The Chatter Newsletter

Tools for Turning First-Time Holiday Shoppers into Repeat Customers
by Darlene
eBay Stores Marketing

The holiday shopping season is the most important time of year for eBay Stores sellers to boost sales and acquire new customers. In this month's column I'm going to talk about how you can convert your first-time holiday shoppers into repeat customers with three powerful promotional tools available to eBay Store sellers -- Email Marketing, Promotional Flyers, and RSS Listing Feeds.

Using Email Marketing to Promote your eBay Store

Add to Favorite Sellers

Email Marketing is a tool that allows you to quickly and easily send customized, promotional email newsletters to your buyers. You can reach new and existing buyers who have opted-in to receive your email list.

Here's how you can manage your email marketing programs in three easy steps:

Step 1: Invite and add subscribers
Buyers will need to sign up to receive your promotional email by going to the "Add to Favorite Sellers and Stores" page. While eBay automatically inserts links that allow your buyers to add you as one of their favorite sellers on a few areas of the site (see the table below), you can really create additional placements that boost your subscriptions:

Step 2: Create and send your email newsletter
Creating effective email campaigns is easy. eBay's easy-to-use email template helps you send out professional-looking email newsletters to your subscribers. You can also use customized HTML to create your own email campaigns.

eBay's email template offers you a wide range of options for your newsletter. For each newsletter that you create, you can specify:

• Recipients: Select up to five mailing lists to receive your email.
• Subject line: Enter a targeted email subject line to attract buyers' attention.
• Custom email header: To reinforce your Store's branding among your subscribers, give your email header the same design and settings as your custom listing header.
• Personal message: Enter a personal message in the email body that your buyers will receive when they open your email. You can also insert custom HTML in your personal message, including eBay's special HTML tags for custom listing layouts.
• Item showcase: Show off your inventory with large pictures. You can feature up to four items from a particular category.
• Item list view: Use the item list view or Gallery view to feature up to 50 items from your eBay Store.

Step 3: Measure the success of your campaign
Email Marketing has built-in tracking that allows you to determine the effectiveness of your email campaign. Tracking your newsletters will help you understand which messages or product offers are most effective, and help you fine-tune your marketing tactics.

Here are a few metrics you can track to measure your campaign's success:

• Number of recipients: The total number of unique recipients of each email.
• Emails opened: The total number of unique recipients who opened and viewed the email.
• Item clicks: The total number of clicks on items you've featured in the email.
• Bids: The total number of bids or purchases that the email generated.

Advertising your eBay Store with Promotional Flyers
You can easily create custom flyers to promote your eBay Store, individual items, or special offers. Inserting these flyers in your shipments to buyers is an excellent way to encourage them to shop with you again. Once you create a flyer, you can print it an unlimited number of times.

Getting the maximum advantage from using promotional flyers

• Include flyers in your shipments to buyers to advertise your eBay Store and help them remember your Store URL. This will better encourage them to come back to your Store the next time they shop.
• Use flyers to highlight new or interesting items in your eBay Store.
• Inform buyers of your terms of sale, such as your return policy.
• Promote special deals such as limited time discounts.
• Use flyers in place of a business card.
• Give buyers a flyer with their receipt to advertise your eBay Store.

How to create promotional flyers

• eBay has convenient templates you can use to create custom flyers. These templates allow you to include your Store header, a page border or pre-designed theme, a custom message, a showcase of your items, and details about the buyer's purchase.
• To save time, you can print the default version of the flyer which automatically highlights information from your eBay Store settings.

Keep Customers Informed with RSS Listing Feeds
RSS, which is short for "Really Simple Syndication" (some people prefer to call it "Rich Site Summary"), is a technology that makes it easy to see updated headlines from websites or pages that Internet users like. This year eBay has been working to incorporate this technology for members to utilize on eBay.

eBay Stores sellers are now able to set up a "feed" that will send out a regularly updated summary of the most recently-listed items in their Store to people who subscribe to it. This can be a great way for your customers to keep informed about your new listings.

If you're a Store owner who is interested in providing listings via RSS feeds, go to "Manage My Store > Listing Feeds (within Store Marketing)". Click on "Distribute your listings via RSS" and click "Apply". The RSS button should appear on the lower left hand side of your Store.

To subscribe to a RSS feed, you'll need an RSS reader or aggregator to gather and view the updates. Several free and commercial RSS readers are available, and some examples can be found on www.dmoz.org (just search for "RSS News Readers"). Once you have an RSS reader, simply go to the bottom of any RSS-enabled page you are interested in, click on the RSS button, copy the URL from the page that opens, and paste it into your reader to display the content in RSS.

Good luck with the remainder of your holiday selling – I hope these tips and tools help to create repeat buyers for your business in 2006 and beyond!