By now you’ve probably heard the news, Google has made keyword search counts available to all through its Keyword Research Tool (before it only showed relative search volume in little green bars).

There are many free and paid keyword research tools out there, but until this announcement, none were able to provide Google-only data. But like Avinash Kaushik said last week in his Analytics webinar, “The goal is not to collect more data – it’s about extracting insight from this data.”

So today we’re going to go through some tips on how you can tailor Google Keyword Tool’s data to your needs (much like you would with Google Analytics), and how you can apply this research beyond your SEO and PPC campaign to other marketing activities. We’ll also cover the limitations of this (and all) keyword research tool(s).

Google Keyword Research Tool Tips

1. Select Your Countries

Google will share search volume based on country (not sure if it’s calculated from Google.ca, Google.fr etc only or if they include Google.com searches performed outside of the US). So you can change the default US database to your territory. But if you sell to multiple countries from one website, or you target multiple countries from one AdWords campaign, you can select more than one country by doing a “Control + Click” or “Command + Click” - depending if you’re Mac or PC.

You can also simply select All Countries if you sell globally, anyway. Of course, there’s also multiple language selection - but I’m not sure why you’d want to select multiple languages at once.

2. Generate Keywords

There are a couple options for generating keywords - you can enter your own keywords, or use an existing URL. In the second option, Google will extract keywords off the page and generate related keywords.

Option 1: Keywords

Type in a few off the top of your head, or import an existing list from an AdGroup, for example.

In this case, if you’re a retailer selling “learning toys” - you could type in the obvious “learning toys,” “educational toys,” “baby toys,” “toddler toys,” “children’s toys.”

Choose to use synonyms or not. I’d use synonyms the first time, and if the results are irrelevant, go back and uncheck the box, and redo the search.

You can also apply negative keywords, for example you sell parachutes, you should exclude “coldplay” and “what color is your.”

Then, click “Get keyword ideas.”

Option 2: URL

Here’s a trick - don’t use your own URL. If you sell “learning toys” - choose the top search result for “learning toys” in Google and let Google extract related keywords off that page.

You can also toggle between your 2 options without losing your keyword list or URL input, just click “Get keyword ideas” again to re-run the search. When you’re doing heavy-duty keyword research, sometimes you need to look beyond what you have brainstormed - so leverage your competitors. Just be sure to ignore keywords that are not relevant to your site.

3. Set your match type to “Exact.”

When looking at data, if you choose broad or phrase match, you’ll end up with inflated keyword counts because it will include longer queries that include your keywords. For example, “learning toys” would include searches for “learning to make wooden toys” with broad match, or “used learning toys” with phrase match. Exact match will show you the true keyword count.

Unless you’re using the tool to work on your AdWords campaign (building AdGroups or looking at advertiser competition or estimated bid prices for broad and phrase match), then you don’t need to see broad and phrase match stats.

4. Add or Remove Columns

By default, you can’t all the data available. Simply click “Show All” to see everything, and remove the columns you don’t need, like Average Position or CPC if you’re not doing AdWords. (Some AdWords advertisers don’t trust the estimates anyway).

Removing columns not only simplifies what you’re looking at, but helps you export only the data you need to text, .CSV or with the Table Tools Firefox plug-in.

5. Jump to Data

If you used the URL option, Google will “chunk” out your keywords into smaller groups, but you can navigate them through links:

6. Sort Data

Don’t forget that the Keyword Tool, Google AdWords and Google Analytics tabular data is sortable just like an Excel spreadsheet.

7. Download ALL Keywords, Don’t Build a List

You can click “Add {match type}” to build a list of the keywords you want, but this won’t keep your search volume data. So make sure you’re looking at the data you want to keep (the columns that are relevant), then click download {option} (text, .CSV):

Then delete the keywords you don’t want from there. For this reason, I suggest keeping your keyword lists tightly focused so they’re easier to work with and make decisions from, rather than every single keyword that might apply to your site (choose a category or a line of products). You could paste the data into one big spreadsheet if you want (a worksheet for every group of keywords). If you know of a more efficient way, please leave us a comment.

Applying Keyword Research

Now we’re ready to apply this data to various marketing activities. These are just examples, not exhaustive applications for each activity.

PPC

If you’re researching for PPC and you sort by advertiser competition (click twice to get low-high), you may spot a decent volume keyword that’s relatively cheap, like “learning express toys.” If you don’t carry that product (and you don’t because it’s a competing toy store), you’ll want to make sure you add “express” to your negative keyword list (if you use broad match).

Come back tomorrow, we’ll cover negative keyword research in more depth.

SEO and Site Usability

Sometimes there are two ways to describe the same thing. What are customers more likely to think of - “educational toys” or “learning toys”? “Educational games” or “learning games”?

You could take a wild guess, but keyword research will give you better insight. If you sort by “Approx. Average Search Volume” (not last month’s searches but average monthly search), you can compare synonyms:

• Applying keyword research to categorization and navigation labels

In this case, a toy retailer would do well to use “Learning Toys” and “Educational Games” as text links in navigation menus. Not only does it give an SEO boost to those category pages, but also has a better chance of being spotted by a customer who’s scanning the page looking for that keyword she typed in the search engine to get to the site.

If you discover highly searched keywords, you may even create categories or prioritize which links appear in your menus (to keep menus manageable, some retailers will “chunk” menus into 7-9 links, with a “view all” or “more” link to see all categories).

• Applying keyword research to merchandizing zones

Different types of products may spike in different months, so featuring them on your home page at different times of the year makes sense. You also provide the category or product page links a bit of an SEO boost by linking directly from the home page (makes it look more important in search engine’s eyes).

From content on Wonderbrains.com’s home page

Melissa and Doug and V Smile seem to be in-demand brands - why not feature them on the home page, or in the Educational Toys or Learning Toys category? Even if your sales data shows your sales for these brands are low, it may be because you’ve buried them in your site and you’re not attracting SEO or PPC traffic for these terms.

• Applying keyword research to site search

You can also manually tweak your site search to make the hottest brands appear on top (as long as your site search tool allows you).

You should also pay attention to synonyms that you may not have optimized internal site search for. Perhaps you lost 50 sales last month simply because you delivered “0 results found” for “educational games” because your category is called “Learning Games.”

If you use keyword tagging for products (which may create keyword optimized pages in search engines, depending on how you implement), you can tag with synonyms.

• Other Applications

Boost your SEO by creating new content (or blog content), adding keywords to your title tags, or using keywords in “anchor text” for your internal linking and in external link building campaigns. Or use keywords and hot products in your email marketing headlines and offers. If you’re really daring, register keyword domains and redirect to your site (to capture type-in-traffic) or build out niche microsites.

Limitations

Despite how uber-excellent this tool is, it’s not perfect. Do keep in mind:

• This is historical data, which can never precisely predict the future. Just because V Smile was all the rage last year, doesn’t mean it’s this year’s hit.

• This data can’t show you conversion rates or your “real” click through. It depends on your SEO and PPC optimization, your competition, your product offering, the relevance of your offer, your price, your landing page, the economy…
• This can’t show you keyword profitability. Maybe you’re burning your budget on high volume keywords - the broad ones where people are just researching and not ready to buy (though you can estimate commercial intent with a tool from Microsoft)
• This data is only Google’s - and Google still only has ~60% market share. Maybe Yahoo and MSN traffic converts better for your industry, and your market prefers these engines.
• Some people claim the estimates are way off when reconciling against their AdWords keyword impression counts. But do keep in mind discrepancies can happen for many reasons:
  • you need to apply the proper geo-targeting filters

  • your campaign may be set to show ads more evenly over time, thus not appear for every search
  • you may exceed your daily budget some days and not appear for every search
  • your ad may not appear on page one every time - search was performed but your position was below 10
  • your match types are different
  • AdWords impressions include the “search network” (AOL, Ask, Shopping.com for example), while the keyword tool restricts to Google.com and Google TLDs (.ca, .co.uk etc)

  Got any other ideas how you can use the Google Keyword Tool? Have you played around with it and found it lacking? Discover a hack or have a tip I missed? Please leave a comment.

  And stay tuned, we’ve got lots of tips on how to maximize Google Tools this week.

As email marketers, we never know what mindset email recipients will be in at any given time. So a good idea is to design your copy and creative to speak to all personality types/buying modalities: competitive, spontaneous, methodical and humanistic. If this makes you go “hmmm?” make sure you check out our explanation of the buying modes in our personas webinar and webinar recap.

For example, I’m in the market for a GPS. I’m not actively researching one right now, but it’s “on my radar.” Being methodical, I usually research the heck out of something before I buy. I read reviews, compare products, compare retailers. I just don’t have the time to look into my GPS purchase now.

But I recently received an email that caught my attention. The headline read:

“Initial GPS is All Sold Out! Here’s A Magellan Instead from Comp-U-Plus!”

Though I’m usually methodical, if an email like this could cut out my research time and tell me why I can’t go wrong with {featured product} and give me a deal - I just might wax spontaneous and convert today.

So, how does Comp-U-Plus “speak” to all four buying modes in this email? Let’s break it down:

Headline

This would have made a good trigger email if I had viewed the Initial GPS recently on Comp-U-Plus as a registered, logged in customer. Or if I had added it to my cart and abandoned the purchase. But since that’s not the case, I assume this email was sent to all subscribers.

First off, some people may be confused by the wording of this headline. “Initial” is a brand of GPS (I was not aware prior to this email), but also is an adjective, noun and verb. Worst case scenario, the message comes across as:

“Our first GPS is All Sold Out! Here’s Our Second Best Instead!”

or

“GPS Personalized With Your Initials are All Sold Out, But We’ve Got Magellan”

Okay, maybe this is a stretch, but these are examples of lost-in-translation subject lines.

Assuming there’s no confusion, this headline may appeal to the competitive shopper, who responds to best-seller merchandising. Unfortunately, competitives also want to own the best-seller, so offering a “consolation prize” is counter-productive. Same with humanistics who trust others’ opinions. If so many people love the Initial, what about the Magellan makes it equally attractive?

Really, the body of this email needs to give compelling and persuasive back-up for why someone should buy a Magellan today from Comp-U-Plus instead of buying an the Initial from a competitor.

Before we move on, please note that nowhere in the email does Comp-U-Plus address back-orders or restocking of the Initial.

Competitive Shoppers

• Likes to be the first to own a product, responds to new items, featured or best-sellers. Naturally, competitives want to win, so “…consolation prize! Grab it before it’s gone too!” is fitting - although consolation prize does suggest someone is not a winner…

• “…fastest GPS position accuracy in the industry” is a powerful selling proposition. The product description would serve competitives who prefer to scan copy better as a bullet list.

• Competitives are less likely to comparison shop and read lots of text, so making a compelling sales pitch in the email copy is essential. This text is also readable with images off.

• Offering exclusive web-only prices for a limited time speaks to competitives who like to have the edge on the regular folk.

Spontaneous Shoppers

• Responds to sales, discounts, limited stock and time-limited offers (like day-only sales), so this campaign is appropriate.

• Spontaneous are text scanners, so bullets would be better here, too. They like to see products in action, a link to a demo video would be great. Or an enlarged image.

• They’re interested in what others bought, and how popular. Including a customer review star-rating and “how many” reviews there are for the Maestro model may help that spontaneous conversion.

Methodical Shoppers

• Likes product details, very thorough in researching a purchase. So providing a product description and link to more details is great.

• Unfortunately, the product description doesn’t explain how the Maestro model is comparable to the Initial. Methodicals like side-by-side comparisons.

• “Fastest GPS position accuracy in the industry” is a powerful selling proposition - but as a methodical, I want back-up and proof before I believe the hype. But if I’m really interested I will read more, and hope the site has enough information for me to make the right decision.

• I like the phone number option, I can ask questions of the CSR in real-time. I just hope the CSR is knowledgable about the product.

Humanistic Shoppers

• Star ratings and a sample review would help persuade humanistics, who value the opinions of others. The telephone number is great too, he or she knows a person is available to talk through the purchase and answer questions.

The gratuitous use of exclamation points aside, Comp-U-Plus’ email includes something for every buying mode. It also provides links to other categories if the featured offer doesn’t do it for you.

My recommendations would be to tweak the copy to include:

• Bullet points to make it easier to scan

• An average star rating and link to all reviews (unfortunately there are none that belong to Comp-U-Plus.com)
• Some idea of how the Maestro compares to the Initial
• Information on how to backorder the Initial.

And the landing page could definitely use some optimization:

There’s no price on the landing page to confirm the promise made in the email (you have to click to see a pop-up, but that’s confusing). If you need to hide prices from the public because they are so low, you could create a custom landing page for your email campaign that’s not linked to from the rest of your site (like you would for an A/B test) and show the price.

What’s worse is the recommendations for similar items, with star ratings, from other retailers (powered by Shopping.com) appear on the landing page.

*Smacks head*

Yesterday we posted a Q&A session with Sally Lowery of Bronto Software on trigger email campaigns. Today we have 2 real-world examples from Amazon. These emails followed up the purchase of a camcorder:

• Amazon doesn’t wait for you to come back to the site to push recommendations at you. 10 days post-purchase,

• Notice the low price point relative to the camcorder (about 10% of purchase price)
• Notice the 2 star customer rating - not too persuasive, eh?
• It would be more persuasive to auto-recommend the highest rated relevant accessory, with a snippet from and direct link to the most helpful positive review
• The link to “improve your recommendations” is a good idea, especially if it was just a gift. Adjusting preferences now means more relevant suggestions next time you log into Amazon.com

• 15 days post-purchase, Amazon sends another plea to buy more

• Gone are the star ratings
• Amazon’s pushing categories, not specific products - there are 3 product links without descriptions, and links to category
• Mix of price points, software can be 3x the price of the purchased product
• Includes service plans
• Includes opt-out: “We hope you found this message to be useful. However, if you’d rather not receive future e-mails of this sort from Amazon.com, please opt-out here.”

Now, I understand these are automated recommendations and crafting 1-to-1 cross-sell emails is not efficient. But this email could be a lot more persuasive if it explained more about how these would enhance the ownership experience of the purchased product - and from a fellow customer’s mouth, not the retailer. For the tripod featured in both emails, there’s a video review that 46/47 people found helpful.

Wouldn’t that make for a killer trigger email?

I recently caught up with Bronto Software’s Online Marketing Manager Sally Lowery to chat about trigger-based email campaigns. Think sending welcome emails, reminders to repurchase or hey, “you haven’t been interacting with us for a while and we’d like to win you back” emails.

Q: Can you explain trigger-based email messaging?

A: A real-time message, or triggered message, is one that is generated based on a meaningful change or event in a customer behavior or profile. Trigger-based messages can create a truly relevant email campaign to customers that yields a greater ROI, because it is a customer-facilitated exchange that triggers the campaign.

Q: What are some things to consider when implementing a trigger-based email program?

A: To be successful with a trigger-based automated email program, consider the following:

Define Business Rules. A well defined trigger-based program can create a significant return. Be certain to recognize where it’s appropriate to create trigger-based campaigns and where there may be little benefit. Creating a business rule that sends a transactional message that includes an up-sell opportunity only makes sense if the product that is promoted matches the customer’s interest.

Set Frequency Limits. Don’t oversend. After you have established your business rules, review your plan and determine instances where a customer may be sent too high a frequency. If your email service provider enables a frequency limit, take advantage. You don’t want to send three trigger-based campaigns to a customer in one day…or possibly even one week.

Remember Recency. When was the last time the customer or prospect received something from you? If you are able, create business rules around when your prospect or customer was last sent a message.

Think customer first. What frequency of trigger-based campaigns will not bombard your customer or prospect leaving them fatigued from over-sending? What promotional opportunities make sense: cross-sell, up-sell, discounts, free shipping? The possibilities are limitless for how you will use trigger-based email campaigns, but always be cognizant of the impact on the customer. You want it to be a positive experience that reinforces trust.

Keep it simple. Your automated plan should mirror your brand. Once you’ve done the tricky part of configuring your trigger-based message, you’ll be able to learn and test on the fly, so pepper in new business rules and continue to polish messages.

Q: Can you give some examples of trigger-based email campaigns?

A: Trigger-based email programs can include transactional, recurring, and threshold triggers. The most commonly used are transactional and threshold.

Transactional triggers: Messages that are based on a direct transaction with a customer target such as a purchase, profile update, opt-in, or conversion are an underutilized tool in the world of email marketing. Think brand reinforcement, promotional opportunities, and trust recognition.

Recurring triggers: These messages are based on the customer’s profile. It could be a simple birthday trigger or a more complex product re-order message. For recurring triggers, the opportunities are limitless, but be cautious as these are easily the most recognized place for over-mailing.

Q: How will these trigger-based email campaigns help e-commerce clients?

A: E-commerce can easily integrate and have a successful return with a trigger-based email program. There are several places where a trigger-based campaign can be integrated with their customer behavior.

Welcome Programs. Incorporate trigger-based email messages into your welcome messages. Create a welcome message when one of the following actions is completed: download, purchase, sales inquiry, or registration.

Cross-Sell/Up-Sell Programs. You can create effective cross-sell and up-sell email campaigns using trigger-based actions based on your customers purchase profiles.
Abandonment Programs. When a customer abandons their shopping cart, trigger a message regarding their abandoned items and offer an incentive to complete the purchase.

Win-Back Programs. If you haven’t had a customer return to your site or make a purchase in six months or more, integrate a win-back email that entices the customer to return.

Q: Do you have any rules of thumb to offer after a client’s transition?

A:

1. Plan for your content and promotions. Remember, that despite the fact that these are transactional campaigns, the message that you communicate to your customers and prospects should align with your business objectives.

2. Use HTML. Enhance your messages with html. Incorporating your brand, as well as look and feel of your other marketing touches, can add to your transactional messages. Many companies spend very little time on their transactional messages, despite their significantly higher open rate.

3. Customize. Relevancy means customizing your messages to the individual recipient. To create an ongoing dialog with customers, consider dynamic content in your campaigns. Your customers are far more likely to respond to messages that include information that relates to their preferences, behaviors, or past purchases.

4. Measure. Just like any other email marketing campaign, don’t leave it on its own. Test and review and find ways to optimize your trigger-based email program to increase your ROI.

Thanks again to Sally and the Bronto team for sharing these tips with Get Elastic. If you’re interested in more information about trigger-based email campaigns, you can check out Sally’s white paper The Need for Ease.

We learned from our recent webinar Jon Stewart or Oprah: What’s Your Website’s Personality Type that different people experience and interact with your website in different ways depending on their dominant personality type.

These 4 buying modalities have been described as Competitive (fast and logical decision-making), Spontaneous (fast and emotional decisions), Methodical (slow and rational) and Humanistic (slow and emotional). (Read this summary if you’re not familiar with the 4 modalities.)

You may have a tendency to make most of your decisions a certain way - that’s just who you are. But different buying situations can throw you into a different mode. For example, a typically spontaneous person must take a slow and rational approach when evaluating software vendors for a major ecommerce project, even though he may download iTunes tracks on impulse several times over the same period.

Personality Types and Email Marketing

If you had an email account that was purely ecommerce offers (no messages from work, friends or Nigerian ambassadors), you would see the majority are vying for your attention like: SALE! UP TO 50% OFF! NEW STOCK! ONLINE ONLY! EXCLUSIVE! FREE SHIPPING!

Continue Reading:
Do Your Email Subject Lines Deliver? »

Saks Fifth Avenue sent out a postcard-style email on Monday, with the clever “Jeanius Sale” headline. Although the pun may be lost on anyone without 20/20 vision. Slapping stencil font in low-contrast red on this pile of blue jeans would be an awful home page design decision, and it’s no different with email.

It would have been easier to look at with a few adjustments to color and contrast:

Not a huge improvement, but the colors don’t “bounce” as much.

Today kicks off a weekly tradition (though definitely not original) here at Get Elastic. Every Friday I will be posting a Blogger’s Digest that recognizes outstanding content from around the web of interest to ecommerce marketers, managers, bloggers and SEO-types to give you some rainy day reading for the weekend (especially if you’re in Vancouver/Seattle).

Ecommerce News

• Bad news for Yahoo Stores as Cyber Monday traffic crashes the platform and brings down 3 million online shops.

Search Engine Optimization

Following up on previous posts about permission marketing and welcome emails for ecommerce websites, I’d like to share my personal experience registering for 87 accounts with the top online retailers and offer some tips for registration form design.

Your site may have several forms that ask for personal information - for email subscriptions, creating an account, entering billing information, requesting help, general contact, creating a wishlist or order tracking. It’s important to note that in my test I was taking initiative to sign up for an account by clicking “Register” or “My Account”. I did not reach these forms in the middle of a checkout process (required registration).

Popular Form Fields and Frequency

1. Password - 100%

Obviously this is a requirement for all sites, but 100% required users to invent their own passwords rather than sending computer-generated temporary passwords (which are terribly annoying). But Dell and Nieman Marcus failed to mention clearly that their passwords require at least one number until you fail at your first password attempt.

2. Repeat Password Field - 89%

Though it takes a small amount of extra time, this is recommended because it’s easy to make errors when you only see **** as you type. How frustrating for customers when they cannot log in because the password they *thought* they entered is wrong.

Continue Reading:
Registration Usability - 87 Registration Forms Tested »

While reviewing the registration process of 87 of the top online retailers, I observed 66% of these sites took advantage of the registration form as a way to remind customers to opt in to email marketing programs by including a check box on the form. However, 57% of these retailers pre-checked the opt-in box, which is poor ‘Netiquette when it comes to permission marketing.

Registration with an ecommerce website is NOT opting in to receive future offers via email. Some marketers may intentionally pre-check the box to increase sign ups, knowing that a number of customers don’t notice the box or will forget to un-check it. Although this might build a bigger list, this practice can backfire.

If your customer was unaware he had opted in, all future emails from that website will look like spam, which is a step backward in building trust and long term customer relationships, hurts your corporate image and dilutes your overall email campaign success. Low open and response rates from uninterested people skews your performance metrics.

Continue Reading:
Registration Usability - Permission Email Dos and Donts »

Back in high school when I worked at a shoe store, I remember being trained on strategies to save a sale. Probing, offering a discount, encouraging the customer to take the shoes home to try out or offering to order a pair in from another store. It was easy to make these attempts face to face with a customer on my turf.

Online shoppers abandon shopping carts for a variety of reasons. They may balk at a shipping charge or total price of multiple items. They might encounter problems entering credit card information or perceive the checkout process as too long. In the online world, it’s not as easy to recover a sale when a customer interacts with a screen and can exit with a click of a mouse. But it’s not impossible. An interesting study by Marketing Experiments on using email follow ups to save sales from abandoned carts gives some insight on how.

By sending two follow up emails – one sent within an hour of cart abandonment, and the second 24 hours later, the experiment’s test etailer was able to recover $8,000 worth of revenue from saving 277 sales over a six month period.

Continue Reading:
Recovering Sales from Abandoned Shopping Carts With Email »