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I thought I’d get you started with your own email headline swipe file, taking inspiration from 9 Proven Headline Strategies, a guest post to Copyblogger by Dean Rieck of Direct Creative. Dean provides 9 kinds of headlines and the pros / cons of each type. I’ll highlight the first 8 here, as the last one is tough to do in retail and in my opinion is more suited to direct sales landing pages.

Below is a summary of Dean’s proven strategies, with some examples I gleaned from the Retail Email Blog’s daily AM Inbox reports (which always finish with a collection of the best retail email headlines of the day) and my own email inbox.

1. The simple and direct headline

Get right to the point without clever wordplay or jokes. Works best for strong offers, famous brands or familiar product types.

Retailer examples:

4th of July Savings at BassPro.com‏
25 patriotic styles to show your colors this 4th of July.
ThisNext: Win a Jones New York Shopping Spree
No payments, no interest for 12 months storewide
3 Days Left for Free Shipping Over $99

2. The “big benefit”

State your #1 selling point up front communicates your value prop (or the product’s) even if the email isn’t opened.

Retailer examples:

Exclusively At Urban: The Alexander Girard Collection‏
Guaranteed Delivery for Father’s Day + Great Gift Ideas‏
Great Savings On Wrinkle-Resistant Styles For Dad‏
What’s New in Entertainment: Free Jonas Brothers Download‏
Huge markdowns, free gift with purchase and more at eToys
Oprah Magazine agrees! Our no iron shirt, a great buy at $59.50
Effortless silk: it’s washable! Plus, 20% off favorite wear-now looks.

3. The exciting news

Dean suggests you appeal to curiosity and craft your headline in a way that suggests news rather than advertising. Note that the subject does not have to be new, just new to your customer. I’ll add that compelling magazine-style headlines can also be powerful.

Gap.com does the magazine headline thing exceptionally well. The following are all from Gap.com:

Introducing Athleta, the newest member of the Gap Inc. family.
This Just In: Fall’s Casual Cool Look
Summer Getaway? Top Picks to Pack
Spring Must-Haves, Starting at $15
Top News: The Season’s Shirts Are Here
New! Summer Styles You Need Now
What to Wear Now: Ultra-Feminine Tops
Closet Essentials: What You Need Now
Summer Love: The Chic Shorts Trend

4. The “How-To”

Focus on a need or want and promise to fulfill it (and follow through on fulfilling it in the creative). I had a tough time finding any retail subject lines that started with “how to,” so I added some to the following:

Before you put on makeup – do this
(How To) Tighten, Smooth & Lift – In All the Right Places
(How To) Create Incredible Easter Eggs
(How To) Calm your dog’s anxieties

OK I did find one how to. I just wasn’t sure the content could fulfill the promise:

How to be the hottest thing on the beach

5. The “provocative question”

Dean says: “Asking a question directly involves your reader. However, your question cannot be random or clever. It must relate directly and clearly to the major benefit of the product. It must also prod the reader to answer “yes” or at least “I’m not sure, but I want to know more.”

Retailer examples:

Are You Ready For Dress Season?
The Season of the Dress. Are You Ready?

Gap uses the headline two years in a row, couldn’t have bombed the first time.

OK, I admit, those were the only 2 examples I could dig up. So I made up my own:

What if you never had to iron again? Your wrinkle free wardrobe is here.
Running out of ideas for the Dad who has everything? I bet he doesn’t have this…
Think you have no time to cook? 5 perfect dinners in 15 minutes or less.
Is your fashion budget on a diet? Splurge on our $10 tees, 100% Shipping Free!
Could you use a better night’s sleep? Our top rated pillows and mattresses up to 75% off

6. The command

Taking charge and using a command verb may prompt more readers to take action on a sub-conscious level. It also clearly states the benefit of what you’re offering.

Try Bare Escentuals’ #1-selling makeup item‏
Transform Your Dad with Savings on Grills, Tents, Workboots and More‏
Make travel easier for Dad!
Give dad a piece of New York baseball history!‏
Dress up your boyfriend
Be the first to shop our June collection.
Enter to win a new Black Stainless TRIO Refrigerator‏
Over 400 items $14.99 or less. Shop Outlet now!

7. Offer useful information

…But not just any information. Dean suggests folks are drowning in facts and seek out tips, secrets and rules that promise to help them improve their lives or their world.

Earth-Friendly Recipes: Smart Seafood, Local Ingredients, Garden Herbs
Advanced treatment for cold dry winter air.
New Year’s Resolutions: How to be flirty without flirting + FREE SHIPPING ends today
New ways to keep your New Year’s resolutions
4 ways to get great sound for your HDTV

Bonus tip: offer a mix of product promotion and information, but lead with information. See Should Retail Email Sell or Inform?.

8. The honest testimonial

Customers trust people like them more than the marketing machine, and may get higher click through for being different – it was tough to find examples of these. In fact, I only found one by LL Bean (via RetailEmailBlog):

“Is it really wrong to love a doormat?”

Be careful though, testimonial headlines can look spammy – we’re all tired of outrageous direct marketing copy like “I lost an amazing 50 lbs in 10 days with huckleberry extract!!!”

Other Headline Tactics

Go ahead and peruse headlines on the Email Retail Blog (you’ll find the day’s best at the bottom of every post) or iStorez.com. (Or if you’re a sucker for punishment like me, sign up to about 80 retailer’s emails!)

You’ll notice other tactics retailers use that you might want to test, including:

Mixed case, like “Hurry! There’s still time to shop our “ALL ON SALE” sale!” and “Come home: FREE SHIPPING on select home updates.”

Use numbers and percentages, like “Save up to 50%. Sneak peek sale—3 days only!”

Highlight best-sellers and customer favorites, like “Shop our best-selling pants” and “Welcome to Williams-Sonoma Favorites”

Or extra long subject lines, like “Ends Sunday! Extra 50% Off THE MIRACLE BRA Swimwear. Plus, Free Shipping. Details Inside.”

Happy testing!

Source: GetElastic

Why would it be any different when it comes to product reviews? Most retail sites require registration before submitting a review. How many words are being left on the table?

Altrec is one site that lets you quickly and easily, all you need to enter is an email address (similar to leaving a blog comment):

The only downside to this is if you have a lot of reviews to submit, you need to enter your name and email address each time.

Though it’s tough to attract customer reviews, shoppers trust the opinion of “people like them” far more than your slickest sales copy. Customers are willing to enhance your product pages out of the goodness of their hearts. Make it easy for them.

If your reviews vendor does not allow you to offer this to customers, suggest that they make this a high priority in their next product release. Their business model is enabling customer feedback — so go ahead and tell them what you think!

Source: GetElastic

Google Base is a fantastic tool and should never be underestimated.  If you don’t know what Base is – it is a database where users can upload data feeds of products, blog posts, reviews, jobs, hotels, you name it…   On occasions, Google will supplement their usual search results with results from Base.

For example, check out this search for TV Wall Brackets – on this page you can see three results which are “Shopping Results”.  These results have very good click through rates, simply because they list a relevant product, and they also echo the delivered price of a product.

Before now, trying to get all your products from your Magento site on to Google Base was pretty impossible – as it’d be a manual job to go into the database, export it as CSV, put it into Excel, delete the fields which are not required etc.

Now however, a plugin has been released via Magento Connect, called “SingleFeed Export Module” – this module is fantastic because it exports products from your Magento Store into a SingleFeed compatible data feed format.

Subsequently, SingleFeed then can submit your products to over a dozen comparison shopping engines including Google Base/Product Search, Nextag, Shopping.com, Pricegrabber, Shopzilla, Yahoo Shopping and many more.

The beauty of doing it through SingleFeed is that it will allow you to manage your products with only one feed instead of one unique feed for each shopping engine.

Therefore, check out SingleFeed and also see the Export Module plugin on the Magento site.

Source: Blastedthing

We all know that most people back in the day used to design websites with the user being nothing more than a distant thought.  Now however, the User Centred Design approach is common-place in every design agency – and these companies use a plethora of tools in order to reach the promised land of perfection.

In terms of Magento – being user centred is crucial.  The web design needs to be perfect, positioning needs to be 100% optimised, and you need to make sure that what you want to be clicked can be clicked, and what you don’t want to be click isn’t clicked. You want users to click the “Buy Now” button, and not scoot off to the Terms and Conditions page!

The thing is, it is difficult to know this information without the tools – however now, we’ve found one.  We’ve all heard of heat mapping software for your web page, but what about video-mapping…. now this is good!

ClickTale.net is a fantastic free service whereby you can take videos of the users’ mouse and keyboard interaction with your website.  You cannot see what users are typing (as that is an invasion of privacy), but what you can see is their mouse movement on your web page, the time it takes them to click through from page to page, when they add a product to their Magento cart etc.  You also see where the cursor goes whilst they are on a page, the clicks the do once they are on a page (whether they are hyperlinks or not), and also the referring web page….  they’ve got it all.

It’s fantastic data.

You may realise that people are seemingly disregarding the main meat of your Magento site (where the products are) and instead seem to be scrolling to the bottom of your page all too quickly – you may also find that people keep on clicking a picture of your face, but your face isn’t actually clickable!  These are problems this web-based software will help you resolve.

ClickTale will reveal these answers and more – I definitely recommend it, and I’d love to know how you get on with it!

Source: Blastedthing

Part 1: Magento Themes – Getting to the Core of CSS

Development on Magento has continued again, and this week I’ve been changing a lot of niggly design elements, including adjusting the Cascading Style Sheets, which help to create the overall look and feel of the web-site.

As mentioned before, Magento has an interesting architecture – with pages being populated by a plethora of hierarchical folders, XML files, database content, static objects etc – therefore sometimes it is pretty difficult to track down which include helps to create the design.

I’ve discovered a Firefox tool called Firebug, which is absolutely superb for changing the CSS!

Definitely definitely download this tool – it will save you hours.  Once installed, it really is so very easy.  If you have an element on the home page that you wish to change, say for example, the “Compare Products” heading, simply highlight it, right click it, and select “Inspect Element”.

The line of code that creates the particular element is then highlighted in the window below, and then when you double-click this code, it highlights the particular CSS file and line of code from where the elements’ attributes come from – which means you don’t have to spend hours finding the class in the stylesheet.

Source: Blastedthing

• Fully compliant with Paypal Website Payments Pro (UK) TOS
• Payment options by credit card (Visa, Master Card, Switch, Discovery) or by Paypal Express
• No complicated SDK and integration with Paypal APIs
• Fully compatible with you installation of Zencart
• Highly customizable to adapt your own needs
• Strait-forward install instructions

Ater applying the module, your store will work as follows:

• Express Checkout

If a logged in customer clicks on “Checkout,” they’re taken to the shipping page with a “Paypal Express Checkout” button at the top. If they click on the “Express Checkout” button, they’ll be taken to Paypal where they’ll choose a shipping address and payment method, then be sent back to the checkout shipping page to choose a shipping method. From there, depending on your settings, you will go to checkout confirmation to complete the order.

Express Checkout Demo:

http://blog.smartosc.com/video/express_checkout/

• Direct Payment

If they log in, or create an account, and go through the normal checkout process, then they can type in their credit card numbers and the direct payment API will charge their card transparently.

Direct Payment Demo:

http://blog.smartosc.com/video/direct_payment/

To use this module, you must meet the following requirements:

• Zencart 1.3.x
• PHP 4.3.0+
• cURL
• SSL certificate installed – for live transactions
• Business account with Paypal UK Pro
• Website Payments Pro (UK) direct transactions approved (please check the request form on Paypal’s site on your “Overview” page when you login)
• The API certificate that you receive from PayPal after being approved for WPP

Why should you install this module?

• Complete functionality
• Customizable
• Low-cost
• Get an all-in-one payment solution.
• Accept credit card payments directly on your website
• Allow PayPal account holders to check out fast with saved information

Please contact us for a non-obligation quote.

• Over 25 bug fixes and improvements
• register_globals compatibility for PHP 4.3+ servers
• Visa PCI conformance of accepting credit card information on the checkout confirmation page
• Public titles for payment modules so the name of the payment service provider is not used as a payment method
• Maximum number of product quantities that can be added to the shopping cart (by default 99)
• New login routine for the Administration Tool
• New summary modules to display on the Administration Tool index page
• New web-based installation routine (backported from 3.0)

osCommerce Online Merchant v2.2 Release Candidate 1 can be downloaded here:

http://www.oscommerce.com/redirect.php/go,41 (hosted at Sunsite.dk)

An upgrade guide for existing osCommerce 2.2 Milestone 2 060817 installations can be found here:

http://www.oscommerce.com/ext/osc22rc1_upgrade.html.zip

(Source: Oscommerce Official Site)

1. Optimize your images
Many of you starts uploading heavy images which increases page load. A solution for this would be installing automatic thumbnail generator with cache features. This contribution will will cache the image instead of doing it “on the fly”, thus, server load reduces considerably.

2. Think twice before adding contributions
One of the advantages for the Oscommerce community is the broad range of pre-made contributions that users can install to the stores. But then store owners make the mistake of adding too many contributions because they want to add more and more functionality. Our advice is to install only the ones you need because. each contribution you install will add overhead to process the logic whether it be pure PHP code or MySQL queries (or both).

On the other hand, if you don’t use certain default features, like : banners, “requests since” footer display, who’s online, etc. then removing these features will increase performance.

3. Do you really need to install STS ?
STS (Simple Template System) is one of the most popular template systems available for osCommerce. However, this contribution increases the number of queries, specially when you have a significant number of categories on your store up to 200-300%.

4. Index your Sessions
If you store the sessions in the database consider adding a (primary) multi-column index on sesskey and expiry columns.

5. Unable Caching
If you have a large number of categories, products, and orders, then it is important to cache data. Some experts advice to create directory ABOVE the publicly accessible document root and giving it proper permissions for the server read/write. Creating it ABOVE the document root ensures that would-be hackers cannot access it with their web browser. Once you have the cache folder created and settings configured then turn on the cache features.

6. Compress page output
Oscommerce has the feature of page compression via GZIP. The optimal setting is compression level 1 for speed as higher levels will not result in significant reduction of page size.

7. Optimize your code and database queries
There is obviously different in every store, due to the fact that each of them installs different contributions although they are based in Oscommerce.

So first of all, you have to debug your queries. There is a very good contribution (written by Chemo) : per page query output contribution which will allow you to see which queries are being executed on a per page basis and easily identify those that are redundant or taking excessive time to execute. So that’s a good place to start with.

However, there are some existing code, that can be common functions in all the stores and you might want to take a look.

a. MS3 tax class for MS2. This replaces the stock MS2 tax code with the new tax class for MS3 which is much more efficient and uses less queries per page. The tax query is executed on each price display even if the setting to display tax is disabled. So installing it will increase the page performance.

b. The also_purchased module (product info pages) is a powerful upsale tool however it is the absolutely most server intensive query for the osCommerce application. Some recommend using X-Sell contribution instead.

Finally, some contributions that will help you optimize the store:

• Faster Page Loads, Less DB Queries.

This contribution caches the data and eliminates the database query…thereby saving the table scan for when the cache is not present. This contribution is HIGHLY recommended.

• More Meaningful Data from Query Logging

This contribution replaces the stock logging code to only capture queries that take longer than “X” seconds to execute. Instead of storing every query it only stores the ones that are excessively resource intensive. Also, it stores more useful information such as query, time to execute, calling script, IP of browser, cookies enabled or not, and other nice data.

• osC Explain – for developers

This contribution adds a real nice EXPLAIN feature to every query executed. It allows you to capture each query executed and associated MySQL EXPLAIN data. If you are serious about query optimization this tool is a must.

• Queries and Parse Time Footer Output

This contribution outputs the queries executed and page parse time on a per page basis without storing it to file system. This is handy to optimize page performance on a per page basis. I use it to identify redundant queries or as a quick tool to diagnose performance issues. You can tell at a glance if the lack of performance is due to MySQL, PHP, or other page factors.

• osC-Advanced Cache Class

This contribution has the ability to cache anything you can throw at it: parsed HTML, arrays, or even executable PHP code. If you find tough areas to optimize this class will solve your problems.

Do you have any other experience ? Please share