E-dreamz Company Blog

Shopping online can be a scary thought for your average consumer. It’s an unknown that almost only gets negative PR when credit cards are stolen or hacked. While this does happen sometimes it’s a little more than just an inconvenience. Credit card companies and merchant websites have secured and streamlined the process to protect the consumer.

I recently was able to sit down with Fox Charlotte reporter, Audrina Bigos, to go over some ways a consumer can also prevent credit card theft online. Watch the video here.

Here are a few other methods you can use to help secure your online purchase:

1.       Use a virtual credit card - Major banks often offer an application in your online banking that allow you to create a throw away/short term virtual credit card number.  You can even limit this virtual credit cards limit to exactly the amount you are looking to spend with the retailer.

2.       Type the merchants name into Google. If users have had bad experience in the past you will likely find large volumes of complains related to the company.

Overall shopping online is just as secure and safe as giving your waiter or large box retail cashier your credit card. They use nearly identical systems and suffer from the flaws. In the worst case scenario you will have to call your bank, report the fraud charges, and wait a few days for a new card. 

Here at E-dreamz we have our own email marketing tool called Emailz Direct where we manage hundreds of clients email marketing campaigns. We focus heavily on delivery rate which ensures clients get their email inbox’d to every customer on their list. Stats like Bounce Rate, Marked As Spam, Open Rates, etc. all are on our radar every time a blast gets sent out. In watching this I started to notice quite an interesting trend on who was marking email as spam.

I collected around a month’s worth of emails that totaled 103,436 unique sends. I then broke them down by which service/ISP they were sent to:

Nearly 61% of emails were sent to “The Rest” which was anything outside of the AOL, Hotmail, etc. Typically these consisted of company emails or personal domains. I was surprised to see Yahoo and AOL out numbering Gmail in recipients. I guess my perception is skewed since I typically email people in the tech business where their email is a company’s domain or Gmail.

Out of those 103,436 emails above we had 384 marked as spam.  So 0.37% of all the emails processed thru Emailz Direct were marked as spam. This number still seems quite high considering how much we protect lists. Majority of the emails in Emailz Direct come directly from and opt-in form on the clients website. No one is buying emails or blasting viagra sales. The typical client we cater to is industrial B2B. To get on these lists you did business with the company, gave them your email, or filled out an online form with an opt in.

You would assume the ratios of Emails Sent Vs Marked as spam would stay mostly correlated right? Wrong! Check out which providers actually marked emails as spam:

AOL is boasting 39% of all emails marked as spam. Hotmail is in a not so far second place with 25%. How can two companies that represent only 19% of emails sent generate 64% of email spam reports?

The first place I thought to investigate is how the spam button is placed on the email tool bar. Let's take a look:

AOL:

Hotmail:

Gmail:

Comcast (Note: This might be dated. No Comcast Accounts here):

Yahoo:

Interestingly enough AOL has the most pronounced spam button. It is the last button on the  right and even has a nice little “No” image right on the button. Hotmail labels spam as “Junk” unlike the rest. The other tool bars mostly follow the same template.  

So we know part of the problem is related/correlated to the tool bar, but what about the users themselves? Hunch.com has done a great job breaking down of What your email domain says about you. A little less scientific study was performed over at The Oatmeal. AOL users take a beating in every study. It appears they need some education on how to properly unsubscribe from an email list they opted into.

Spam buttons are for.. spam!

Today a member of the E-dreamz Internet Marketing team noticed something different in Adwords. Way way different. Feast your eyes on this ugly offer:

                Click to Enlarge

Only Jason's account/computer managed to get this offer to show. I searched from multiple IP's, accounts, and computers with no avail.

When the ad is clicked it leads you here:

                        Click to Enlarge

It seems every month we are losing serious real estate in the organic search area. This is just one more.. ugly step.

Anyone else seeing these?

Charlotte, NC 04/01/2011

E-dreamz is proud to announce a brand new innovation to rock the Internet Marketing industry: Link Juice – SEO in a can. This profound invention can be used to benefit both the SEO professional and a website directly.

What makes Link Juice so powerful you might ask? To start the process we imbue with the strongest anchor text from .edu. Then the refinement process begins with some social book marks and directory listings creating the smooth, but strong taste of high organic rankings. Then the final product is canned and sealed tight with a kiss from Matt Cutts… Yes Matt Cutts kisses every single can himself to ensure the batches never go black hat.

If you want #1 ranking Link Juice is where it’s at. Cases are available in limited quantities to only the serious SEO professionals. Email us at LinkJuice@edreamz.com for more details.

Customer Testimonial:

I bought a case of Link Juice for my website TricycleSideCartsDirect.com. Minutes after using the direct FTP drip feed I am now ranking #1 for “Tricycle Side Carts.” Link Juice doubled my business as I just sold my second side cart today! – Jason Ehmke

P.S. APRIL FOOLS! :)

Here at E-dreamz we get a wide variety of clients which come with a wide range of platforms and CMS systems. Every once in a while we get a client with no CMS which can be a challenge in both implementation of tracking code and actually tracking leads.

A client with no CMS wanted a way to pinpoint the contact us leads without sending the email a form generated to multiple email addresses. This website in particular only gets a handful of leads per week, but each lead has a very large commercial value. Therefore pinpointing what keywords/Adword makes a lead convert is extremely important. With no CMS I sat around brainstorming.. then I remembered I could pull specific fields into Analytics e-Commerce. I knew I could get that ecommerce tracking code into the ‘Thank You’ page for the lead form. So I turned on ecommerce tracking and created a specific code:

View Code in a Text File

This code was written with specific calls to the clients contact form, but should give you a good idea of how it works. To apply it to your website you would need to edit the php echo fields with whatever language/call you have in place.

Now you can take a more detailed look into customers right in your Analytics dashboard.  I can automatically generate a simple report each month that show cases the clients email and the exact search phrase/ medium they arrived from. On top of that you now have a pseudo CMS system in place.

Do you have any neat Analytics hacks that have helped you better manage a client? Drop us an explanation or link to your blog below.