But even though its pretty easy to setup an online community, its entirely much harder to make a successful online community. So given my experiences, I thought I would put together some best practices for helping to optimize and improve online communities. So let’s get started…

- Customize the look and feel of your online community. Even though Ning  and KickApps offer plenty of themes for communities, in order to really brand your community and set it apart from others, you have to stylize it, particularly a good header graphic - if you aren’t good at design yourself, there are plenty of cheap options out there for web design. But don’t try and wing out though - trust me, image is HUGE for a community.

- Create your online community’s value proposition - then clearly state it on your home page and near your logo. For example, my Classic Rockers Network online community states clearly ‘The Only Online Community for Classic Rock Fans’ - in other words, don’t make your visitors guess at the true value of your website - make them easily understand why they should join your community - or you may not get a second chance to convert them into a happy repeat visitor!

- Think of a great, catchy domain name for your community - this goes a long way to making your community seem more authentic - don’t use the subdomains that you get given to begin with. Domain names are very cheap these days and go a long way to help branding your community.

- Create original content for your online community members. Give members a reason to come back to your website by coming up with your own original content. Here are many ideas for creating great content - interviews, polls, reviews, latest news, contests, commentary on hot issues, user guides etc. Another great idea is to do a series of related posts, as these will encourage people to come back and read the latest.

- Add fun interactive web 2.0-like content to your community. Don’t just offer regular text content - add videos of related content (find and embed from YouTube or even create your own), add related photos, and even add widgets (but don’t go overboard!) You can even add music if your website is music-orientated.

- Customize the member profile questions to match your theme. Don’t just stick with the generic ‘age’, ‘gender’, ‘location’ questions - come up with some fun community related profile questions that will spark conversation between members. For example, if you have a movie online community, you should add profile questions like ‘What are your top 5 movies?’, or ‘Who are your favorite actors?’. It works remarkably well!

- Send personal comments to your new members. Treat your new members like gold. One of the best ways to do that is to send each new member (particularly in the beginning) a personal welcome comment, thanking them and telling them what they can do on your social network. Trust me - this is great way of introducing yourself and the site, and to start community friendships.

- Customize the welcome email that gets sent to your new members. Its very important that new members understand what they can do on your community. The best way to remind them is via the auto-welcome email, but its usually just generic to begin with. Find out how you edit this on your community, and customize it to mention the first things that a user should do your on your community, thank them for joining, and ask them to invite their friends!

- Send regular ’broadcast’ messages to your members to stay in touch - a great way to stay in contact with your members is to email them with your latest community news and your latest great new content. Always encourage them to come back for the latest and greatest - its easier to get existing members to come back than to get new members. Don’t send more than a couple of emails a week though - you don’t want to come off as a spammer and lose members!

- Run a refer a friend contest to get more members. Getting new members to join is often very hard - particularly in the infancy of your community. One of the best ways to get more members is to encourage your existing members to invite their like-minded friends to join up - a great incentive for them to refer their friends is to set up a contest, where the person who refers the most members wins a prize (gift certificates, or something appropriate to your community).

- Use RSS feeds to add to freshness to your community. If you don’t have time to create regular new content, a great way to keep your online community fresher is by finding a related blog and put the RSS for it up on your site. Remember to ask permission from the blog owner - chances are they will be grateful for the extra traffic and exposure to their blog!

- Search engine optimize your community! This is where it gets a little tougher, but there are some important things you should do to help increase your rankings in the search engines (thus generating your free targeted traffic). Firstly you should pick and place your target keywords in the description of your community, as these usually form your page title and meta tags. Secondly, think of your target keywords while writing new content - always try and use target keywords in the content title, and in the body text and even in the image ALT tag. Then lastly - start building links from other sites - reaching out to related blogs for link exchange definitely helps. All this helps build your search engine rankings.

- And lastly… advertise your community on Facebook. What better place to find new community members than to advertise on a place that is full of people who understand and love communities - Facebook! The Facebook advertising platform is fairly new, and it allows you to easily target your advertising by keywords and demographics. Its really worked for me, and I have personally found that its much cheaper than Google Adwords too.

So there we have it - hopefully this guide helped all the budding online community builders out there to improve and optimize! And if you don’t have your own social network yet, I suggest you create one about one of your passions (I personally recommend using ning.com). Its great fun - and could make you some great money on the side, and some great friends/contacts!

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Basically, unless your web visitor is clicking your Twitter link from the Twitter.com website, it won’t show up as a direct Twitter referrer in your analytics (it will simply appear as direct/bookmark traffic). Therefore if the user is visiting from a desktop application like TweetDeck, or a mobile phone app like TwitterFon, it will come in wrongly as direct/bookmark traffic instead. And unfortunately a pretty high proportion of all Twitter traffic comes from mobile or regular Twitter apps, and not from the Twitter.com website.

Luckily there are several great ways to track your success better and address some of these tracking issues. So, lets take a look at some great ways to track and measure your success (or current failure) on Twitter…

- Use Tracking Codes! Put tracking codes in the URLs that you use in Twitter. This is fairly easy if you use Google Analytics campaign builder- yes, I know its a pain to do so, but trust me, it will help you see the true impact of your Twitter usage, including its impact on your site goals like sales or signups. And to make it even easier, you can use this great Google Analytics Twitter hack to take out the annoying manual part of doing this.

- Use a better URL shortener! Instead of using the default Twitter URL shortener, you can use a better one like bit.ly or ow.ly - these include built in tracking codes so you can monitor clicks, and who is Twittering about the URL that you put in your link. And they show up in your analytics as their own referrer (instead of as direct traffic), no matter whether the clicker uses a Twitter application, or Twitter.com, so you can measure your Twitter usage better!

- Measure your influence! There is also a great free tool that actually gives you even better Twitter analysis - its called Twitalyzer, and lets you measure your influence, not just measuring clicks. It uses a system to calculate things like your reach, genorousity and clout in the would of Twitter. Definitely worth a look!

- Track your re-tweets! The more people who are retweeting your messages the better - so use a tool like ReTweetRank to measure the amount of retweets about you per day, and try and grow your ranking on there. You can also use it to compare your retweet rating against your competitors or peers - and beat them!

- Follow your follower levels! Use TwitterCounter to measure and grow the amount of new people following you per day, and average growth per day. You can also find the number of users who are unfollowing you per day - if your unfollowers increase, change your Tweeting habits until the unfollowers stop.

- Put your ear to the ground!  It’s really important to listen to who is talking about you to get true insight (good and bad) - TweetBeep measures the amount of times your Twitter name or product or brand is mentioned, and what is being said, and automatically emails you anytime this happens. Very useful - and remember to always reply to these people talking about you!

- Customize Omniture if you have it! Lastly, if you are lucky enough to be using Omniture Site Catalyst, you can customize the tool to automatically track top Twitter clicks, clickers, followers, and keywords mentioned about you.

So there we have it - some great tools that help you understand and track your Twitter success better. What other Twitter tracking tools do you use?

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Here are the main reasons why I think Bing.com won’t succeed in wrestling away much of a search share back from Google, and what they need to change…

1: Bing.com is not friendly to first time users - it doesn’t give a real value proposition on the homepage.  And when I mean no value proposition, I mean that it doesn’t inform users about why they should use Bing rather than another search like Google or Yahoo. Microsoft are obviously just expecting people to try using Bing just because its the new cool thing by Microsoft, and use it because its supposed to be the new competitor to Google. But it doesn’t let the user know why they should run their search on Bing.com instead of at Google. If people don’t understand the real value behind Bing after the first few searches, they are simply going to go straight back to Google or Yahoo, probably rarely to come back. Remember that web users are more fickle and picky than ever before! Fair enough if Bing.com was the first web search on the scene, but its not. And it really needs to help persuade people better with the goliath that is Google just a few clicks away.

2: The homepage doesn’t explain the unique features of Bing and why its better than other search engines. Imagine thinking about buying a supposedly great camera without seeing a list of its great features. Bing is like that. They don’t offer a complete list of the benefits of using Bing anywhere that I found on their site. And its not like they don’t have great features - they have better filtered searching, better image search, autoplay video in results, cashback offers, and more - here is a more complete list of good Bing features.  For a better first time user experience, on the Bing homepage, there needs to be a prominent area with words saying something along the lines of  ‘First time user? Find out why you should use Bing.com’, with clear benefits listed after clicking. Maybe even show a comparison Matrix highlighting why Bing search is better than Google search. Come on Microsoft - play tough - just look at the abuse you are taking from Apple on those PC vs. Mac commercials… go big or go home.

3: Lack of ‘real time’ news search options showing in regular results- No breaking news results come up at the top or bottom of Bing searches like appear on Google search results - these news results are often much more real time than the regular search results, and are of high value to many searchers wanting the newest information possible. There is also no ‘blog’ results search either, which are often another great news source. Probably pretty easy to integrate these better.

4: Bing needs some serious grass-roots viral marketing campaigns to make a real impact. Even if Microsoft do fix the above issues, Bing really needs some kind of wondrous viral marketing campaign, at the grass roots level, aimed at trying to convert the hardcore and loyal Google search users into loyal Bing users. If you convert the mavens like these people, they will spread the word naturally. And the masses will begin to follow. Traditional advertising online is not likely going to work very well here, sorry Microsoft.

Overall, nice try though Microsoft - Bing has some good features, and at least you are showing up for the fight. Now really make the people want to use it - in the very least, don’t make the user work to try and understand the benefits of Bing. It will be very interesting to see how things pan out for Bing - I personally hope they do well, and at least wrestle some of the search share back away from Google’s monopoly, which is bad for a search user experience.  Anyone else have any good thoughts on Bing and their search future?

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Most people who own or work for a website need help optimizing and improving it to get better results (after all, no website is ever perfect or complete!) - so simply let me know what you need help with via Twitter and you get a chance to win the iPod Nano!

I will do my best to answer everyone’s website help questions that I get (and may even do a complete blog post on the answer if its a good question). And you will get the chance to win my brand new iPod Nano for free!

How to Win the iPod:
1: Follow me on Twitter.
2: Retweet the following message below on Twitter, along with what you most need help for optimizing and improving your website.

‘I want to win @RichPage’s iPod Nano http://bit.ly/richipod and I need help with (insert what your website needs help with)’

Great examples of website help requests would be:
- I need help getting more people to convert for my free trial
- I need help reducing the bounce rate of my homepage
- I need help improving my shopping cart to get more sales
- I need help getting more newsletter subscribers
- I need help getting more items added to my shopping cart

Please be honest, and don’t just make something up - because if you win, I will be helping you with the website problem you mention. And please note, one of the few things I really can’t offer much help with is website design.

I will pick and announce a random Twitter reply on June 9th as the winner, and will do my best to reply to all the messages I get too.

Thanks and good luck!

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So I thought I would write a beginners guide all about behavioral targeting, and hopefully help you understand the importance of it. So, lets get started…

Whats so good about behavioral targeting? Well. Imagine walking into a bar where everyone knows your name, and your favorite drink is sitting at the bar waiting for you, without you having to ask for it. Not bad eh? Now imagine going to a website that welcomes you with your name, and shows you content relevant to what you looked at the last few times you were there. This happens more often than people think - especially on ecommerce sites like Amazon.com and eBay. Go back and visit some of your favorite sites - how do they know what you are looking for? Well, they use behavioral targeting.

So how does it work? When you visit a website, you are ‘cookied’ - a cookie gets stored on your computer with your visit details. Websites that use behavioral targeting then use this cookie to put you in a specific segment  based on your behavior or how you arrived (like first time user, frequent visitor to music section, visitor from a newsletter etc). Depending on what segment you are in, you will get relevant content shown to you - often different than other users will see. And this content will hopefully be more related to what you really want to see, thus improving your website experience. And its been proven to work VERY well - many large websites are already using this with great results.

What are some good ways to use behavioral targeting? Well, there are many different ways to segment and target your users. Here is a list of some of the better ways to meet your visitors needs better and make them happier:

• Show welcome content to new visitors, and ‘welcome back’ content to repeat visitors (ideally, show their name/username). I actually do this on my blog - see at the top of each post.
• Show content to visitors relating to their previous purchases (much like Amazon and other leading ecommerce websites do).
• Show content to visitors relating to previous content seen. Like if a user on an electronics site looked at cameras the last two times, show them cameras on the homepage when they return.

Enough of the basics. What about about some more advanced ideas? Sure, here are some methods that will help you stand out from the crowd:

• Show different coupons relating to items visitors have purchased before or put in their shopping cart. This will increase conversions and hopefully increase sales.
• Show the user ads relating to what content they have previously seen. Not only does this make the ads seem less annoying for visitors, but it also increases click through rates on ads, which is great for sites trying to make money that way (like media sites).
• Depending on what search keywords a user arrives to the site, dynamically insert them into content. This way it will match users needs better and reduce the chances of them leaving early.

What’s the best way to start behavioral targeting on my site? A new great tool you can start experimenting with is called BTbuckets, and it allows you to being doing some basic behavioral targeting, by segmenting users and then showing them relevant content. If you want to get more advanced, you can use more robust solutions offered by Magnify360.com or SiteSpect.com. Also, for more indepth posts on this topic, check out Anil Batra’s great blog which covers behavioral targeting very well, and has great tips and advice.

What else is important for behavioral targeting? Well, if you go into behavioral targeting blind with no idea of what you want to achieve, then it probably won’t work well for you. Remember to first set your goals and what would determine a successful behavioral targeting implementation.

So there we have it - hopefully I have enlightened you and you now understand a little bit more about behavioral targeting. Go ahead, start experimenting… your visitors visitors will be thanking you!

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Twitalyzer- this is a great new Twitter usage analysis tool from the web guru that is Eric Peterson. It allows you to determine your very own Twitter usage rating, and it allows you to analyze other Twitters influence  too(people, companies, you name it). It breaks your usage down by things like influcene and genorisity. According to my ratings results, I guess i’m pretty worth following on Twitter, because I have an 86% noise to signal ratio - in other words, I only put out good stuff (follow me and find out for yourself!) For those of you who are avid Twitter user, I suggest you go use this great free tool right now…

BTbuckets- imagine being able to segment your website visitors into different ‘buckets’, and then be able to target and automatically show them content based on what bucket they are in?  Well with BTbuckets, you can now do this and make your site an even better user experience! For example, if a user visits an electronics section of a site often, they would automatically be shown a section devoted just to electronics when they come back to the homepage. Cool eh? I definitely recommend you go play around with it - one of the easiest things you can do is just simply show different messaging depending whether the visitor is new or returning (much like you see at the top of each blog post on my site).

WASP - This is a great new tool for web analysts, created by a web analytics expert, Stephane Hamel. It allows web analysts to easily check out their web analytics tool setup, and do quality assurance on it. It works on hundreds of different web analytics tools (tracking tools, testing tools etc), and can be a real godsend when trying to trouble shoot tracking issues.

Abandonment Tracker - This is a pretty innovative new tool - it allows you to track and recapture the users that abandon your website (and yes, every website has plenty of users that abandon early that need rescuing). They have a free basic version, and also a full paid version, loaded with advanced options that actually allow you to automatically email users who abandon your website. In particular, its great for trying to recapture visitors who left during registration or a shopping cart. Definitely worth checking out!

So there we have it. Some great new tools that any web marketer or web analyst should be checking out and putting to good use!

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It is the first time that I have actually got to attend this leading web analytics conference, and am excited to meet some amazing analytics and optimization experts like Avinash Kaushik, Eric Peterson, Anil Batra and of course Jim Sterne.

If anyone that reads my blog is also going, I would love to meet up with you all. Just shoot me an email or a twitter message, and we can try and meet up.

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Therefore, its very important to make your homepage be as good as possible for first time visitors. But before I discuss ways to help improve your homepage, it’s important to know what metrics to look at for understanding how successful your homepage is, and how much potential you have…

What Determines a Successful Homepage?
Firstly, here are the three most important metrics that you should be looking at to determine how successful your homepage currently is, and after you improve it:

Low Bounce Rate (definition: single access/entries*100)
This takes into account interest from visitors directly arriving on home page from offsite. Anything over 50% is considered bad, below 15% is considered excellent.

Low Exit Rate (definition: exits/visits*100)
This takes into account interest from visitors arriving at your homepage from within your site. Again, over 50% is bad, below 15% is considered excellent.

High Click-Through-Rate (definition: total clicks/total pageviews*100)
Also known as CTR, this is a sign of visitor engagement - if your visitors aren’t clicking through your homepage, then its a sign of trouble. Anything over 50% is considered good. Below 20% is considered poor.

How to Improve your Homepage:
So now that you know what metrics you need to be looking at to determine current and future success of your homepage, here are some of the most important things you need to do to your homepage to improve it:

1: Place a  tagline near your logo.  Ideally in less than 10 words, having a good tagline will help give your visitors an instant idea of who your site is for and why they shoud use it. Ideally your logo should be in the top left hand corner, so visitors see your logo, and then can read your tagline to help them understand what your site is about.

2: Prominantly display your unique value proposition. This is kind of like an expansion of your tagline - it needs to explain the main benefits of your website for its visitors, and more importantly, why a visitor should use your website rather than a competitor. And if you don’t even know your unique value proposition, then start thinking about it - and don’t confuse it with your mission statement either.

3: Place a site search in the top right hand corner. What makes this so important? Well, if a visitor can’t find what they are looking for, there is one last thing they will do before leaving your website. And thats running a site search for what they are looking for. So if you don’t have your search in an easily findable place (or worse still, don’t even have one), then you are going to be increasing your bounce rate, and losing potential repeat visits.

4: Have an easy to use navigation menu. Your navigation menu should also be clearly labelled, have obvious names of the tabs (don’t make them guess), not be too hard to move around without dropping off, and should make use of drop down menus. These allow the user to explore your site without having to actually click around it. Very user friendly!

5: Use images that support your unique value proposition.  Images should not just be used for decoration or to fill in space - they should give value to the visitor and help convey your unique value proposition.  You may want to make use a slideshow, so you can portray several things about your value proposition at once. But don’t use too many images or too much flash as this will slow down your homepage and increase its bounce rate.

6: Have a section for your latest news and products/services. Its important to keep your visitors up to date with your latest and greatest. In particular, this is great for repeat visitors, and if they know to expect it there, it will give them another reason to come back to your homepage in the future.

7: Shorten up your homepage and offer less choices. Recent studies have shown that the more options you give someone to choose from, the more likely that they will actually choose nothing, and simply leave your site. So ask yourself this about all of your homepage content - ‘do my visitors REALLY need to see this on the homepage?’ If you have any doubt, leave it off.

8: Consider removing at least one advert. A page with too many adverts is a common complaint from visitors - and having that feeling about your homepage is a very bad first impression in particular. Losing just one ad on your homepage shouldn’t be financially damaging, because you will ultimately please more people and get more clicking through and seeing more ads on your interior pages. In particular, if you are selling something, and not a media site, consider removing all ads from your homepage.

9: Personalize your homepage for visitors. Usually the hardest of all these things to improve, but you should try and personalize the homepage for logged in/cookied visitors. You can show the visitors name in the form of a welcome, personalized recommendations based on what they bought before, or show content/modules they want to see, ala My Yahoo or Google homepage. Doing things like this will help improve repeat visit rate and reduce bounce rate.

10: Test, test and test! Don’t just take my word for it with these improvements - you can test implementing these yourself and their impact with a tool like Google Website Optimizer. Some of these improvements will work better for different kind of websites, and you can try coming up with your own variations to test and improve your homepage. The main key is to keep testing!

So there we have it - hopefully after reading this you will have more people loving and using your whole site, rather than just looking at your homepage and immediately leaving and going back to Google to click on a competitor. And remember to keep monitoring those metrics I mentioned at the start to see how you are improving over time.

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What do businesses like these all have in common in a bad way? Well, surprisingly few of these types of business  take full advantage of what the web can do for growing their business. And I don’t mean just having some bare bones website which are more often that not just glorified online brochures for these kind of businesses.

So in order to help out the many hundreds of thousands of businesses who are still failing to take full advantage of what the internet can do to help their business grow and make more money, i’ve put together 10 ways to help turn offline businesses into thriving online businesses -  lets get started.

1: Start your own website or improve your current one - believe or not there are still many regular businesses that don’t even have a website yet, or only have their menu or contact details on it. For example, write some original content, post latest news about your business, write bios of employees, etc.

2: Create an online community - there are two main reasons why its important to do this - firstly, its a great way for you connect with your business fans and users, and secondly its a great way for them to connect with each other and meet like minded people. Its fairly easy to setup an online community using free tools like Ning.com or KickApps.com.

3: Create a themed blog - a blog is another great way to connect with your visitors. You can post latest news about your business, new special offers, interviews with your regular customers, etc. Its pretty easy to set up a blog for free at Wordpress.com or Blogger.com. Also, you should entice your regular customers to go online and use the blog and comment on it - this will make it seem more popular with first time visitors. Also, if you want to get really advanced, you can integrate your blog into your community by using RSS feeds.

4: Get some free targeted traffic - do some basic search engine optimization (SEO) tricks to your website pages - think of the keywords that someone might use to search for a business like yours (like pet sitting services), then add those keywords to your title tags, meta tags and throughout your website text. This will help increase the chances of your website being found in the search engines, thus getting you some great free targeted traffic. And if you want some paid SEO help, you can use the great services like SEOmoz.org or eVisibility.com offer.

5: Offer ‘online only’ coupons so you can track website ROI - a great way to tell just how effective your website has become is to offer coupons that can only be found online at your website. This way, if a user comes in with that coupon, you know they have been to your website, and that your website doing a great job of driving sales! Good options here are buy one get one free, 10% off your next purchase in store, or you can even offer free samples coupons.

6: Get an official business listing on Yelp.com. If you haven’t already heard of Yelp.com, and you own a business, then you simply HAVE to get an official business listing on Yelp.com - its increasingly becoming the most common way of people finding local businesses. And remember to listen to your reviews and act on their feedback - both positive and negative! If you only do one thing of out these ten, I would do this, and right now…

7: Start doing paid search on Google, Yahoo and MSN - once your site has been up and running, start experimenting with paid search marketing - depending on what your business is, its fairly cheap to send targeted search traffic to your website (between 10-50 cents per click for search keywords is about normal, but some are very expensive, like for law firms).

8: Get a Facebook profile, get many friends on it, and advertise on it - unless you have been living in a cave, you should be well aware of how important Facebook.com has become, even to businesses. There are now over 200 million users on Facebook.com - many of which could be potential customers of yours - so go ahead and set up a profile and begin networking and spreading the word of your business in the local community - and remember to try their new advertising service too - its been getting good results.

9: Sell branded goods with your logo or business name - to help make your business some extra money, and to increase the branding of your business, you can use sites like CafePress.com to easily and quickly create t-shirts, mugs, caps, stickers, and more, all personalized with your company name and logo. Very cool, right? It’s a good feeling to have people wearing things with pride that have your company name on it.

10: Promote your website at your place of business - its important to remember that you need to get your regular offline visitors to go online to your website - try using stickers, banners, business cards, bar mats - try and get creative. It’s important to let your regular customers know that you have an online business - and the reasons why they should check it out.

These tips will of course vary slightly depending on your business model, and on the nature of your customers, and how likely they are to be loyal, but these should provide business owners with a good online kick start.

And if anyone would like some more personalized ideas to help your very own business just shoot me an email and I will try and help you.

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So for this next in my series of ‘Win at Website Optimization’, I have created a  list of great email tips that you should follow in order to increase the chances of someone ordering from or visiting your site again:

Basic Email Auto Follow-Up Tips:

• Immediately send a confirmation email informing them of their purchase or signup (this should be automated). This email should include any necessary support details (email and phone) and login information.
• In this first confirmation auto email, also include clear expectations of what the next steps are going to be in the ordering/shipping process. This helps reduce order anxiety.
• Always send another auto email as soon as the product has been shipped, or the service has commenced, and provide website links so they can check their order status at anytime.
• Just in case the visitor wasn’t quite sure about their purchase or what they just signed up for, always provide them with a get out of jail offer - the auto confirmation email should show the refund policy, and ideally offer at least a 24 hour refund guarantee.
• If the product or service they have purchased requires any vague understanding of how to use it, or how to get started, automatically send them another ‘here’s how to get started’ email.
• A month or so later, auto email the visitor a coupon for a discount off their next purchase or signup. This will increase the chances of them coming back and ordering again.
• Once every few months (not too often though, as it would annoy them), you should auto send an email that informs the user of any hot new products/ services, and latest site news. This helps engage the user further. Always provide clear unsubscription links too - otherwise you are technically spamming them.

It’s actually pretty easy to send these simple auto follow-up emails too - if you aren’t already using AWeber, a simple, but great email autoresponder tool, I suggest you sign up now and follow the tips above. But if you want to get a little more cutting edge, and you have a slightly bigger budget to develop or purchase a more advanced email auto follow-up tool, then try out some of these tips below:

Advanced Auto Email Follow-Up Tips

• If possible, depending on what they have just purchased or signed up for, automatically put them into a different email marketing segment, and send them targeted emails showing them other products/ services that relate better to what they just purchased or signed up for. This will increase the chances of the recipients engaging with your site again.
• Some email marketing tools enable you to send auto emails to visitors who abandon your checkout flow before purchasing. This way, you automatically ask them if there was anything you can do to help them complete their purchase, or offer a further incentive to buy. This has been proven to work very well for rescuing abandoned shopping carts.
• If possible, send an auto email if a user hasn’t logged into your site for over 2 or 3 months, reminding them they haven’t been back for a while. Include an update of what’s happened since then in this auto email too, and encourage them come back to your website.

So come on. Start putting your email marketing system to work. By using tips like these above, you will definitely help improve the success of your website! And if anyone else has any other great tips that work well for getting the most out of follow-up emails, please reply so we can discuss!

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