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.

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.

Rishi Rawat of the Retail In The Eyes of the Everyday Customer blog posted a very thought provoking idea on his blog earlier this week: Could a retailer improve its natural search rankings by asking its email subscribers to Google its most desirable keyword phrase and click on its listing in search (especially if it’s on the second page of results)? Rishi calls his tactic “email marketing optimization” or EMO (not to be confused with emo or Elmo).

Click through rate in natural search could be a factor in Google’s secret-sauce ranking algorithm. SEOmoz estimates click through to account for 7% according to its Search Engine Ranking Factors report:

Note that SEOmoz’ research is based on the expert opinions of some of the world’s top SEOs, not of Google itself.

It makes sense that Google would consider click through rate as a sign of a web result being relevant to a search term. (Have you marketed yourself well in meta description tags?) Click through rates by human beings add that personal element to its computerized intelligence.

Another clue to the quality / relevance of a search result is the bounce rate, which is easy for Google to calculate the time elapsed from the click through to the click back.

A campaign such as what Rishi proposes is brilliant. His hypothetical email goes like this:

Subject: Search and win

Email Message:

1. Google gourmet chocolate popcorn.
2. Hunt down kukuruza.com.
3. Instantly take 5% off all our 27 flavors.
4. Promo ends 1/29/10.

Not only does this attract click through, but encourages customers to at least browse the site for something they want (27 flavors of chocolate popcorn — this I gotta see!).

Of course, the promotion could be reinforced through content spaces (banner images) throughout the site and the promo code auto-applied through targeted selling, writing a rule that all referrals from Google for the target keyword qualifies for the promotion in the cart.

Anyone going to give this trick a try?