With the abundance of online shops, it’s difficult to make out an individual. To withstand severe competition and allure customers to stay with you, your e-store should stand out from the crowd and offer as many opportunities for its clients as possible.

Below you will find 3 tips how to make your clients stay with you and not sneak away to your competitor.

#1 Give your clients detailed information about your products and services

Before buying a product, a lot of customers try to find its description, peculiarities and possibilities of its usage. People prefer sites that give them detailed data about products and services. Try to cover the obvious questions your customers would ask.

The Knowledge Base extension by aheadWorks gives you the opportunity to provide additional product information, such as instructions, safety procedures, demonstrations, or manufacturer specifications. Besides, you can offer background information, advice, or how-to guides. Useful data about your products can help your clients make the right choice quicker, and thus, stimulate your sales.

#2 Give your clients the opportunity to ask questions

When people can’t find certain information, there should be alternative methods to get it. Don’t let your customers leave your store without purchases because they can’t ask questions about your products. Offering increased interactive elements at website, you give confidence to your clients.

The Product Questions module for Magento encourages your website visitors to interact with you and find out more about your products. As a result, they are more likely to make purchases. Resolve their doubts and don’t let them leave your store.

#3 Give your clients the opportunity to submit reviews

Online reviews play a key role in influencing purchasing decisions. Customers using the Internet try to find reviews at every stage of buying process, as they tend to trust the information generated by fellow consumers more than the information generated by professionals. Adding to your online store the ability to write reviews and rate products, you will not only speed up decision-making of the existing clients, but also attract new visitors to your website.

The Advanced Reviews Magento extension encourages customers to submit their reviews and makes the process extremely easy. The pros and cons section is invaluable and makes it easy for users to select options for product rating. People will trust you if they see that you are open and always available.

Think of your clients’ convenience, provide them with more possibilities. In return, they will be thankful and devoted to you.

The fact that it is very topical at the moment, let’s talk about simple but sufficiently effective ways of improving your online store. More traffic doesn’t mean more purchases but it’s definitely a big step towards it.

According to the latest research of a global search engines market share, Google is still a confident leader with 87,6% of market. That’s why it makes sense to orient the optimization for Google search. Bellow you will find some advices on how to make you online store ranking better than it is, how to pick correct keywords, work with links, and which Google sources you can use to check the data of your store and control the changes.

Make Your Pages Ranking Well

• Adopt each web page for a unique relevant keyword
• Make sure you have at least 200-250 words per page
• Remember, title tag is the most important element on the page. A title tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is. Ideally, you should create a unique title for each page on your site.

• Pay special attention to Home page, as it is the most important page
• Don’t forget about heading tags (H1, H2)
• Use contextual links
• Text links are much better than graphic links
• Alt tags for images are also helpful
• Meta tags don’t improve rankings
• Meta description can influence what’s displayed in the search results, as it gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about

Improve Your Keyword List

The selection of keywords for you web site is what you definitely should start with. Search engines use them when searching results for a particular request. Keywords can make or break your search engine ranking. Optimize the number of keywords per page, as overusing can cause your site to be banned for spamming.

Check the popularity of keyword searches using special tools for that:

• Google Keyword Tool – you can type in any word, phrase or website name. After that, you will get a list of keyword ideas and data showing how often words are searched and their ad bid competition.

• Google Trends – this service shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most.

• It is also important to check the competition of keywords in the search engines. One of the most famous ways is to calculate Keyword Effectiveness Indicator (KEI) score:
  KEI= (volume of searches per month*)^2/(total number of competitors**)

  For example, let’s compare the keywords we’ve decided to work with.
  

  magento extensions = 6,600^2 / 775,000 = 56.206
  magento extension = 8,100^2 / 333,000 = 197,027

  The higher the KEI score, the more attractive the keyword is to target (assuming it’s relevant to your business). That means the “magento extension” phrase is better for using as a keyword. It still has a large number of searchers but at the same time a smaller number of competitors.

  *To obtain the number of competing web pages, go to Google.com and search your keyword phrase with quotation marks
  ** According to the data of Google Keyword Tool

Increase the PageRank with Links

PageRank – Google algorithm for measuring a page’s importance; other search engines have similar measures. PageRank scores from 0 to 10.

• Inbound links play a key role in determining rankings
• Quantity is not the solution for link popularity, it’s more about quality, importance of the page and its relevance
• Keep in mind: each web page has its own PageRank score
• Check your PR with Google Webmaster Central or/and Google Toolbar
• Do your best to offer link-worthy content. Keep it fresh and interesting
• Provide an RSS feed
• Use social media

• Try to get good keywords in the hyperlink text
• Use footer and site-wide links that are leading to the internal pages on your website. Probably, they are cannot be your primary SEO strategy, as they don’t have much value for Google, but make sure the content of site-wide and footer links is relevant.

• Sites with higher PageRank get crawled earlier, faster, and deeper by Googlebot
• Participate in the blogosphere. With help of blog, you can make deep links to your ecommerce site.

Rethink the Structure of Internal Links

• While thinking about inbound links, don’t forget about internal links, as they are matter too
• The PageRank of your home page gets distributed to your deep pages by virtue of your internal linking structure
• Links are very important for search engines, so spread them wisely within your site. Pay attention to:
  • site hierarchy
  • guided navigation
  • site map
  • breadcrumb navigation

  

  • related products, articles, and searches
  • tag clouds and tag pages

Influence the Click Decision

• You can get a synergistic effect of being at the top of the natural results & paid results. Some companies prefer to use paid Internet marketing methods, as the results are more immediate. But the truth is that any good Internet marketing plan should use both paid and organic tools.

• Grab user’s attention with a trustworthy call-to-action proposition in your descriptions
• Don’t forget that your title tag is critical
• Search results are tailored to the user, so you may be the number one for some results but not to others

Keep Abreast of Your Online Store

Check the data relating to your SEO activities.

• Number of pages indexed
• Google PageRank
• Link popularity
• Alexa
• Positions in the search results for important keywords

The secret of SEO success is that there is no secret. The best advice is to keep it simple and think about your visitors. Good luck!

May 13 is Mother’s Day. It is time to give thanks and tell your mom how much you love her. Celebrate the holiday with our weekend sale!

In honor of the Mother’s Day, all Magento extensions in our store are 10% off.

Hurry up! This offer lasts only for the weekend.

• Category&Product Page Enhancements (+38)
• Shipping&Fulfilment (+29)
• Shipping (+14)
• Ease of Use (+13)

aheadWorks also made its valuable contribution and introduced lots of updates for our extensions. While you’re enjoying the perfect quality and premium user experience of our products, we are ready to come back in June with the new Magento Connect statistics.

Stay in touch with us by leaving your comments and feedback!

Fact 1

76% of consumers expect to receive a welcome email once they’ve subscribed

Based on survey responses, consumers expect to receive a welcome email immediately upon signing up, as it’s essential to engage subscribers while they’re highly interested in you.

But remember, your customers don’t want to be bombarded by a flood of emails that are not relevant to their interests.

In the welcome email, you can introduce new subscribers to all the benefits of your email program: highlight your website, social media pages and SMS offering if applicable, provide links to helpful resources you offer, etc.

Fact 2

76% of respondents don’t want to receive e-mails unless they signed up for them

Don’t assume that you have permission to send promotional emails to your customers if they buy from you online. Ask for permission to send mails during the checkout process.

Don’t risk losing customer loyalty just because you sent unwanted emails. It would be much better for you to build a trusting, valuable relationship with your customers.

Fact 3

62% of respondents unsubscribe from e-mails to avoid not relevant messages that were sent too often

The primary reason consumers unsubscribe from an email program is because they feel they’re getting too many emails that are irrelevant to their interests and preferences.

Think of consumers as real people — not just email addresses in a list. Make sure your emails provide value and live up to the expectations you set when the subscribers join your program.

Use segmentation to target subscribers based on their interests and level of engagement.

Fact 4

41% of respondents are open to an option to reduce the frequency of e-mails rather than to unsubscribe

Considering that relevance and frequency are the top opt-out reasons, give subscribers the ability to change their preferences. Provide frequency options as an alternative to unsubscribing, so implement an opt-down program or a preference center to reduce unsubscribing.

Ask subscribers to take an optional survey when they unsubscribe to find out why they’re leaving. Use this data to optimize your email program. Consumers want to be in control of the type of content that they’re getting. Let your consumers control the terms of their relationship with your brand.

Fact 5

37% of respondents in the survey share e-mails over Facebook and Twitter

If subscribers see something share-worthy in an email they receive from you, they’ll often post that email to their social networks. Besides, take into account that social media integration with email could become your strategy for increasing the number of subscribers.

To maximize ROI of your campaigns add share-to-social links in your emails.

Fact 6

70% of all respondents immediately delete e-mails that don’t render well on mobile devices

A majority of consumers surveyed immediately delete emails that are poorly designed for mobile devices. Note: such kind of emails create a negative impression of brand.

You can use the following tricks to avoid the most popular issues with mobile view of email:

  · if your text is under 12px, the iPhone will automatically scale it up and that can break your layout. To turn off auto-scaling, use the code style=”-webkit-text-size-adjust:none”

  · poor contrast is heightened on tiny screens which make small elements hard to read. Pay attention to that fact while creating your email and remember that white text on a gray background is not advisable

  · small call to action buttons invisible and hard to use. Make them at least 44px high, positioned were the thumb naturally rests and expand it across the width of the page. That will make no difference whether you’re holding the phone in right or left hand.

Create your emails suitable for mobile devices otherwise they could be immediately deleted.

It is important to set clear and honest expectations about your emails, think not only strategically but also tactically. Remember – you need to justify the confidence of your consumers to win their trust.

Especially for you, I singled out the most interesting and useful topics of the month, the most significant updates, and of course I prepared an offer you can’t refuse!

Limited Promo

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Enter GDTOP20 coupon code while checkout to get 20% discount for this great extension! Note: the offer is valid for the first 20 buyers.

Hurry up to get into lucky 20!

Marketing Discussions

aheadWorks blog is the main source of information for our dear customers, regular readers and those who casually visited the blog!

With a great pleasure, our team keeps you posted about all the important events and news related to the Magento world and particularly to aheadWorks, useful stuff for the improvement of your store and many other interesting things. Keep in touch to be the first to know!

Let’s go thru the most interesting topics of April:

• do you want to meet aheadWorks team at the main Magento events? (find where)
• will the fast growing Pinterest change the fundamental principles of social networks? (share the opinion)
• can the mobile version of your store be the guarantee of online success? (find it out)
• still have some issues with organizing cross-selling? (solve them)

Updated Extensions

Here are the hottest updates of the month gathered in one place. Check out the new opportunities of the extensions and make sure you have the latest version installed on your store.

Product Preview Pro 1.1 3 features See changelog	Advanced Reports 2.3 6 bugfixes See changelog	Image Slider 1.3 1 feature / 5 bugfixes See changelog
RMA 1.3 2 features / 3 bugfixes See changelog	Z-Blocks 2.3 2 features See changelog	Delivery Date & Notice 1.3 2 features / 3 bugfixes See changelog
Advanced Search 1.2 3 features / 1 bugfix See changelog	Knowledge Base 1.2 3 bugfixes See changelog	Points & Rewards 1.4 3 features / 1 bugfix See changelog

With the Subscriptions and Recurring Payments extension, you can accept recurring payments and sell subscription products in your Magento store easily and efficiently.

Today we are glad to release Subscriptions and Recurring Payments v.1.7. The module has been enhanced with the following features:

• virtual products support
• regular price is displayed on category page
• CIM profile updating after billing or shipping address changing in customer area
• ability to show ‘First delivery’ calendar at product page

Besides, issues with overdue subscriptions and special price displaying have been solved in the new version of this Magento extension.

Visit the product page of Subscriptions and Recurring Payments to find the complete description of the module and play the demo.

The Automatic Product Callouts Magento extension allows you to organize your top product sets in blocks in any place of your site. With this Magento extension, you will help your customers to make the right choice. In Automatic Product Callouts v.1.2 that has been released today, AW_All is updated. Besides, new variables (category_ids, current_category_only) are added to block configuration. Moreover, the updated version has the following bugfixes: native MAP compatibility SQL optimization Get more information about the Automatic Product Callouts extension on the product page.

With the Product Updates Notifications Magento extension, you can keep your customers informed about new products, stock additions or special promotions. It is a perfect tool to increase your sales and profits by bringing back existing customers and registered users to your site. Product Updates Notifications v.1.2 that has become available has multistore support. Besides, the following bugs have been fixed in the new version of the module: localization problem e-mail sending issues Learn more about the extension features on the product page of Product Updates Notifications.

Comprehensive promotion

Certainly, there are products at your website that need more attention in promoting. These can be not very popular or new items. Somebody, vice versa, tends to promote top and exclusive products. The following modules for Magento will be helpful in luring customers to make a purchase.

How to offer alternatives defining various rules

The Automatic Related Products 2 Magento extension is more complicated in settings than the modules mentioned in the first part of the article. But having spent some time on configuring the extension, then you will save your time due to a simple way to relate products on your site. You can define start and end dates of block displaying that will save the trouble of the information relevance checking. Speed up your work and make it more comfortable! You will appreciate how flexible and powerful it is. The module enables you to define rules for related products and offer alternatives to the current product automatically. Dynamic rules make the related products blocks more appealing to people who browse your store.

Automatic Related Products 2 enables you to choose what products to promote. The cheapest, most popular and most valuable products can be promoted at the same time in different blocks. It is possible to randomize displayed products. Thus, more items in stock are covered that is really useful for Magento stores with a great number of products.

How to make a profit on the customer’s wish to be trendy

The Automatic Product Callouts extension for Magento allows you to keep your pages updated with zero maintenance from you. The module is quite easy in configuration, and it gives you an excellent opportunity to highlight your top products as “Best Selling”, “Top Rated”, “Top Searched” and/or “Top Viewed”. With this Magento extension, you will help your customers to make choice. Don’t let your clients to get bored during tiresome attempts to find something worthy among hundreds of variants. Draw their attention to the most popular items that can satisfy their requirements.

Besides, the public approval of these things induces more purchases. Customers like to be in style that’s why they are inclined to choose the top products.

Automatic Product Callouts is particularly recommended for stores with large catalogs. Store owners admit that clicks-through to the top products displayed in the blocks double with this module.

How to attract clients entertaining them

The Featured Products 3 extension helps drive more of your visitors’ attention to the products in your Magento web-store due to the attractive presentation. The module is very flexible for configuration. The opportunity of choosing the block position, the layout for your featured products – a slide or a grid, and animation effects makes the site inviting. This is not only appealing, but also convenient! Make your site peculiar. Your customers will be attracted by catchy elements of website design and new opportunities of stylish preview. With the Featured Products 3 module for Magento, you display “Top Sellers”, “Top Rated”, “Most Reviewed”, “Recently Added”, and “Random Products” to entice customers to explore the features of your products. More detailed settings can take some time, but this will save countless days of great efforts configuring upsells. It’s a nice and easy way to promote your products at your Magento store in a pretty visual way. The module makes products presentation more lively and memorable. Make your work efficiently!

aheadWorks offers a wide range of cross-selling Magento software. Your choice of the most appropriate extension should be based on your store scale, product variety and your personal preferences, wishes and readiness to set special functions and additional effects. You can choose even several modules for different purposes to get the maximum benefit.

All the extensions mentioned in the post give your customers a genuine idea of other products that might be useful to them. When your customers are in the mood to buy, a glimpse of popular products is all they need to spend more money.

Previous purchases influence

Recommendation is the best kind of advertising. People tend to trust other customers’ opinions finding them truthful and reliable. Customers think: “If others buy these products, it must be OK for me to do it too.” Recommendation software plays on the human tendency to be influenced by what others have done.

How to get extra profit without efforts

The Who Bought This Also Bought and Who Viewed This Also Viewed extensions for Magento have very easy and fast configuration, don’t need filling a lot of fields and have an intuitive interface. The modules pick up real information about products from orders, thus, they save your time on relating products due to the automated process.

The Who Bought This Also Bought extension displays the items that were ordered by your customers with the current product.

Who Viewed This Also Viewed exposes relevant products to the current item that visitors viewed in the same session.

These modules encourage your clients to pay attention to more products. Customers are influenced indirectly by choice of other people.

How to make your product page Amazon-like

The Frequently Bought Together module improves the functionality and usability of Magento’s core Related Products function. Therefore, the process of choosing products for displaying in the Frequently Bought Together block is familiar to every Magento-based store owner. The extension gives the store a nice Amazon-like sophistication. The advantage of the Frequently Bought Together extension for Magento is in the comfortable display of products. The total price is defined for all selected items. The extension allows adding animation effects when customers tick off related products. Besides, you can choose the block position by inserting a simple code in your CMS. This is a great extension to increase your average cart total!

Take advantage of using social proof to drive more conversions and revenue for your business. It is a powerful tool of influence on customer behavior.

I will come back soon to continue the overview of cross-selling software from aheadWorks.

Stay tuned!