Time: 8:30am - 8:45am
Session: Welcome Greeting
Presented by: Scott Sanfilippo

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the most effective and the most popular way to drive traffic to your e-commerce site.  Search Engine Marketing runs the gamut of activities from commercial pay-per-click advertising to natural ways of search engine optimization.  SEM is important, but it is also complex and dynamic.  Even if you are an e-commerce pioneer you still need to understand the latest trends and technological improvements.  Along with changes in technology come changes in taste.  New search engines gain in popularity while others fade.  You have to know the technology and you have to know the territory and that’s what we’ll teach you in this important session.  We’ll start with the ABC’s of search marketing and walk you through the latest changes you’ll need to understand to stay ahead of the SEM game. 

We’ll review the past, present and future of search engine marketing, including:

• Users vary with search engines.  Yahoo!, Google, MSN and other search engines attract different demographics.  We’ll sort it out.
• Learn the numbers.  Get more search engine bang for the buck.  We’ll teach you how to make the spiders work for you.
• Keywords count!  Learn how to identify the words that will drive traffic to your site.
• Beat the keyword price game.  You can get around paying the high prices for keywords and still maintain your search engine ranking.  We’ll show you how.
• Click Fraud A to Z.  How to see it, how to find it and how to fight it. 
• Search Terms.  Search terms which worked well yesterday often aren’t as effective today.  We’ll tell you what’s hot, what’s not, and what’s next.
• Search marketing agencies.  We’ll show you how to choose the right agency for you and how to handle them.
• Page optimization is changing.  There are new rules.  Did you know? 
• Boosting your ROI.  We’re internet vets.  We’ll teach you what we know.

If you're managing a Google Ad Words campaign, you probably know a thing or two about keywords and text ads. You've found the right keywords for your business, but how do you write ads that customers will click on? Experts from Google will give you the how-to on writing effective ad copy. Writing ads isn't about throwing a bunch of words together - there are specific insider tips and tricks that you need to know to set your ad apart from your competition, attract the customer's attention, and propel the customer to click on your ad.

This session introduces two of Google’s latest product offerings. Have you ever wanted to advertise on radio or in newspapers outside your market but didn’t have the budget or know-how to do it? Google makes it easy and affordable with these two great products. Be one of the first e-businesses to start using Google Audio and Print by attending this session.

Are you ready to know how your customers interact with your site? Are you tired of working with other software to import cost data or create keyword tracking codes? There is now a solution that you can implement on your store.

With Google Analytics you receive a few benefits that you may not have been taking advantage of, such as:

• The cost is FREE, so you can spend your marketing budget on your site and not on software to keep track of where your customers are going on your site.
  
• No matter your skill set or the type of information you are looking for, the interface is easy to use for a beginner to an expert.
  
• The service is hosted by Google so you can expect consistent service
  
• Your Adwords account is integrated directly with your account. You are able to track all of your campaigns in their interface. You can also see how your other advertising is doing by using the graphs and data within the analytic software.
  

Email can still effectively increase e-commerce sales, but only if you do it right.  Customers are increasingly wary and weary from wading through a swamp of spam as well as increasing amounts of legitimate business and personal email.  Email marketing has evolved and e-commerce merchants must change their strategies and tactics to get their message through to their customers.  It’s all about engagement and retention.  We’ll teach you how to get your target audience to open that mail and then act on what they read. 

This will teach you to:

• Personalize.  Effective email says more than “Dear Joe….”  We’ll teach you to personalize so your email feels personal.
• Segment.  Learn to separate your customer e-mail lists according to their web buying behavior, e-mail open rates and conversion rates.
• Is More Better?  It is important to understand how and under what circumstances the frequency of email affects response. 
• Cross-selling/up-selling.  Learn how to use transactional e-mail messages to promote more sales throughout your e-commerce site.
• Email lists.  Learn how to keep your lists current.  Learn to increase your lists without alienating your potential customers.
• What works.  We’ll teach you which web site offers best encourage your customers to sign up for your email. 
• Certified Email?  It had to happen.  We’ll tell you what it is and how to use it to your advantage. 
• Event-triggered marketing.  We’ll show you how to do it so that you actually attract customers for a change.
• Targeting.  We’ll teach you how to combine analytics with email to improve your message marketing.

Affiliate marketing can be a big money-maker, but it takes care and planning.  It is true that affiliate marketing has exploded in recent years.  Affiliates have evolved from the informal days when sites tried to pick up a little extra cash by posting a link to retail sites and taking a piece of the final sale.  Now affiliates are a force of their own.  They are major shopping destinations with their own marketing, promotions and loyal customer bases.  They can be a valuable asset to your business, depending on the arrangement.  Margins are the key to successful affiliate marketing.  Affiliate marketing is a major force in e-commerce, but as with any major force it must be handled with care.  We’ll teach you how.

This is advanced affiliate analysis.  Solid Cactus will help you:

• Strategic thinking.  We’ll teach you which are the best affiliates for you and how to cultivate and manage those relationships.
• More vs. better.  It is important to strike a balance between the number of affiliates you choose and the sites which work best for you. 
• Protect yourself.  We’ll teach you to handle problems like spyware.  Some affiliates use it; we’ll help you deal with it.
• Get technical.  A key to search engine marketing are the terms affiliates will bid for on your behalf.  These terms are crucial and we are experts.  You’ll learn from the best.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Solid Cactus Team Members Available from 9:00am to 5:00pm

Blogs are becoming increasingly popular and now wear many hats at retail web sites. They can help to establish a retailer's professional credentials, they can engage shoppers in an informal but seductive way which can turn them into buyers and provide additional keyword-rich material for search engines to identify. But while retailers across the spectrum have started blogs, the most successful ones are those blogs related to a particular topic that has a community of devotees.  Within that community you can shine if you know the territory and you know how to present that knowledge.

In this workshop we will:

• Analyze.   We will examine what makes a successful blog.  We will identify markets and products where blogs are most likely to work and see why certain blogs fail to connect with customers. 
• Demonstrate.  We will teach you the ingredients necessary to create and maintain a blog, how to attract loyal customers based on your product knowledge and market expertise.
• Benefit.  You can add value to your ecommerce site with an effective blog.  We’ll tell you what to expect from your web site blog and how to keep your blog current and relevant to your customers.

Your new store is up and running and the traffic is great, however, you’ve got more lookers than buyers. What’s wrong? You have to get your customers to take that next step, and we know how to do it. Lou and John will guide you through advanced features for your store that makes the shopping experience easier and more reassuring for your customers.

These advanced features include an important opportunity for customer reviews and feedback. How your customers feel about your store can be critical in attracting other shoppers.

It is a fact that items which have product reviews attached to them actually sell better. It’s because shoppers believe other shoppers when they comment on your products and your store, and their opinions can make the difference in a new sale. You can spend all the money you like in advertising, but your customers see advertising as self-promotion, just what you see when you look at advertising. But a customer is seen as non-biased and can say things about your business that register in a way advertising never can.

You’ll also learn about features all designed with one thing in mind, getting customers to buy from you. We’ll show you cross selling, how to display related products and spur sales. We’ll demonstrate multiple add to cart buttons, tabular product info tables, dynamic paging and more.

Each of these features makes it easier for customers to see your products and better understand their options. And the better they feel, the more likely you are to make that sale.

Adding a human touch to your website can make all the difference in today’s hyper-competitive market. Attend this session to learn how to increase online sales, improve customer service and manage interactions across all channels: chat, voice, email, and self-service/ knowledgebase.

Have you ever wished you had x-ray vision into your website activity? Don’t miss the discussion on how real time site monitoring can give you that power.

Gilad will also present a live demo of LivePerson’s award-winning chat and contact center solutions, which over 5,000 companies are using to:

§  Increase conversion rates: visitors who chat are three times more likely to buy, and their average order sizes are 35% higher than non-chatters 

§  Improve customer satisfaction: chatters are twice as likely to return to the same website within a day, and exit surveys reveal that 85-90% of chatters rate their service experiences as “good” or “excellent” 

§  Lower service costs and improve productivity: shifting service requests from phone to chat can reduce the average cost per interaction by 80%.

If you answered YES to any of the questions above, Shipping Manager from Solid Cactus is the answer.

We all know that with the current Yahoo! shipping manager you can have shipping methods setup based on a Rate Table, Flat Rate or UPS Real-time Rates. Shipping Manager will give you the ability to customize your shipping methods to meet your individual company goals.

With Shipping Manager you receive the following benefits:

• Receive Real-time rates from not only UPS but also from USPS, and FedEx
• Set item-based rules, instead of having the rules based off of the order information.
  • Set flat rates for individual items.
  • Set restrictions per item � for example you can now limit the type of shipping available for the particular item.
  • Have a source zip code for a particular item - this is particularly useful for companies that use drop-shippers or companies that have multiple warehouses.
  • Specify the quantity of shipments per item - this is very useful if you have items that need to be shipped by themselves (solo-ship) or items that require multiple shipments.
  • Set the dimensions of a particular item - this will allow you to recover any carrier surcharges for oversized items.
• Customize your Real-time rates. - Yes that's right, not only can you add an extra charge on top of the real-time rate but it also will take into account any restrictions placed on the particular items.

Not only do you receive the features above but the Shipping Manager is a hosted application. This means that you are not required to install any software, purchase any servers or maintain any updates to the software. We will be doing all of this for you. One other benefit, you will immediately be able to take advantage of any enhancements we develop.

Get ready to break out of the stone age, and step into the future of shipping methods. Fill in the information below and a Solutions Advisor will contact you shortly. The shipping customization you have been looking for is just a click away!

At FedEx, we know that small businesses are the backbone of the world's economy, accounting for more than 99% of the businesses in the United States alone. In order to help our small business customers grow and develop, we tailor our portfolio to meet their unique needs with personalized services, tools and discounts.

The services we are known for - time-definite FedEx Express and day-definite FedEx Ground deliveries, palletized FedEx Freight shipping, and international transportation - can help small businesses grow with the convenience and reliability backed by the FedEx name.

I will discuss more about how FedEx is leveraging our global expertise to help these very important customers find success no matter where their business takes them.

• Learn how to list your products.
• Learn about the road blocks like data feed problems.
• Categorization.
• Which products do you submit to the SCE’s, and why?
• Once your products are listed, then what?

The problem with most SCE’s is that their reporting is terrible.  Most engines only report overall winning and losing with very little specific product performance information.  We’ll discuss the options for dealing with the problem of what’s selling and what’s sitting.

As e-commerce grows, many consumers are choosing to shop through merchant product aggregators, known as Shopping Comparison Engines (SCEs) like Shopping.com, Amazon Seller Central, Ebay Stores, etc. SCEs help consumers more easily identify items and more conveniently compare pricing between merchants. This is a growing market. Forrester Research estimates SCE revenues are expected to reach $54.3 billion in 2007, or a whopping 27% of e-commerce sales. Merchants benefit by placing products in front of customers who are ready to buy. SCEs benefit by taking a percentage of transactions or via pay-per-click.

The key to a successful SCE campaign is careful monitoring. Most SCEs are payper- click (PPC) arrangements. If someone clicks on your space, you pay each time whether a sale results or not. The problem arises when you see a bill at the end of the month, telling you that you lost money on an SCE. Was that because they shopped but didn’t buy anything, or was campaign unprofitable because of a few non-performing items? The answers to these questions can make or break your future on an SCE, and those answers are difficult to find. There are analytic packages out there that will give you precise answers. They also start the bill at more than $1,000 a month and take a percentage of your sales. That is about to change.

Solid Cactus has spent a year and a half on this project, with a six man team working non-stop. The result is a program called Feed Perfect, which will analyze your performance on various SCEs. You’ll get analytical feedback, telling you which products are selling on which SCEs and advising you which products to drop from your PPC lists. You’ll get the same analytical expertise that Fortune 1000 companies get for thousands of dollars a month for at least eighty percent less! This is a major step in product development for Solid Cactus, and a major money saver for you.