You may have seen recent posts about when refunds are posted to your account, or how to make sure you’re not losing money on international orders. I’ve even written about how to help customers who want to change how often receive a recurring delivery to simplify the process.

As I thought about it, I realized that most of the tips and tricks I’ve come across with 1ShoppingCart with my clients relate to specific problems.

It seems to me that you guys should be asking the questions that you want to see answered here on this blog. I want to help you make your website as profitable as possible, but that only comes with knowing your specific concerns.

So, fire away and let me know what aspects of setting up an account or keeping it running are giving you a headache. Consider me aspirin that comes in several forms:

1. If it’s a quick question, you might see me pop into the comments to address it as soon as I get to reading it. You don’t have to worry about long waits.
2. For more involved processes, you may see the the answer as an upcoming blog post. We’ll be sure to let the asker know and credit them in the post!
3. If you need a full-scale consultation to make sure that your business can go from scratch to fully up-and-running, you want to contact me through this site so I can assess your needs.

Three choices and whichever you choose, you’ll get rapid responses about your 1ShoppingCart needs from a leader in the field.

Let’s get started: What do you want me to write about and answer just for you?

“How many subscribers are reading your newsletter and clicking through?”

(The link in your email should be your ‘call to action’ and it’s only effective if your visitors are clicking on it.)

And you know what the response is nearly every time?

“I don’t know Tyler!”

And that response isn’t good enough… You want to know why?

Sure we can send the emails as a HTML newsletter or broadcasts so we could measure the ‘open’ rate.  But many people want to stick with text emails for S-P-A-M reasons. We all know text emails breeze through S-P-A-M filters.

So let me ask you a question… “How many subscribers are reading your newsletter and clicking on the ‘call to action?’”

We just got done testing one of my clients email marketing campaigns and noticed their click-through rates were a miserable 0.83 Percent. We send an email roughly every other day and these numbers were consistent over a two week period.

To put it more simply… We were sending a broadcast to 12,000 people, and only 100 people actually clicked through to the clients website.

When we saw those numbers we knew we had to jump into action. We tried three different variations of emails we sent out.

Email #1: one link in the email at the bottom driving them to the website

Email #2: one link up top and one at the bottom

Email #3: a short teaser email with a link back to the site

Which one do you think outperformed the rest?

Email #1: A 0.83% click-through rate bringing in little to no sales

Email #2: 2.1% click-through rate

Email #3: 14.3% click-through rate bringing a huge increase in sales!

Now for the good news. Those numbers will only go up from here as we will always be testing EVERY email we send out. Our goal is to get over a 22% click-through.

If you get over a 10% click-through rate then you are doing good and anything over 20% is phenomenal.

And even better news for you… I’ve laid out exactly how we test each email step-by-step below:

1. In 1ShoppingCart set up an ‘AdTracker’. Name it the date – type of email with the number of characters in the email – page we drive them too (Ex. “12-01-09 – Teaser 456 Char. – Blog”)
2. Next we set up a redirect through our website instead of using the AdTracker link so it looks like it’s coming from our website.(If you want to learn how to setup a redirect visit http://www.everythingwebbased.com/affiliateredirect.html. This is for our affiliates but just change Insert-Your-Affiliate-Link-Here with the AdTracker link)
3. Upload the new redirect page to your server
4. Put the link to the new redirect page you just created in the email.

Now you may be asking, why do I want to track this through the shopping cart?

Well the answer’s easy.

In fact, I am going to give you the exact excel spreadsheet we use to track each email.

Click Here to download the excel spreadsheet.

Remember, you should always be working on ways to make your emails campaigns more effective. Keeping track of all my clients email campaigns allows us to immediately see what’s working and improve what’s not, which leads to more money in the pocket.

Leave your comments below
and let me know what you want to learn next.