As a thank you to our valued Get Elastic readers, we’re offering you our Friends and Family discount code for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store.

The code is good for 15% off any purchase, no minimum! (Excluding Red Mittens, Petro Canada glasses and video games. Ends February 14th.)

For our US readers, use the code EPFRIENDS2010US at the US Olympic Store.

The rest of the world, use EPFRIENDS2010 at the Olympic Store.

Just to clarify, that is the year 2010, not the letter “O” in the code.

I recently caught the replay of a web clinic presented by Marketing Experiments titled Affiliate Marketing: Tests and tactics that increased clicks and leads by 165%. The presentation is full of great tips for both retailers and affiliates and I encourage you to watch the whole thing, but there was one point that stood out as a really novel idea:

“Solicit advice from your affiliates, many are seasoned online marketers who can offer you valuable insight on what does and does not work.”

Improving your landing page is essential when you have an affiliate program. Not only does it impact your revenue and your affiliate program performance metrics, but it’s crucial to retain high quality affiliates. According to the 2009 MarketingSherpa Ecommerce Benchmark Survey, 74% of respondents cited “finding high quality affiliates” as a significant challenge, and 50% “keeping high quality affiliates.”

High quality affiliates are motivated by the profitability of working with you. Even if you have a higher commission, with a stinking conversion rate the affiliate isn’t making maximal money. They are thinking earnings per visit.

Reaching out to your affiliates to work with them on conversion optimization is not just “a bit of free consulting” for yourself, it lets your affiliates know you are committed to increasing their performance as well as your own. Offer affiliates some flexibility in landing page design, product copy or headlines, soliciting their input and facilitating tests. The higher earnings per visit the affiliate can achieve with your program, the more likely the affiliate will promote your offers above others on their own sites and in their email and online advertising campaigns. And the less likely you’ll be tempted to continually up the ante on commissions to retain top affiliates.

This post is contributed by Janis Lanka (@janislanka, who manages front-end development for Elastic Path Software.

This post is a continuation of a series of posts related to conversion optimization for the Official Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store. Following checkout process and product details page optimization, in collaboration with Wider Funnel, we looked at the store’s homepage. Following list of hypotheses were made:

• Too many banner spaces create high clutter
• Secondary (left side) navigation doesn’t stand out and is difficult to navigate
• Product photos are too small with no indication on available alternative colors

Control

(Click to enlarge, will open new page)

Variation A

(Click to enlarge, will open new page)

Variation B

(Click to enlarge, will open new page)

As a result, we produced two alternative variations with following changes:

• Reduced banner amount and increased size to improve prominence of each banner
• Increased prominence and clarity of secondary navigation
• Provided color thumbnails to products that have alternative colors
• Increased size of photos and reduced amount of products shown under New Arrivals, Featured Products, and Most Popular tabs

What We Learned

This was a very tough test where even 2053 transactions and 21 days did not provide a statistically significant winner. However, decision had to be made and Variation A was chosen based on following data:

• Variation A converted (GWO) 3.14% better than control variation
• Visits with Variation A resulted in 12.54% less Bounce Rate
• Overall site Conversion Rate was increased by 0.59%
• Average Order Value was increased by 5.16%

As a bonus point in our findings (to put it in perspective), if hypothetically we would be using the winning AOV and Conversion Rate, revenue would be increased by 5.78%.

Finally, a thing we learned which might be already obvious for some: use banner space very strategically. Based on your overall strategy – be that to increase AOV or Conversion Rate – you will need to choose carefully what to advertise and where to send users.

1. Show visually where to find item numbers.

2. Provide instructions, but keep them short.

3. Allow customer to add extra input fields, or give instructions on how to add more items than your default form provides.

4. Allow customer to input quantity.

5. Watch your error handling. Make it clear when the item no longer exists and provide a search tool or customer service number.

Eddie Bauer (above) does this well. 1-800-Flowers unfortunately kicks you out of Catalog Quick Order to the home page if you make a mistake or the product no longer exists.

6. Allow customer to request a catalog.

7. If possible, allow customer to select size/color without having to view product page.

8. Ask for “Source Code” for customer matchback analytics.

9. Use cart button best practices (wording and design).

We know cart buttons that fade into the background won’t convert as high as bright, bold buttons:

And wording is important. “Add to cart” assures the customer that the quick order will fast-track to the cart summary. Generally it is advised not to use button text like “Submit,” which has a negative connotation in people’s minds.

“Submit Request” does not imply you will be taken directly to the cart. Submitting a request usually involves a time lag and a person contacting you by phone or email, which catalog quick order is not.

No shortage of amazing blog posts to link to this month, was tough to narrow it down. Here’s a list of my favorite ecommerce related posts in January. Enjoy.

• Justin Palmer kicks off our list with 5 Anti-Resolutions for Marketing Success in 2010. All the things you shouldn’t rely on this year.

• While we’re talking about things to avoid, Kevin Hillstrom has 5 things to avoid in your annual sales forecast.

• Ever wonder if those “Tweet this” links in emails get used? According to Silverpop research, sadly, the answer is no.

• Essential reading for anyone involved in pay-per-click is the Rimm Kaufman Group blog. Don’t miss George Mitchie’s Broad Match is No Substitute for the Long Tail and Evaluating a Paid Search Program.

• There’s no one who sees more retail email than Chad White, who’s rounded up his favorites for the Email Design Hall of Fame, 2009.

• Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz shares a tutorial for determining your success in the search engine indices with Indexation for SEO: Real Numbers in 5 Easy Steps.

• Mobile data can and should be integrated with information from other channels according to DM News.

• In last week’s webinar Bridging the technology and marketing divide for ecommerce success, someone asked the question about the role of SaaS — some marketing departments look to SaaS as a way to circumvent IT. Todd L. Michaud makes a great point that bypassing IT for SaaS is not a way to eliminate the “bottleneck” that IT is pegged to be:

As more outsourced point packages are implemented within an environment, the more the emphasis is placed on integration management. Integration is tough enough when all the systems are in-house. When you add disparate technologies (because the service providers don’t standardize on a single technology set just for you), separate companies (that now have to be coordinated with when there is any change) and feature overlap (each one of these products offers some functionality that another system already provides), it can really become a problem.

The IT team is now forced to spend more time and money on making sure that its systems all play nice with each other. Integration starts overtaking all of the other aspects of IT, and less time is spent on developing new offerings.

• Some lively discussion happening at YouShouldTestThat.com debating the usefulness of computer generated heatmaps as a conversion optimization tool.

• There’s still time to grab your own copy of our Ecommerce Tips desktop calendar by joining our Research Panel.

• Sally McKenzie brings us home with It’s 2010. Do You Know Where Your E-Commerce Strategy Is? 7 Signs You Need to Find It.