CV3 is celebrating the beginning of summer in style — road trip style. Starting on Memorial Day we’ll pack up an RV in Orlando, Florida with our trade show booth, a bunch of swag and a strong sense of adventure. Our destination? Booth #1523 at the 2013 Internet Retailer Conference in Chicago, Illinois.

On the way we plan to see America CV3 style, by stopping at as many of our merchants’ retail stores and businesses as possible. If they’re open we’ll buy some stuff, give away some swag and jump back in the RV. If they’re closed we’ll snap a photo of their sign in the moonlight and keep going. Continue reading “IRCE Road Trip! CV3′s Amazing Race to Internet Retailer” »

“If it were not for Commerce V3 we would be out of business. Our previous dedicated web hosting platform was very expensive and difficult to make changes. With CV3, we have found a partner who cares about their customers’ success …”

Read the rest of this quote and see more testimonials for CommerceV3 here.

I know it seems like I’m yelling, but sometimes people just don’t listen and learn. No matter how many times they touch that iron, it burns them every time. At last count CommerceV3 had over 5,000 revision and climbing, that’s a lot of new or updated features we’ve made, so when I show you one so simple like product reviews, it just hurts my head to see people not using it or even worse, their customers not using it.

CommerceV3 has a product review feature built right in so a product can be reviewed and rated, the site owner can review and approve, edit, or delete the review, we’ll save the “only post good reviews” commentary for another time. But having customers tell future customers that they love a particular item and how they use it is pretty powerful, much more than the site owner saying how great something is. But if you’re looking at a bunch of blank reviews on every page of a site, they’re no more valuable than if the feature didn’t exist.

Why not ASK your customers to review a product that they’ve purchased from you. You can schedule an email request to be sent right out of CV3 to ask a customer for a review, its another built-in feature we have that not everyone uses. Don’t think your customers will respond, check out the Reviews tab at Boston Coffee Cake and pay attention to the dates they were submitted. Another of our clients has taken to social media via Twitter to ask for reviews;

Enjoy @Revgear products? Write us a review, just click “Write a review” under the description of the product you like on…

— Revgear Sports (@revgear) January 19, 2012

So don’t be shy, just ask for what you want, you may be surprised by how many loyal customers respond. If you need help let me know, we can show you how to use it or have a marketer work with you on the best way if you’re not sure.

Everyone that knows anything about websites, SEO, and marketing (and virtually anyone that hasn’t been living under a rock since Al Gore invented the internet) knows about Google. The term “Google” has been used as a noun and a verb, possibly a few other less savory ways as well. We all care about Google, worry about Google, some even fear Google, but having your website come up at the top of page 1 when someone searches for a term that’s even remotely related to your website is the golden ring that everyone online is reaching for. But what about the site that comes after Google.com as far as searches, you know, the one that’s OWNED by Google?!

YouTube has only been around since 2005 and has gone through several changes. Once thought of as a place for amateurs and wackos to go post silly short videos for their friends to watch on a terrible quality player, it’s now the third most visited site behind Facebook and Google. Sure you can still go spend hours watching cats chase lasers (honest boss, I don’t do that) but you can also learn how to sight in a laser on a gun, make a jalapeno popper (that looks like David Hasselhoff), make a router pantograph, remove an axle from a Jeep, or put on fully fashioned stockings. You might think these are crazy things to do but nearly 80,000 people went to YouTube to see how to make that 3D router pantograph. Those last three also happen to be CommerceV3 customers that are using YouTube to educate their customers on how to use their products, introduce new products, or even just show off customers using their products.

I know I know, everyone has a fear of being on camera or putting up a shaky, low quality video that they think will likely scare off more business than gain, but those days are gone. You don’t need a production studio any more to put out something decent that will educate a customer, or better yet, potential customer that’s never heard of you, we’ll get to that in a bit. An inexpensive Flip video camera, as well as many of the latest smartphones, can produce HD video thats more than adequate for YouTube, and editors either come with the camera and in the case of an iPhone, you can even download an app and edit right on the phone, I’ve seen some pretty awesome short films done this way. Eagle America sells router bits and accessories and Kaiser Willys selling parts to fit older model jeeps, both have a clear vision of how YouTube can help a client that is trying to accomplish something, but “oh by the way,” happen to sell stuff to help you do that. While Secrets in Lace’s “how to put on stockings” may be a stretch (har har, stretch, get it,) they use video to show off their products on real world models that aren’t size 0 with over sized, well you know. Many sites struggle to have photography good enough to convey everything about their product, what better way to do that than have a human being holding, wearing, or using the product?

Google also owns YouTube and because of that, videos happen to come up pretty high in search rankings, many times on page 1 of searches. You could get a video to rank higher on Google than some of your actual site pages, especially if you have many competitors, they’re likely to be afraid of video as well so you may even be opening an untapped market. People also will go to YouTube specifically to learn how to do something or research products, even my three daughters 16, 13, and 8 do this, especially near Christmas and birthdays. You can even put the videos on your site, either on product pages themselves or on content pages (Content Only Product in CV3) so visitors to the site can also see and learn just by copy and pasting the embed code that’s right on the video page, into the product page in the store. You can even choose what size player you want to display so you don’t eat up too much room. Check out Eagle America’s product page for that router pantograph, they use a tabbed view to access their videos. If you notice on the YouTube page there was a link in the description right to it. You’re also giving people/customers, another reason to come to your site as well as another reason to market to them, Your email subscribers will probably enjoy getting an email from you that isn’t “Come buy my stuff!” Take it a step further and use our customer groups feature to segment that list and send the right emails to the right customers about the new videos, hey look, you’re “getting social!”

Give it a try. Its free to play around with the camera and upload to your own personal account, you can even mark a video as private so no one sees it until you’re ready. If you need help with ideas let me know and if you give it a try let me know, I’d love to see your videos.

Hi there,

Let’s talk about a couple of powerful ways to remarket to your customers. The first one, you may already be using, is abandoned cart emails. If you aren’t already doing these, by all means, now’s a great time to start. They are easy to set up and free to send via CommerceV3. It’s all available in the admin, or you can email support and they’ll send you the link to the documentation on setting them up.

The second option is through banner ads. Ever visited a site and then kept surfing, only to feel like you see their ads everywhere? That’s how these remarketing banner ads work, they display targeted ads to consumers who have visited your site.

Here’s an example of a remarketing campaign from our friends at Boston Coffee Cake:

Boston Coffee Cake home page:

Here’s what the ad looks like:

And here’s how it looks on Accuweather:

You can do this yourself through Google.com/ads/displaynetwork or avoid the hassle by signing up for CommerceV3 Growth, and our Online Marketing Experts will advise you on content, creative and budget for your remarketing campaigns.

Email Marc to get started with Growth today.

Are there other features you want, but haven’t seen yet? Tell us about it on User Voice. Not familiar? Look over here —>

Next: Another installment of SEO 101 – 3 Kinds of Ranking Factors (from our Online Marketing Experts at CV3-Timberline.

Get a high-level overview of On-site, Off-site and Keyword Agnostic Signals at www.timberlineinteractive.com

Thanks for reading. Have a great week!

Best,