Sunday, May 31, 2015

How Does A Solar Panel Work?

In researching the topic of “How does a solar panel”, we find contradictory information on how energy is produced by the panels and the cells themselves. A number of solar cells should be connected in series to achieve a usable voltage for use with a storage device or electric.

The electricity generated by the panel is a direct current (DC) that is usually identified by their negative and positive terminals. As also has a battery positive and negative terminals, the cells operate in a similar manner.

In a serial connection, two cells, which have 4 terminals (2 positive and negative 2) may become a larger cell when you simply connect negative to 1 on the positive (positive to negative and vice versa). What remains is just one negative and one positive, but the tension of the two panels (0.5V + 0.5V = 1V) were added. Two cells have become larger cell. Similarly, when you have 12 cells in series can be simply connected by connecting all the positive and negative aspects that will end no matter what you do with just one negative and one positive at both ends.

In a parallel connection, the same two cells, which have 4 terminals (2 positive and negative 2) are wired differently. One positive terminal is connected to a negative terminal 1-1 positive and negative (positive to positive and negative to negative). Both cells have not become a big solar cell instead began to work together to amplify the current, measured in amperes (A). Here we can probably say that two son became a great thread, in this case, two positive have become a large positive advantage and the same goes for the negative child. Parallel connections are used only when it has reached the target voltage over a series connected solar cells. A series of 36 cells can generate about 18V (36 x 0.5 = 18V) and 18V this is the ideal for charging a 12V battery voltage. If you want to charge quickly, you have to add more solar cells but must keep the same voltage (18V), and it is therefore necessary to connect the next set of solar cells in a (positive to positive and negative to negative) parallel.

If you connect three groups of solar cells connected “in series”, it is called a connection to 3 strings of solar cells and the 3 channels is called a solar module or modules. It becomes a solar panel integrated when all other components such as the chassis, the backsheet, the glass cover and the junction box.

A solar panel in turn can be connected to another solar panel also in series or parallel depending on the design of the photovoltaic system. Several series-connected solar panels, said panels 12, also considered a chain when connected in parallel to another channel or more other channels. Several strings of solar panels are then called a matrix or sun.

Importantly, in a series arrangement, the voltage (V) and then added in a parallel arrangement, AMPS (A) increases. Voltage multiplied by the amplifier results in determining Watts (VXA = W)

At this point, you should be able to understand the relationship of small solar cells on its larger counterpart, the solar panel. If you can build a solar panel, then in principle, you can also build a large solar panel equivalent to a solar power plant.

Everything depends on you to buy solar cells, but make sure you ask the right amount based on the solar panel to do what is something in this article will cover the latest how-to articles cells. Also be aware of the electrical output of the solar cell is important for the amount of electricity you need to get. Typically, a solar cell has a voltage of 0.5 V and its rated capacity is about 4Wp. I hope this information helps you in your search for “how a solar panel works.”

Friday, May 29, 2015

5 Easy A/B Test Ideas To Get You Started on Conversion Rate Optimization

(This is a guest post authored by Philip Ryan from Toonimo.com)

Most websites don’t have a massive traffic problem, however every website in the world has a conversion problem. – Bryan Eisenberg

So you’ve just stepped into the world of Conversion Rate Optimization. Everyone seems to be advocating A/B testing. But you are still a little disoriented and would appreciate some direction to get started.

You are in the right place.

Internet is littered with posts that simply ask you to go ahead and test this CTA or that headline. It’s important to bear in mind that the best performing A/B tests are ones that are planned and executed well — using the scientific method.

Scientific Method

Source

A/B testing comes at the experiment stage of the scientific method. Without such a process, testing becomes a spray-and-pray tactic that yields little dividend.

If you have ever burned your hands doing random tests, you should be reading this –The Complete Guide to A/B Testing.

Without further ado, here are 5 easy A/B test ideas to give you direction and a glimpse of the many possibilities.

Test #1: A/B Test Headline Copy

Let’s start off with this element (some say the most important) that you should consider testing. This should be your launching pad in the A/B testing realm, as headlines act as a doorway, a welcome mat, that all visitors must cross.

Only 2 out of 10 readers ever make it past the headline, on average. This means that 80% of readers never make it past the headline. If you suffer from lack of conversions on your homepage, it should be an indicator to test your headline. As the first message displayed to visitors, the headline holds the greatest (and easiest) opportunity to optimize your landing pages. The saying “you only have one chance to make a first impression” looms large over grabbing that first time visitor, and you only have a few milliseconds according to Carleton University, Canada, before the visitor moves on or bails.

For instance, a company called Monthly 1K wanted to increase the amount of visitors purchasing their online courses. They decided to test if they simply changed how the headline was presented, it would lead to better conversions. The original headline they presented was “How to Make a $1000 a Month Business”. The second headline excluded the dollar sign. The results were crystal clear, providing an actual dollar amount resulted in a higher conversion rate. Visitors were able to visualize themselves making a dollar amount rather than just the number value. Showcase the value of your products, that’s the only thing visitors will every pay for.

Here’s how VWO tested their homepage headline to increase click-throughs to the pricing page by 9.6%.

Test #2: A/B Test Your Colors

The color of your words, calls to action and the purchase buttons are examples of how simple changes can have a huge effect on conversion rates. Say, you have a scenario where your call to action prompts visitors to click through to a “make an appointment” form. You test your calls to actions with a red button in the control version and a green button in the variation. You discover that more visitors were clicking through to the appointment form with the green CTA. By changing your CTA to green your appointment bookings surge. Changing your CTA to a different color won’t work in every situation, but since you’re testing it with your live visitors, you can see firsthand what makes them click.

Take a look at the case study below on how a color change can have a positive effect on conversion rate. Here the color change was done in conjunction with a button design change. The combination of the two led to a nice conversion increase. This particular online seller realized a gain of over 35% in cart additions.

Color Test Image

Source

Test #3: A/B Test Call to Action

This is where all the magic happens. You’ve gotten visitors to this point. You want them to click and your team have come up with 12 different CTA buttons with different combinations of wording, colors and fonts.

Sometimes, all those things do not play much of a role. Often, it’s just the wording on a call to action, not a time-consuming redesign or color change. A key takeaway from the example below is offering the user value. You are offering them something in return for a click on the button.

Call To Action Test

Source

Your landing pages should inspire users to take action, whether it be signing up for your blog, booking an appointment, downloading content or buying a product. There are a number of sub-elements you should take into consideration when testing variations of your CTA.

  • Switch the wording on your CTA button to one that you feel would grab your target. Just one phrase often does the trick and translates to higher conversion. Buy, Click to Purchase, Checkout are just a few.
  • Test a page with a few CTAs against a variation with a single button.
  • Consider switching the location of the CTA on your landing page.

One of VWO’s clients A/B tested the copy on their CTA button from “Go Further” to “More Information” and obtained a 14.41% increase in click-throughs to the sign-up page. Read about it here.

Test #4: A/B Test The Form

Your website might be a five pager or it could be 20 plus. The more entry points your website has the more chance for friction with the visitor. Forms are just such examples for potential friction. Anytime you request visitor-information, just know that the lesser amount you request the better, the simpler the content and image the better.  How you ask it can also make a huge difference.

A site called Huffduffer tested our two different types of form styles. They defeated conventional wisdom and found out that a paragraph-styled form with inline input fields worked much better than a traditional form layout. This type of form style is called “Mad Libs“, and it ultimately increased their conversion rate by 25-40%. This may not work for everyone, so before adopting this or any other fad (or good suggestion, for that matter): do your own form A/B tests.

Form A/B Test

There are plenty of variables to try out. Here are some format ideas to get you started:

  • Test forms with images/video on them versus none.
  • Test 5 field forms against 3 field forms
  • Test a form that includes a special offer or discount to one that does not
  • Test a form with an assurance that the signer will not receive spam or other messages unless they opt in
  • Test a form with larger fields rather than letter sized fields

Test #5: Social Widgets A/B Testing

While Social proof is a big part of increasing user confidence, it can also have a negative effect. Let’s take a look at why:

  • Social sharing buttons are a distraction as they take away from the true call to action
  • Many times, the social numbers are so minute that it actually diminishes social proof

For example, did you know that the addition of social sharing buttons can even actually lead to a decrease in conversions. There are a number of reasons for this. To highlight this fact, I suggest reading this great post highlighting a case study on how one eCommerce site increased their conversions by removing social sharing buttons.

However, each case differs and sometimes social widgets will increase the conversions on your page. Marcus Taylor of Venture Harbour, found that a floating sidebar outperforms share buttons located above or below a blog post. He ran this experiment on this blog post and found that using a floating sidebar with sharing buttons increased the rate of sharing by 52%. The moral of the story is not to follow random suggestions on the best placement for your social sharing buttons. By adding and removing the widgets and testing those versions you’ll be able to decide the better option always.

Social Widget A/B Test

Source

Testing all these elements to determine which one converts better on your landing page is a learning experience. Tracking email click-through rates may prove to show you which headlines work better. Twitter is also a great way to gauge headline effectiveness.

Go ahead and do your first A/B test. Conduct tests with your users in mind and with a definite idea of what you are trying to accomplish.

Let us know how it goes. We are always here to help :)

The post 5 Easy A/B Test Ideas To Get You Started on Conversion Rate Optimization appeared first on VWO Blog.

Daily Search Forum Recap: May 29, 2015

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web...

A Simple Guide to Overcoming Ad Blindness for Publishers

Posted by Trumplier

Ad blindness is one of the main reasons publishers must rethink their monetization strategies. When it comes to dealing with this phenomenon, advertisers typically have multiple options at hand. Still, there are steps you can (and should) take on the supply side to successfully deliver ads to audiences.

The psychology behind ad blindness: detection theory

The Psychology Behind Ad Blindness: Detection Theory

Ad blindness is rooted in the human ability to filter out unnecessary information—the psychological mechanism studied within the framework of detection theory. Due to this inborn capability, we ignore everything similar to those advertisement types we find irrelevant or unappealing.

However, this doesn't mean users overlook all ad units. Although we might not be looking at ads intentionally, we still see them from the corners of our eyes and our brain processes them, as argued by iMedia’s Brandt Dainow. In fact, people are inherently capable of tracking and discerning fairly evanescent signals.

That’s why we notice almost everything important that enters our field of perception. In a sense, we are biologically programmed to ignore information noise, while retaining the ability to instantly detect and process everything worthwhile.

With this in mind, the bottom-line objective for publishers is to serve ads visitors find worthwhile. While this may be difficult to achieve, there are tactics you can apply to decrease ad blindness rates in a non-disruptive manner.

These tactics constitute the groundwork of an efficient monetization strategy.

Monetization fundamentals: adding value to ads

Ultimately, you need to promote ad relevance, quality, value, and viewability if you want to trigger the audience’s attention in a non-disruptive manner. Although these factors won’t provide you with an instant remedy for ad blindness, understanding them essential to ensuring you serve the right ads to the right audience.

1. Ensure relevance with real-time bidding

Ensure Relevance with Real-Time Bidding

Consider real-time bidding (RTB) as a practical way to serve highly relevant ads on your website. This approach is based on auctioning highly targeted ad impressions with advertisers competing over the users who are most receptive to their ads. All available user-related information (e.g., demographics, location, and online behavior) is collected and analyzed to guarantee that the displayed ad creatives are relevant to the audience’s interests.

You can also opt for direct campaigns with advertisers that make full use of big data analysis. The most convenient way to do this is to cooperate with online advertising companies (including ad networks and supply-side platforms) that have both the hardware and experience needed to make the best use of these technologies.

2. Promote quality with non-standard ad formats and creative thinking

Promote Quality with Non-Standard Ad Formats and Creative Thinking

Know the industry standards—particularly, the guidelines created by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)—and make sure your advertising network or supply-side platform (SSP) follows them. In particular, keep an eye on IAB “Rising Stars”, because new, high-quality visual solutions have a good chance of sparking your visitors’ interest.

However, following best practices is just one of the ways to improve ad quality and battle ad blindness. Another powerful method is to provide support for creatives with unusual, stand-out design. In order to do this, you need to supply non-standard ad space and ensure the demand for it. You can achieve this goal through direct cooperation with advertisers, or with the help of networks and SSPs that offer custom advertising models. These two examples will serve as a good basis for your own monetization solutions:

  • Homepage skins (also referred to as wallpapers) are creatives displayed in the background of the main content and user interface elements. Ad units of this type are typically paired with traditional banners.
  • Custom ads with a strong emphasis on aesthetics are ideal for websites with a minimalistic layout. Full-screen ads of this type are used as one of the monetization tools by WeTransfer.

3. Choose value over volume

Choose Value over Volume

Investigate the possibility of cutting the amount of remnant inventory (ad space and impressions) used for low-quality, non-targeted ads. Although this tactic may cause a short-term reduction in revenue, you will likely countervail negative effects with higher profit from high-value campaigns within the course of a couple of months.

As argued by Roger Williams from Maxifier, this approach will eventually lead to better user experience, increased demand for ad space, and higher cost per 1K impressions (CPM). More importantly, it directly addresses the main cause of ad blindness: the audience’s negative reaction to the overabundance of low-quality, irrelevant ads served on many websites.

4. Increase ad viewability

Increase Ad Viewability

Focus on viewability (i.e., the ratio of all displayed ads to the ones the can actually be viewed by users) as a key metric that will be especially important for advertisers in 2015. According to this infographic from Google, an ad unit is considered viewable if at least half of its pixels are displayed on the screen for at least one second. The average publisher’s inventory viewability was only 50% in November 2014. This implies that a very large portion of ads wasn't (and isn't) shown to the users. You can improve the situation by following these tips:

  • Experiment with placing 300x250, 728X90, or 320X50 units just above the fold, not directly at the top of the page
  • Opt for vertical banners that stay within users’ range of vision for longer periods of time
  • Place some ad units below the fold (as this pattern accounts for 40% viewability rate)

By working on increasing your viewability, you ensure that more creatives are regularly in the visitors’ field of view, which increases the odds for these banners to be clicked on.

Ad placement tips: Hacking the detection theory

By applying the “monetization fundamentals” tactics, you promote valuable ads that have better chances at getting your visitors’ attention. You can also approach detection theory, viewability, and user experience in a more aggressive manner—and use specific placement patterns that prompt users to click on ads. While this approach is easier to implement, the effects it produces are rather short-term.

1. F-shaped reading pattern

“F-Shaped” reading Pattern

Apply the results of eye-tracking studies to your monetization tactics. The research from Nielsen Norman Group proves that there is a very particular way most people scan through web content. Jacob Nielsen describes this near-universal reading pattern as “F for Fast.” In most cases, users read the first sentence or heading, move down and read another line, and then proceed to skim through the text vertically. Place the ads somewhere along this route to prompt people to look at the creatives.

2. Near-content placement

Near-Content Placement

Place your ads closer to the main content to gain more attention from your audience. Essentially, this method works for the same reason native advertising does—site visitors care about and focus on content. For this reason, users are much more likely to fix their eyes on the ads located in the vicinity of or inside the post (e.g., between paragraphs or photos). Consequently, this setup accounts for a noticeable increase in click-through rates (CTR).

3. Welcome pages

Welcome Pages

Explore the potential of using welcome page ads on your website. This placement pattern is based on displaying a nearly blank page with an ad before showing actual content to the users. This way, the chances a visitor will actually pay attention to the ad skyrocket (compared to traditional placement patterns).

Although this approach adds prominence to commercials, users’ reactions to welcome pages may be negative, especially if they load slowly. This is why this advertising model should always be subject to A/B testing. Still, welcome page ads are successfully applied by several top-level publishers, including Forbes, The New York Times, The Atlantic and Merriam-Webster.

The bottom line

To build an effective monetization strategy, publishers must start by promoting relevant, high-quality, viewable creatives. Location patterns provide additional results, but require frequent rearrangement. You can then add other ad placement solutions to your system to increase the overall performance of your monetization strategy. Still, the ultimate recommendation is to complement your content with advertisements that users will find relevant and valuable.

(All images provided courtesy of the author.)


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9 Ecommerce Strategies to Optimize Sales

Let’s face it: Website visitors can be skittish.

If you can convert them into paying customers, you can generate more sales without ever having to change a price. But for that to happen, you need to clear the path to purchase.

Now it’s imperative that you get your homepage and site structure down cold.

You’ll want to advertise through paid search campaigns, display advertising or social media ads. But if your site design isn’t optimized for conversions, you won’t get a return on that investment.

Fortunately, there are many ways to encourage your visitors to take action by using simple (and proven) ecommerce techniques.

Here are 9 top tips for encouraging users to take that next step.

Conversion Tip #1: Free Shipping

The most common reason visitors abandon a purchase is shipping cost. Your solution? Offer your customers free shipping, and clearly state that benefit on your site.

  • 39% of customers would purchase enough to get free shipping.

In addition, a study by Compete states that:

  • 93% of online buyers would be encouraged to buy more products if free shipping were offered.

By offering free shipping, you can increase conversions as well as the size of your orders. Check out this article from Web Marketing Today for some great advice on how you can offer free shipping to your customers.

 free shipping

Conversion Tip #2: Show Discounts and Specials Clearly

Discounts and coupons are powerful marketing tools that allow you to:

  • give your clients special offers on products or categories
  • let wholesalers purchase at special rates
  • provide incentives through your offline advertising
  • help clear “difficult to sell” stock amongst many other uses

In the Oneupweb consumer study, 95.5% of respondents cited clearly stated pricing and shipping information as an influential factor in making a purchase decision. Don’t be a victim!

Make sure a product’s price is clearly stated, whether on your homepage or on the product page itself.

If at all possible, try to calculate taxes and shipping when products are added to the cart so your shoppers know the final price before they ever get to checkout.

image002

Conversion Tip #3: Referral Discounts

Test #1

Optimizely tested a call to action (CTA) for an outdoor gear retailer’s refer-a-friend program and found that active outdoor enthusiasts are significantly more motivated by “Earn Rewards” than “Get Rewards.”

In the case above, “Earn $25. Invite Friends,” increased program engagement from the baseline, “Invite a Friend. Get $25,” by 60%.

 image003

The lesson? Offer referral discounts, and while you’re at it, test different ways of presenting the offer. They work, obviously, but they can still be optimized.

Test #2

Or take a tip from Airbnb and offer a product credit in return for referrals.

image004

The new program encourages users to invite their friends by offering them cash credits to be used towards future Airbnb bookings.

According to Courtney Boyd Myers, writing for thenextweb, Airbnb got good results from the program.

Airbnb first tested the new referral program in a hugely successful closed-beta program of 2,161 existing members, which brought in 2,107 new members, nearly a 1:1 ratio of community goodness.

Conversion Tip #4: Add Reviews and Ratings

Figleaves ran an experiment to see how product reviews and ratings affected conversion rates. They found that products with reviews had a 12.5% higher conversion rate than products without reviews.

More importantly, the conversion rate for the same product—after adding reviews—was 35.27% higher than it was before adding reviews.

They also found that the number of reviews mattered a lot. Products with 20 or more reviews had a whopping 83.85% higher conversion rate than those without.

image005

Conversion Tip #5:  Take Your Email Marketing Beyond the Inbox

Over the next few years, we’re likely to see a lot more ecommerce companies combining their email marketing campaigns with related social advertising.

In a study where a leading retailer in the US targeted 925,000 email subscribers with both its regular emails and coordinated Facebook ads, subscribers who received both ads were 22% more likely to make purchases than those who only received emails.

The potential of what you could do with this strategy is mind-boggling.

Imagine a customer purchasing a product online, then finding an advert on Facebook five minutes later with a popular upsell product. If they don’t buy the upsell, you could then send them an email with a discount on that specific upsell product.

Wishpond has written about how to set up these kind of adverts, along with strategic ideas to experiment with in this post.

image006

Conversion Tip #6: Use videos to draw attention to your company’s website

Using video in the right way will have a direct effect on user engagement.

Short explainer videos are an excellent way to help visitors quickly understand your company, your products, and your services.

Visually showing your product in action gives visitors a better understanding of how your product works.

That helps soon-to-be customers get more comfortable with making a purchase, thereby boosting both your revenue and your conversion rate.

In fact Salesforce.com recently added an explainer video to its homepage and increased conversion rates by 20%. Approximately 30% of visitors watch the video and approximately 50% of those viewers watch the video in its entirety.

image007

Conversion Tip #7: Add Live Chat to your Conversion Rate Optimization toolkit

Live chat has the potential to close the gap between the online shoppers and retailers. You have the chance to connect with your potential customers and build their trust.

Recent studies have shown that 68.5% of CompUSA customers used live chat while browsing the website:

  • 32% percent of them used live chat during the final phases of the buying process.
  • And out of the 32%, 10% percent converted into a sale. At this point, it is still relatively early in live chat implementation; however 28% of e-commerce websites now offer live chat.

Young helpdesk operators

Conversion Tip #8: Security Badges can Increase your Conversion Rate

With the rise of ecommerce, the need for trust signals has become critical. Many “trust badges” are associated with SSL, or secure sockets layer, and they

Case Studies: There are a number of case studies highlighting the benefits of adding Norton Secured (VeriSign), AllClear and McAfee Secure.

Blue Fountain Media saw a 42% increase in sales.

VeriSign prepared a case study showing a 30% increase in conversions for Central Reservation Service, an online hotel booking site.

image009

Conversion Tip #9: Increase Urgency

There’s a reason why urgency is last in this list. All the points above must be in place before urgency will work.

Adding urgency doesn’t work if your offer is full of distractions, or if your value proposition is crap. It won’t work if your offer’s irrelevant to your audience, or if your audience doesn’t trust you.

Urgency is a strong catalyst, but it doesn’t stand up very well on its own. After doing everything mentioned above, here’s how urgency skyrocketed one campaign’s conversion rate.

Below are two variations that I tested on the offer’s landing page. As you’ll notice, the only difference is that one communicates urgency and how many packages have been bought, where the other does not.

Variation A:

image010

Variation B:

image011

This is one of the most impactful A/B test I’ve ever run. The conversion rate of variation B was almost 3x that of variation A.

Here’s what happened to our conversion rate as we gradually rolled out variation B to all users. Our conversion rate went from ~3.5% to ~10%.

image012

Since running this campaign two years ago, I’ve become fascinated by the power of urgency, and I’ve found multiple ways to integrate it into my strategy—boosting blog traffic, online sales, and engagement.

Conclusion

By implementing each of the tips above, not only will you see an increase in sales, conversions, revenue, and profit, you’ll build a reputable brand for your products and services.

Whether you’re offering free shipping or discounts, adding reviews or adding a security badge, you’ll see more consistent profit levels—which will allow you to continue to scale and grow your business.

Does a particular ecommerce experience stand out for you? If you’ve had a smooth, hassle-free experience that made you want to order again, I’d love to hear about it. Please tell us about your experience in the comments.

Read other Crazy Egg posts by Chawki Trabelsi.

15 Hygiene Tips to Keep Your Email List Clean as a Whistle

A healthy email list is vital to any business. Thanks to bounces, unsubscribes and address changes, you can lose upwards of one-third of your list each year. If you’re not replacing churned email addresses with new active ones, your business can feel the impact.

Here are 15 tips to help you clean, maintain and grow your email list.

Remove or win back inactive contacts

Many email list guidelines recommend waiting for a full year of inactivity before removing a subscriber from your mailing list, but many providers now advise removing inactive email addresses after just six months of inactivity.

That said, it’s important that you try to engage a subscriber before removing him or her from your list. There’s a variety of ways you can win subscribers back or at least learn from their behavior before they go.

Tip No. 1: Send a “we miss you” email with a special offer or discount code to see if you can incentivize the customer to make a purchase.

Tip No. 2: Send a polite “fish or cut bait” email asking if they’d like to confirm they want to stay on your email list before you remove them.

Tip No. 3: Find out why they’re inactive. When you give your contacts a way to unsubscribe after a long period of inactivity, give them a one-click survey on your unsubscribe page to find out why they’re leaving. Too many emails? Irrelevant content? Not enough discounts? Use the information to keep the next contact from leaving. You can also include a similar survey on your unsubscribe confirmation page.

Maintain the working parts of your list

Tip No. 4: Mail your list at least once a month. It will keep your readers engaged, increase the likelihood that they’ll make a purchase or donation, and let you know (via bouncebacks) which accounts are no longer active.

Tip No. 5: There are some great tools to help you maintain a healthy email list. Kickbox helps eliminates bounces before you launch your email campaign by “scrubbing” your list and replacing it with a squeaky-clean version. Kickbox uses a real-time API to verify email addresses before it adds a subscriber to your list. It also detects disposable email domains, role-based email addresses (e.g., webmaster@, info@, support@) and low-quality addresses. All Kickbox users get 100 free verifications every day. What’s more, VerticalResponse users get a 10 percent discount for additional verifications.

Tip No. 6: You’ll also want to take a cue from your open rates. If 99 percent of your list isn’t opening your email, you’ll need to do some work on your subject lines and the timing of your emails (day of the week and time of day). Dasheroo allows you to instantly view key stats from your VerticalResponse emails alongside your other apps like Facebook, Twitter, Google Analytics and many more, all in one easy-to-understand business dashboard! And it’s free.

Tip No. 7: If you’re not already doing it, consider segmenting your emails based on purchases or links clicked. If you sell clothing and certain customers only purchase men’s clothing, they may not want to receive your emails promoting sales on children’s apparel. Likewise, if you sell pet supplies, you can divide your list into categories based on the animal(s) they buy for or are interested in.

Grow your list

Tip No. 8: One of the simplest ways to collect email addresses is with a sign up form on your website or blog. It’s easy to set up, and you don’t have to think about it once you created it. VerticalResponse offers sign up forms for free with every account.

Tip No. 9: You can also collect emails at expos or brick-and-mortar locations. Encourage visitors to drop their card into a fishbowl for a chance to win something. People understand that by doing so, you will include them on your email list.

Tip No. 10: Some retail stores have great success obtaining emails at the register when customers pay. You can offer incentives, such as discounts and promotions, for signing up.

Tip No. 11: Tatango allows new contacts to add their email address to your list with a simple text. Customers text your business’s unique word to 33733, and they’ll be asked to reply with their email address. You can add up to 250 contacts each month to your VerticalResponse email list.

Tip No. 12: Run a contest on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest requiring participants to supply their email address to enter. Remember to follow contest guidelines for each social network.

Tip No. 13: Justuno is a tool that allows you to build email lists with incentive-based promotions. Using an instant offer widget, you can offer site visitors a coupon code or free download if they join your email list.

Tip No. 14: Include a link to your sign up form in your personal email signature.

Tip No. 15: Collect contact information with Twitter Lead Generation Cards, which requires the reader to do nothing more than click on the call to action and then hit submit. The beauty of these cards is that the person’s name, Twitter handle and email address is automatically filled in for them. You can see how to set up a Twitter Lead Generation Card in this short video.

For more marketing tips for your business, subscribe to the weekly VR Buzz Newsletter.

Wendy Burt-Thomas is a full-time freelance writer with four books and thousands of published articles to her credit. Contact Wendy at WendyBurt@aol.com.

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