Monthly ArchivesNovember 2022

In the ever-changing landscape of online marketing, there’s one thing that hasn’t changed.

Email marketing works, and it works well.

It drives the highest ROI of all B2B strategies. In fact, studies show that email marketing campaigns earn $44 for every $1 spent. Nice.

With email analytics, the more you know, the better, so you need to have a handle on your email marketing analytics.

When it comes to email marketing, it’s crucial to understand exactly how your audience is interacting with the content showing up in their inbox. In this post, we will explore how to track and interpret results for key email marketing metrics.

Google Analytics Email Tracking 101

Using Google Analytics for email tracking is an essential tool.

Once you set up tracking, you’ll be able to see how well links in your emails are performing, what percentage of your traffic is opting into your list, where visitors are converting on your site, and more.

Here’s how to set up your email marketing analytics.

First, set up ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics. Next, work within your email software provider to connect it with your Google Analytics. For example, with MailChimp it’s as easy as going to their Integrations page and authorizing Google Analytics, and then checking a box that enables link tracking when you set up your campaigns.

Once you set up the connection, you’ll be able to see sales that were driven by your email campaigns directly from your email software provider’s dashboard.

It’s not just your analytics tracking and email marketing conversion rate you should be monitoring. There are lots of other goals to consider.

6 Email Marketing Metrics (and How to Work Them Out)

Before jumping right into a campaign, it is important to define the goals and KPI metrics you want to accomplish and which metrics you need to track to work toward those goals.

Let’s explore your options (plus the formulas to work them out).

1. Open Rate

Open rate is the number of emails opened compared to the total amount delivered.

The sender name and subject line affect the open rate most, so make sure to test these variables. Then write copy that makes people actually want to open the message.

Adding “You’re nearly out of time …” creates a sense of urgency and makes people want to open that email to avoid missing out on the offer.

2) Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Click-through rate is the number of clicks on the links in an email message, divided by the number of emails delivered.

For a good click-through rate, you want to pay close attention to the email content, particularly the images, copy, and calls-to-action.

Not only does this content stand out, it’s personal too. Using “your deals” makes people feel they will lose something if they don’t click through.

When it comes to CTR, you want to test the wording and styling of your call-to-action (CTA), content layout, and images often.

3) Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of email addresses that returned an error after they were sent.

These errors fall into two camps:

• Hard bounce (permanent) – invalid (or non-existent) email addresses that will never get the message.
• Soft bounce (temporary) – full inboxes, out of office notifications, or temporary server issues. If resolved, the email will be delivered.

Monitoring bounce rates is a good habit to build for a few reasons. For starters, higher than average bounce rates may point to a larger problem such as:

• An issue with a specific email client
• Incorrect input or upload of the email addresses
• Fake/dummy email addresses resulting from ineffective collection methods

Don’t forget: Hard bounce rates are a key indicator used by internet service providers (ISPs) to determine sender reputation. Always clean up your email lists promptly when these issues crop up. If you don’t, your email account could be frozen.

4) Conversion Rate

Every email you send should have a clear action you would like users to perform:

• Make a purchase
• Read an article on your blog
• Fill out a subscription form
• Request a quote
• Sign up for an event or webinar

Email conversion rate measures how effective your email is, in relation to your objective. Always be aware of this and how it averages at different times and levels.

The conversion rate is the percentage of subscribers who complete a desired action (or become customers). It really depends on your conversion goal.

Here’s how to calculate your email conversion rate:

(Number of users who have completed the action / Emails delivered) x 100

Calculating your conversion rate is a two-step equation.

1. Divide the number of signups (or purchases) by the total number of successful emails deliveries.
2. Multiply that number by 100.

Simple.

Once you’ve got your head around your email conversion rate, you can compare it to industry benchmarks to see how it stacks up.

Experiment with different CTAs and monitor the effects on your conversion rate.

5) Opt-Out / Unsubscribe Rate

Having people unsubscribe from your email list is inevitable.

Keeping track of these trends is important for you to understand why your audience may not be engaging. Ideally, you want the number of unsubscribes to be lower than the number of new users.

If this rate rises, it’s time to do some digging. Examine your list-building tactics, email content, and sending schedule. Are you making any obvious mistakes that could be causing your audience to scroll past your emails? If nothing jumps out at you as an immediate problem to fix, consider running A/B tests to work out why.

Some aspects of email testing can include:

• Subject lines
• Send name
• Send time
• Email content formatting
• CTAs within emails

One way to determine what to test is to simply ask people why they opted-out. Email service providers usually allow you to survey users who unsubscribe. Your survey doesn’t have to be super complex, just offer subscribers a few possible reasons to choose and reply:

6) Overall ROI

We’ve saved the best for last.

Return on investment (ROI) puts the key in key metrics. Accurately monitoring ROI directly measures the cost-effectiveness of an email campaign.

Why? Because if you know how much you earn from your emails, and how much it costs to send them, you know how much you can invest in future campaigns and predict future earnings.

If your emails generate $20,000 in sales every month, and the cost of producing and sending emails is $1,000/month, your ROI is 1900 percent.

(If this sounds high, it’s actually lower than the average of 4400 percent. There’s a reason email is still so popular.)

In fact, your functional ROI may even be higher. Not all of your sales are going to convert directly from the emails you send. Sometimes people see an email, click the link, and come back to it later, but it’s still possible to get an approximate ROI through Google Analytics via assisted conversions.

So What Can I Learn From My Email Analytics?

There are lots of other email marketing metrics to consider, but you want to focus on metrics that are important to your business.

What do these important metrics actually tell you? And what can you learn from your email analytics? (I’m glad you asked.)

• Who is reading your email? – Check your email reports to see the number of people who opened your email. Note your most engaged audience members and perhaps reward them with a loyalty discount.
• What did your subscribers like in your email? – Have a look at your click-through rate and unique clicks to see what content your list is liking the most. This will help guide you when it comes to creating content. If a topic is getting a lot of attention, it makes sense to produce more and feed your audience’s interest.
• When’s the best time to email? – Find the sending schedule that gets the most engagement. Once you know, stick to it and be consistent so your audience starts to expect your emails.
• On what device are people reading your email? – Find out whether people are reading your emails on mobile or desktop, then make sure you are using a responsive email template.

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Monitoring and analysis are essential to get the most out of every email marketing campaign.

Always be tracking. When it comes to your email analytics, there are three things you want to keep in mind.

1. Make sure you can measure email performance
2. Make sure your email list is healthy
3. Make sure you are progressing toward your goals

If you can keep on top of all three, you are on track for an awesome email marketing campaign.

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There’s no way around it. Product photography has a major impact on how customers perceive your brand and its products.

When you use high-quality images and professional photo editing:

1. Your products look more valuable — so you can charge more for them.
2. Your store look more professional and trustworthy — which can build your brand reputation.

You don’t have to be an expert to master photo editing, as there are hundreds of tools and services that can help you whip your product photography into shape.

In this post, we’re sharing 14 of the best photo editing software tools that are both free and paid.

Best Paid Photo Editing Software and Services

Paid photo editing software is generally more advanced than free versions. Additionally, all photo editing services incur at least a small fee for you to outsource your editing. This makes paid software and services the best option for ecommerce stores with a high volume of product images or a desire to be more creative with editing.

Subscription Photo Editing Software

PicMonkey

PicMonkey is a web-based subscription photo editing software. It provides all the expected professional editing tools, including resizing, adjusting exposure, and retouching. You can also use it to add graphics or text to your images. If you prefer, you can download the PicMonkey app for iPhone or Android.

This option is a simple and user-friendly photo editor that’s geared for beginners to photo editing. You can purchase a Basic subscription for $9.99 a month, a Pro subscription for $12.99 a month, or a Team subscription for $33.99 a month.

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is a popular photo editing tool with advanced editing capabilities. This feature-rich tool allows you to make extensive image corrections as well as to add graphic design elements for promotional images or marketing assets. Keep in mind that a tool of this caliber and extensive features may require some training to get up to speed.

For individuals, pricing ranges from $9.99 to $89.98 per month, depending on the services and features you want includes.

One-Time Payment Photo Editing Software

Corel PaintShop Pro

PaintShop Pro is a popular photo editing software that you can download to your PC — provided it uses Windows 10 (it is not compatible with Mac).

In addition to the basic photo editing tools, PaintShop Pro also allows you to edit raw images, to create animations with your photos or to add drawings or text. For a one-time payment of $79.99, it’s marketed as the “affordable alternative to Photoshop.” (Photoshop is about $10 a month or $120 a year.)

Alien Skin Exposure X4

Alien Skin Exposure X4 can be purchased as standalone software for Mac or Windows, or it can be purchased as a plug-in for Photoshop or Lightroom.

What differentiates this software from others is that it merges all its features into a single screen, compared to other software that may open different screens for organizing files, editing, or exporting. You can use Exposure X4 for all professional editing, including batch-editing with preset filters to save time. The regular version is $114 and the bundle version is $149.

Photo Editing Services for Outsourcing

Pixelz

Pixelz is marketed as an on-demand retouching service, and it exclusively serves ecommerce companies for product photography. You send your images to Pixelz to be retouched to eliminate flaws or remove or replace the background, and you receive back the edited images within 24 hours.

In addition to paying a small fee per photo, you pay a subscription every month. For solo entrepreneurs the cost is $9 a month, for small to midsize companies it’s $95 a month, and for large companies with a high volume of images it’s $1,995 a month.

Fix the Photo

Fix the Photo is an established photo editing outsourcing service that offers everything from editing wedding photos to retouching product photography.

For product photography, they offer image cropping, color correction, noise reduction, and background removal. At the Basic Level, editing is a flat rate of $2 per photo, but there are discounts for volume orders.

Best Free Photo Editing Software for Mac and Windows

The best free photo editing software for Windows 10 and Mac are enticing alternatives to more advanced paid options, especially if your product images don’t require creative editing or significant adjustments. In addition, free photo editing software is often easier to learn for beginners than high-tech software.

Free Built-in Photo Editing Software

Apple Photos

Apple Photos includes basic editing capabilities, and it is automatically downloaded to your Apple devices. It offers a surprising number of features, including the ability to edit raw images. If you simply want to retouch or sharpen your images, then your built-in Apple Photos editor may be all you need.

Google Drive Editor

Google Drive Editor is one of the best free options for photo editing software for Windows 10 and Mac, because it integrates seamlessly with your Google Drive. This makes it easy to store and organize photos for editing. The editing options are basic, but if your images are already high quality, you may not need to get a more advanced photo editor. You can sharpen images, enhance with filters, or rotate and crop.

Free Web-Based Photo Editing Software

Fotor

Fotor is a user-friendly photo editing software you can use right from your browser. It’s designed for beginners to photo editing and is one of the most popular choices for web-based photo editing software. You can selective blur, retouch, add filters, add lettering or graphics, and more. And it’s completely free.

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With more shoppers moving online, ecommerce customer experience is becoming a more complex and critical part of acquiring and retaining customers. According to HubSpot, 80% of consumers say they would stop doing business with a company because of poor customer experience. And by 2020, a Walker study estimates that customer experience will dethrone product and price as the primary way to differentiate a brand.

Customer experience is the soon-to-be-crowned king of ecommerce, and you’ll need a good design and marketing strategy to compete. Here are some strategies for building an ecommerce customer experience to support your conversion rate optimization strategy.

What’s Ecommerce Customer Experience?

Creating an ecommerce customer experience involves fulfilling the practical and emotional needs of your customers. Practical needs include intuitive navigation or an easy-to-use checkout process. When you meet a practical need, you make the customer journey easier. A customer’s emotional needs are satisfied through user experiences like enticing product images that inspire them to buy or an “About Us” page that builds positive brand affiliation.

By satisfying your customer’s practical and emotional needs, you’re able to nudge them into converting more. Without a simple process, customers get frustrated. Without an emotional connection, they lose interest. Effective customer experience satisfies both needs with a comprehensive design and marketing strategy that increases conversions.

Homepage Design

Customers need to know what you’re selling and how to find your products. Your store’s layout and navigation is the foundation of this experience.

Main Navigation Design

Your customers have a better experience when your main navigation is simple and displays all of your product categories. Customers can get confused when they hover over a “Products” button only to be overwhelmed by a drop-down menu of dozens of product names and categories. Keep it simple and streamlined.

Don’t hide all of you categories behind an “All Products” button. This makes it hard for the customer to see everything that you’re selling. They might think you only sell electronic gadgets when you also sell clothing.

Your main navigation should display your product categories on your homepage. At least 18% of ecommerce sites don’t do this, according to Baymard Institute.

Keep your navigation headings specific. Avoid general labels like “What we do” and “Products”. These descriptors are straightforward, but they don’t inspire clicks, and your customers aren’t searching for those terms anyway. Instead, use Google Keyword Planner to populate your navigation panel with relevant keywords to describe your various sections.

Site Search

Having search functionality on your ecommerce site is the quickest way to connect customers with the products and services they’re looking for. So, make your search box prominent on the page, especially for the mobile version of your site. The most common placement is at the top of the page for both mobile and desktop.

Use contrasting colors for your search field and/or button so customers can find it. Design your search field with icons like the magnifying glass so customers immediately recognize its function. And put the search field on every page of your website.

Autocomplete helps customers find what they are looking for faster. Use the search bar plugin to deploy this technology on your store.

Product Pages

When a customer land on your product pages, you can increase their motivation to buy if you design your page and marketing strategies to include these elements.

Incentives

The law of reciprocity states that a customer will feel motivated to repay you for something you’ve given them. That’s why incentives like free gifts or discounts are effective ways to compel customer conversion. By giving customers a small gift, you can then ask them for “payment” later, in the form of signing up for a newsletter or purchasing a product “recommended for you.”

It can be frustrating for customers on the edge of converting to wait a day to purchase, only for the item to sell out or for a sale to end. Keep shoppers up to date on current availability and sale timelines. By making it known when an item is popular and selling out, potential customers aren’t caught off guard by inventory shortages.

Social Proof

Fill your product pages with proof from others that you’re a reputable vendor. Customer trust is a major motivator and is affected by many different factors—from online reviews to what payment gateway you use.

One easy way to show social proof is to display trust badges on your product pages. Badges from the Better Business Bureau, PayPal Verified, or McAfee Secure all communicate that you run a legitimate business, improving your ecommerce customer experience. Here are some other types of social proof:

• Client testimonials
• Press mentions
• Customer reviews
• Expert/Celebrity testimonials

Product Images

The happy customer is the one whose expectations match the product they receive. When done correctly, product images go a long way in setting customer expectations before payment and shipment happen. That cuts down on returns and improves customer experience.

Plus, attractive images of your products are enjoyable to look at. Get a variety of shots. Close-ups emphasize fine details, while different angles create an overall understanding of a product’s shape and size. To get the best of both, use medium shots of products and hover zoom tools for closer looks.

Pay attention to your image file sizes. Large files make your product pages load slower unless you have web hosting designed for ecommerce. You should optimize your images by compressing them and using browser caching to increase page load speeds. Here are some recommended image sizes for your product pages:

• Small Thumbnails: 200 x 200 pixels max
• Medium Sized: 800 x 800 pixels max
• Hover zooms: 1,000 x 1,000 pixels max

Really amp up your customer experience by A/B split testing your images to discover which images drive the most conversions.

Checkout Process

There’s no better place to look for barriers to conversion than the checkout process. Complicated checkouts can lose you almost a third of your conversions. Big or small, any hiccup in payment and shipping can cause a customer with the sincere intention of leaving with your products, to instead, leave a bad review. Here are some common checkout problems to avoid.

Account Required

According to a Baymard Institute survey, 37% of shoppers say they will abandon their carts if the site requires creating an account. The sale you’re missing is more important than the gathering of customer contact information. Customers who don’t want to buy from you because of the extra step to purchase aren’t going to be enthusiastic about your emails either. Make guest checkout an option. It will reduce your cart abandonment rates and improve your customer experience. And use a cart abandonment plugin to recover any lost sales you have.

Shipping Charges

Customers often get sticker shock at the checkout process because of extra fees, taxes, and shipping rates. Up to 60% say they will leave an online store because of extra costs like shipping. Cut down on cart abandonment by throwing in shipping for free when you can. Roll the shipping costs into the product’s price to keep things simple and streamlined. The improved customer experience will offset any loss the higher price presents.

Customers love free shipping, so let them know you’re offering it every chance you get. Put it on your homepage, emails, banner ads, and social media ads. And use the advantage of free shipping to upsell and cross-sell. Offer free shipping for multiple items or as a “special offer” when sales slow. Customers know they can maximize the free shipping advantage with more purchases. So, they’re incentivized already.

Personalization

The best customer experience is one that’s personalized. Forty-eight percent of consumers spend more when their experience is personalized. Keep it all about your customers with these features.

Sizing Charts

Sizing is a big reason why many customers opt for brick-and-mortar retail rather than online. Overcome this fear with a helpful sizing chart.

Give your customers enough sizing information in your charts. Provide numerical sizes (6, 8, 10) along with their standard descriptors (small, medium, large). Overall, try and include sizing information that doesn’t require measurements, since most customers won’t know their measurements, nor have a measuring tape handy.

To increase your sizing accuracy, encourage your customers to upload images of themselves wearing your clothing or using your products. Consumers can use them as a helpful fitting guide. Plus, the images are a highly effective form of social proof.

Color Swatches

To add another level of personalization, include a color swatch selector next to your sizing chart on your product page. The color swatch lets customers easily cycle through the different color and fabric options you provide.

Recommendations

Product recommendations increase conversions. One Barilliance study found that 31% of ecommerce site revenues resulted from product recommendations. Recommendations also improve your customer experience. Customers who engage with recommendation widgets are 5.5x more likely to complete a purchase than those who don’t.

Recommendations fall into three categories:

• Those based on data from individual customers (“You might also like…”)
• Those based on data from other users (“Other people also liked…”)
• Or a mixture of both types of data

Plugins like Recommendation Engine for WooCommerce give you the flexibility to offer recommendation within all three of these category types. In the Barilliance study, the best performing recommendation widgets were those making suggestions based on what other customers were buying.

To make your recommendations more effective, place them above the fold of your product pages so customers don’t need to scroll to find them.

Page Load Speed and Customer Experience

Website performance affects both the practical and emotional aspects of the customer experience. When customers have to wait for product images to load or transactions that take too long, their frustrations grow exponentially—and their experience suffers. Performance studies estimate that for every 1 second it takes for your ecommerce site to load, your conversion rate drops 7%.

Use a site speed tester like GTMetrix to get a performance benchmark. Then use the GTMetrix report to identify ways to improve your page load speed times. Also, consider whether your current website hosting is optimized for ecommerce. For example, some WordPress hosts are built for blogs, not image-heavy, high-traffic online stores.

The Future of Customer Experience

If the customer experience is soon to become the key differentiator of a brand, what are the big picture implications for online store owners? Online sales lack the personal connection brick-and-mortar stores enjoy. There’s no happy face to greet them at the door, no fast and friendly sales associates or dressing rooms for confirming a good fit.

These are limitations online store owners will need to overcome by anticipating objections before they happen. That means maximizing the personalization benefits online shopping does offer—like predictive algorithms for personal recommendations and targeted marketing campaigns.

Despite the anonymity and privacy online shopping affords, shoppers will always crave the need to feel special and connected to something. That something is your brand, which is nothing more than the collection of the dozens of small touch points that make up your customer experience. Make each one count.

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Most online retailers and ecommerce businesses rely on numerous sales channels to drive conversion and revenue. This is called a multi-channel attribution marketing strategy. But, there’s a problem.

How do you make use of all the conversion data that those channels generate? Do you have to manage the data separately on every channel, or is there a way to bring it all together in one comprehensive reporting tool?

If you’re asking yourself these very questions, there’s a good chance that multi-channel attribution modeling and reporting is your answer. So we’ve put together everything you need to know about multi-channel attribution and Google Analytics multi-channel funnel reporting.

What is Multi-Channel Attribution?

Multi-channel attribution is a term related to analytics. In theory, it refers to the rules that a business owner has in place to gauge the performance of (or the sales generated by) every different marketing channel.

In practice, multi-channel attribution involves assigning a value — often dollar amounts — to every sales channel and customer touchpoint that occurs throughout the buyer’s journey. As you follow revenue back through your conversion paths, you can see which channels are contributing to the most conversions.

You can also track these conversions with multi-channel attribution. In this context, conversion is considered any action or consumer behavior that’s deemed “valuable” and moves the consumer further into your conversion funnel. For instance, you can assign a conversion value to emails acquired from potential customers who requested a PDF download. Ultimately, the purpose of multi-channel attribution is to determine which of your channels and touchpoints have the greatest effect on consumer behavior, conversion, and revenue. It’s a way to read massive amounts of data and find out what returns you’re getting on your marketing investments.

Understanding Multi-Channel Funnels

Google Analytics takes a lot of the work out of multi-channel funnel reporting. Once you have Analytics installed on your ecommerce store, the platform collects data to show you the role that your sales channels play in converting leads into customers.

Let’s take a look at how multi-channel funnels are represented in Google Analytics with these terms to know.

Acquisition Channels

In Google Analytics, acquisition channels are labels used to group or categorize your sales channels and customer touchpoints. As you use multi-channel funnel reporting, you’ll see a number of acquisition channels referenced throughout the different reporting menus, including the following: Paid Search, Organic Search, Direct, Social Media, Email, and Affiliate.

Assisted Conversion

An assisted conversion is when a channel or touchpoint moves a customer further into your conversion funnel. In Google Analytics, assisted conversion reflects how the points of engagement that occur along a prospective customer’s buying journey contribute to conversion. All but the final interaction in a conversion path are considered assisted interactions.

Conversion Path

A conversion path is a sequence of channels and touchpoints that reflects a prospective customer’s buying journey. Typically, there’s a first interaction, assist interactions, and a final interaction which is the last touchpoint before conversion.

Custom Channel Groupings

Google Analytics separates sales channels and customer touchpoints into groups. The default channel groupings fall in line with the standard acquisition channels which include Paid Search, Organic Search, Direct, Social Media, and Email, and Affiliate.

However, you have the option to create custom channel groupings of your own. Therefore, custom channel groupings are when you add to or replace the default channel groupings in Google Analytics.

Multi-Channel Funnel Reporting With Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides several useful reporting options for your multi-channel funnel. These reporting options take the data you’ve collected and turns it into a visual so you can see clear insights into your conversions.

When it comes to Google Analytics multi-channel funnel reporting, there are five options to know. To access each of these different reporting options in Google Analytics, navigate to Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels.

Overview

Overview provides a snapshot of your conversion data. With Overview, you’ll get a representation of how your sales channels and customer touchpoints work together to convert leads. One of the main elements is a line graph that shows your conversions over time. By default, you’ll see your conversions over the past 30 days. Additionally, you can compare your conversions to other conversion-related metrics.

Overview reporting is also where you’ll find the Multi-Channel Conversion Visualizer, a Venn diagram-esque representation of how your sales channels interact and overlap. By toggling channel groupings on and off, you can hone in on the data you need.

Assisted Conversions

In Google Analytics, an assisted conversion refers to when a channel or touchpoint aids in the conversion process. All touchpoints in the conversion path, other than the final touchpoint, are considered assists.

The Assisted Conversions feature offers performance data for your channels, showing how often they are converting. From there, you can get quite specific with the reporting. For example, you can see which specific landing pages and URLs are assisting in the most conversions by selecting the appropriate primary dimension under the “Other” tab.

Under the Assisted Conversions menu, channels and touchpoints are broken down according to whether they initiated, assisted, or completed a conversion. This is useful for determining where your channels and touchpoints tend to fall in your conversion paths.

Top Conversion Paths

The purpose of Top Conversion Paths reporting is to show you which conversion path(s) convert customers with greater frequency.

Each line item on the list is a unique conversion path, consisting of one or more channel groupings. So if, for instance, the top conversion path shows as Organic Search, Social Media, Direct Search, then you can deduce that the most conversions are coming from an interaction that looks something like this:

• Someone discovers your business in a non-branded Google search
• They follow your business on social media
• They eventually visit your ecommerce store through a direct Google search
• They make a purchase

Time Lag

Time Lag reporting tells you how much time the conversion process takes for your customers. In other words, the length of time that spans between the point of first contact with a lead and when the purchase is made. This tells you how long it takes for your customers to convert. If the conversion is quick, then the channel or conversion that preceded the purchase has much more value than if conversion takes many days.

Path Length

Path Length reporting shows how many interactions (with your channels and touchpoints) it takes to convert leads into customers. When conversion requires just one interaction, then the channel or touchpoint that converted the customer is extremely effective at converting and has immense value. Conversely, when numerous touchpoints are necessary to convert, then individual interactions have less value.

How to Set Up Multi-Channel Attribution

Basic multi-channel reporting is built seamlessly into Google Analytics. However, if you’re looking for more advanced reporting, you may need to do some additional setup.

Follow these steps to ensure that all your data is included and organized appropriately in the Google Analytics multi-channel funnel reports.

Link Your Pay-per-Click Campaigns

By default, pay-per-click campaigns don’t show up in Google Analytics. For pay-per-click campaigns to be reflected in Analytics, you need to link your Google Ads account to your Google Analytics account. Once the two accounts are connected, Google Ads campaigns will be counted under the Paid Search channel grouping.

The process is rather simple.

1. Log into Analytics and open the Admin panel, then navigate to the property you want to link the AdWords account to.
2. In that property’s column, click Google Ads Linking, then click New Link Group.
3. From there, select the Google Ads account you want to link and follow the prompts to complete the linking process.

Create Custom Channel Groupings

Google Analytics has default channel groupings, referred to as “MCF Channel Grouping.”

The default channels are:

• Display
• Paid Search
• Other
• Organic Search
• Social Network
• Referral
• Email
• Direct

For many business owners, these default channel groupings are sufficient. However, custom channel groupings might be necessary for certain situations.

A prime use case for custom channel groupings is separating branded from non-branded keywords.

This addresses an increasingly common way that people use search engines, which is to use a business name as the search query. For this reason, separating branded from non-branded keywords minimizes the amount of direct traffic that could be mistakenly categorized as Organic Search.

The option to create custom channel groupings is available in most Multi-Channel Funnels reporting menus. When available, the option appears as a dropdown box.

Select the Create a Custom Channel Grouping option. This will bring up a window where you can customize the names of the channel groupings as well as how they’re defined. When finished, click Save. Then your custom groupings will show in your conversion reports.

Manage Your Data Points

It’s important to track the right data in Analytics. When you’re tracking the right data points, you can make extremely useful and insightful inferences from multi-channel funnel reporting. However, when you’re tracking the wrong data points, the picture you’re getting from the conversion reports won’t be accurate. If you’re basing your decisions on inaccurate data, it can create a host of other problems.

For example, while it’s useful to track visits to your store’s website as points on a conversion path, you shouldn’t qualify a visit to your store’s website as an actual conversion.

In other words, users who visit your store online shouldn’t be considered “converted” under most circumstances. Similarly, visits to a specific product page probably shouldn’t count as conversions either.

The data points you track should depend on the goals you set for your business, whether it’s converting prospects into leads, converting leads into customers, or some other goal.

Segment Your Data

In Google Analytics, segmentation is how you isolate and analyze specific data points related to your conversion. There are a number of situations where you might need to create a conversion segment. For example, you could filter instances where the first interaction in a conversion path was with a paid advertising campaign. With conversion segmenting, you can hone in on the most pertinent or relevant data that wouldn’t otherwise be visible in the default reporting options.

Segmenting your conversion data can be done with the Conversion Segment builder in Google Analytics that is accessible from any of the Multi-Channel Funnels reporting menus.

At the top of the page, click on Conversion Segments, then click Create New Conversion Segment. After naming the new conversion segment, use the conversion segment builder to customize which conversion paths you want to be included in your segment. This is achieved by defining the conditions of your desired conversion path.

For example, if you wanted to create a segment that shows instances when a specific website served as the first interaction in a conversion path, then the conditions would look like this: [Include] [First Interaction] from [Source] [Containing] WebsiteURL.com.

Once you’ve completed these basic setup steps, you’ll be able to track your multi-channel attribution using the reporting options in Google Analytics.

Make Managed WooCommerce Hosting the Foundation of Your Conversion Funnel

A multi-channel marketing strategy can only be as strong as the ecommerce store where your leads will shop. If your store relies on a low-quality hosting provider, then all your efforts to implement multi-channel attribution will be for naught.

Fortunately, there’s Hostdedi, your premier hosting provider for ecommerce. With managed WooCommerce hosting from Hostdedi, you’ll have everything you need to run (and grow) a successful ecommerce site.

In fact, we have created more than 20 different performance tests to ensure that your site can handle any amount of traffic coming from all your sales channels. Best of all, managed WooCommerce hosting from Hostdedi is available in tiered plans, so there’s hosting for virtually any budget.

To learn more about our managed WooCommerce hosting, check out our plans today.

Make sure your product photos are exceptional.

Good product photography isn’t cheap, and cheap product photography isn’t good. DIY product photography can be a false bargain because less-than-stellar photos of your products can drive customers away (and end up costing you sales).

Great photos, on the other hand, generate revenue because 93 percent of customers consider visual appearance to be an essential part of purchasing decisions. One study found that images have a strong influence on price sensitivity.

When you need to hire a professional to take care of your ecommerce product photography, it’s important to know what questions to ask. Once you have the answers, you can better evaluate your candidates and find the right person to get the job done. There’s a major difference between amateur and professional product photography.

Another thing to keep in mind is what kinds of photos will be best for your brand and product pages. We’ll touch on that later.

Let’s look at some critical questions to ask a freelance photographer before you hire them.

1. What Kind of Equipment Do You Use?

There’s almost no limit to the number of gadgets and tools a photographer can employ to get the perfect shot, but by knowing what sort of pictures you need, you’ll have a better sense of what equipment those shots will require. This is a key screening question because it will help you evaluate a photographer’s skill level and expertise.

Here are some contextual examples of how this question is relevant for your search:

• Do your product photos need a flawless white background (known as a “Packshot” in the world of ecommerce)? This background will call for a specific type of lighting.
• Do you want to showcase the fine details of a product? You’ll want to make sure the photographer has a macro lens and knows how to use it.

Remember: Equipment includes software, too. As ExpertPhotography notes in their post on lighting and equipment, the right tools can be as simple as a mirror, a good lens, and an interesting background — but you need to hire a photographer who knows how to use them.

Find out what photo editing programs your photographer uses and what their policy is concerning editing and production. Depending on the look you want, processing can take much longer than the actual shoot.

Software can also cover up sloppy technique. You don’t want to be invoiced for the time a photographer spends correcting their own mistakes. Ask about their production process and how they price that part of their work.

2. How Many Photos Can We Expect to Receive?

You’ll want to have several images per product on your site. A single image often doesn’t show enough of the product to convince a buyer. Find out how many images are included in your photographer’s rate and ask how they are organized.

You’ll also want to know the average turnaround time for images from the shoot to final edited versions. This will be important if you’re working on a launch schedule and need to meet deadlines. Ask about availability and turnaround times from the get-go, and have your photographer commit to a deadline in writing.

3. Are You Insured?

Ask to see a copy of your photographer’s insurance policy. Are they covered if products get damaged or somebody gets hurt during the shoot? The time to answer these questions is before something happens.

It’s also a good idea to ask about the photographer’s deposit policy. You can expect to lose your deposit if you have to cancel, but what if the photographer has to cancel? Do you get your deposit back? Talking about money can feel intimidating at times, but you’ll want to get these details out of the way before making a commitment.

4. What Is Your Experience/Background?

Experience with product photography is critical because you need someone who knows not just how to shoot products, but how to handle them as well.

A skilled photographer knows how to work with items that attract dust, have reflective surfaces, or show fingerprints, for example. This experience can mean the difference between showcasing smudges and literally getting the white glove treatment.

Don’t underestimate the value of experience in terms of years in the photography business. A photographer who has more experience is usually better at adapting to unforeseen issues that may come up (because they’ve been there before.) Ask about the number of shoots they’ve done. Don’t be afraid to ask for references while you’re at it.

5. Can I See a Portfolio?

When in doubt, look to a photographer’s past work. If their entire portfolio is landscapes or family portraits, this might not be the person for the job. Try to find someone whose portfolio reflects experience doing work that’s as close as possible to your project.

If you love someone’s portfolio, don’t be afraid to go with the less experienced but more impressive photographer. You can get good value for your money this way.

Call those references, too. Find out what went into the finished shots you see in a portfolio. Did the photographer get it right the first time, or have to go back and forth with the client?

6. What’s Your Style?

Photography is as stylistically diverse as music. If you were hiring a band, one of your first questions would be what style of music they play, right?

Different photographers will deliver different styles, and different styles come with different setup requirements. Ask for a general description of the photographer’s style and review his/her portfolio through this lens. Make sure their primary style strengths match what you are looking for.

7. Do You Shoot in Natural Light or Studio Light?

Lighting is a marketing decision. Which sort of lighting suits your brand? Both natural and studio light present logistical challenges to consider ahead of time.

• Natural light is best for showcasing products being worn or used, or in a realistic environment.
• Artificial light is best for capturing details and emphasizing the product on its own.

Natural lighting depends entirely on the location, the time of day, and that most unpredictable factor, weather.

For studio lighting, are you bringing your products and models and whatever else you need into the photographer’s studio, or are they coming to you? Do you have space for them to set up?

Making Nice in the Midwest explains how different types of lighting produce different photos when working on product photos.

You’re going to want to figure out as much of the lighting as possible ahead of time and discuss the logistics in detail. The last thing you want is to deal with scheduling conflicts for a shoot during “the golden hour” or a rain delay or a location that doesn’t have the right light.

8. What Does Your Fee Include?

You need to know what you’re actually paying in extra fees. Ask for a breakdown of the total cost.

Some photographers charge a studio fee and an extra fee for retouching. Some photographers will charge for travel, or for rental equipment. Find out not only the cost of your project but how much it could cost with all the extras.

9. What Are the Rights to the Photos?

Get this in writing, as the last thing you want is to have a simple product photo shoot turn into an intellectual property dispute. Unless otherwise agreed in writing, the images belong to the photographer by default. An experienced photographer will provide a contract — this will protect both of you.

Many photographers charge a digital rights fee. This is not the same thing as copyright, and it needs to be spelled out in your contract.

10. Do We Supply a Shot List? Is There a Creative Director Managing the Shoot?

Communication is key. Make sure you understand each other completely before you sign anything or put anyone on the clock. Everyone should know who’s in charge of creative direction for the shoot.

Be clear about what kind of guidance and input your photographer expects from you (and vice versa) at every stage of the project.

Hire a Product Photographer with Confidence

The more you know about what goes into professional product photography, the easier it will be to get yourself on the same page as a photographer who can deliver it. These questions should give you more than enough info to make an educated choice when hiring a photographer to create amazing product photos, which will help to create product pages that sell more products.

Need an Ecommerce Hosting Solution?

Managed WooCommerce Hosting from Hostdedi comes standard with image compression which will keep your images looking excellent while retaining site speed, along with premium plugins from IconicWP which will enable more functionality for your product pages to shine.

An email list can be a powerful sales tool, but what’s more powerful?

A segmented email list, that’s what.

Did you know that open rates for segmented emails are 14.31 percent higher than for non-segmented campaigns?

Making sure your email is reaching the right audience, at the right time, and with the right content can jump-start your sales engine.

In this post, we will cover how to use email segmentation as a tactic to deliver relevant email marketing to your subscribers based on their demographics, interests, location, and purchase history.

What is Email Segmentation?

Email segmentation is dividing up email subscribers into smaller lists (aka segments) based on set criteria.

Usually, this segmentation is used as a personalization tactic in order to deliver more relevant email marketing to subscribers.

Segments exist so that marketers can craft different offers and content for specific people based on their interests and behavior instead of just sending one email to everyone. It’s much more effective.

The 4 Benefits of Email Segmentation

There are four benefits of using market segmentation:

1. Improved Sender Reputation

Internet service providers (ISPs) calculate how recipients interact with your emails when they get them. If most aren’t engaging, then the ISP will mark that email as unimportant or may even begin to send it straight to the spam folder. Using email marketing segmentation can help deter this.

2. A Personalized Approach

With email marketing, it’s not a one size fits all, cookie-cutter approach. You need to consider how customers will respond to your messages. Not all users will respond the same.

Consider how your message will be received by different customers and how they will engage with it.

Segmenting your email list lets you speak to your customers depending on different factors (more on that later) and what they actually want. Not only do users get what they want, but you increase your chances of converting them to customers.

3. The Right Message at the Right Time

Your email list is made up of contacts that are at different stages in the sales cycle.

They need different information depending on which stage it is. Sending the wrong information at the wrong time to the wrong person is a waste of everyone’s time.

Avoid this by segmenting your list so that you never miss out on any potential sales.

4. Better Results

Here are some of the outcomes you may get using email marketing segmentation:

• Better open rates
• Higher click-through rates
• Increased revenue
• Improved deliverability
• Lower unsubscribe rates
• Additional clicks
• More engaged users

Sounds good right? Of course it does. Let’s learn about the different types of email segmentation you can apply.

Types of Market Segmentation

There are lots of different ways you can segment your email list. Let’s run through some email segmentation strategies you can start using right now.

By Demographic Data

Segmenting email lists by demographics is one of the most obvious. Things like age, gender, and income can give you a good idea about a person and their interests.

One of the simplest ways to grab this information is during the sign-up. Ask some additional questions.

An email marketing platform like Mailchimp will let you customize email sign-up questions. Just don’t ask too many questions as this can put people off from signing up.

Something as simple as this form will do the trick.

Decide what is most important for your business and include those questions in your signup process.

You can also collect more data later. Encourage subscribers to complete their profiles by offering them an incentive like a coupon or a free gift. Or simply make periodic surveying a part of your general process, such as post-purchase or every year.

By Looking at Email Engagement

Looking at email engagement is a simple but effective thing to do when it comes to segmenting your list. Open rate and click-through rate are worth your close attention.

For example, you can segment your list into active versus inactive users.

By looking at users who haven’t opened an email in months compared to users who open every email, you’ll be able to create special campaigns to try to help inactive users re-engage.

Alternatively, you’ll be able to send exclusive emails to your active users as a reward.

You may also want to consider emailing your less active subscribers less frequently. It may make them less likely to unsubscribe from your list which can happen if someone with a smaller interest in your business sees too many emails from you.

After all, open rates and unsubscribe rates are critical to the overall send-ability of your list. If you have too many unsubscribes or a dismal open rate, email marketing software providers may freeze your entire account.

By Geographic Area

There are loads of different ways to use geographic data in marketing segmentation, especially for businesses with physical stores.

Again, gathering up this data doesn’t have to be complicated. Just asking for a zip/postcode on sign up will help:

Some email software providers can even tell you where subscribers are based on their IP address when they open one of your emails. So if you don’t manually collect postal code information, you may still be able to see where your subscribers are located.

Once you know where your customers are based, there are a few things you can do with that data.

Send Time-Based Emails

Send emails at the best times for customers spread across different time zones. Some providers even allow you to do this with the click of a button.

Target Based on Weather

When featuring sales and specials, highlight cold-weather clothing to folks in colder climates, and lighter fabrics to those in warmer places.

Capitalize on Local Interests

Feature the colors of local sports teams to different regions regardless of what you sell. You could target orange and black apparel to people in Cincinnati, as those are the colors of the NFL’s Cincinnati Bengals. Or feature red items to people in Manchester, England which is the main color of Manchester United FC. Even if the item isn’t sports-related, people in these cities tend to have an affinity for these colors.

Target Geographic Tastes

Different areas may have affinities for different flavors/aromas if you are selling food products. You might promote a whiskey-flavored chocolate to people in the Southern U.S., a chili-flavored chocolate to people in the Southwest U.S. and a beer-infused chocolate to folks in the Midwest.

Past Purchase History

Understanding your user’s past purchases is a good way to improve your segmentation.

An easy method here is sending out email recommendations for similar items (or accessories) that would go well with their previous purchase.

Amazon is the master of this technique.

If a customer bought something from a particular category, there’s a good chance they will like similar products. If a customer is looking for women’s camping backpacks, they’ll likely be interested in women’s hiking shoes and apparel as well. It’s equally likely they may also require replacements or upgrades which you can also send in targeted email blasts.

Amount Spent

Do you sell a range of high and low-value items? The amount spent by each customer can be a useful segmentation strategy.

Using this data, you can find out which customers buy more high-ticket items and which are more interested in the affordable ones.

From there, you can send out emails featuring products that are in each person’s price range, and increase your chances of them converting.

Analytics allow you to see which customers only buy when they have a coupon, and which ones buy without coupons. That way, you don’t send coupons to folks who buy without them, and those who love coupons will get them.

Time Since Last Purchase

Segmenting users by time since last purchase can be a very valuable strategy.

It doesn’t make sense to send the same email to a customer who has recently made a purchase as the one who hasn’t done so for a while. Plus, it will be annoying to the customer who’s only recently purchased from you.

Instead, split them up into two groups:

• Frequent customers – these will generally like your brand and are engaged. Try upselling them products in line with their purchases or offer them promotional deals.
• One-off customers – these customers bought from you once or a few times, and haven’t purchased in a while. Try offering discounts based on past purchases or send them reminders to make a purchase.

Interests

This might be a little trickier to get working, but it’s an investment that can do wonders for your sales.

By creating user profiles, you can get detailed information about users/subscribers personal interests and send them emails accordingly

If you’ve got a massive store that sells a range of products, you can let users select which products they want to hear about in emails.

By simply asking your subscribers to pick their preferences, you can make sure your targeting is spot on with every email you send out.

Email Segmentation: A Winning Tactic

Email segmentation and targeting go hand in hand. Understanding how your market will respond can be a real boost to sales.

And since everyone can use more sales, email marketing segmentation is a tactic for businesses of all sizes to use. Your customers get what they want, and you get more sales. Everybody wins.

Managed Hosting Can Help

Armed with the tools available from Hostdedi’ managed WooCommerce hosting along with some creative thinking and data, you can start targeting your audience with these segmentation strategies today.

Not a Hostdedi customer yet?

Check out our managed WooCommerce hosting plans to get started today.

Whether you’ve got an ecommerce site, a brochure site, or a thriving blog, if you use images on your website, you’re going to need to also think about image optimization.

7 Image Optimization Tools For Your WordPress Site

Here are seven tools that get the job done:

1. ImageOptim

By default, the free ImageOptim exactly preserves image quality, but if you adjust the settings, it will use more aggressive optimizations to get the biggest results. ImageOptim reduces image file sizes so they take up less disk space and down­load faster by applying advanced compression that preserves quality, and removes invisible junk like private meta­data from digital cameras, embedded thumbnails, comments, and unnecessary color profiles.

2. EWWW Image Optimizer

EWWW Image Optimizer has a suite of WordPress plugins to help speed up your site through faster loading images. The free plugin uses available optimization tools directly on your web server or using the EWWW I.O. API to compress and resize JPG, PNG, and GIF images and PDF files.

3. TinyPNG

Make your website faster by optimizing your JPEG and PNG images automatically with using the Compress JPEG & PNG Images WordPress plugin. This plugin comes standard with Hostdedi Managed WordPress Hosting, making it even simpler keep your images optimized.

4. Imgix

Imgix transforms, optimizes, and intelligently caches your entire image library using simple and robust URL parameters. With imgix, you first share where your images already live, then you resize, crop, and enhance your images with simple URL parameters while intelligent, automated compression that eliminates unnecessary bytes. Finally, customers see images fast thanks to caching and global CDN. Plus, with a pay as you go plan, you only pay for the images and bandwidth you actually use.

5. Compressor.io

Compressor.io is a free online tool that allows you to reduce the size of your images while maintaining quality so there is almost no difference before and after compression.

6. Optimus.io

Optimus targets a lossless compression of PNG images and a slightly lossy compression of JPEG images of media uploaded to WordPress — while focusing on protecting your data. The Optimus WordPress plugin slims down the original image and all preview images of an uploaded image file and only compresses images that are uploaded to the WordPress media folder after the plugin has been installed.

7. Jetpack Site Accelerator

Jetpack’s Site Accelerator (formerly Photon) helps your pages load faster by allowing Jetpack to optimize your images and serve your images and static files (like CSS and JavaScript) from the Jetpack global network of servers. Site Accelerator uses the WordPress.com CDN, meaning your images are hosted on their servers, alleviating the load on your server and providing faster image loading for your readers.

Keep Optimizing Your WordPress Site

Image optimization isn’t the only way to optimize your WordPress site for speed. You can also try using a lightweight and trustworthy theme, WP Disable to decrease bloat, and GTMetrix reports for speed analysis.

Optimization never ends, and you need to always be on the lookout for the latest tools to keep your site faster than the competition.

Need a Managed WordPress Solution?

The Compress JPEG & PNG Images WordPress plugin has been vetted by our team and comes automatically packaged with your site as part of Hostdedi Managed WordPress Hosting.

Check out our plans to get started today.

Looking for a great way to add custom bookable products to your store?

When it comes to creating bookable products, the WooCommerce Bookings plugin has a good amount of options for customizing the way a service or physical goods can be scheduled and booked.

Managing multiple resources is a breeze with ‘Resources’, and ‘Persons’ makes it easy to designate a certain number of bookable items.

When it comes to adding more complexity to the bookings product page, things can get tricky.

Let’s Build a Product Page

Let’s say you’re building a website for a luxury spa.

Your client has mentioned that they’re selling a lot of Hot Stone Therapy add-ons with their Deep Tissue Massage in store, but they’d really love to allow clients to purchase the add-on directly from their website when booking.

As you begin to create a product for a Deep Tissue Massage, out of the box, the page will have all of the functionality needed to book the service, but no add-ons.

Add Additional Value to the Product Page

What you really want to build is a bookable product page that both earns your client an additional $30 per massage, and offers a simple experience for the client booking the service.

Having the option to book the add-on is important, but so is the real-time adjustment of the total booking price so the client knows exactly what they’re getting and how much they’ll pay.

Here’s an example of the same product page, this time with the Hot Stone Therapy add-on included (and real-time price adjustment).

To achieve this simple and value-adding result, you could definitely add a field to your product page using WooCommerce hooks. If you’re looking for a quicker way to add custom fields to a bookable product and don’t want to spend time creating custom code, there’s a faster way.

After installing the WooCommerce Extra Product Options Pro plugin, head over to the products menu in the WordPress admin, and select Extra Product Option.

Next, add a new field. I chose to add a Radio field, but there are plenty of field types to choose from. Make sure to add a wrapper class to your field as we’ll be using it to adjust the display of the options on the product page.

Note: There’s no additional work needed to enable the product page to auto-update pricing.

Once you’ve designated the price in the options area of the field in the backend, it will automatically update when selected by the user based on your rules.

One of the things that makes this plugin particularly powerful is that you can set display logic in the Display Rules tab.

In this case, additional product options will only be displayed when viewing a product within the Massage category.

Once you’ve set the options within the product field exactly how you want them, save the field by clicking Update Field.

After creating a Radio field, there’s a little bit of CSS cleanup we’ll need to do. The options will likely display in one wrapped line underneath the booking calendar, which isn’t the easiest to understand if you’re booking the service.

Remember that wrapper class? We’re going to use the wrapper class to adjust the display of the option fields so that they’re showing on separate lines.

Use the CSS editor to add the following custom style:

.yourwrapperclass label {display:block;}

With that small CSS change, your product page should look similar to this:

And there you have it.

Grow Your Online Store With Managed WooCommerce Hosting

Now you know how to add a custom field with auto-updating price to a WooCommerce booking product page.

In addition to the strategies we’ve listed here, a great hosting plan can be instrumental to growing your business. Fortunately, Hostdedi has you covered.

Our managed WooCommerce hosting plan is ideal for growing businesses. Specially designed to convert more sales, WordPress managed hosting for ecommerce is packed with cutting-edge technologies to reduce query load times and cart abandonment rates.

To learn more about fully managed WooCommerce hosting, check out our plans to get started today.

When your ecommerce business is in its first few years, you may not be bringing in enough revenue yet to invest in professional product photography.

Hiring even an entry-level product photographer can cost as much as $125 per image with more experienced photographers charging up to $1,000 plus per image. Buying your own professional DSLR camera can come with a hefty price tag as well. Quality, semi-professional DSLR cameras range from $500 to $3000, not including the cost of additional lenses.

If your budget is tight, these costs can be hard to swallow. However, not being able to afford the equipment, or not being able to hire a professional, doesn’t mean you’re out of luck when it comes to showcasing your products effectively.

Your smartphone has the capability needed to take quality product photography photos (if you know how to take advantage of the built-in features on your phone’s camera).

In this post, we’ll cover tips and tricks for taking high-quality product photos without the use of expensive or professional equipment.

Make Sure Your Smartphone Camera is Semi-New

If your smartphone was made within the last three to four years, its camera will be able to take great product photos. However, if you’re in the market for a new smartphone and want to make sure the camera is the best it can be for your product images, there are some smartphones whose cameras stand above the rest. Let’s take a look at those.

Best Smartphone Cameras

If you’re willing to pay for the best smartphone camera available, then you should start with the following options.

Google Pixel 3

With a price tag between $500 and $800, this smartphone came out in March of 2019 and has already had buzz around its powerful built-in camera. The camera is most heralded for its night-shooting capabilities which means it is an excellent option if you want to shoot at night or in low light settings.

Huawei P20 Pro

This smartphone was released a year earlier than the Google Pixel 3 (March of 2018), but its camera is a close rival. Similar to the Google Pixel 3, this smartphone is able to take high-quality photos in low light. It boasts three built-in camera lenses and costs $600 to $700.

iPhone XS

The latest version of the iPhone includes the best camera from Apple yet. It’s especially adept at capturing the most realistic and natural colors in photographs, and stabilizing images for minimal blur. Released in fall 2018, it comes with a price tag of $1,000 which makes it one of the most expensive smartphones on the market. For iPhone product photography, you can’t get much better than the XS.

Inexpensive Smartphones With Quality Built-In Cameras

If your priority is to save money on your product photography, then the following options offer good quality smartphone cameras with a significantly lower price tag.

LG G6

Compared to its top competitor the Samsung Galaxy S8, this smartphone camera is much better at taking sharp, focused, and balanced photos. The difference is especially noticeable with bright colors. This phone came out in 2017 and now costs only about $300.

Nokia 7.1

This smartphone’s camera outperformed all other smartphones in its class, making it a great choice for a quality, built-in camera at a low cost. Released in 2018, it now costs about $350.

iPhone 8

Though the iPhone has been through two iterations since the iPhone 8 was released in 2017, there haven’t been significant upgrades to the camera. That means purchasing this slightly older model of iPhone gets you roughly the same camera quality as the latest iPhone XS. At a cost of around $600, this smartphone is $400 less than the XS but still more expensive than many Android phones.

Improve Your Smartphone Photography Quality With a Camera App

No matter what kind of smartphone you have, it’s good to know of the helpful apps that can improve your product photos with a few quick taps. Let’s look at some popular options for doing just that.

Best Photo Apps for Android

Open Camera

Open Camera is designed to help you make full use out of your camera’s functionality, even if it seems to be lacking. It offers additional support for focus, white balance, ISO, and zoom, as well as offering additional grids to center your photos. It’s free to download but has limited editing capabilities.

VSCO

VSCO is a popular (free) camera app for Android that allows you to take photos on your smartphone in the raw format instead of JPEG. You can control shutter speed, white balance, ISO, and focus. In addition, it comes with a mobile editing function and will allow you to add filters and tweak your images in post-production.

Best Photography Apps for iPhone

ProCamera

ProCamera turns your iPhone camera into a DSLR approximate. You can use it to shoot in different formats including raw, TIFF, and HEIF, and you can adjust manual settings like white balance, ISO, and shutter speed. It also comes with an on-screen histogram which can help you be a technical judge of whether or not you have too much exposure in your image as you make edits in post. It costs $5.99 to download.

Camera+ 2

Like VSCO, Camera+ 2 allows you manual control over your smartphone camera settings including white balance, shutter speed, ISO, and focus. It also comes with a few presets for special images like action shots, as well as a built-in editing function so you can get your photos looking just right. It is $2.99 to download.

Gather Other Equipment You’ll Need for Smartphone Product Photography

Unfortunately, even with the highest quality smartphone camera, you can’t just set your product on a table and click. To make up for the slightly lower quality camera than a professional DSLR, you should take the time to build a workable at-home product photography studio.

The good news: it’s not as difficult or expensive as it sounds. You can easily DIY many parts of an at-home product photography studio with household items.

DIY White Backdrop for Product Photography

The simplest way to get a crisp white backdrop for your product photography is to use a clean white sheet. Just attach the top of the sheet to your wall, leaving enough extra fabric at the bottom to run under your product.

Another easy way to achieve a white backdrop without spending much money, is to use a roll of white paper. Rolls can be found at your local craft store or purchased on Amazon. Like the sheet, tape the top of the paper to a wall and leave enough length at the bottom.

DIY Lighting for Product Photography

The least expensive way to get soft, bright light for your product photography is to set up your shoot near a well-lit window. Then, use a clean white shower curtain taped over the window to diffuse the light evenly. In addition, you can enhance or redirect less-than-ideal natural lighting using a reflector made from aluminum foil.

Smartphone Tripod

A tripod for your smartphone is crucial for quality product photography. A tripod keeps your phone camera in the same place for multiple shots to ensure that each image is framed identically. In addition, it drastically reduces the chance for blurred images, since it maintains a completely still position. Most smartphone tripods are relatively inexpensive — ranging from $15 to $40.

Make the Most of Your Smartphone Camera Functionality

Most smartphones include a way to manually adjust the camera settings. However, sometimes these settings can be hard to find or understand. The following tips will help you make the most of your smartphone camera functionality.

Tips for Using Manual Settings With Android

• Look for a “manual mode” or “professional mode” in the mode menu in your camera app.
• If you don’t see the manual mode, swipe up from the bottom of your screen in the camera app. The manual settings may be hidden there.
• Experiment with adjusting the metering, ISO, shutter speed, and white balance to see what works best for your studio light.

Tips for Using Manual Settings With iPhone

• Turn on the grid function in camera settings to frame your photos correctly.
• To change focus, hold down your finger on the screen where you want to focus until the “AE/AF LOCK” symbol appears (which means your focus settings are locked in place).
• To adjust exposure, tap on the screen once for the tiny sun symbol to appear. Drag the sun up to increase exposure and down to decrease exposure.

Make It Work

You don’t have to spend a fortune to get great product photos when you have a top-notch camera right in your pocket. No matter what style you choose, hopefully, these tips have given you the confidence to take amazing product images with your smartphone.

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We recently spoke to two successful dropshipping entrepreneurs. One who started up in the last couple of years, and one who’s been at it for more than a decade.

Their businesses are very different. One sells crickets to lizard owners, the other sells custom promotional gifts to consumers and businesses — but they share three common traits.

1. Dedication to building content for SEO
2. Monitoring and upgrading suppliers
3. Willingness to multitask and wear many hats

Jeff Neal: The Critter Depot

The Critter Depot sells live crickets to reptile owners, who feed them to their pets. Jeff Neal, the owner of the business, says he pulls in about $15,000 a month in sales.

Neal told us he’d been wanting to start an ecommerce business for years. He was looking for an underexploited niche but hadn’t found the right opportunity. He considered selling thermal scopes, meat thermometers, and women’s shoes. Then, he heard the call of crickets.

“The effort required to get first page organic rankings was pretty easy,” Neal says.

Easy, but not quick. Neal says it took about two years for his site to rise up the rankings.

During that time, The Critter Depot was just a side project. He found a supplier and fulfilled some orders, but he didn’t do much more. “I might go months without touching the site,” Neal remembers.

He wrote some articles for his site, but they weren’t that extensive and didn’t help his rankings much. What did help was when Neal started focusing on publicity and getting backlinks.

He began contacting reporters looking to write about unique personal finance stories. “I’m a millennial who sells crickets,” Neal says. “It’s pretty unique.”

Neal subscribes to a service called Help A Reporter Out. It’s a service for journalists who are looking to interview people for articles and blog posts. When Neal sees a request that relates to his experience, he responds and makes himself available for email or phone interviews.

Neal’s story has appeared on the websites of US News & World Report, USA Today, Reader’s Digest, and others. And critically, so do links to The Critter Depot. The link authority of those venerable sites is a quality signal to Google. Each story helps Neal’s site inch further up the rankings, and higher rankings lead to higher sales.

Now Neal puts in 20 to 30 hours of work per week on The Critter Depot. He wakes up at 4 a.m. to answer customer emails and make sure orders are on track. He has held onto his full-time job, so once that’s over, he comes home and spends another hour on the site in the evening.

“I’m really trying to branch it out and make it more informative,” Neal says. “The benefit of the internet is all information — that needs to be the focus of the website.”

Towards that end, Neal hired a zoologist to write in-depth care guides like this one: How to Care for Your Beloved Bearded Dragon.

Neal also says that his increased sales have helped him find better suppliers and better margins. Once he was delivering a consistent number of orders, the bigger commercial growers were willing to fulfill for him. He’s not only getting more orders; he’s profiting more on every one.

He’s bullish about the long-term prospects of the site because the pet industry itself is growing so much. Neal notes that big food brands are expanding into pet food and supplies.

“Maybe someday I can flip it for seven figures,” says Neal.

Michael Lerner: Promos On-Time

Rather than searching for a business idea the way Jeff Neal did, Michael Lerner started his business in an industry he already knew well — selling custom promotional items and personalized gifts.

“I had no idea about the web,” he says.

Lerner launched Promos On-Time in 2006. Back then, with ecommerce in its infancy, Michael didn’t have access to off-the-shelf software or software services like today’s ecommerce entrepreneurs do. 

His startup costs included a few thousand dollars for customer relationship management software, and another $3,000 to $4,000 on a web developer. “Within a week we were getting orders,” Lerner says.

Lerner’s experience in the industry helped him establish relationships with suppliers. “I was able to get favorable pricing, rebates, and other incentives.”

Lerner says the company did $500,000 in revenue in the first year, with their only promotional expense being a small amount of search advertising.

As the ecommerce industry has grown, startup businesses have many more resources than Lerner did. Sales CRMs, web development, and dropshipping can be acquired at the click of a button. But with ease, comes more competition.

“The space is 50 times more crowded than when I got into it,” he says.

Lerner keeps up with the competition by keeping on top of his suppliers.

“Constant monitoring,” he calls it. Lerner says to keep a close eye on suppliers as they grow. “The ones who have grown are the ones you have to watch the most. Inevitably they don’t keep up with inventory or quality.”

He has also identified niches like National Volunteer Week, and Teacher Appreciation Week. “We try to cater to those because there’s not as much competition,” he says. That includes original content to help rank for these terms on Google.

On a typical day, Lerner says he’ll work on many different tasks — from adding products to the site, to editing copy for fresh content, posting to Facebook and Instagram, publishing product copy, analyzing metrics … “You’ve got to wear a lot of hats,” he says.

Lerner also devotes 30 minutes a day looking at other websites to get ideas for what he should be doing on his own.

Starting and Succeeding With Your Own Ecommerce Business

As you plan and grow your ecommerce business, consider the key elements of Neal and Lerner’s success.

Neal offered some simple advice for anyone thinking about starting an ecommerce business: “Learn SEO.”

Why These Entrepreneurs Invest in Search Engine Optimization

Both Neal and Lerner devote considerable attention to identifying and selling products that consumers are searching for online. In Neal’s case, he didn’t even start his business until he found a term that he knew would rank in results. And even then, it took two years of effort to start ranking.

The simple benefit of ranking high in search engines is a consistent, motivated customer base that you don’t have to pay to reach. While offline businesses invest in expensive marketing efforts like trade shows and television advertising, you won’t need to, and you can keep prices lower than your competitors.

Search is one of the main reasons Neal is paying a zoologist to write original guides for the pet owners he markets to. It’s why Lerner targets unique gift-giving events like Volunteer Week rather than try to compete with massive competitors on search terms like “graduation gifts.”

Link building, keyword research, and technical SEO are three key elements of SEO that every prospective ecommerce entrepreneur should understand. (You should also know how your hosting service affects your Google rankings.)

Attracting and Monitoring Supplier Relationships

No dropshipping business can succeed without reliable suppliers who offer competitive wholesale prices. The dropshipping entrepreneur may face a “chicken and egg” problem like Jeff Neal’s. Until he achieved a high volume of orders, the best suppliers wouldn’t do business with him. You may have to accept low or even negative margins as you build your customer base.

Once you have that base, and you get the supplier you want, don’t think that your work is done. As Lerner points out, suppliers who are in demand may see their popularity as a chance to skimp on customer service and product quality. Slip-ups by a supplier can decimate the customer base you built so patiently.

Be Ready to Work!

Dropshipping entrepreneurs don’t have to create or package products, but the time they save ends up being devoted to administrative and marketing tasks.

Both Neal and Lerner have the work ethic and flexibility to dive into many different facets of owning a business. Lerner told us that some of his bigger competitors have more than 100 people responsible for the tasks he handles himself. Some of Lerner’s roles include:

• Site Merchandiser
• Web Content Editor
• Social Media Manager
• Copywriter
• Webmaster
• Data Analyst
• Industry Competition Consultant

Likewise, Neal is up before sunrise every morning to keep Critter Depot on track. He has a full-time job and piles 20 to 30 hours of ecommerce entrepreneurship on top of that.

The trade-off? Unlike the people filling these roles at ecommerce behemoths, entrepreneurs like Lerner and Neal can decide when and how to do these tasks. They have the freedom to experiment and innovate, and if they’re successful, enjoy a full ownership stake that would be far more valuable than their corporate perks.

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