21 Aug

Examples of Abandoned Cart Emails

Part (all) of a search marketers job is to increase sales. To that end implementing an abandoned cart system allows you to double back to someone who almost bought and try once again to convert them. Once an abandoned cart system is in place you should work on optimizing for conversions, after all higher conversion rates mean more sales which makes everyone happy.

To this end I found this blog post 37 Examples of Abandoned Shopping Cart Emails which has the text of 37 different abandoned cart emails sent out by various companies on the web. Not only did I find the text interesting but the fact that Zappos has two text messages shows they are split testing their abandoned cart emails.… Read the rest

09 Aug

Google Tells You About Manual Penalties

Finally, after years of asking for it, Google now let site owners know about manually applied penalties.This information is easily available now through the Google Webmaster Tools site at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools under ‘Search Traffic->Manual Actions’.  Apparently 2% of sites have a manual action against them.

For background Google has two types of penalties, algorithmic penalties are in their ranking algorithm and are automatically applied and removed as necessary – this includes the Panda and Penguin updates along with a whole host of other penalties. Manual penalties are applied by someone in Google after they have reviewed your site, and can only be removed by someone at Google.… Read the rest