As consumers tighten their budgets and reevaluate spending during the Christmas season, it is important to sharpen your online marketing efforts.  Here are a few suggestions courtesy of John Jantsch, author of Duct Tape Marketing:

Direct Offers - Create offers that involve low-cost trials, free samples and valuable education-based information. Make an immediate response to these offers the sole reason your advertising exists.

Repackaging - Re-introduce your products with added features or services of value or do the same with your service offerings by packaging them in new and innovative ways. Increase the value of your products and services and spell the value out in terms that mean something to the prospect.

Referrals - Get out to your customers and start [talking] with them about ways to partner for referrals. Your customers know times are tough, too. [Communicate] with them and honestly explore ways to help them help you.

Strategic Partners - Now is the time to build your network of strategic referral partners. Start by referring business to trusted partners and make it a point to sit down with at least one current or potential strategic partner each week with the sole purpose of directly discussing ways to help each other grow.

Creative Thinking - Give your customers and vendors “reason why” thinking to encourage larger orders, better terms, guaranteed purchases, and loyalty clubs.

Magento offers native functionality that allows you to execute on many of John’s strategies:

• Flexible Coupons: create offers to get customers back in your store
• Email Newsletter Management: deliver the coupon via email
• Multi-tier pricing for quantity discounts: increase order size by encouraging larger quantity purchases
• Bundled Products: repackage how you offer your products by bundling
• New Items Promotional Tool: highlight new products
• Up-sells in Shopping Cart: increase order size at time of purchase
• Cross-sells on Product Page: increase order size during shopping experience
• Send to a Friend: make it easy for a visitor to forward their wishlist to mom in time for Christmas

Eric sent an email to our Elias team earlier today with a few observations that are worth sharing about Magento:

1. Magento hit its 500,000th download about 3 weeks ago
2. A couple months ago there were usually about 300 people on average at any given point signed in to Magento’s website. Recently that number has more than doubled to 1200.
3. Release 1.1.7 just came out.

Here is a clever follow up to my previous post on focus.   SOA NOW created a funny microsite to communicate to technology professionals that they “get it.” The campaign stars “Greg the Architect.” Here is the description of the episode entitled “Focus Pocus”:

Greg is concerned that the SOA team can’t stay on target. He needs a vacation, but his cruise will have to wait as Jerry recruits him to crash an SOA conference. Will Greg find the magic he needs to put his team back on course?

You have decided to create or update your own online store. Great. Now, how do you translate your hard work and tools like Magento into profits? Technology will amplify and accelerate a winning strategy, but first you must have a focused strategy to become number 1.

…focus is difficult to achieve because it means giving something up. It runs counter to our most basic marketing instinct: If we narrow or offering, won’t we narrow our opportunities for profit? Answer: Not necessarily. Its often better to be number one in a small category than to be number three in a large one. At number three your strategy may have to include a low price, whereas at number one you can charge a premium. History has shown that it pays handsomely to be number one in your category - first, because of higher margins, and second, because the risk of commoditization is almost nonexistent. Yet number two can also be profitable, despite a smaller market share. Number three, or four, or five, however, may only be worth the effort if you think you have a realistic shot at becoming number two someday.

Taken from Marty Neumeier’s The Brand Gap

Being number 1 requires focus…and it pays. How do you translate focus to an ecommerce platform? In my opinion, you use a strategy similar to CSN stores: build web properties with very tightly focused product offerings. So instead of building homefurniture.com you create coffeetable.com, daybed.com, and diningroomtable.com. This strategy has put CSN in one of the top two spots and made them very profitable.



Magento’s ability to control multiple websites and stores from one Administration Panel makes it an attractive ecommerce platform for the focused eRetailer. Drop us a message using the contact form below if you would like to learn more.

Google released new analytics functionality yesterday.  Check out the custom reporting capability (demo video below)!  They have 80-90 preconfigured reports for various metrics (adwords performance, ecommerce, etc…).  These reports will make a fantastic suppliment to Magento’s existing integration with Google analytics.

The media says that the economy is in a recession. Ok. So now what?



Someone told me the other day that Jewish people have a concept of “backing into the future.” No one can fully predict what will happen next, but we can look at history to learn what might happen. If we are in a recession, then wouldn’t it make sense to look at how companies survived and grew during the Great Depression?



I found someone who asked a similar question. Check out this quote from Google Answers:

Both anecdotal and empirical evidence support the case that advertising was the main factor in the growth or downfall of companies during [the Great Depression]. To put it bluntly, the companies which demonstrated the most growth and which rang up the most sales were those which advertised heavily.

The article goes on to talk about the growth in two new forms of advertising during the Great Depression: radio and direct mail.  So what are you doing to take advantage of said recession?  Whatever you do, cutting marketing is not the answer.

While Magento continues to build a loyal following, we here at Elias think that it has just scratched the surface.  We have worked with a number of early adopters who want a great online ecommerce management system, but larger enterprise clients have yet to join the movement.  This got our team thinking about why the clients we talk to selected Magento.  Here is what one of them told us:

When we decided to do a new implementation of the site, we wanted to find an open-source cart system that we could modify we didn’t expect our needs to be met entirely by any existing system. Our existing site uses an extensively modified OSCommerce installation and we are not at all happy with it and wanted to start over on a better platform. We chose Magento because it is powerful out of the box, flexible, well engineered, and built on a code framework (Zend) that is also actively developed. Also, it’s been developed and supported by a company, and not just a couple of unrelated developers. It has some downsides as well, but overall it looks like a good platform to build upon.

What about you?  We would love to hear why you are working with Magento or what concerns you have about the platform.

Thinking about using email to market your new online store (using Magento’s eCommerce platform, of course). Here is your random stat for the week thanks to The Retail Email Blog:

The most popular day to send retail emails last week was Tuesday.