10% Off and Early Bird Discount for Sheerluxe Conference 25-26 February 2010

Once again Shine Marketing will be at the excellent Sheerluxe etail conference in February 2010.

The conference is the best event we have attended for  niche, upmarket and luxury shopping sites.

This year's speakers include:

• Katie Lee, (Founder of blogging network Shiny Media)
• Miriam Lahage of net-a-porter and formerly Koodos
• Finlay Clarke, Big Mouth Media's Online Retail SEO Specialist
• Michael Ross, eCommera, co-founder of Figleaves
• Martijn Bertisen, industry head at Google
• and many others...

The 2 day event is once again packed with invaluable advice from leading names in the industry, and successful retailers who have been there and have the scars to prove it.

10% discount from Shine Marketing.

In recognition of our long association with the event as speakers and sponsors, Shine Marketing are able to offer a 10% discount on the normal rates. To take advantage of this, just email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) for details.

This is on top of the early bird discount that applies to bookings made before 15th January 2010.

Full details of speakers and pricing can be found on this page.

Web-safe fonts, a reference guide

Introduction

Here you can find the list with the standard set of fonts common to all versions of Windows and their Mac substitutes, referred sometimes as "browser safe fonts". This is the reference I use when making web pages and having shared it with many print designers over the last few months I hope you will find it useful too.

If you are new to web design, maybe you are thinking: "Why I have to limit to that small set of fonts? I have a large collection of nice fonts in my computer". Well, as seasoned web designers already know, browsers can only use the fonts installed in the same computer, so it means that every visitor of your web page needs to have all the fonts you want to use installed in his/her computer. Of course, different people will have different fonts installed, and thus come the need of a standard set of fonts. Fortunately, CSS allows set several values for the font-family property, which eases the task a bit.

A number of new technoligies such as sIFR, Cufon and the CSS font-face attribute can be used to acheive other fonts, but these are limited to short snippets of text such as headlines, or your site will run considerably slower and with unpredicatble results in many browsers.

If you want to know how the fonts are displayed in other OS's or browsers than yours, after the table you can find several screen shots of this page in different systems and browsers. Also, you can take a look to the list of the default fonts included with each version of Windows.

The list

First, a few introductory notes:

• The names in grey are the generic family of each font.
• In some cases the Mac equivalent is the same font, since Mac OS X also includes some of the fonts shipped with Windows.
• The notes at the bottom contains specific information about some of the fonts.

The Mac font list was obtained from the Browser Safe Fonts PDF of webbedEnvironments and from the List of fonts in Mac OS X of the Wikipedia.

Eloise Lingerie Chooses Shine Marketing for New eCommerce and Catalogue Designs

Eloise Lingerie, a specialist retailer of lingerie for the post mastectomy and maternity market, has chosen Shine Marketing for an overhaul of its direct channel branding including an update to their brand identity, a  new ecommerce Website and mail order catalogue.

Shine Marketing was chosen after a 6 month pitch process including the incumbent agency.

The new ecommerce website, being developed on the Magento eCommerce platform, includes a number of bespoke features including enhanced product views, content management for essential customer information, and a number of enhancements for Search Engine Optimisation.

The system will eventually integrate with the new Khaos Control mail order system, due to go live in early 2010.

Eloise.co.uk is the first project that Shine Marketing are delivering under an innovative performance-related deal whereby a portion of the project fees are based on increased sales volumes through the new website.

Stephen Pratley, Managing Director of Shine Marketing said:

"Our new performance-led fee structure shows our commitment to the project, and our belief in the untapped potential in Eloise.co.uk as an online sales channel. From our early analysis of the existing site performance we have already identified opportunities to increase both the volumes of traffic via search optimisation, and the conversion rates by implementing better product display and a smoother checkout process."

Harriet de Wolff, Marketing Director of Eloise Lingerie, said:

"We were impressed by Shine Marketing's expertise in online retail, particularly in a niche apparel sector. Finding such a provider that can provide a coherent strategy across our web and mail order channels was just what we were looking for, and their evident confidence in their own ability to perform made them the obvious choice for the project"

About Eloise Lingerie:

Eloise Lingerie are a multi-channel retailer of lingerie and swimwear for women who have undergone any form of breast surgery including mastectomy operations. The business sells product from over 15 specialist brands via mail order catalogues, an ecommerce website at Eloise.co.uk, and at specialist fitting centres in Wimbledon and Huntingdon.

How attractive is your website design?

Judging website designs is, for most people merely a matter of opinions in most cases, so we thought we'd share this nice tool that can give a bit more objective feedback onyour designs. Enter Feng Gui, an eyetracking simulator.

Eyetracking is a technique for seeing where a user's eyes glance, and fix on different places during the first few seconds of looking at the page. Ithas been used widely in laying out retails stores in the past, now moved to website design and enough studies have now been done that the results are largely predictable.

We ran an image of our new homepage through the tool to see what it could tell us about users first impressions of the site.

Overall we're pretty pleased with it. Our aim was to let the content of each page really stand out, using a much darker overall template than our old site, and bringing in the colour and highlights of our clients site photography as the main focus.

We've managed to get the balance about right with a fair amount of skimming over each of the menus and our own strapline to see what we're all about. Other pages have a much stronger single focus like a headline or a contact form.

The tool is free for one use per day, give it a go on your site and let us know how you get on.

Buy Beauty Brands to relaunch on Magento.

BuyBeautyBrands.com, an upmarket retailer of skincare and beauty products has agreed to redevelop their website with Shine Marketing on the Magento ecommerce platform.

Felicity Hamilton-Jones, eCommerce Manager for Buy Beauty Brands said of the move,

"Our first site built by Shine gave us a very quick payback from a minimal investment as well as plenty of guidance in where to make our marketing investments. We are now reinvesting in the ecommerce platform to give us better SEO, closer integration with our email marketing, an in-house affiliate programme and a whole new content management area to provide our customers with beauty and skincare advice.

The platform also gives us the opportunity to create brand-specific sites for a number of new skincare brands for whom we will be providing fulfilment and online marketing services for a much lower investment than it would take to build their own stores."

The new site is planned to launch in January 2010.

ShineEmail introduces A/B split testing

Shine Marketing's email marketing solution - ShineEmail - is now offering A/B Split testing as standard on all accounts.

What is A/B Split testing?

Split testing will be familiar to anyone with long-standing direct marketing experience. It is the practice of trying out two different versions of a mailing on  a portion of your list, then taking the best performing version and 'rolling out' to the rest of the list.

ShineEmail automates the process of both the test and roll out allowing you to judge your best test email campaign by open rates, clickthroughs, then automatically send the best version out to the rest of your list after a chosen time.

Test can be as simple as two versions of a subject line, or an entire email creative.

For example, we sent our last newsletter out on Tuesday with two subject lines. 25% of our list was mailed with each version. On Wednesday, the system chose the winning version with the highest open rate, and sent it to the other 50% of the list.

Testing costs nothing but a little extra imagination and will teach you an enormous amount about what works and what doesn't in your email campiagns.

7 Ways to get more from your eCommmerce strategy

'Build it and they will come', was once the mantra of eCommerce site owners and at the turn of the last decade this was largely true, with any half decent site able to attract a little PR, rankings in Google and a good stream of visitors.

Back then the biggest challenge was managing to get a working eCommerce site built in the first place, but today it is possible to have a basic site up and running in just a few days - and at little cost. The resulting millions of new eCommerce sites launched each year mean that your biggest challenge is getting anyone to visit your website in the first place.

This means that marketing your site needs to be considered as an essential part of the planning process. Different marketing tactics will have an impact on your website so it's worth considering these well before you launch, to avoid missing opportunities in the early days of your online trading. Here, I work through some of the most common online marketing tactics and the impact they can have on your website. I also suggest a plan of action that will allow work done for one set of marketing tactics to be used across several areas.

1. Do you have a clear proposition for your online business?

Taglines, elevator pitches, call it what you like, a succinct description of what your site has to offer and who it is likely to appeal to, is an essential first step before you even start trying to drive visitors to your website. Only Amazon and eBay can say with real confidence that they have 'something for everyone' so focus on the area where you can really excel. Here are a few good examples:

• Coast-Stores.com: 'Women's Evening Wear'
• BritishHampers.com 'Gifts of Food To Lift The Mood'
• MyLivingSpace.co.uk 'Designer home-wares and design led accessories'
• These are very much 'does what it says on the tin' statements about what you'll find on each site. Whatever you decide on, make sure it is written down somewhere you can refer back to it, often.

2. Are people looking for what you are offering?

Online, there are essentially two ways to encourage people to visit your site and see your products. Either tell people about them, or find people who are already looking. Unless you have a large marketing budget, let's assume that the latter is a more reliable recipe for success. This leads us to the best place to find people who are already looking for your products; the search engines. Google provides a handy keyword tool to show you the demand for various phrases. 

Try plugging in various combinations of words from your proposition to see how well it matches whether anyone is already looking for your products: for example, the tool show that there are around 7,000 people looking for 'food hampers' in the UK alone even in the height of summer so British Hampers looks like it's on to a reasonable business model.

The tool also gives other similar phrases which might help you refine the wording of your proposition to something with more demand. My best example of this to date was convincing Blockbuster that they should be focussing on 'DVD rental', not 'Movie rental', exposing them to 500 per cent more customers for a campaign they were running.

3. Have you set your search engine objectives?

The phrases you have identified above are your target phrases for search engine optimisation. This article is too short to explain all the nuances of SEO but for a phrase you want to rank number one for your business you should start to include it in your website pages and every possible mention of your business online. One caveat though; if you type your phrase into Google and find the first page full of global brands, you might want to pick an easier fight. 'Evening wear' will be far less competitive than 'Women’s Fashion', and people looking for more specific phrases are also more likely to turn into a customer.

This is the first instance of marketing impacting on your website plan. To rank number one for 'Food Hampers' you need to have at least one page, if not many, talking about food hampers. Food hamper products, food hamper buyers guides, ideas for what to include in your food hampers. The list goes on and on. To achieve this, your site will probably need more than just a product catalogue so think about what content management system you might need to include to add this information for the search engines to read.

4) Do your landing pages match what people are looking for?

You've set your big SEO target, but what about the more specific pages in your site? Christmas food hampers, Mother's day hampers, corporate gift hampers and so on. Do your shop category pages match what people are looking for? If you are paying for clicks to these pages using Google's Adwords, until your SEO kicks in you want to drive visitors to the most specific pages possible.

5) Are you gathering email addresses yet?

Email is likely to be the most effective way to gain repeat business, or turn prospects into buyers so have you started gathering email addresses yet? Even before your site launches you should have a page up to gather emails ready for your launch. For example, Give.co.uk, George Davies' new brand had a holding page up to collect emails ahead of its first mention in the press and had already buildt a sizeable list before its launch day in October 2009.

6) Are you working closely enough with your offline media campaigns?

Imagine two scenarios, you run a reader offer in a magazine and the link you give to find the offer in question is
'Yourwebsite.com/index.php?cat-12345&prodid=54321&src=rdr0709vge'

This links to a page on your website. Alternatively you give a link to 'Yourwebsite.com/voguejuly' which links to the same selection of products on a page with a Vogue reader offer banner. Which one is most likely to create the best shift of print readers to online, the most trust in the relationship and the most sales?

7. Is social media even considered?

Blogs and Twitter accounts where you can show just how expert your business is in its field aren't just a gimmick -- they are now a serious part of marketing your business and getting feedback from your customers. Your site should have some sort of blog, news or other area where you can keep customers up–to-date with new products and offers, and ideally it should feed into a Twitter account which you can also add other information to. Dell outlet's Twitter feed has added 3 million dollars to their bottom line this year, it's serious business.

The above are a handful of issues which many eCommerce businesses dont realise they need to address until it is too late and opportunities are lost. Hopefully they come together to say one thing: launching an eCommerce website isn't the end goal of your business, it’s just the beginning. For a successful online business you need to think about where your customers will be coming from and give them the best reception possible.

A Last Minute Checklist for Online Retailers

With only one more pay-day before Christmas, many stores will already be in full swing for the festive shopping season. For those still wondering if they are ready for this crucial retail period, the following are a few changes that it's not too late to make...

Update PPC your campaigns

Are your advert texts targetting gift buyers and have your christmas messages such as guaranteed shipping dates and gift wrap services been incorporated?

Update your homepage offers for gift buyers

Is your homepage still all about your regular customers, or is it aimed at new shoppers, buying for their friends & family? Make sure you have links to your gift selections in place and that critical gift-buying messages such as delivery details are highlighted. If you offer gift vouchers, push them at every turn.

Get emails ready for cyber Monday

The biggest online shopping days for Christmas are likely to fall on the 8th and 15th December. Make sure you have emails with strong offers ready to go out early in the day.

Is your gift wrap up to date?

Have you changed your gift wrap for christmas? Update the picture in your checkout or wherever this service is promoted.

Special delivery for last minute orders

Do you have a last-minute buyer option after your regular shipping dates have cut off? With Royal Mail strikes happening more and more often, a guaranteed and express service are more and more important.

Publish your last posting dates

Make sure these are clear, and convincing. No "we will endeavour to", no buts, make a promise and stick to it.

Is your sale ready?

Shopping patterns over the last few years have consistently shown the 26th December to be a huge day for online shoppers who have either hung on for a bargain or have gift vouchersto spend. Make sure you have a plan in place to cope with the changes. Waiting until everyone is back in work a few days into January is far too late. While you're at it, let as many of the shopping offers sites know about it well in advance. Many money-saving websites now carry lists of sales and discount codes. Search in Google for "january sales", you'll find plenty of people to tell the world about yours.

Christmas can be a make or break season for many retailers, good luck with yours!

eCommerce Platforms for Small Businesses

Over the last 2-3 years a small revolution has gone on in the options for eCommerce for small businesses with the advent of hosted ecommerce platforms which take away many of the headaches in setting up an online retail presence for a small business.

Two platforms in particular have caught our eye as possible options for small businesses.

Shopify - a very simple and clean looking solution which also has the ability to quickly implement very attractive designs through it's template 'Liquid' template language. Shopify works well for small brands with a limited number of lines, but a high quality design requirement.

BigCommerce - a hosted version of the Interspire Shopping Cart software. This carries a lot more features out of the box than Shopify, but requires more skill to adapt the designs to your needs. BigCommerce works best for stores with large numbers of products, where unique branding is less of an issue. We have delivered small stores built on this technology in sectors like electronics.

These two services have largely taken the place of software such as Actinic Catalogue and OS Commerce by taking away the need to understand hosting, web software installation and maintenance.

eCommerce software vs skills and knowledge

So much for the tools, what about the skills you need to run them.

To get a store up and running you will still need to set up the following:

1. Tax rules for the markets you are selling to
2. Shipping prices based on whatever fulfilment partner you are using and how much of the P&P costs you want to pass on to the customer
3. A payment gateway which may  be a simple as Paypal or a more complex gateway which can be branded to match your store.
4. Terms & Conditions, Delivery details,  Returns policies

These are all 'one time' decisions and you can find a small business solution providers, or even just a freelancer to help you do this at the outset.

Your next set of skills are ones you will need more regularly in adding and editing product in your store.

1. Photography and image manipulation (cropping & resizing)
2. Pricing
3. Copywriting
4. Inventory management

The work involved in the above should not be underestimated, but once you have each of these pieces of information for each product you are ready to open the doors to your shop.

Simple. In fact this IS simple, if you have done this before and understand the steps. To see how quickly this could be done, last year we set up a sim free mobile store. This used some mobile product data from an affiliate network. About 8 hours work to get the store up and running using 100% out-of-the-box settings and design and the site was ready to trade. Another couple of hours work and the site was found by Google and made our first sale in under 48 hours. 

This was certainly an interesting excercise, and along with trying to sell a product on eBay, is a useful excercise for a start-up business wanting to uncover all the steps needed to sell a product online, but it is a long way from actually building a business.

We're not the only people to have tried this approach as an experiment. Jonathan Briggs, professor of ecommerce at Kingston University has written this blog post about budgeting for an ecommerce site. The end of the post has an example of costs for Market Quarter, a shopify store that he has set up as an experimental project and that trades on an ongoing basis. He counts 13 man-days, excluding marketing, for a small store with bespoke design.

Interestingly, the project misses many of the steps listed in higher up on the post, but has still managed to trade around £10,000 turnover in its first year after another 20 days spent on marketing and a budget for PPC of a couple of hundred pounds a month.

What's needed next

I said above that setting up a store online and selling your product does not mean you have an eCommerce business in place. An ecommerce business needs to generate sales, and cope with the scale of profitable sales needed to cover the staff costs and overheads.

A 2009 survey by BigCommerce shows that users of these small systems rarely commit the sort of marketing budgets needed to acheive this scale. Either that or their efforts are driven entirely by tactics like SEO or PR which require no media budget, and the store manager is valuing their time at nothing.

Bringing an ecommerce store to the scale needed for consistent profitability brings about needs for the following capabilities:

1. Branding
2. Design
3. Merchandising
4. Decision support (tools like image zooming or reviews that help a customer decide to purchase)
5. Copywriting
6. Photography
7. Search optimisation
8. Email Marketing
9. Partner & affiliate management
10. PR
11. Promotions management
12. Social media strategy and implementation
13. 3rd party catalogue integration (e.g. Ebay, Amazon marketplace, Kelkoo or Google base)
14. Web analytics
15. A/B Testing
16. Multi-language and multi-currency management
17. Content management (non product, e.g. blogs)
18. Product design or procurement
19. Supply chain management
20. Warehouse logistics
21. Inventory management
22. Customer services

The tools to support these activities are simply not available in smaller platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce, or would require large amounts of bespoke development to either build or even integrate with other existing systems. This is why we now develop even our SME sites on the Magento eCommerce platform.

Whilst this is somewhat overkill for small projects, and is more costly to implement truly bespoke designs on, the platform has the ability to grow at a much lower ongoing cost, and to a much higher level. The Magento Showcase shows some of the global-scale businesses that are using the system at the top end. At the smaller end we've delivered sites similar to Jonathan's Market Quarter site in around 15 man-days effort.

So, whilst we thoroughly recommend any small start up has a look at tools like Shopify or BigCommerce, we also recommend that they look at their business plan and be realistic about how far a tool like this can take them. For the sake of cashflow, a hosted  option may well be a great first step to get you through your first year or two of trading, but for growth to even a relatively small business capable of supporting a handful of employees, a more scalable platform such as Magento would definitely be our tool of choice.

Visit us at ECMOD 2009

Shine Marketing will be exhibiting at ECMOD on 7th and 8th October 2009. Come and visit us on Stand 612.

The exhibition is a trade event for brands and retailers who operate eCommerce, catalogue or other mail order channels.

We'll be there to talk you through our range of eCommerce, design and marketing services for upmarket brands developing their direct consumer sales channel.

In addition, you can also enter a draw to win a comprehensive audit of your existing eCommerce website and marketing performance by our MD Stephen Pratley, just drop by and leave us your business card to enter.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Online Marketing Presentation from the Speciality & Fine Food Fair 2009

Below is the presentation given by Stephen Pratley (Managing Director) at the Speciality & Fine Food Fair 2009 at London Olympia and 7th September 2009.

Download a PDF of the presentation including notes from here.

Ten tips for affordable usability testing

Building an ecommerce website is a complex process involving multiple disciplines. Business owners, developers, designers, operations managers, and marketing managers all have a say in how a site should operate, but how often do companies consult with their customers?

Letting the end users contribute to the project through user testing before the launch can help stave off potential problems that those involved too closely in the site might never notice. And it need not be a painful disruption to the project. Here are a few tips for involving users in the design process:

1) Accept that you can’t build the perfect site without involving your users. Inexperienced designers and developers often shy away from testing in case the users don’t like their ideas and leave them exposed in front of their clients. A good site is built for the users, not just the business, so make sure everyone puts his ego into check and focuses on the customer. The best sites in the world have big user-testing budgets, so don’t expect to launch a great site without some feedback.

2) Test early. Don’t wait until you have a working site to begin receiving feedback. Rough designs are good enough to obtain early responses to such questions as

* What do you think this site sells?

* Where would you click to find a [your product name here]?

* How would you get back to the home page/product listing/search results?

3) Test often. This sounds like a project management nightmare, as testing invariably results in change. But feedback from real users often results in less complexity in the final site, so early testing can actually reduce the scope of the project rather than expand it. Remember, it is certainly easier to cope with change before a site is set live than afterward.

4) It’s better to test badly than not at all. Well-run testing facilities come with professional moderators, two-way screens to observe tests as they happen, and good-quality video recording. These are undoubtedly going to give you a better result than DIY approaches, but don’t let the cost put you off doing any testing at all. Some friends, rewarded with beer and pizza, sat around a laptop in the office in the evening is a better test than no test at all.

5) Six users is enough. User testing is not research, so “statistically significant” is not your issue. Put six people in front of your website. If one struggles, consider ways of adapting the site; if two or three struggle, definitely make the necessary changes.

6) Use the right criteria in finding test subjects. Marketing managers tend to obsess about demographics such as age or income, but behaviours are usually more important. For instance,

* How much are your site visitors likely to know about your industry?

* How often do they shop online?

* How many hours a day do they spend on the internet?

Get a spread of responses to each of these questions and consider each user’s actions with his level of knowledge in mind. A less experienced shopper who stumbles but gets there in the end is less of an issue than a regular shopper having the same degree of difficulty using your site.

7) Watch, don’t guide. Try to get an independent party, rather than someone directly involved with the site, to sit with the user in the test. This person will be less eager to guide the user round the site and “prove” how easy it is to use.

8) Keep tests short. Two or three tasks is enough—for example, have the user find and buy a product, look for sizing and fit information for a product, and check on the status of a previous order. It’s tiring work, and don’t underestimate the amount of notes and video that each testing round creates.

9) Don’t expect your users to give you the answers. User testing is not an opportunity to get the user to solve the problems with your site; it’s a chance for him to show you where the problems lie. Your team will still have to resolve the issues—and then you’ll try the proposed improvements out on other users to obtain additional feedback.

10) Testing never ends. Never consider your site to be finished. Shoppers are coming into contact with new online tools and experiences all the time, and it’s important to see how well you are keeping up with the competition and ironing out creases that are, hopefully, smaller and smaller. As your online business grows, changes that were once not worthwhile will start to be able to pay for themselves as more and more people visit your site. Improving conversion rates almost always brings back better returns than generating more traffic, so when times are tight, make sure you are looking after the users you already have.

Shine Marketing appoints new Creative Director

eCommerce specialist continues to grow from strength-to-strength

Continuing its steady expansion, Kingston-based Shine Marketing (http://www.shinemarketing.com), a specialist in building and marketing ecommerce websites for upmarket brands, has appointed Angela Davies as its new creative director.
Davies’ appointment strengthens Shine’s existing design team, in its core ecommerce web design business. It also makes way for the company’s broader involvement in branding and design projects, across its portfolio of retail, fashion, beauty and fitness clients.
Davies comes with vast experience, having worked for The Set Up, where she managed design projects for clients including: The Economist, Tamarisk and Gazprom.
In her role at Shine, she will be responsible for managing client design and branding projects, along with business development – working closely with commercial director, Domenica Di Lieto.
Commenting on the appointment, Stephen Pratley, managing director of Shine Marketing, said: “Angela’s approach to design has a strong focus on the audience, and therefore the commercial outcome. And, her work demonstrates that she always remains true to the ethos of the brands she is representing.
“Her role as creative director means that Shine’s online projects can now take the lead in our client’s brand experience. We firmly believe that Angela will play a central part in the company’s next major growth phase.”
Angela Davies added: “Shine Marketing specialises in online, a sector which is seeing continued rapid growth.
“I am excited by the challenge that lies ahead, and keen to be involved in helping to develop Shine into one of the leading ecommerce specialists.
“I believe that successful creative direction boils down to having immediate contact with the client, this is when ‘best of breed’ work is achieved. And that is what I am setting out to accomplish in this new role.”

-Ends-

Notes to editors

About Shine Marketing:
Shine Marketing (shinemarketing.com) is a specialist in building and marketing websites and eCommerce websites. Run by marketeers who have experience of running successful eCommerce businesses – Shine understands what is needed to create a successful retail business online with its strong focus on achieving return on investment for clients through user-focussed design and effective marketing.

With specialist interests in fashion, beauty and fitness, Shine Marketing has built and marketed websites for brands such as Sahara, Zelens Skin Science ZPM and DeviDoll.

Shine Marketing is based in Kingston-Upon-Thames, Surrey and was established in 2006.

Further information/interviews:
Katrina Suppiah
Business Accent PR
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Tel: 020 8543 6582; Mobile: 07809 028711

Shine Marketing advises specialist food brands on how to prepare themselves for going online

FOOD BUSINESSES: YOU CANNOT AFFORD TO “STAND STILL”

Stephen Pratley, managing director of Shine Marketing, http://www.shinemarketing.com, a specialist in building and marketing ecommerce websites for upmarket brands, will present a speech on ‘Preparing Yourself for Going Online’ at this year’s Speciality & Food Fair. 

In his speech, Pratley will address the importance of creating a strong online presence for your brand. He will warn retailers, across the speciality food sector, that they cannot afford to stand still in this booming online market – particularly in the run up to Christmas 2009 .

Pratley will also look at planning your business vs planning your website, and will provide an overview of the goals that need to be set for the design and implementation of a successful website. Finally, he will show how to measure return on your investment.

He will address the importance of designing a website for your customers, whether they are businesses or consumers, and how its ecommerce function should be integral to this. He comments:

“Websites should not just be about the technology; wider product availability and smarter delivery options are now top of the list when it comes to online shoppers’ demands.

“Naturally, it doesn’t stop at the build of a website, retailers then need to place emphasis on its promotion, including Search Engine Optimisation, online PR and email marketing.”

The speech will also cover how a website can support wholesale business, as well as direct consumer sales, and Pratley will advise the audience on where to go to find out more about this. 

Stephen Pratley’s speech will be taking place in the Small Business Forum on Monday 7th September, between 1.30-2.15pm.

-Ends-


Notes to editors

About Shine Marketing:
Shine Marketing (shinemarketing.com) is a specialist in building and marketing websites for upmarket brands. Run by marketeers who have experience of running successful eCommerce businesses – Shine understands what is needed to create a successful retail business online with its strong focus on achieving return on investment for clients through user-focussed design and effective marketing.

Shine Marketing is based in Kingston-Upon-Thames, Surrey and was established in 2006.


Further information/interviews:
Katrina Suppiah
Business Accent PR
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Tel: 020 8543 6582; Mobile: 07809 028711

An Introduction to SEO

With more smoke and mirrors than a David Copperfield show, the area of search engine optimisation is confusing for the best of us.

We've published this easy Introduction to SEO ebook to help you get the basics right and get you started on a reliable search engine marketing strategy.

Shine Marketing collaborates with Kingston University to improve the online shopping experience

Shine Marketing, a specialist in building and marketing eCommerce websites, is pleased to announce that it is working with Kingston University on a new eCommerce research project.

The project will help Shine Marketing increase its service offering to its online retail clients through a deeper insight into ways of measuring customer behaviours on shopping websites.

The collaboration is through a Knowledge Connect programme which is part funded by the London Development Agency and provides a way for Universities in and around London to share their research and knowledge for the benefit of small to medium enterprises.

Shine Marketing will be the first business to take advantage of this scheme with Kingston University.

The habits of online shoppers can be measured in many different ways but the eCommerce industry still has much more to learn about consumers shopping habits to better the customer experience online.

Stephen Pratley, managing director of Shine Marketing comments:

"As a specialist agency in eCommerce, we wanted to work with a leading eCommerce professor in the UK to further our knowledge in the area of tools that measure consumer behaviour online and in turn help our clients improve the online shopping experience they offer their customers. We are thrilled to be working with Jonathan Briggs, Professor of eCommerce at Kingston University. Professor Briggs brings the unusual combination of practical experience and academic theory through his work at the University and his own company Other Media."

The Knowledge Connect project will run for three months over the summer. It will involve detailed research and analysis of existing measurement tools on the market and how these tools can be adapted and the then replicated across different types of online retailers.

Professor Briggs comments: "I'm really excited about this project; it provides a fantastic opportunity to do some well-targeted research and development with a local company. Stephen Pratley has a high level of knowledge of eBusiness and this collaboration will be mutually beneficial to both parties. We are already seeing signs of being able to extend this collaboration beyond the initial project and hope to find and develop an entirely new tool that enables online retailers to gain a better understanding of the customer experience and in turn build better eCommerce websites. This project provides a very quick way to make a rapid assessment of whether some eCommerce ideas have wings and warrant further funding and investigation."

Briggs continues: "This project will also allow Shine Marketing to be part of a network where specialists from industry and research can come together to strengthen the local eBusiness community in South London and compete against the large agencies for big client projects."

Ends
About Knowledge Connect
Knowledge Connect (knowledgeconnect.org.uk) is a dynamic and practical programme that's helping London's businesses to grow and prosper by connecting them to the knowledge and expertise of the City's universities, colleges and research organisations. This funded programme provides a fantastic opportunity for businesses to develop new products, services and markets and for knowledgebase organisations to put their expertise to practical and commercial use.

About Shine Marketing
Shine Marketing (shinemarketing.com) is a specialist in building and marketing websites and eCommerce websites. Run by marketeers who have experience of running successful eCommerce businesses - Shine understands what is needed to create a successful retail business online with its strong focus on achieving return on investment for clients through user-focussed design and effective marketing.
With specialist interests in fashion, beauty and fitness, Shine Marketing has built and marketed websites for upmarket brands such as Sahara, Zelens Skin Science ZPM and DeviDoll.

Shine Marketing is based in Kingston-Upon-Thames, Surrey and was established in 2006.

About Enterprise at Kingston University
Kingston University (www.kingston.ac.uk/services-for-business) believes it is very important for the local economy that education works effectively with business and industry, and offers a range of knowledge transfer and consultancy services as well as professional focused work-based training programmes.

For further information please contact:

Caroline Wiggins
Business Accent PR
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Mobile: 07739 709073

Katrina Suppiah
Business Accent PR
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Mobile: 07809 028711

New email research shows growth in use of mobile devices

New research released today by Campaign Monitor shows some big moves in the way people are reading their email, with big shifts towards mobile devices and little or no growth on web-based clients like Gmail or Hotmail.

The biggest winner is the iPhone, which, with both versions added together is now more popular than AOL, Lotus Notes, Thunderbird and Entourage put together.

More and more, marketers need to be looking at simpler versions of how their emails are rendered by these small mobile devices, and including tests for devices such as Windows Mobile, Blackberry and the iPhone when designing their marketing communications.

Moving to a professional email newsletter platform

Many companies and clients wonder what benefits an external email service provider can offer them, and whether they could just do it in-house themselves. In this article we will cover the major benefits of using an email service provider to send and manage email campaigns.

Easily measure the success of your campaigns

If you know who opened your emails, what they clicked on, who bounced and who unsubscribed, you can start to understand who your audience really is, and what they are interested in.

For every campaign you send, ShineEmail automatically creates reports that are:

• Easy to understand
• Automatically updated
• Simple to share with other people

Save time

What administrative work? Sending the email might not take too long (although it may crush your mail systems internally!). It’s dealing with the results of your campaign that can eat up your time.

• Subscribe and unsubscribe requests — every time you send a campaign, some people are likely to want to get off the list. It may only take you a minute or two to deal with, but if you need to stop what you are doing and switch tasks, it adds up quickly. And what happens if you miss one and send to that person again?

  ShineEmail lets people unsubscribe instantly from any email they receive, and your list is updated automatically.

• Dealing with bounced emails — For any given campaign, you might expect up to 10% of the emails to be bounced back to you. That could be hundreds or thousands of emails you need to handle somehow.

  Are they permanent bounces? Then should you remove them from your list? Or do you need to resend the email to them?

  ShineEmail instantly removes hard bounces, and re-sends your campaigns automatically to addresses which soft bounce.

• Dealing with spam complaints — Sometimes people forget that they signed up for your emails, and hit the spam button. ShineEmail instantly removes people from your list when they make a spam complaint, ensuring they do not receive any more email.

• Avoid hold ups on your own mail servers — We’ve heard of more than one marketing manager staying up till all hours trying to send email campaigns out without shutting down the company email network.

  Let our servers handle that load for you.

Improve your deliverability

Your email campaign can only succeed if your recipients are actually able to read it. Using ShineEmail to send your campaigns can have a big impact on the number of people receiving the emails.

• Whitelisting and feedback loops — We have relationships with major ISPs like AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo! and many more that mean our mail servers are recognized as legitimate senders of bulk email, so your campaigns have a much greater chance of being delivered.

• Monitoring of blacklists — We continually check blacklisting services to make sure our servers are not being listed, something which is time consuming and complex to do for your own servers.

• Specialized network of mail servers — our mail servers optimize email delivery for particular recipient mail systems, throttling the speed of delivery to match acceptable levels for each system.

Use advanced options and smarter features

• Personalization — Use custom fields to adapt your emails for individual subscribers
• Segmentation — Send focused emails to subsets of your full lists
• Powerful import and export — Easily get your subscriber lists into and out of the system at any time
• Archive your campaigns — Easily display your previous campaigns on your website

Constant improvement

A web based service like ShineEmail can be updated with better performance, new features and smarter tools very quickly, and at no extra cost. You don’t have to worry about having the wrong version, or getting out of date.

Every month we are adding features and making updates to make ShineEmail do more for you in less time.

Secure, reliable and supported

Your valuable subscriber information and campaign details are kept safe in our data centers. With biometric security, uninterruptible power supplies and environmental control units, our physical security and reliability is state of the art.

We keep your data backed up and duplicated across our network at all times. Our hardware is completely redundant, meaning that even if one disk or server fails, nothing will be lost and the system will stay up.

Focus on your customers, not on your technology

Sure, you can use your own email client, or some other in-house tool to add your subscribers and deal with unsubscribe requests and bounces from bad emails all day.

But wouldn’t you rather spend that time working on the email itself, crafting the message to better meet your customers requirements and tweaking subject lines and headlines to get better results?

Using an email service provider lets you avoid the mundane administrative work and concentrate on serving your customers better.

To find out more about our email marketing solutions, contact Shine Marketing on 0208 973 4637, or email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Press Release: Shine Marketing announces new websites for retail guru , George Davies

Kingston-Upon-Thames, 15 June 2009: Shine Marketing, a specialist in building and marketing websites and eCommerce websites, is pleased to announce its involvement with three websites under the George Davies business empire - George created NEXT in the ‘80's, the phenomenally successful ‘George at Asda' in the ‘90's and per una was the revolutionary brand key in the turnaround of Marks & Spencer in the ‘00's.

George-Davies.com which went live on 13 June, 2009. George-Davies.com profiles the ‘designer of the decade' behind retail giants such as Next, George at Asda and Per Una @ Marks and Spencer, and covers his business and charitable achievements past and present. The site also gives the first hint of George Davies' 4th new Womenswear Brand - Give (give.co.uk) launching in October, for which Shine Marketing have also been working on the eCommerce offering. Shine Marketing has been responsible for the development and management of george-davies.com along with two other websites under the George Davies brand: red-creative.biz and sporter.co.uk.

Nigel Roberts, Head of Commercial, Systems and Logistics comments:

"The three new sites give us a new opportunity to showcase a breadth of work from our group of companies that many are unaware of. George Davies charitable and educational ventures, brand development work from Red Creative and the merchandising and logistics skills from S'porter that back up the public facing brands that George Davies is known for.

Shine Marketing has been instrumental in the development of these websites. We are very pleased with the advice they have been able to give on the strategy behind these sites and their understanding of how to carry our brand thinking onto the web."

Red-creative.biz is the new showcase site for Red Creative, a design and marketing agency for the retail industry. Red Creative is known for creating all the brand assets for per una @ Marks and Spencer as well as George at Asda and the merchandising businesses run for Liverpool and Arsenal Football Clubs.
Sporter.co.uk will be the new website for S'porter Retail which is a design and supply company combining fashion with sport established in 1995 by George Davies. Shine is responsible for the development and management of the site as well as its search engine optimisation. Creative for this website is being provided by Red Creative.

Stephen Pratley, managing director of Shine Marketing comments: "We are very pleased to be involved in the consultancy and development of these sites as well as Give.co.uk.

George Davies' brands have stood out for their passion for innovation and great customer experience and we're delighted to have the opportunity to make this stand out on the web."

Ends

About Shine Marketing
Shine Marketing is a specialist in building and marketing eCommerce websites. Run by marketeers who have experience of running successful eCommerce businesses - Shine understands what is needed to create a successful retail business online with its strong focus on achieving return on investment for clients through user-focussed design and effective marketing.

With specialist interests in fashion, beauty and fitness, Shine Marketing has built and marketed websites for brands such as Sahara, Zelens Skin Science ZPM and DeviDoll.

Shine Marketing is based in Kingston-Upon-Thames, Surrey and was established in 2006.

The A-Z of SEO for Retailers

The following are the slides from the presentation given at the Sheerluxe Online Retailer Conference 2009

The presentation outlines the basics of planning a search strategy for online retail and how to assess the value of each part of the strategy using examples form existing SME business that Shine Marketing have worked with.

If anyone would like to know more about our approach to SEO for online retailers, do get in touch and we'd be happy to work with you to grow your site's business.

Shine Marketing Launches Entry-Level eCommerce Solution

Shine Marketing - the leading provider of integrated eCommerce website and marketing solutions to the UK retail market - has unveiled it's entry-level solution for businesses new to online selling.

The objective is to create a package that addresses the most common problems that other entry level products face, reducing development cost and times and leaving more budget for branding and marketing.

Stephen Pratley, Managing Director of Shine Marketing said:

"There is an enormous appetite in the UK for starting new eCommerce businesses, but many are put off by the technical aspects of setting up a site and those who get past that hurdle are often disappointed with poor presentation of products and the difficulty managing an online shop, which is very different to a high-street store.

We have focussed on the issues which I have personally experienced in building and managing eCommerce operations since 2000, and in discussions with hundreds of aspiring retailers, and created a solution that meets those challenges.

Shine's small business eCommerce solutions are there to close the gap between unbranded eCommerce solutions like eBay stores, and our 100% bespoke sites which have a higher cost in specification, design, development and management time."

Our sites include critical functions to help get retailers started selling, and at a cost that leaves plenty of money for the marketing budget:

* A store that is up-and-running out of the box. We take care of installing, hosting, and configuring the store to the needs of your product
* A range of high quality, modern store designs which project the right image without incurring the large costs that bespoke design incurs
* Clear navigation, quality search and clear product presentation
* A checkout which works smoothly!
* A set of the most important marketing tools to bring people to your store - SEO, PPC and email marketing
* Excellent merchandising to make them shop when they get there
* Clear reporting to measure where your money is being spent

Typical first year costs are less than £5,000 including setup, hosting and support, and we expect the costs to fall further as the year goes on.

Stephen Pratley said:

"The initial reaction to the system has been great, our first store - Buy Beauty Brands - took less then 2 days to set up and took its first order on the day it launched without spending a penny on marketing.

2009 is set to be a great year for online retail as the high street suffers more and more problems, we're looking forward to being part of that success."

New Site: Sahara Women’s Fashions

We are excited to announce the launch of our latest eCommerce site today for Sahara, a women's fashion brand.

The site is the first eCommerce site for the brand which was created in the 1970's by Suzy Coppersmith-Heaven.

Aimed at women in the 40+ age group, the site has been designed to be simple to use and very clear in it's presentation of the products right down down to zoom tools which show the very detail of the fabric on each item.

From a business perspective, with nine stores in London the South East of England and an existing base of catalogue buyers, the site has been designed to scale up quickly to cope with known existing demand, with slick pick & pack and easy returns processes built into the warehouse management module.

Shine Marketing are now moving on to the marketing of the site through search marketing and email, as well as an ongoing process of improving the site through regular user testing and feedback.

http://www.saharalondon.com/

SEO for Luxury Brands

Stephen Pratley's presentation on SEO for Luxury Brands, given at the Sheerluxe Conference today, is now online and can be viewed at Slideshare.

3 SEO Principles that make a difference

As an SEO company we often get asked by clients "can you SEO my site?". It's a frustrating question that usually shows they have only been given half the picture about what Google is looking for in judging a site.

SEO is not something you just 'do' to a website site. SEO is about showing Google that your site is the best choice to show to anyone looking for a particular product or service. It involves creating content on your site to show your knowledge, expertise and uniqueness. It involves encouraging other people to link to that content and recommend you to others, and it involves making sure Google can understand and find its way around your site.

Too many people concentrate on the last step - tinkering with their site coding and tags - because it is 100% in their control, yet it is the smallest part of the task.

What follows is a list of principles that we know, though experiments of our own, and discussion with other successful SEO professionals to be the factors that we count on most to improve search rankings in Google, Yahoo and MSN.

1) Your site is less than half of the problem, your reputation is a bigger problem
Anyone can change their own site to be more 'SEO friendly'. Then what?
When you have over 5 million pages about "ipod nano 4GB Black" how does Google choose between them?
The answer is in what other people say about your site, not what you say about it.
The answer is in links to your site, from other sites, sites that people respect.
The concept of 'authority' is fundamental in SEO. Your site has to be the most important, the most referred to, the most popular site in its sector.
Then you'll have visitors a plenty. But don't expect this overnight. In competitive sectors, age is a big factor.

2) What people say about you matters
Your company probably does several things, and you are keen to get them ALL on your website.
It's mostly the things that make you unique that make you stand out. That could be that you have the cheapest iPods in town, or that you also sell the only left-handed iPod belt clips at 50p each. Which is going to make you the real money?
So prioritise your message, understand where you really want to get your message out and make sales.
Optimise your site for these messages and don't clutter it up. This process is called 'keyword research'. It's about finding what your customers are looking for and responding with content about offers that make you profit.

3) Content is King
No-one is going to link to your site if you have nothing interesting to say. No-one is going to believe you are the 'best' if you don't know it, and show you know it.
So give a little away. Tell your customers why your shirts feel so luxurious, tell them why your shoes will last forever, tell them how your dating service will get them into a secluded corner with George Clooney at the next office party. Tell them all the things you'd tell them if they had walked into your shop with a black Amex and said 'why would I want that?' . Tell them, because Google will hear you, and they will tell billions of others the same story when they search for 'luxury shirt tailor', 'best shoe-maker' and 'how to get a date with George Clooney', because right now there is not one site that will tell you that last one.

While there are plenty of ways to get small successes in Google in the short term, none of them will build you a business that will last.
Concentrate on these three principles and in a few short months Google will learn to love you too.