With Shop.org’s Online Merchandising Workshop less than a week away, we decided to focus our Talking With… attention on one of the keynotes that seems to be getting the most interest: “21 Secrets of Top Converting Websites”. So we reached out to online marketing pioneer Bryan Eisenberg, author of the best-selling Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? and managing partner at Eisenberg Holdings LLC, who discusses which online retailers have mastered web optimization, outlines the biggest mistakes retailers make with email marketing, and shares what attendees at his anticipated session will walk away with on July 13.

Your upcoming session at Shop.org’s Online Merchandising Workshop has garnered quite a bit of attention. I don’t want to spoil your session, but how about a sneak peek at what attendees can expect?

Come on, they’re secrets! How could I share them here? What I will tell you, is that after working on improving the conversion rates of ecommerce websites for more than a decade, I have distilled the essence down to 21 of the most powerful things you can do to improve your website.

Let’s say a retail company wants to get optimized and work toward a smarter, more efficient marketing plan. What’s the first step?

How do you eat an elephant? It’s a big task to get all optimized. You start one bite at a time; simple. Make your first changes, maybe one or two that I’ll recommend in the session, measure the impact, and repeat. Do this until your corporate metabolism builds up to handle more than one little bite at a time.

What brands do you think are on the forefront of web marketing optimization and are firing on all cylinders?

In my presentation, I highlight many of the brands that represent the best of Shop.org. I think many different companies are doing some things amazingly well even when others need improvement. It’s hard to fire on all cylinders in digital marketing. It evolves and grows daily. Certainly, Amazon is among the closest. Amazon accounts for nearly 25% of all ecommerce transactions in the US. I’ll be happy sharing some of those secrets from Huntington Beach.

Give us your take on social media marketing. How should retailers allocate resources when it comes to jumping in the social media world?

The world is becoming more social and connected daily and so must retailers. Go where your customers are. That’s not an opinion or a suggestion. It’s a fact: retailers ignore at their own peril. Nevertheless, it is not about setting up accounts and buying tools to connect with customers. Those are the means to an end. The end result is thrilling customers and having them share that experience.

The key is to make yourself remarkable so that people want to talk to you. This is truly about your brand and products, and not always directly correlated to immediate sales conversions. It’s more like dating to find a partner for life then scoring every night. Today, branding is so much more about what you do than what you say.

In our last Talking with…, Jeanniey Mullen talked about whether the star around email marketing is fading. What do you see as the number one mistake retailers make when marketing through email?

It’s about the content. Stop getting your customers addicted to your offers. Offers are great but if you use them too much, your customers will wait for that extra special offer and only buy then. Is that how you want them trained? I’ve seen it happen before. If you’ve got nothing else interesting to say when you’re not offering a discount, then perhaps you should be asking why your customers should care about you.

How’d you get your nickname The Grok?

Back in the mid 90s, we were working with one of those famous dot-com incubators helping some of their web properties. Author Robert A. Heinlein coined the term in his best-selling 1961 book Stranger in a Strange Land. From the novel:

“Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science and it means as little to us (because of our Earthly assumptions) as color means to a blind man.”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines grok as “to understand intuitively or by empathy; to establish rapport with” and “to empathize or communicate sympathetically (with); also, to experience enjoyment.”

So when we were trying to come up with how to tell people about the importance of conversion rates when all they cared about were eyeballs, one of the people at the incubator suggested we create a mascot to tell our story and I became The Grok. Grokking is so much more than knowing, it’s about appreciating all the nuances and applying them in a cohesive way to improve the customer experience.

As an online marketing pioneer, how did you get your start in the industry?

I’ve been online since the early 80s when I first started my own bulletin board system on my Atari 800 and 300 baud modem. Even back then, I would change words and the menu system to see if I could get people to go where I wanted them to.

It was in 1998 that I started focusing on online sales. In the age of “The Internet Will Change Everything”, I was like the little boy who asked: Why does the Emperor have no close? Sure, I know it’s clothes, but closing sales is why companies are in business. Speaking of closing sales, I’d like to ask your readers a question.

If your conversion rate is below 10%, how do you justify that?

I look forward to seeing you at The 21 Secrets of Top Converting Websites and letting you know that you shouldn’t have to settle for less than 10%.