Exclusive Concepts Blog » Herb

Three New Daily Deal Bar Features Added

Herb — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 15:01:36 +0000

The Daily Deal Bar was the first of our Conversions On Demand services, and has gone through significant upgrade since its introduction.

Simply put, the Daily Deal Bar (DDB) is a terrific promotional mechanism that is easy to install and use. It can operate on any and all pages of the store, except the cart, and includes the major features and benefits below.

Feature	Benefit
Promotion of a specific product or category with a link directly to it.	Market product or category specials that can be changed frequently and don’t require publishing the store.
Promote a coupon code (e.g. “10% off today use code 10less”)	Market your discounts or Free Shipping promotions easily without publishing the store.
Automatically distribute Yahoo! single-use coupons	Eliminate coupon site distribution of valuable coupons
Create a dropdown that displays a large image plus whatever promotional text is desired.	Much more effective promotions using graphics and text
Schedule promotional deals by the hour or day weeks or months in advance.	The DDB will automatically publish these scheduled promotional messages without the store owner having to be involved once they are set up. Allows the user to use frequent and varying offers without having to do this manually.
Add Google/Yahoo! tracking links	Allows the store owner to track sales resulting from promotions that link to products or categories.
Publish DDB promotions to Twitter	All Twitter followers to learn of a deal as soon as it’s available.
Add Links to a store owners other social media sites (e.g. Facebook).	Provides an easy way to make a store owner’s social sites to be easily located by shoppers.

Today we have launched 3 new features:

New feature	Benefit
Bulk Deal Scheduling	A complement to the existing deal scheduling feature – The store owner can now upload a spreadsheet of future scheduled deals. This eliminates entering future deals one-by-one
Position the Daily deal Bar at the bottom of the screen	Currently the Daily Deal Bar is positioned at the top of the page. If a shopper scrolls down they no longer see the DDB. The store owner can now choose to position the DDB at the bottom of the screen, where it remains visible regardless of scrolling.
URL shortening for Twitter	Twitter has a 140 character limit. Previously if the DDB message + the tracking link were longer than that, Twitter would truncate the message. Now, we will use URL shortening from bit.ly to create a 20 character URL. One side benefit is that the store owner will be able to see how many Twitter readers clicked the URL by simply adding a “+” to the URL in the browser address bar.

In addition, we have consolidate all the Daily Deal Bar display controls
in a single "Display Control" section. We have also added a new Bulk
Scheduling section.

Daily Deal Bar – Stop the Bounce

Herb — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 15:33:03 +0000

We recently added a feature that allows you to display the Daily Deal Bar without the bouncing action. If you find bouncing more of a distraction than an “attention getter” then just click the bounce control link in the left navigation of your Conversions on Demand back-end admin and turn it off. It will take effect immediately.

Daily Deal Bar – Twitter Publishing

Herb — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 15:31:09 +0000

As you know, Twitter has changed the API that was previously used to publish your Daily Deals. Prior to the change, you provided your username and password, which was then used to publish the deals. Earlier this month, Twitter implemented a new authentication scheme based on API tokens and developer registration which prevented the Daily Deal Bar from publishing. We have addressed the problem, and this has now been fixed. The fix will be released by the end of this week.

We no longer need to store your Twitter username and password (which is a security benefit) and instead you just need to authorize us to update your Twitter account. Our goal is to make this process as easy as possible for you, our users.

Please follow the instructions below to restart Twitter publishing for your Daily Deal Bar.

To begin the authorization process, locate the “Sign in with Twitter” button in the Syndication and Social Networking page of COD backend. Upon clicking the button you will be redirected to twitter.com where you log in.
Then after successful login, you will asked to allow or deny the Daily Deal Bar the ability to publish through the API. Once you click “Allow” you will be redirected to the Conversions On Demand backend.
If you are already logged into your Twitter account in the same browser you will be directly sent to the “Allow/Deny” page ( i.e. Twitter login page does not appear in this case).
This only needs to be done once. The “Sign in with Twitter” button will now disappear.

Since we no longer require your Twitter username and password we have removed these entries as options. Please follow the above Twitter syndication steps and your deals will begin publishing.

Daily Deal Bar – Schedule by hour of day

Herb — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 15:53:14 +0000

You can now schedule your deals by the hour. That means you can have the Daily Deal Bar from Conversions On Demand promote a new deal multiple times during any day. We have updated out calendar widget to allow you to select a specific hour on a specific date for your deal to run. Remember, all scheduling is based on the US East Coast time zone.

The Cart Closer – Minimum Cart Value

Herb — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 15:52:57 +0000

We have added a new feature to The Cart Closer from Conversions On Demand that allows you to specify the minimum cart value (not including shipping and tax) that will determine whether The Cart Closer will trigger. If you specify zero or leave this field blank then The Cart Closer triggers without regard to the cart value. If you want to use a Minimum Cart Value then just enter an unsigned number without a dollar sign.

The Cart Closer Gets Even Better

Herb — Thu, 20 May 2010 14:14:39 +0000

We’ve listened to feedback from our users and have added several new features to The Cart Closer.

Coupon Codes Can Now Be Modified
You can now modify the coupons used for The Cart Closer. For the near future we still use the coupon codes to track revenues so we still have a minor limitation that any coupon used must begin with “cod-”. But, in the near future we will modify the way we do tracking so even this limitation will disappear.

Return Visits
Previously we would only display The Cart Closer pop-up once to any shopper. This was “hard-coded” in the system so as to prevent savvy shoppers from taking advantage of the offer on every visit. We also felt that the pop-up could get annoying if it was too persistent. While we still think that these are good reasons to limit The Cart Closer from always being triggered, we have now added a feature which gives you the ability to specify how many return visits you wish to enable.

These new features demonstrate that we are listening to our users needs for increased control and flexibility. We are serious about our promise of “The Power You Need. The Control You Desire.”

Visit Conversions On Demand to learn more about The Cart Closer.

New Conversions On Demand Website launched

Herb — Thu, 20 May 2010 14:00:44 +0000

Conversions On Demand now has it’s own website. This will become the home for all our future marketing and educational initiatives for Conversions On Demand. We’ve included a convenient login so that you can bookmark this location and make it your destination for all things “COD.”

We’re very excited about the official launch of Conversions On Demand as a free standing software as a service offering. We have big plans for new services and encourage you to provide us ideas for enhancements to our existing services (Daily Deal Bar, Peel Away Ads, and The Cart Closer) or for new ways we can help improve conversions and revenues for your store. Thanks for being a part of the launch of Conversions On Demand.

New look, new features and simpler pricing…

Herb — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:37:05 +0000

We have made a number of changes to Conversion On Demand today. The most obvious is the new look of our menu system. We have organized the various links into a more logical “tree” structure. This should make it easier for you to locate what you need and keep clutter to a minimum.

We have also added a Peel Away Ads capability, that is available for no extra cost to our Daily Deal Bar users. You’ll see this as a separately available service but it’s already available to your store. Just upload the necessary images and turn the display status on. If you would like our partner EY Studios to create custom designed images for use with the Peel Away Ads please just send me an email.

Finally, we have simplified our pricing and capped the high end. You can see the details on the “My Account > Pricing” section in Global Settings.

By the way, you’ll see a discussion there of a soon to be announced new Conversions On Demand service called “The Cart Closer.” This is an exciting new capability we will be announcing very shortly that will help you boost sales revenues. We have seen great results from our test stores and will be rolling it out soon to everyone.

The New Conversions On Demand Communications Center

Herb — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:25:35 +0000

Today we are introducing our new Communications Center. Our goal is to provide you with relevant and timely information related to the Conversion On Demand platform as well as our service offerings. The Communications Center is now your new “home” page when you sign in. We’ll be updating it regularly to keep you informed as well as providing links to articles that may be of interest. We hope you find the new Conversions On Demand Communication Center a valuable addition.

Some of the key features of our Communications Center are:

New Feature Announcements
System Alerts related to our software and services
A general announcement area for message of interest to the community
Links to our most recent articles on SEO, PPC, Conversion Optimization and Email Marketing

Google to end support for IE6

Herb — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:37:20 +0000

The bane of every web developers existence has been ensuring that websites operate properly in all the major browsers.The browser that creates most problems (by far) has been Internet Explorer 6. Why? Because it does a poor job of supporting HTML and CSS standards. While we can criticize Microsoft for even releasing a product that is so “proprietary,” they have released multiple replacement versions that do a much better (if not perfect) job of supporting these standards. Unfortunately, too many users haven’t bothered upgrading.

As long as significant numbers of the user community use IE 6 we need to ensure that what we develop will work with this outdated and proprietary browser. We’ve recently done some analysis among a cross section of our clients and found the following browser usage:

Browser Users

IE 8.0      30%
IE 7.0                      29%
firefox       18%
IE 6.0                      11%
Safari Mac        9%

While IE 6 is down to 11%, that’s still too significant a user base to drop support. What will it take for users to finally upgrade? A major player dropping support.

Thankfully, Google has now announced that they are dropping support! Hopefully, this will finally rid us of the ghost of IE 6.