Newsletters are an essential part of customer communication. They are simple to create and cost-effective to deliver. They allow you to let existing customers and interested parties know about the latest news, offers and changes in and around your shop. But in order for newsletter campaigns to also be successful, merchants should be sure to do the necessary planning up front. The ePages blog will show you what to keep in mind.

Provide a structure

Create brand recognition for your newsletter by giving it a solid structure. Determine in advance which topics and themes are to occur regularly. Then create a template that will apply to all future newsletters. From time to time you can send a completely different newsletter which will stand out. You can use this one for particularly spectacular sales, for example. You’ll be sure to get the attention of your readers.

Stay in touch

You should send out newsletters in a regular cycle so that your customers are reminded of you in an optimal way. But don’t overdo it and choose intervals between mailings that are not too short. Place yourself in your customers’ shoes: How often would you like to be “bothered” by an online shop where you have only made one purchase?

Find the optimal interval

Not every day is equally suitable for sending out a newsletter. Not too long ago, a study by an Austrian e-mail marketing company identified the days of the week which are particularly suitable. They determined that the opening rate on Mondays was around 40 percent and decreased as the week progressed. It turned out that later Monday evenings were the optimal time for sending out a newsletter.
But have a look at the e-mail addresses of your customers. Are they primarily companies or private addresses? For company addresses, concentrate on delivery of the newsletter during the week. For private addresses, it makes sense to send it out on Saturday or Sunday. On Sunday evening in particular, you’ll be able to reach customers in a relaxed, sales promoting situation.

Plan in advance

Many shop operators send out their newsletters based on a gut feeling that it’s time to get in touch with customers again. They write up a quick text and fire it off to customers. Show your customers that you can do better. Always be thinking about new material for the next two mailings so that you always have a reserve from which you can create. Occasions like Christmas or Easter offer regular opportunities for special sales and a newsletter text. But why not try a special promotion on “International Kissing Day” or on “World Poetry Day”, for example?

Entice your customers

The opening rate of newsletters is usually surprisingly high. Studies show that it lies near 40 percent. But with a little intuition about your customers, you can increase this opening rate even more.
A few options: Everyone likes to be entertained. Try being a little provocative and funny in your texts. Present your offer in a refreshingly different way than your competition. Or use special offers for subscribers, for example, coupons that don’t require a minimum order amount. Invite your readers to send the coupons to their friends as a way to gain new customers

Give yourself an unmistakeable look

The best way is to first use a suitable HTML editor for the design of your newsletter in order to utilise the full potential. Orient yourself on the design of your shop in order to create a brand recognition for your customers. While doing so, consider the limitations of a newsletter and how it differs from the limitations of a website: A good newsletter should have a much smaller breadth than a website. The reason for this is the standard way e-mail clients like Outlook or front ends of freemailers like web.de display HTML-formatted e-mails. Also make sure you don’t create endlessly long newsletters – nobody wants to have to scroll through advertising e-mails. Don’t waste valuable space with long introductions. Get right to the point and start with the most important first.

Is creating HTML templates for newsletters a mystery to you? Then take advantage of one of the many free templates that you can find on the Internet. Or ask a friend who knows how to design webpages to help you make a template. But even better than this: Contact an agency and ask them to create a template for you. The few hundred Euro it will cost you will pay off in the long run.

Think about the inevitable

Newsletters also have obligatory data that you absolutely need to have. The imprint of the sender and contact information must be present in every newsletter. You also need to offer the option for recipients to quickly and easily unsubscribe from your newsletter at any time. A request that the recipient send an e-mail when they wish to be removed from the recipients list is not sufficient in this case. Instead, place a link to the newsletter subscribe/unsubscribe page.

Create an archive

Newsletters that have been sent out should not be subsequently deleted. Instead, create an archive of your newsletters in your shop. You’ll kill two birds with one stone: On the one hand, you can provide a link to the HTML version of the newsletter in your shop thus offering recipients with technical problems the ability to read the newsletter online. On the other hand, it gives you a simple and elegant way to have additional content and a regular update on your website. This will help you with search engine optimisation.

Our Partner TribaSpace is now ready for the online market. Please have a look at this website.

TribaSpace (http://tribaspace.com), the B2B web application for the fashion industry, launches its main product – Secure Online Showrooms.
Following a year of development and testing after the soft launch in January 2010, the application is now fully functional. Especially designed to solve day-to-day problems in the fashion industry, TribaSpace provides online solutions for PR, marketing and distribution.
TribaSpace Online Showrooms are secure, invite only online spaces in which companies can exclusively communicate and interact with their clients – efficiently, globally, 24/7. Each Online Showroom doubles as a public brand communication portal, allowing users to publish news and events to the website’s public streams in order to promote their business and make new connections.
Companies can benefit from a wide range of feature sets. To mention a few, they can:

• Present their products in a secure and professional environment
• Send, receive and manage orders online
• Distribute high resolution images and press releases
• Manage guest lists
• Publish news and events publicly or privately

“TribaSpace Online Showooms help fashion companies instantly join the digital revolution and capitalise on new business opportunities on the internet,” states CEO and founder Saydou Bangoura. “Fashion is and will remain a face-to-face business. The internet can help streamline established workflows by making them more time and cost efficient. TribaSpace provides fashion companies with out-of-the-box software solutions so they don’t have to build, finance and maintain these applications themselves. Additionally, it provides access to an international business platform which allows professional communication and networking on a global scale.”
The freemium application was designed to work seamlessly with the best of existing fashion business practices, combining the efficiency of SaaS (software as a service) with the intuitivity and usability of social media. In design, implementation and maintenance TribaSpace has especially been built to ensure the highest industry standard in security.

onlines showroom TribaSpace

We just completed our first projektwerk tutorial! This short video aims at showing you in simple steps how to create an account and publish a project or profile on either the IT, consulting, creative, engineering or fashion platform.

The tutorial will be integrated into our platforms soon but wanted you to watch this in advance.

Feel free to tell us what you think of it!

How do I draw attention to my shop? A lot of online merchants ask themselves this very question upon opening their onlineshop. One of the most popular answers to this question is Google AdWords.  Google AdWords offers an ideal opportunity to capture the attention of potential customers as they have just begun their online search for products. Yet AdWords campaigns are not always successful. Why is this the case?

Google AdWords provide shop operators an invaluable advantage compared to conventional advertising campaigns by addressing the concrete needs of potential customers. As a shop operator, you thus have a chance to focus very precisely on your target group and appeal to them directly.

So far, so good. In the pursuit of luring as many users as possible to their website, however, many online merchants unfortunately overlook that simple principle. “But I’d fail to attract 80 percent of potential customers if my ads are too specific,” is a beloved objection to segmented AdWords marketing, along with the sometimes arduous work it entails. Instead of addressing specific search queries with tailored ads, a lot of online merchants opt for generalised ad texts which correspond to basic keywords. In so doing, shop operators quickly lose sight of a fundamental question:

“How do I sensibly structure my advertising budget?”

AdWords is practical for users, too. Instead of being forced to rummage through a great many search results, users see relevant results at a glance. The very fact that a merchant has paid for the ad tells the user that the link will lead to relevant information. Many users therefore notice AdWords ads and click on them.

Good for you as a shop operator. But a click on your ad does not constitute a purchase. Even when you do appeal directly to potential customers, a majority of them nevertheless will buy nothing on your website. A lot of users namely open several ad links at once. If a potential customer does not find the product straightaway they are looking for, then they will immediately close that window.

And that begs the question: what is more important? A high click rate — enticing a lot of people to visit your shop — or a high conversion rate, which means that a lot of users choose to buy from you? Let us briefly examine a statistical example.

General vs. specific: what yields more?

Let us suppose that your generally worded AdWords ad is displayed 10,000 times. Of these 10,000 users, 1,000 click on your ad text to visit your shop. If each click costs 10 cents, your advertising costs amount to 100 euros. Not bad for 1,000 willing buyers, right? Let us continue to compute. The average conversion rate (the ratio of your shop’s visitors to your shop’s customers) is between three and six percent. Because your ad is general, you can present only a general product page. Your customer must therefore explore your shop — which lowers the conversion rate. Consequently, we must assume that your campaign will enjoy only limited success. Assuming a conversion rate of three percent, 1,000 visitors to your shop will result in 30 purchases. In this scenario, your advertising costs would be about 3 euros per purchase.

Let us now apply the same statistical approach to a targeted AdWords ad. Because fewer people will enter a specialised term into a search engine, your ad will appear less frequently. Let us assume that the aforementioned 80% of all users will miss your ad because of its specificity. Your ad will thus be displayed only 2,000 times instead of 10,000. As above, 10 percent of users click on your ad text; in turn, 200 potential customers visit your shop. Because your ad is displayed less often and also generates fewer clicks, your per-click AdWords costs are lower. Let us assume that each click of your ad costs only half as much: 5 cents. This would entail spending 10 euros for the 200 visitors to your shop. It is safe to assume that these visitors will purchase more on a percentage basis, for they were drawn to your shop by targeted advertising. At a conversion rate of six percent instead of just three percent, 200 visitors to your shop will result in 12 purchases.

Quadrupled sales thanks to targeted marketing

An advertising budget of 100 euros will permit you to launch nine additional targeted AdWords campaigns. Instead of 30 purchases via a general ad, the direct targeting of potential customers results in 120 purchases. In other words, you can use the same budget to quadruple sales via targeted marketing.

It ought to be clear now that you should always strive to address (potential) customers in accordance with their needs. It is worth investing the effort to create and pay for tailored ads for individual products. Carefully consider which keywords you specify for your AdWords campaigns. Vague keywords such as “laptop” result in lower conversion rates than, for example, specifying a particular model such as “Dell Latitude laptop”.

Bad adword ad

Good adword ad

4 designing tips

1. Your ad text should feature the keyword in the heading to convince customers that your shop sells precisely what they need.
2. Your ad text should entice potential customers to your shop: Promise customers something they cannot refuse!
   Poor: “The expert for laptops”
   Better: “Sale: 20% discount on all Dell notebooks” or “Free shipping of all Dell notebooks”.
3. Open the back door! Online shops are different from brick-and-mortar shops. The main entrance — your home page, in other words — is not necessarily the best choice for an ad campaign. Your customers instead prefer entering via the back door and learning right away about the items which interest them. You should therefore go to the trouble of creating different links for every ad. If a potential customer wishes to buy a Dell laptop, than a proper ad will guide them directly to the proper place in your shop so that they do not have to click their way through your entire shop. You will thus increase the conversion rate within your shop. Never forget that a customer can leave your shop at any time to visit someone else’s shop!
4. Use “speaking URLs” to promote the content of the landingpage the adwordd is pointing to. In lieu of a cryptic “database URL” such as “www.laptopshop.de/61504599.cf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/Shops/61504599/Categories/”Lemote product” linking to a product, you better use a short URL as “www.laptopshop.de/dell-special_offers”. This will indisputably benefit your AdWords campaign by convincing potential customers that your shop is the perfect place to be.

The easiest way is not always the best way. If you want to sell well online, you must learn how to draw attention to your website and persuade people to buy from you. Why does self-created content helps to boost your sales figures?

A typical scenario: after considerable consideration, you’ve decided to open an online shop. You have also invested a lot of time researching available technology and have concluded that a flexible, customisable and inexpensive ePages rental shop will be ideal. An excellent choice! You learn how best to use the software, create a wonderful layout and begin entering products.

After you’ve already invested hours in your future online business, you want to save time by resorting to the standard texts which the manufacturer supplied together with product images. Stop! Step back and reflect — instead of making one of the biggest mistakes possible in this situation.

Why, you ask? Spend a few minutes researching online to determine just how many of your online competitors use the manufacturer’s product texts. You will be astonished.

To name but one example, let’s select an excerpt from Apple’s product text for its iPod touch and then google the phrase. A search for “Use the revolutionary Multi-Touch interface to flick through your music in Cover Flow” returns over 12.000 results for web pages which all use exactly the same standard text. If you use the identical product description, then you will compete against all those website operators for the attention of search engines and customers.

The pen is mightier than the sword” — in the online era, as well

Google and other search engines value originality and reward it with a higher ranking. The pivotal factor in this regard: search engines tend to recognize who first used a given text online. Such websites benefit from the originality of their texts and receive better evaluations. If you use a manufacturer’s product texts, then it’s extremely likely that somebody else did the same long ago. Google and other engines will barely notice your website — if at all. Conversely, if you compose your very own product text, then you will have the undivided attention of search engines.

Unfortunately, content theft — the unauthorised use of others’ content — is rampant online (despite the fact that it is every bit as prohibited online as it is offline). So, what happens to your ranking if one of your competitors simply copies large amounts of the product texts which you worked so hard to create for your own website? Developers at Google provided an answer some time ago at Google Blog:

“Don’t fret too much about sites that scrape (misappropriate and republish) your content. Though annoying, it’s highly unlikely that such sites can negatively impact your site’s presence in Google. If you do spot a case that’s particularly frustrating, you are welcome to file a DMCA request (http://www.google.com/dmca.html) to claim ownership of the content and have us deal with the rogue site.”

Use words to sell

People finding your website is half the battle; persuading potential customers to purchase from you is the other half. How can original texts help you?

Just imagine you’re at a party. Would you rather talk with the innumerable guests who all have the same things to say and merely contribute to the background noise? Or, instead, with the one person who knows how to tell an interesting story and exudes eloquence, wit and charm? Not a difficult decision, is it?

But the presentation of products in your online shop is no different. If you lazily resort to mass-produced standard texts and standard images, then there is nothing which will distinguish you from your competitors — except price.

But you will gain a decisive sales advantage versus your competition if you can show customers that you have spent time analysing the products you sell, you know their respective advantages and disadvantages, and you can provide informed opinions about your products.

Exploit this opportunity to increase your sales.

Get ready to write

It literally pays off, by all means, to create your own product texts. Yet where and how to begin? We provide some help on getting started in our article: “Writing for the Web: 10 Rules” (http://www.epages.com/en/blog/index.php/2009/01/14/writing-for-the-web-10-rules/ )We also recommend the following books to everyone who wishes to more deeply explore this (admittedly) complex topic:

“Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content That Works”
by Janice Redish
(amazon)

“Writing for the Web”
by Crawford Kilian
(amazon)

On January 18, 2011, the “The Denim Day by Sportswear International” is taking place in Berlin – a date that you definitely should not miss.

Take the one-time chance and meet the leading players of the worldwide jeans and denim community on the eve of Bread & Butter fair, just before the next season´s opening on January 18, 2011.

Get exclusive insight into the world of denim and discuss with the following most sophisticated denim experts:

Karl-Heinz Müller, BREAD & BUTTER
Adriano Goldschmied, Citizens of Humanity
Nigel Cabourn, Nigel Cabourn
Shubhankar Ray, G-Star
Augusto Romano, Meltin’Pot
Donna Ida Thornton, Donna Ida
Jason Denham, Denham The Jeanmaker
Andy Dunkley, Lee Cooper
Hakan Ström, Cheap Monday
Dieter Jacobfeuerborn, VF Group
Leon Keyworth, Denim Consultant
Nish Soneji, Pepe Jeans
Miles Gray, Monkee Genes
Ruppert Bodmeier, Hermes NexTec
Wolf Jochen Schulte-Hillen, SH Selection
Maurizio Donadi, Levi´s XX
Marco Lucietti, Isko
Gulperi Erkanli, Bossa Denim & Sportswear
Alberto Candiani, TRC Candiani
Panos Sofianos, Denim Valley by Tejidos Royo
Axel Dammler, iconkids & youth
Evelyn Hammerström, Jades Düsseldorf
Sam Benavraham, Atrium New York
Amy Leverton and Helen Job, Stylesight

Special Guest: Lapo Elkann and Leopoldo Durante, Care Label

On topics such as:
Generation Z – Who is your next denim consumer?
To hit the right Jeans Price-point – From premium back to 39 €-jeans?
The Raw Material – Are cotton and fiber prices destroying any profitable margin?
Governmental Currency Protection – Boon and bane of worldwide trade
And many more!
More information, a detailed program and registration form are available online under www.conferencegroup.de/denimday11.

Contact:
The Conference Group GmbH
Eva Wick,
Phone: + 49 (0) 69/7595-3022
Fax: + 49 (0) 69/7595-3030
E-Mail: eva.wick@conferencegroup.de
Internet www.conferencegroup.de

When it comes to search engine optimisation there are a lot of different opinions. Which actions are recommended? What improves a shop’s ranking and what is counterproductive? It’s always interesting when Google themselves speaks up and tells us their point of view. A few weeks ago it was that time again: the “SEO Starter Guide” has finally been updated.

Feel free to download the “SEO Starter Guide” by Google here and start optimizing your fashion shop right away.

Do you know ft-insite.com?
ft-insite.com is one of the few free-access professional online trend portals with a first trend forecast 18 months before each selling season: with exciting news and events from the area trends. In addition to the fashion trends Books as a unique forecasting and styling package, users of fashion trends also find here the most important silhouettes for download in vectorized form as an added value.
looking forward to this new partnership and the newest trend informations.

projektwerk Fashion is very much looking forward to presenting a new cooperation partner: the fashion community styleranking. At styleranking, exciting projects of projektwerk Fashion project will now be regularly presented and editorially promoted. styleranking is a portal for fashion-conscious young people. At style ranking (www.styleranking.de), members present images of their outfits, evaluate styles and exchange fashion styles and trends.

According to Bild.de, the styleranking fashion blog is one of the most important of its kind in the world. Every day in the editorial fashion blog (blog.styleranking.de), all the latest fashion trends are discussed by a fashion editorial, exciting designers are interviewed or exciting shopping guides are published for international cities – all in a very Web 2.0 style. styleranking covers important and significant events like the Fashion Weeks in New York, Paris or Berlin, the international shoe fair GDS or the world’s largest street fashion show in Krefeld. The well-known bloggette Julia Basagic from Vienna writes the weekly column “Hello Monday.” In addition, regular columns are offered, such as that of fashion blogger Sarah Steidel from Munich “Experiences of a Fashion Junkie,” and Susan Fengler writes from and about the fashion metropolis New York City. There’s also a design series called “Apfel-Päckchen” (Apple Pack), in which Mia Klöting writes about stylish and new technology products. She covers innovative phones, tablet PCs or laptops with an emphasis on lifestyle aspects and design. ”

In addition, styleranking runs a job portal for fashion jobs called (www.stylejobber.com)

The focus of all activities of styleranking, therefore, is on the exchange of fashion, lifestyle, trends and style ideas. For members and readers, styleranking is inspiration, for fashion manufacturers and distributors, it’s a relevant advertising environment and for up-and-coming designers, it is a voice and launch pad.

Find out more here:

http://www.styleranking.de
http://blog.styleranking.de
http://www.stylejobber.de