store has. So how are you treating them? Are you struggling to make every customer’s experience a positive one? Are you answering every e-mail from your customers, replying to their tweets, commenting on their statuses? Are you creating relationships with them? Do you know who among your customers would be angry if you didn’t e-mailed them about your new product, and who among them would consider it spam? Do you have any interest in their personal life? Did you send a gift voucher or some discount to your existing customer on his birthday? Did you ask them about their shopping experience on your store and what you can do to improve it? Do you actually take action when your customers give you good advice or you just nudge your head in form of approval of their idea but never actually implement it? Can you name just 10 of your customers? Do you create content interesting to them besides your products? Do you mention them on your blog, in your tweets? Do you make them feel special? Have you met with your most loyal customer in person? How did you award your most loyal customer? Did you thank your customer last time someone told you this customer recommended you?

What if your competitors start doing this? Lets be honest, if you were a customer and someone treated you this way, would you consider them a better option?

The king is not dead, hail the new king

Don’t get things confused, Facebook is in no way a “Google killer”. It became kind of a normal thing to say in the tech industry that when a new service emerges it has to be a killer of another preexisting product or service. That point of view is completely wrong, and especially in the tech industry where completely new markets tend to be invented and evolve out of the blue. Just think of the Google’s AdWords program. It was a completely new market that didn’t exist. They invented something new and they didn’t kill anyone in the process. One could argue that in the long run it did hurt the traditional advertising, however, it’s their problem that they didn’t adopt to the new rules of marketing. An example of a giant new market that emerged from the tech industry in the even closer history would be Apple’s app store.

Facebook is becoming extremely powerful, almost as powerful as Google. Eventually (very, very soon), it will overpower the search giant. Google knew this. They could see it coming. That’s why they made several (in my opinion extremely bad attempts) at entering the world of social media. Lets just mention Orkut, Google Wave (remember this one?) and off course, their latest failure: Google Buzz.

If you can’t beat them, join them!

I believe that Facebook’s introduction of it’s newest set of social widgets a.k.a. Facebook Social Plugins (Like Button, Activity Feed, Recommendations, Like Box, Login with Faces, Facepile, Comments, and Live Stream) is the moment that marked the new age of Internet. Let’s name it “The Age of Facebook’s Omnipresence” a.k.a. “AFO“.

What’s the main difference between the pre and post AFO age of the Internet? First of all, search engines are no longer the primary source of traffic, nor they are the primary source of information. In the AFO age, users get information they probably wish to read without even searching for it. The information comes to them through their network of friends and people with similar interests they are connected with.

In the pre-AFO age, users were the one requesting information, searching for it. In the AFO age, targeted informations are broadcaster to them while they retain the ability to choose the informations they will consume and control the sources that broadcast to them.

Not everyone will accept this right now. Some giants will continue to fight the war they can not win and try to push the Facebook away from their websites, but eventually, I’m afraid their competitors who do accept Facebook’s new gifts will beat them.

A major news portal in Croatia Jutarnji.hr already made its peace with the fact that we entered the AFO. They basically gave up their comments section and implemented the Facebook comments instead. They also push their Facebook Fan page really hard on the visitors and they introduced the Like Button on their news articles. They know they can’t beat Facebook, so they decided not to fight the war at all, but join them instead. I believe this was a good call. We’ll see how will this strategy reflect their number of visitors but I can bet it will bring them a giant advantage over their competitors.

What if?

At the end, I’d like to leave you with a single thought to think about: What if Facebook decides to attack the search industry and put more resources into their web search? They are already the homepage of many and according to some sources, the most visited website in the USA. Do you think they would be able to take control of a significant share of the search industry away from the search giants? Do you think they could arrange some sort of strategic partnership with Microsoft and team up against Google on the search industry battleground?

If you liked this article, you should totally join our Facebook Fan Page, or “Like it” if you prefer the new term.

I’ve seen people that are new to the concept of inbound marketing asking questions such as: Should I use Twitter? Should I blog? Should I use social bookmarks? Facebook? LinkedIn? Directories? SEO? SEM? SMM? Conversion rate optimization?

If only they knew that the time spent on asking these questions and reading through answers could be much better used on trying these things for themselves and seeing them work in action.

ROI, ROI, ROI.

The biggest mistake is trying to measure every single one of these elements of inbound marketing separately. Why, you ask?

Because, they work together. Instead of spending ridiculous amount of time on just figuring out how are you going to measure the ROI of each of these elements and then spending lots of time on actual measurement, you should look at all of these elements as one – Inbound Marketing.

All of the elements of inbound marketing work together as one, each making others stronger and more valuable in achieving the omnipresence. Because of this complex interaction between these elements it is almost impossible to measure the actual ROI of a single element in this mix.

“What is the ROI of spending a week on calculating the ROI?” [mp3]

- David Meerman Scott

Could you measure the ROI of 10 seconds it took me to write a tweet? Sure you could, but do you really want to?

• You first need to calculate how much 10 seconds of my time are expense to the company. Then you need to take several measurable factors into equation…
• Did we receive any new followers because of this tweet?
• What’s the monetary value of this particular follower (it’s not the same if you’re followed by a person with lots of money interested in your products / services or some random folk for example).
• Did this follower just found out about our other communication channels like our blog or LinkedIn account, group etc.?
• What’s the value of that follower being there?
• … and so on…

Even if you somehow managed to take all of the possible measurable elements to calculate the ROI of me spending 10 seconds to post this tweet, it would take such a ridiculous amount of time that this kind of measurement makes no sense.

Let’s say that after you did the miracle and managed to actually accurately measure this ROI, this follower we gained brought us a few extra followers. What do you do now? You go back to your ROI spreadsheets and make corrections?

You could have a legion of mathematicians working behind an inbound marketer and they wouldn’t be able to measure 10 seconds of his work in one day.

This is why I advise you to measure the Inbound Marketing as a whole and not every element of it separately otherwise your measurements will not be accurate.

If you take home one line from this text let it be: “The goal is omnipresence.”

OK, these numbers might be a bit exaggerated but it’s the image of Twitter a normal user sees nowadays.

I’m not trying to say there is no such thing as “Social Media Expert” or that SMM doesn’t work. I’m just trying to say there is way too many of them that present themselves as the expert in social media while their accounts, actions and interactions show you the opposite.

Just to list a few titles of blog posts these guys do to give you a clear picture of what I’m talking about… A “Social Media Expert” that probably never ran a single corporate account gives you the article about:

• 10 essential Twitter tools to run a successful corporate account

Oh come on! How many tools do you need to run a Twitter account? All you need is already on the Twitter.com. You can use some sort of client if you’re going to Tweet from your mobile but that’s as far as I’d go. Most of the Twitter tools you see out there will not save you any time or make your life any easier at all. I know, trust me, I tested almost every single one of them.

Another kind of blog post titles I love seeing and laughing at:

• Get a consultant before your business fails at Twitter
• 20 reasons to hire a Social Media consultant

This is a harsh truth that no “Social Media Expert” will ever tell you:

All of these social media websites are made for users, not marketing superstars. You already posses all of the knowledge needed to run a stupid Twitter account. It’s a dead simple thing: You have a box where you put up to 140 characters and hit the “Update” button… And yet they (“Social Media Experts”) have the ability to make hundreds of articles every day about how complex this dead simple thing is.

A typical internet user is more then qualified to run your corporate Twitter account. It might take a few days before this person learns a few tricks and figure out how to gain an audience but reading hundreds of blog posts on that topic will only get this person even more confused. It will give out the impression that if they don’t follow some guidelines set by “Social Media Superstars” their business will fail at social networking.

As I said at the beginning of this article, it’s not that social media experts are useless, it’s just that most of them are not experienced in their field at all. They have great theories, but theories in this case don’t pay the bills.

The conclusion:

I’d advise you to hire a social media expert when: you need a dedicated person to run your social media accounts and work with the rest of your marketing team to fulfill your end goals.

I’d advise you not to hire a social media expert when: you think you need someone to teach you how to use Twitter.

If you like what you see, you should follow me on Twitter (and by me I mean our corporate account that I run). Thanks for the CC image left on Flickr by TheArtGuy, I made this cool image in this blog post from it.

HSoS is a spot on an URL that is most noticeable. It’s not to be confused with spot / spots that get noticed first, it’s simply a spot that stands out the most on a website, no matter how long you stay on it.

The best use for HSoS is a call to action. It sounds pretty basic thing, but I saw lots of websites that have completely useless stuff on their HSoS.

Let’s have a look at some websites that used their HSoS really well.

HubSpot’s homepage:

No matter how long you stay on the site, “Request Demo Now” button in the middle of the site remains the HSoS. They used it perfectly. They could have put just about anything there but obviously they believe that most important thing for a visitor to do when they arrive is request a demo from them.

NerdyShirts single product page:

Just look at this Buy Now call to action. It’s totally a HSoS and a really good use for one I might add. We worked on this project, there were lots of Google Website Optimizer tests performed and we’re still doing some.

Twitter:

I’m not sure if the input field or the “update” button itself is a HSoS here but in either way it’s the best possible use of HSoS for this service. Probably the most important factor of Twitter’s success was a great use of call to action in their HSoS.

How do you use your HSoS? Is there a call to action on your website that stands out the most or is there something else that occupies your HSoS?

Google’s ranking algorithm has changed so much in the past few years that SEOs that have been living under the rock for the past few years can’t optimize your site anymore. It is now a common knowledge among the real SEO professionals that ranking has been dead for a long time. Problem is, most of the clients don’t realize that and they demand a little piece of information we like to call “ranking reports“.

What client thinks when SEO gives him a ranking report:

• I am ranking number X for keyword “XYZ” on Google.

What is the actual truth:

• I am ranking number X for a keyword “XYZ” on Google when searched by “A” located in “B” with previous search history of “C” loged-in / loged-out of his / its Google account at “X” AM / PM with IP address “XXX.XXX.X.X”.
• Even in this case, a simple refresh could bring completely different set of results. If any of the parameters above change, the entire SERP can change. This brings us to conclusion that there is no such thing as ranking position nowadays.

You can be number one to some people, but when searched from a different PC in the same room you could be somewhere else. You could even be number one to someone, and after a refresh, results could change.

Ranking reports make no sense. Concentrate on your traffic reports and overall amount of traffic you receive from search engines and how well that traffic converts instead of obsessing about a nonexistent metric – ranking position.

Need help with your Magento store’s SEO? Request a quote!

I started creating two lists with our Inchoo twitter account: Magento twitter List and Inbound Marketing Twitter list. I’m accepting recommendations on which accounts should I add to the lists, please comment if you know I’m missing someone who really deserves to be there.

Here are the Magento related Twitter lists you can follow:

• highrockmedia/magento
• anderstr/magento
• iniplanet/magento
• thomas_schmidt/magento
• inchoo/Magento

Here are Inbound Marketing (SEO, SEM, SMM) Twitter lists you can follow:

• inchoo/Inbound-Marketing
• Mr603/seo-copywriting
• riksharr/social-media
• WholeMind/marketing

First thing you need to know is that meme is pronounced “meem” (/?mi?m/). Wikipedia’s definition of the term “meme” is pretty complicated so I’d define it with a bit less gobbledygook for the average Joe:

Internet meme is a piece of content that went extremely viral and is now commonly known by the vast majority of the internet population, often thanks to it’s comedic nature.

In order to understand what kind of content, how, and why creates viral success you should know bits of internet history that cover how these memes came to existence. Internet memes are the basics of viral marketing.

Thanks to Rocketboom, a widely known internet video podcast, we have detailed videos explaining some of the best known internet memes nowadays:

The Rickroll Internet Meme

All Your Base Internet Meme

Tay Zonday Internet Meme

For more internet meme explanations, visit Rocketboom’s YouTube channel.

UPDATE: You can also have a look at this awesome infographic explaining the history of “RickRolling”

Via: Online Schools

Measurement in percentage form is wrong in so many ways, let me show you an example:

Website A:

• 1000 monthly visitors
• Conversion rate 10% = 100 conversions
• Improved to 15% conversion rate = 150 conversions

Website B:

• 200 monthly visitors
• Conversion rate 10% = 20 conversions
• Improved to 50% = 100 conversions

As you can see at website B we did a miracle and made 50% of visitors convert, but website A has much more customers with much lower conversion rate. The thing is, website A for example has much bigger online presence and gains lots of visitors from social networks and referral sites that convert much less. Website B however only receives a smaller number of visitors and these are the high converting ones – targeted search engine traffic.

Although website B has much better conversion rate, we did better job with website A. This is why measuring conversion rate optimization success in percentage is pretty unfair. Basically what this means is, it’s not bad to have low conversion rate if the cause of your low conversion rate is a little bit of less targeted traffic. There’s nothing bad in receiving lots of traffic from social networks and referral websites. It will lover your conversion rate, but, it’s the money that counts, not the percentage of visitors that turned into customers.

The real problem is, the idea of conversion rate optimization is to increase website’s profit. Relying on percentage, we can actually increase conversion rate by lowering the profit of a website. Pretty stupid, right? Here is what I’m talking about:

A site gains lots of visitors from social networks. Now, we all know these visitors don’t convert as well as search engine traffic as they’re not targeted enough, but some of them still convert, right? Right. So by eliminating the use of social networks we get higher conversion rate as we’re only left with search engine traffic that converts much better. Well that’s great, we basically eliminated part of work needed to maintain the site’s marketing effort AND increased the conversion rate significantly, wooooohooo, we’re the champs, right? No. The problem is, although the website now has significantly higher conversion rate, website’s profits went down the hill.

David Meerman Scott – No business-speak gobbledygook – “Speak to your buyer personas in their language, not yours.” #IMU

The bots run that sentence over and over again spaming us with it, but do you know what gobbledygook actually means and where it comes from? I’ll let Marina (HotForWords) explain it to you in this awesome video (note, video might not be so “awesome” to you if you’re a woman or a homosexual):

Basically, the word gobbledygook was first used in 1944 by Maury Maverick in his memo banning the use of gobbledygook language. Maverick was extremely frustrated with language bureaucrats used. The word “gobbledygook” is also used as an onomatopoeic imitation of a turkey’s gobble. Pronunciation: GOB-ul-dee-GOOK.

Useful gobbledygook resources:

• There is a tool called Gobbledygook Grader that enables you to test your content against the use of this bureaucratic language. As spamers always remind us at #IMU, it’s a good thing to speak to your customers like a person, in a language they understand, a language free of business gobbledygook.

• The Plain English Campaign, that’s fighting for crystal-clear communication since 1979 has created a gobbledygook generator, a simple online tool that generates gobbledygook for you. It’s created to point out how gobbledygook language is ridiculous and has no meaning whatsoever or it’s meaning is to general to accurately apply to anything (can be applied to everything).

Examples of gobbledygook:

• At base level, this just comes down to global incremental programming.
• I can make a window to discuss your optional administrative alignment.
• Our upgraded model now offers total monitored consulting.
• Only geeks stuck in the 90s still go for dot-com policy matrix approaches.

I’ve done a research, comparing a sample of over 300 000 visitors that made over 1 000 000 page views across several different online stores that sell very different products. I came to a conclusion that the most important landing page for conversion rate optimization efforts is your product page. Read this if you’re not sure how to measure conversion rates.

I made a custom report using Google Analytics to be able to compare landing page data with certain ecommerce metrics (which was extremely hard, as there is no ecommerce conversion rate as a metric to select when creating a custom report so everything needed to be calculated manually). It appears that your homepage is the landing page that drives the most revenue in total, but then again, the homepage is the most often visited landing page. However, homepage’s average per visit value is way lover than any other landing page’s per visit value.

Product page as a landing page:

• Conversion rate ranging from 286.89% to 1.95%
• Average conversion rate – 4.69%
• Average order value – ~3.5 average product values

Homepage as a landing page:

• Average conversion rate – 0.005%
• Average order value – ~2.5 average product values

Homepage appears to be visited much more by returning visitors then product pages (which is logical) and thus for you should actually optimize your homepage for your returning visitors.

With single product pages, you should strive to optimize it as if the person landing on it is at your store for the first time. Offer him everything he needs to know right there, don’t expect him to go back to the homepage for info.

With SEO, we have pretty much the same situation. It’s been a long time since SEO simply moved from technical to marketing job. On-site optimization can be easily learned by marketers while off-site optimization has nothing to do with technical background.

Since backlinks have became so powerful ranking factor in search engines in the past few years, the successful SEO has to rely on off-site optimization. The problem is, you don’t have a technical solution for building backlinks (at least not white-hat one) since there is no such thing as white-hat link building campaign.

This leads us to conclusion that in order to do proper SEO, you need to:

• Understand the concept of content marketing and link bait
• Be a good and innovative copywriter
• Understand social networks and other online communication channels
• Build a network
• Build a community
• Know your niche and competitors
• Understand your customers

You see, this is not something that fits the description of an SEO consultant or “search engine optimizer”. SEO became just a small part of one much larger area of expertise – Inbound Marketing.

cc Images: LevelTen Interactive, Cats Home Alone

For us, marketers, this is not an Twitter alternative, this is another communication channel to look after. I really like the ability to easily split the content into four main media categories: text, photos, video, and music.

I still don’t get it what’s the main difference between video and music. I mean, videos can be music as well, can’t they? Perhaps they should have used word “audio” instead of “music” as it really specifies the media, not the content of the media.

How to get a Yahoo MeMe invitation?

Anyway… Check out our new Yahoo MeMe account and drop us a line in the comments here if you want a yahoo meme invitation. Make sure you leave us a correct e-mail address when you leave a comment since the invitations will be sent to that e-mail.

To understand how blog will help you, you must first understand what’s your online store missing:

• Online store is missing content – Most online stores have really low amount of actual content for search engine spiders to index. There are usually just a few lines of text that represent your product’s description and an image or few images at it’s best. Some stores go one step further and allow their visitors to post ratings and reviews of their products. This might generate useful content, but in order to have any reviews (and if you’re in this business, you know it’s not that easy to motivate visitors to write them), you first need to get a significant amount of traffic and customers. If you’re starting a new online store, don’t expect to have lots of reviews any time soon. This brings us to conclusion that when we’re dealing with online stores, we can’t really rely on user generated content to satisfy all of our content marketing needs.

• Online store is missing viral potential – Sure, you could have some crazy products that might go viral and links to them could be spread all over the internet, but in most cases, you’re an serious business that doesn’t really sell crazy and funny products. You need some useful quality content that will attract backlinks and will make people spread it via social networks.

• Online store is missing non commercial content – People really don’t like to be sold to. Sure, some of your visitors will be interested in buying your products and that’s exactly why they came. The problem is, most of your online store’s visitors will be people who are casually surfing or just exploring options, exploring prices and so on. If you have nothing to offer to them except your product’s image and description they will most likely just bounce of your store. But, imagine you had some interesting articles useful to such visitors. They might read it and decide to subscribe to your newsletter or follow you on social networks such as twitter or facebook. One day these visitors might be in need of your products and you already have a way to attract them back to your store.

So this is where your blog kicks in. It’s a tool that will enable you to create all of the things your store is actually missing. It’s a perfect tool for all of your inbound marketing needs. A place where you can write about your products or your niche. A place that will attract search engine traffic from much broader targeted audience that one day might be interested in buying your products. A place that will get you more backlinks and more social media exposure. A place where your visitors can interact and connect with you.

This is why marketers and SEOs usually advise you to start a blog. It’s the useful content you create with your blog that’s going to help you, not the fact that you have a blog. Having a blog and not writing often or not writing interesting and useful post is the same as not having a blog at all.

Inchoo offers services of WordPress and Magento integration. There is also another solution we provide for integrating online store with blog – WordPress + eCommerce.

Adding additional information to support the argument: HubSpot’s Study shows that small businesses that blog gain 55% more website visitors, 97% more backlinks (inbound links – links from other websites to your website) and have 434% more indexed pages on average compared to those that do not blog.

It appears that if you sell products to extraterrestrials, the probability of finding your potential customers on Twitter decreases dramatically. I hope this helps you my respected colleagues.

Follow me on Twitter!

If you want to receive backlinks that are totally white hat, you can’t:

• Buy links
• Beg for links
• Spam or place them on your own in any other way

Basically, you can’t create backlinks that will influence rankings in any non-natural way. This means that only thing you can rely on is your marketing activity. A good white hat link building campaign is actually not link building campaign at all, we’re talking about inbound marketing techniques, content marketing or link bait to be more precise.

Imagine backlinks as your reputation. You need others to respect you in order to increase your reputation. Voting for yourself a lot of times will not help in the eyes of others, they still need to respect you on their own.

No company can ever guarantee you a certain number of links you will receive and call themselves white-hat SEOs. If you can guarantee a certain number of links you are obviously manipulating search engines and you are not doing white-hat SEO.

If any off-site SEO activity is going to be white-hat, it has to rely on your content and ability to gain natural backlinks. So if you can’t literally build links, you can’t do a link building campaign. It’s pretty simple.

Most of the companies quit their inbound marketing activities because:

• They lack enthusiasm
• They made no results
• They see no results (notice there’s a difference between seeing no results and having no results)
• They don’t have time for it
• They just don’t get it

Having a healthy inbound marketing activity is not like making instant coffee, it takes time. Non of the authority blogs you see nowadays made it on day one. It doesn’t even matter if you made the best content ever written in the known universe, inbound marketing just doesn’t work instantaneously.

The fact is, if you stick with it long enough, the odds of your success will increase drastically. You need to understand that not every blog post is a winner. Don’t get frustrated because a post you’ve spent lots of hours working on didn’t receive any feedback. Even the most visited blogs of the world have winning and losing posts. Some of their posts receive lots of feedback, some don’t, it’s a normal thing.

Whenever you receive no feedback for a blog post, instead of being angry, try taking it as a learning opportunity. It’s a valuable experience. Now you know that this kind of content will not receive much feedback from your community, and if feedback is what you’re looking for, you can concentrate on avoiding the same mistake again.

Sometimes there are results but you just can’t see them because you’re not tracking things that matter. In most cases, comments are not the thing you are actually hoping for. The things that do matter to your business are usually sales or leads. Tracking these will be much more useful. Some blog posts might not receive lots of comments, but they might attract a nice number of sales since these two metrics are usually not really connected or dependent on each other.

CC Pictures: picture 1, picture 2

My opinion is that social media networking can be both marketing and sales job. I’ve previously wrote about search & engage technique used with Twitter which pretty much falls into description of a sales job. You can also say that spreading the marketing message to your consumers via social media outlets is a job for marketing team.

The key to successful social media presence of a company is in balance between self promotion, sales activity and general networking. Sales team will always try to sell, and that’s actually good since it’s their job to do so. On the other hand, inbound oriented marketers will often try to network to much and not using sales opportunities enough.

So who should manage social media accounts in a company?

To achieve a nice balance, the optimal solution would be to have as many people from different departments involved as possible. Marketing and sales team can’t write a good piece of engaging content that would be interesting to developer community, so if you wish to target that community, you need a member of that community to engage them.

If you’re a regular here, you’ve probably noticed that here at Inchoo, all of the employees contribute to our blog. So far it’s working really well for us. We get tons of free and pretty targeted leads from search engines, but let me leave that topic for some other occasion.

Our Twitter account and other social media accounts, on the other hand, are mostly managed by me. The reason for this is pretty simple. Although I can’t write a decent article that would be interesting to Magento community, I can easily spread the information about the article to that community. I know where they are, I know how to engage them.

Having several people to manage a single social media account on services like Twitter can be extremely complicated but it’s not impossible.

You would have to make sure you have some sort of task management, to avoid duplicated answers to questions, duplicated engaging of same people and so on. You need this to avoid situations like this one:

• A company engages a target via Twitter.
• During the conversation, another employee also engages the same target with the same company’s account, not knowing that his college has engaged him already.
• Even if we set aside the probability of misunderstandings that would arise, it would look extremely unprofessional for you.
• Your target would feel unimportant or even worse, spamed.

If you’re going to put more then one person on your social media account, make sure they have proper task management and a clean communication channel.

Image attributions: image 1, image 2.

Besides newsletter subscribers, all of your store’s registered users will also appear in your Magento’s newsletter e-mail database. This database also contains information on different store views, allowing you to easily send multiple variations of your newsletter to different store view subscribers. This feature is extremely useful when dealing with multiple language web shops.

How to send a Magento Newsletter?

Newsletter Template:

The process of sending out Magento Newsletter starts with creation of Newsletter Template. Once you create this template, the template will remain there even after you send your newsletter to subscribers, allowing you to change it and use it multiple times. You can create multiple newsletter templates with different styling and test them to see which one attracts the most response from subscribers.

Simply click on “Add new template” button on the right and start creating your first newsletter template. You will see a screen with 5 fields. All of the fields are required. You will also notice that the largest field (“Template content” field)  already has some sort of code inside. Do not remove this code. This code will generate the unsubscribe link for your newsletter. Make sure that whatever you do this code remains on the bottom.

When creating newsletter template for Magento, note that you can actually use HTML in it. This means that if you’re not a tech savvy person, you can simply use some WYSIWYG editor and copy / paste the code it creates into your newsletter template once you’re done. In addition, if you wish to have WYSWYG editor inside your magento, check out our article on how to use TinyMCE with Magento.

Newsletter Queue:

If you open this tab in the newsletter top menu, you will notice that there are no newsletters in queue. In order to queue a newsletter you need to open “Newsletter Template” screen once again and in the action box next to your template choose “Queue Newsletter”. This action will bring up the “Edit Newsletter” screen. Notice that you can choose which store view subscribers are going to receive the newsletter. To select multiple store views, hold Ctrl key and left click on store views you wish to use. (this will only be necessary if you’re using more then one store view).

You also need to set a Queue date start. Notices that the date and time you set are in fact server date and time, not your date and time. If you wish to send your newsletter immediately, you need to set it to your current server date and time or set it into past.

Newsletter Subscribers Export:

If you wish to use some other service for sending your newsletter you can easily export your Magento newsletter subscribers via admin panel. Access the “Newsletter Subscribers” screen via top menu. On the top right you will see select box with options to export your newsletter subscribers in form of CSV or XML. Export it in a form that best fits the import options of your other newsletter solution.

Can’t send Magento newsletter? Here are some common problems:

• Your server time is different then your local time and you’ve actually queued the newsletter to be sent a few hours in future and that’s why it’s not sent right now.

• Magento sent only small part of emails? Don’t worry, it will send them out. Magento has integrated limit on the number of emails it can send at once. Eventually, all of your emails will be sent.

• You might need to activate your cron job as it’s often a case cron job is causing you problem. This means you will need to visit this address insert-your-magento-store.com/cron.php manually with your internet browser.