eCommerce

Marketing

Design

Small Business

Social Media

BigCommerce

Buyer's Guides

Google

Shopify

Mobile Web Design

Technology is constantly evolving. Long gone are the days when you could make a simple website, built for desktop, and tons of leads would come your way. Today, you have to build your site for both desktop and mobile visitors. In fact, you may even find that the majority of site visitors are on mobile devices, rather than desktops. Mobile versus desktop site usage varies by industry and website type, but the message is still the same... Your website has to be designed for mobile. For website owners, knowing how to tell if your site is truly mobile friendly is often difficult and time consuming. That's why it is important to find a great web design company that you can trust (hint hint, Ventura Web Design & Marketing).

While not everyone is a web design expert, we do believe that the more a store owner knows, the more successful the website will be. This doesn't mean that you should become the primary web designer for your site. If you did, you would never have time for your vendors, your customers, or your family. Nevertheless, the information below is presented in a "How-To" style so that you, the store owner, can understand what your web designer should be doing for you. I hope that these tips are easy to understand and help you to get the most out of your website design project.

Start from the Ground Up with Mobile-First Design

The best way to optimize your site for mobile devices is to start when your site is being built. You can approach your website build or redesign from a mobile-first perspective.

You might be wondering what the heck does "mobile first" even mean? It means to begin your design for the smallest screen possible. This approach may seem odd, but it has advantages over "traditional" design techniques.

The small size of a mobile device forces you to focus on what the most important features of the site are. This provides a solid foundation to build into larger sizes. Large display usually include all the bells and whistles. When you start with large screens, you have to strip away as you go smaller. You run the risk of losing features on mobile devices or making it feel like an afterthought.

With mobile-first design you can focus on content. This allows you to create a hierarchy of what's most important. An emphasis on user experience makes your site easy to use. Optimizing for speed allows more people to see your site. To truly have a site that's mobile-optimized, it needs to be built for mobile.

Design your site from the ground up for mobile devices

Build to larger size devices to expand on the core content and features

While all that is great, what do you do if your site was not built using a mobile first approach? Well, we've got some helpful tips to improve your mobile performance no matter how your site was built!

Let's talk about the elephant in the room: images! It's true, images are a huge contributor to heavy and slow loading websites on mobile. Technology continues to improve, many desktop displays are now 4k resolution or higher. This is great for the web, we can show so much more detail, and quality throughout websites. But, sometimes it's easy to overlook smaller devices, particularly mobile phones.

For example, let's consider two image sizes: a large desktop web hero image and a mobile hero image. Our example desktop version at full quality comes in at 923kb, while the mobile image is only 302kb (32.7%). Even then, you would be surprised how many websites don't change the image on mobile devices.

Image file types and quality have a lot to do with file sizes. For many images, it's possible to greatly reduce the file size. In the web design & development industry this process is called "optimization". Here's our example image sizes when optimized: Desktop = 207kb (-77.5%), Mobile = 68kb (-77.4%). That's a massive difference! Optimizing your images for mobile will have a huge impact on your site's performance.

Lastly, when it comes to image file types, the standard and most widely format used is the "JPG" format. JPGs are great for photos, textures & background images. They do lack the ability to be transparent. When you compress JPG files, it usually results in a slightly blurry or "fuzzy" version of the image. For this reason, they're not ideal for logos, crisp text or similar applications.

When you need to display a logo, text, icon or similar small elements, the go to filetype is "PNG". PNG files use a lossless compression algorithm. Lossless compression means you don't lose colors or quality when the file is saved. They also include an "alpha channel" used for transparency. The downside is that PNG files tend to have a larger file size than their JPG counterparts.

Use the correct filetype for the situation

You may have heard the term "responsive design", but what does it mean? It's an approach to website design development in which the website responds to the user. The way that the site changes is usually based on screen size, platform, and orientation.

We build responsive websites using technology designed that responds to the user's device. From a practical standpoint, this has the advantage of allowing only one site to be built. Responsive websites support a huge number of devices. Without responsive design, we would need to build a site for each device.

Using this technology we can decide which images are seen based on the user's device. We can also change the layout and design styles as needed. This provides the most efficient version of the site for every device.

Create one website that works on a large number of devices

Optimize image delivery, layout and styles for each size device

Even with "mobile-first design", other factors can affect how efficient your site is. One major contributor is your site's code structure and scripting.

With so many plugins, apps & other features that can be added to your site, it's easy to go overboard. Sometimes those features can slow your site down and make it less efficient. That's especially true for less powerful mobile devices.

The best way to remedy this is to decide what features are most important to your site and slowly add one at a time. Keep track of your site's performance before and after the addition. As you add more and more you'll notice that it may start slowing down. Don't give it too many tasks (or the wrong tasks) to do when a user arrives at the page. Try to make your website do the least amount of work needed.

Remove excess scripts, organize and minify code, "turn off" scripts that are unneeded. For many owners, this needs a developer to optimize the site without breaking it.

Watch out for code bloat and unneeded scripting slowing down your site

When adding features, test, test and test again to make sure it's working as intended.

Remove or alter scripts as needed to improve performance

Optimizing your site for mobile is a great way to improve your user's experience. This affects all areas of the business, particularly if you run an e-commerce site. Customers are more likely to buy if your mobile site works well.

Optimizing for Mobile Web Design

Running a BigCommerce store is a great way to sell your products online. However, sometimes customers might add items to your cart, but never purchase them. Luckily, the BigCommerce platform keeps tracks of these "abandoned carts". They also offer a user friendly way to contact customers who have left their cart full via "Abandoned Cart Emails".

 people put items in their online shopping cart only to leave it without completing their purchase.¹

That's a lot of money on the table! What would it mean to you to get 1%, 5%, 10% or 20% of those "lost" sales? That's exactly what a proper abandoned cart campaign can do for you.
We've put together a How To Guide for store owners like you to activate and customize your abandoned cart emails.

Getting Started with Abandoned Cart Recovery

Before we begin, we're going to assume you have access to Abandoned Cart Emails via a "Plus" level BigCommerce plan at minimum. To learn more about the feature, see the 

BigCommerce Abandoned Cart Saver support article

Now then, to begin the process, log in to your BigCommerce account and access your store Dashboard. From here you'll want to find "Store Setup > Store Settings > Miscellaneous" Then scroll to the bottom of the page. You'll be able to activate the abandoned cart emails as well as make some choices about how often you will be notified.

Now then, to edit the emails, From the dashboard you'll want to find "Marketing > Abandoned Cart Notifications". On this screen you'll be able to activate or deactivate 3 different emails.

In order to edit an email from the Abandoned Cart Notifications screen, find the header "Action" and click the three dots corresponding to the email you want to edit. You'll be presented with the following screen:

From here you can change your Subject Line, Message, Coupon Code and Send Time. For most users, this is enough customization to add some personality and branding to your emails. Feel free to add your logo or other images and bring your emails to life!

How to Customize your Cart Saver Emails Further

To really bring your branding and design to your abandoned cart emails, you'll need knowledge in HTML and CSS. BigCommerce uses a template system that allows you to fine-tune the emails you send. We've put together a breakdown of the default abandoned cart email that illustrates how these templates fit within one another.

BigCommerce Abandoned Cart Emails - How To Guide

Whether your business is strictly online or it’s a combination of online and brick-and-mortar, you know you want to be at the very top of those search results when anyone Googles something related to your industry. There are countless things you could do to improve your SEO and help get you to the top of that list but today we’re going to focus on 

Your site should have content that is relevant to the business, it needs to include keywords, and it should address common questions or concerns. Pay attention to your competition. Let's say your competition is ranking at #1 for "Auto Parts", it might be difficult to surpass them. However, how do they rank for "cheap auto parts", "best auto parts", or "auto part reviews" etc? Chances are there's opportunity there for you to come in and create the best content for that specific topic instead.

2. Make sure your Meta Data is up to date

Your Title tag should contain keywords you're trying to rank for, this is the link that appears when your site is found in Google or other search engines. Your Meta Description needs to be compelling copy designed to entice visitors to visit your site. This also appears in Google Searches.

Make sure your page URL is descriptive and short. HTML tags, such as H1 and alt tags, should be included on every page of your site. Be sure that your website developer uses the latest website coding techniques to ensure that your site is easy for Google's bots to read and understand.

Update your old blog posts or pages with new, relevant information. Find pages that are underperforming and update them with new content. Google likes to see new, fresh content and will reward your site with higher rankings.

5. Improve your Page Load Speed / Optimize for Mobile

If your site loads slowly, Google will recognize this and it will harm your ranking. It also leads to poor user experience to anyone visiting your site, especially mobile users. Improve your e-commerce site speed by optimizing images, develop the site with mobile users in mind, and/or remove unnecessary elements.

There's plenty more ways to boost your SEO, but this will get you started.

Keep track of your search engine rankings

How is your site ranking? Find out and watch for what content is generating interest and what content is not.

5 Easy SEO Boosts

Content marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on delivering unique, useful and shareable content to a particular target audience. The goal is to generate leads, establish your branding and provide value to your customers.

There are many types of inbound marketing available to you as a business owner, here’s the reasons why Content Marketing is arguably the best way to market your business:

 - Sharing content gets you out in the world interacting with people, new people will learn about you and what you offer.

 - More content seen by more people will improve your SEO rankings

 - If you’re creating great content, people will begin to know, like and trust you. This builds consumer confidence in your products and keeps them following you.

 - Content such as how-to guides or product reviews help keep your customers happy by answering important questions, teaching them or guiding them to the right product.

 - Instead of posting sales and products, content marketing provides you with alternate media to share in order to better engage with customers and build trust.

 - Content marketing can help feature and raise awareness of products. It does not need to be a hard sell, but creating content to announce a new product can make a huge difference.

What “content’ do I share? How does it work?

The content that will work best for you depends heavily on your particular industry and company. Here’s some examples of content marketing and who might use them:


Quality photography can make the difference between a sale and an empty cart. Don’t limit your photography to just product photos, create exciting lifestyle photos showing your product “out in the wild” to connect with your customers emotions. If you have a huge state of the art facility, take photos of the building to show off or if you sell camping equipment, take photos of the equipment out at a campsite.


Product videos have been around for decades in the form of “commercials”, and they still work as well as they always have. With YouTube gaining massive popularity, content creators are building huge audiences around things like unboxing videos and product reviews. Create your own content or work with content creators to produce videos that bring your products to life.


Is your product simple or complex? Do you get customers calling daily asking “simple” questions? Be proactive and create content answering the questions you get. This could be as simple as a Frequently Asked Questions section, or as complex as a full-on product manual. Post helpful advice, tricks or guides to help out your customers. This is a great way to handle customer service and build trust in your brand.


You can utilize quizzes and contents to learn a lot about your customers and drive engagement. Obtain feedback by creating and sharing quizzes! This will do two things: first, it will give you a valuable glimpse into the mind of your customers and second, it will allow you to engage with your audience directly and get immediate feedback. You can even offer incentive to complete the quiz via coupons, perks or store credit.

Here’s some other examples of content you could share:

What makes a piece of content worth sharing?

First off, content marketing shouldn’t go straight for the hard sell. Provide information, inspire, educate or entertain while staying true to your audience’s interests and motivations. Attract attention by creating enjoyable content even if it’s not obviously branded.

Imagine you were your own customer, what content would you be interested in? What would be most useful to you?

With these things in mind, you can now build your content marketing strategy, and with it your brand, your audience, and naturally, your revenue!

Ecommerce Content Marketing

Friday the 13th is here yet again which means all of the 

 are on red alert. If you’ve had an aversion to embracing or even promoting this holiday because of this phobia then you are missing out! We’re here to show you there’s a completely different way to handle this traditionally unlucky day and tell you how to turn it into a positive marketing experience. We’ve put together a list of 7 super lucky marketing tips for Friday the 13th that we’re sure will bring even the most scardiest of cats to your site.

Instead of pretending you don’t know it exists or trying to roll out a different promotion, embrace it! Send out your promotion loud & proud on all of your 

 platforms. Your followers are more likely to focus on the discount itself as opposed to the theme. Use Friday the 13th to catch their eye and get them to notice your brand.

Friday the 13th has always been associated with bad luck and all of the things that go with it (especially a certain less than friendly character who shall remain nameless.) Use your promotion to flip that mindset around and send out more of a “lucky” message. For example you could say something along the lines of “We Only Believe In Good Luck Today. Get Free Shipping Sitewide!” instead of the traditionally negative connotations of the day.

Offer A Discount Featuring the Number 13 


This one is so simple it’s basically effortless. Make your promotion feature the number 13 - “13% Off”, “$13 Off” or even “13 Best-Selling Products On Sale Today!”, something along those lines.

In line with the above tips, draw some urgency along with some positivity to your promotion! Let your customers know that today is the one and only day to take advantage of whatever offer you decide to send out and send it out everywhere! Most likely social & email campaigns will bring the most traffic but having a custom banner promoting the sale on your homepage is never a bad idea.

The internet is going to be chock-full of posts playing on the “bad luck” theme of the day so why not make your brand stand out and go the opposite way? Use any of the tips listed above as a marketing idea and get your followers excited about Friday the 13th!

In addition to doing a special one day sale, you could also build up excitement for the arrival of Friday the 13th by posting about it days, even weeks, prior. Get your followers pumped up by announcing that you’ll be releasing a special offer on Friday the 13th and then make it a huge deal once the day arrives.

Make Sure Your Promotion is Mobile-Friendly 


There’s nothing more unlucky than losing a sale because a user has an unpleasant mobile experience, and that happens on regular non-Friday the 13th days! Never forget to test everything on mobile because more than ever people are making purchases on their phone. “According to last year’s Black Friday statistics...more than $1.2 billion in revenue was generated in a single day through purchases made on mobile devices”.¹

That's it! That's about all you need to know about marketing in a positive way on the unluckiest day of the year. Happy posting!

7 Lucky Marketing Tips for Friday the 13th

No matter how long you’ve been in business it’s a safe bet that you’ve spent countless hours building your brand and meticulously identifying the best way to market that brand to your customers. The big question is have you spent some of those hours making sure your website (your #1 selling tool) is consistent with your brand? If the answer is no then continue reading and find out why you should consider making some changes!

In today’s market most of your target audience is going to find your website via social, email or Google campaigns and they’re going to expect to see the same branding across all of those platforms or else they might lose trust in the integrity of your brand.

 have reported judging the credibility of a brand based on the design of the site?"¹

Not only will neglecting your brand on your website harm your sales, it can also affect your search rankings. Google is all about relevance and making sure the results it returns to users are useful and pertinent to whatever it is they’re looking for and your site is less likely to come up if there’s little to no content mentioning who you are and what you offer. Think of this as a chance to tell your story to the world, a chance to tell them all about your brand and what makes you stand out from your competitors. For instance if your competitors have a more compelling message about their brand in their online presence then there’s a far greater chance that consumers will put more trust in their products instead of yours.

The most important brand elements you should focus on are your company logo, color scheme, slogan (if applicable), and font choice. These elements should all be prominent on your site and should be consistent with any social / email marketing you do.

Whether it’s just simply changing colors on your site or completely changing its appearance it’s imperative you consider making these changes sooner rather than later. If you’re unsure on how to proceed or would simply like a consult we are here for you! Get in touch with us today and let’s get the ball rolling!

Importance of Branding in Web Design

No matter what you sell or what service you provide, you won’t be selling much or providing service unless you can introduce potential customers to your offering. How will anyone find your website, let alone stick around to buy your product? There are many ways to get visitors to you, see our list below for our top 5 methods:

Many people have heard of SEO or Search Engine Optimization. This is a process that involves optimizing your website to be easily found via search engines. This is a simple solution that all websites should be embracing. We like 

 which offers a checklist of 13 quick wins to improve your SEO.

Another acronym used in shorthand for “pay-per-click” advertising. Utilizing this method, customers are shown your ads, but you only pay when they actually click the ad. This can be quite effective especially when selling a product or service to “cold traffic”. Here’s a list of the most common and relevant PPC platforms out there:

All of your advertising does not need to be a direct sale or sales offer of any kind. Many of the world’s biggest brands advertise via content marketing. For example Red Bull and GoPro are companies who share lifestyle photos and video content to build their brand as the authority in their field. Check out 

 for some great examples of lifestyle content marketing. Some businesses will want to look to more product-driven content, like our very own client North Shore Commercial Door. Their YouTube channel is filled with helpful product reviews, 

 and explores their vendor’s brand history. This content marketing establishes them as the expert while keeping the focus on the products. Another way to share helpful content is to utilize customer reviews in your social media marketing. 

 shares recipes, photos and customer reviews on it’s Instagram channel which brings important social proof and allows their content to easily be shared.

Once a customer reaches your site, how do you keep them coming back? And how do you know if your website marketing is having the desired results? Luckily there are many tools available to automate the process of keeping communication open with customers and staff.

How can lead magnets help your business? If you’re not sure what a Lead Magnet is, we’ll explain. A lead magnet is a deal so good that customers cannot resist providing you with their email address to get it. We list 6 ways to use this method:

(Either your Main Product or something Relevant and useful)

(A simple discount or free shipping offer is enough to gather leads)

(This will help you gather leads, but also perform valuable research into your customers)

Even in today’s modern world of marketing, word of mouth is still one of the best ways to find new customers. That’s great news for you because you can offer referral incentives to those customers via a referral program. Even better, offer a “double-sided” referral to give back to your existing customers while gaining a new customer. There are many different variants of this idea, but just make sure you take care of your brand ambassadors, your existing customers! That way they will refer your business to a friend with or without a referral program.

Whether you’re using one or all of these methods, they’re sure to bring in more leads to your business and as a result, more revenue!

How Do I Generate New Leads?

Ecommerce stores often rely on large banner and billboard graphics to help create a positive first impression. But why should you be changing them out regularly? Here are 5 key reasons why making regular updates to your website banner designs is important:

Make sure visitors know they're in the right place.

Your homepage banner and headline will be the first thing visitors see, so make sure it's up-to-date and tailored for maximum impact. This is something that should be tested and changed regularly for optimal results – plus, with A/B testing, you can easily compare two versions of an image or headline to determine which one works best with your target audience.

Direct customers to your best offer or promotion.

Use the main focus of your site to showcase your latest product or discount – this can help drive further engagement with potential customers and encourage them to take action on what you have available at any given time; moreover, by creating banners that emphasize discounts like ‘buy one get one free’ or ‘limited time offers’ this helps add extra incentive for people to purchase right away instead of waiting until later on down the road when those deals may no longer exist.

Address customer pain points with relevant imagery & headlines.

By rotating content that speaks directly to customer needs, you can provide more value while also helping people identify which products may work best for their particular situation(s). Additionally, using powerful words like 'guaranteed' 'instant' 'free', etc., in these visuals will help capture attention from viewers who are looking for solutions quickly without having too much read through text involved.

Keep things fresh by emphasizing holidays & expiring promotions

This helps create a sense of urgency which can boost conversion rates significantly over time as well as keep things interesting for returning customers who may otherwise become bored with seeing the same images every time they visit your store or website page(s). Furthermore, updating graphics seasonally allows businesses an opportunity to embrace new trends while remaining consistent throughout different times of year (easter eggs during Easter season vs snowflakes during winter season) - this keeps things fun yet still fitting into overall brand identity!

Showcase how products work in real life scenarios

Use lifestyle shots that demonstrate how someone could fix, improve or delight in use of a product from within an image rather than just showing what it looks like alone; these types of visuals should be tested frequently depending on current promotions being offered by the business at any given period of time! Moreover, adding captions underneath each photo depicting actual customer experiences will add additional credibility & trustworthiness around products being sold online – leading people closer towards taking action sooner rather than later! Ultimately, changing out banners/graphics regularly allows businesses to keep their sites fresh while still maintaining consistency between brand identity & overall marketing goals (such as email campaigns or other ad campaigns running alongside homepage billboard graphics).

Ultimately, changing out banners/graphics regularly allows businesses to keep their sites fresh while still maintaining consistency between brand identity & overall marketing goals (such as email campaigns or other ad campaigns running alongside homepage billboard graphics).

5 Reasons to change your Banners Regularly

Your guide to a successful e-commerce design starts here. We've put together the essential design elements that make up a great web store, how many of these features does your store have?

 HTTPS is essential to provide security to your customers. The green lock icon tells visitors your site is trustworthy.

 The hero image and headline strongly influence your visitor’s perception of your business by providing users with your most important offer and/or service.

 The call to action tells users exactly what you want them to do. Usually in the form of a brightly colored button, CTA’s direct visitors exactly where you want them to go.

 Displaying featured categories provides users an even easier way to find products relevant to their interests.

 Bring attention to promotional items by displaying a badge or similar element. This catches the user’s attention and will result in more page views of this item.

 Promote top-sellers, high-margin items, or products with high search volume.

 Use an add-to-cart button to make purchasing easier for users who already know what they’re looking for or are return customers who have decided to purchase.

 Use a “new arrivals” section to promote your latest and greatest products; visitors may be looking for new items.

 Build an email list to retain traffic and drive repeat traffic to your site. Email newsletters can be used for promotions, retargeting, and sharing news and features.

 Enable social sharing links to allow visitors to spread your business via social media. This improves search engine rankings and provides social proof to skeptical shoppers.

 Many customers will want to contact you directly; make it easy to find your support phone number.

 Significantly improve users' search experience and utilize this feature to suggest your featured products.

 Providing a category menu will allow visitors to quickly and easily find what they’re looking for by browsing categories.

 Clearly display your shipping, support, and other policies. No one likes to be surprised by shipping costs.

 Displaying recently viewed products increases the chance that a user will purchase a product they may have hesitated to purchase in the past.

 Clearly display your contact information, and if you have a physical location, list your address and hours of operation. This should be visible on every page of the site.

 Breadcrumb navigation shows your visitors where they are on the hierarchy of pages. This is especially useful when you have many categories and subcategories.

 This is the first image a shopper sees when looking for their product. A quality photo can increase the value of the product itself and improve trust in your brand.

 Simulate the experience of walking into a store and being able to pick up a product and look at it from every angle. This provides customers a better feel for the product.

 Video is the most compelling way to engage consumers, especially those viewing your site from mobile devices. Consumers are more likely to buy after viewing a video.

 Displaying related products is an easy way to cross-sell directly to your customers. You can offer them products that work well together or alternative brands.

 Your product title should be large and easy to read, but it also needs to capture their attention and provide enough information to differentiate the product.

 Most people consult reviews or ratings before making a final purchase. As a result, they are more likely to buy from your site if you have product ratings and reviews available.

 Your design should make the price of the item clear and noticeable. Any promotional discounts should be obvious; confusing pricing schemes will only frustrate users.

 Allowing customers to specify the number of items to add to their cart not only improves the number of sales you get but reduces friction and intuitively makes sense.

 Customers want to see all of the options available for an item they’re interested in. Make sure you show customers all of the product details with clickable color swatches.

 Use color and contrast to make the Add to Cart stand out from the rest of the page. The button should be fairly large and include an arrow or design element to draw the eye.

 Display a “trust seal” to overcome skeptical customers’ fears and increase conversions.

 Sometimes a shopper isn’t quite ready to order but wants to remember the product and your store. Make it easy to do so by providing an “Add to Wish List” button.

 Customers have questions about products. Your product description should answer all of the questions before they get to checkout. If they can’t find the information they’re looking for, they are likely to abandon the sale completely.

72 Must-Have Features for E-Commerce Websites [Infographic]

49 Elements Your Product Detail Page Must Have

How The Best Ecommerce Sites Win at Web Design [23 Examples]

Why Product Images Are so Important in Ecommerce

Your DIY Product Photography Resource Guide

Why Online Store Owners Should Embrace Online Reviews

Importance of a Trust Seal on Your eCommerce Website

The Complete Guide to Writing Product Descriptions That Convert

The Essential Ecommerce Web Design Guide

Creating an email promotion doesn’t have to be a difficult task. If you already have your email marketing list in place and your marketing calendar planned out, you’re halfway there. Let’s look at what the next steps are to turning on the money faucet for your business.

For this example, let’s pretend you’re promoting a new line of Widgets from Brand X. It’s Valentine’s Day (a big holiday for Widget sales), and you want to offer 10% Brand X Widgets (for a limited time, while supplies last) with coupon code BRANDX10. That’s everything we need to begin.

Your email marketing platform (Constant Contact, iContact, Campaigner, Mailchimp, etc.) will have an option to create a new email campaign. They will most likely allow you to choose from a set of pre-defined email templates. However, it would be best if you had a custom template that you make and re-use for your emails so that all the correspondence that comes from your business is consistent and your customers know what to expect.

Your email template can be an simple as your business logo and a phone number on top, or you can also include links to your website and customer service hours. Whatever you choose to include, keep the header short and sweet so that readers can get to the most important content of the email right away.

You may also choose to include a standard footer with links to your website. This is likely the best place for links and additional information that are not as important as the promotion but necessary for your business (like legalese and disclaimers).

It’s important to note that people have no patience.

They just don’t read an email if you don’t get their attention right away. We recommend creating one big compelling graphic with your promotion in big bold letters to be included as the very first thing in your email (under the short header, or possibly in place of it). Use as few words as possible to describe your deal. Remember that pictures speak louder than words, so don’t cover more than half the image space with text (under 25% would be ideal).

Whether it reads “Shop Now” or “Learn More” or even “Donate Today”, customers need to be told what to do next to take action. You can’t assume they will know that they can click the image to go to your website (which it should absolutely do).

We recommend making this graphic about 600 x 600 pixels wide. It will be easy to read in all email browsers (desktop and mobile), and you can also use that graphic (or a derivation of it) on social media. Be sure to make a version of your promotion graphic for inclusion on your homepage as a billboard. Consistency in marketing is key, and it’s important that your customers know that your email message matches the branding on your site.

To support your fabulous new main image, you’ll need supporting text just below it. This can be your wordier explanation of your sale or description of the product or products that you’re promoting.

It’s up to you as to whether or not you’d like to promote other items, categories, or brands below this. In our experience, it’s best to keep emails as short and to the point as possible. With that said, if you’re running an ongoing promotion like free shipping over a certain amount, or a contest, it may benefit you to include a smaller section below the main promotion with a custom graphic.

Before you schedule the email to be sent, it’s time to test your email. Send a test to yourself and open it on your desktop, and on your phone. Make sure all the links work!

A great thing about using a professional email marketing platform is that you can schedule your emails well in advance. That way, you can setup all your emails ahead of time and not have to scramble at the last minute to get them done. Good-looking email graphics can take a while and go through a few revisions before you approve, so plan ahead with an email marketing calendar.

And that’s it! You’ve crafted an effective email marketing campaign. On the day you send it out, be sure to keep an eye on your site traffic and email campaign reports.

How to Create a Promotional Email Campaign

You may not have noticed it, but Google made a major change to the way it displays search results. Google recently removed all pay-per-click ads from the right side of it's search results pages. After more than ten years of Adwords pay-per-click results taking up both the top 1-3 spots and the entire right column being a long list of ads, this is a significant shift in how Google is going to provide "answers" to search queries.So why did Google remove a major source of revenue on the right column of its search results? The answer is almost certainly a result of testing and monetization. Google thinks it can provide a better user experience, and make more money, by using that space more wisely. But what is going to go there? To learn where Google is going, you have to be fully immersed in the world of all things Google. Luckily for you, that's pretty much all we do. :)

Over the past few months, the team at Ventura Web Design has noticed that there are many queries that bring up a special box called a Knowledge Panel on the right with relevant info about your search. While the knowledge box itself is not new, how it displays specific information about medical searches is very interesting. Look at the results for "hay fever":

You can now learn about symptoms and treatments directly on the search results page, without leaving Google. This content includes information from medical doctors about how common a condition is, whether it's critical or contagious, typically affected age group(s), and more. The knowledge box includes tabs for an Overview, Symptoms, and Treatments for that ailment. The information comes from a variety of sources, including the NIH, CDC, FDA, WHO, and more. Google has also partnered with organizations such as the Mayo Clinic, Apollo Hospitals, Lumiata, and VoxHealth. The source of the information in the past was quoted very prominently and the goal of Google was to help you go from Google Search Results to the website with the answer to your query. As you can see from the search result image above, that "goal" seems to have changed.

Even the knowledge box is styled and looks nothing like any other knowledge boxes. Google commissioned illustrations from licensed medical illustrators for use here. The colors and attention-grabbing layout differs greatly from what Google has provided in the past.

This is a major shift in Google's philosophy. This layout shows the direction Google is heading: to a more display driven layout, rather than its historically text only layout. Remember when Google's single goal was to get you OFF of their website and on to what you're seeking? Google is now answering a question without linking away. But more importantly, Google is now in the content creation business. This is a major historic shift for the search leader. Think about that for a moment. Google is using the power of all the data it has access to, that you no longer have access to via Google Analytics, to guide its own decision making on content creation.

From the Google perspective, this new direction improves the user experience by providing "quality" answers even faster than before. Google's stated mission is to answer the question you have, before you've even fully typed the question in to the search box (instant search (link:

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/186645?hl=en

The knowledge box is a function of Google's Knowledge Graph, which launched in May 2012. it's used both by Google itself to improve search relevancy and also to present the knowledge boxes that provide facts about people, places and things alongside regular results. Google reports it has over 3.5 billion facts, including information about 500 million entities, including movies, museums, bodies of water, music, astronomical objects, buildings, sports, medical ailments, and more. Similar to how Google uses a link graph to model how pages are interlinked to and which are relevant for searches, it uses the knowledge graph to determine relationships between entities and report facts about them. If you currently have a knowledge graph card and want that information to change, you need to request a change from Google. Here is the link for more information on changing knowledge graph cards. (link: 

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/6325583?hl=en

There is currently no mechanism to include yourself or your site as part of the Knowledge Graph. If you run a blog all about movies, there isn't a way to be listed as a suggested source for information. Tagging information on your landing pages with rich snippets can be helpful in the long run, though it's no guarantee of inclusion. This is where good SEO efforts can help. Your goal, as a website owner, is to have Google view your site as the leading authority of information on a particular topic. If Google determines that your topic is popular enough, it may create Knowledge Cards and include a link to your site or information in that card.

In an interview with Search Engine Land, the Google's Former Head of Search, Amit Singhal, noted that the facts come from publicly available sources like Wikipedia, the CIA World Factbook, and Google Books. They also license data from other sources. "Whenever we can get our hands on structured data, we add it," said Singhal. This is incredibly important to online store owners, as Google has said for years that structured data is important to being able to categorize product listings and display them in a relevant way. While knowledge boxes currently lack the ability to take action on most of their listings (you can learn about the Tower of London but there is no option to buy tickets to a tour), that functionality is coming. Amit recently left Google to pursue philanthropic efforts. (

Resources