“If you use Volusion and you have a pulse, you’ll love this app!”

“… a must have for any Volusion store owner”

“Great app! Love it!”

… so we’ve got that going on, but we would never forget our Android-using Volusion brethren.  Today, their day has come!

Brand Labs is proud to introduce Volusion Snapshot for Android!  In all honesty, it’s been available (for FREE) in the Android Market for a little while now, but we were kinda basking in the afterglow of the first app’s success, so we thought we’d spread the good news around a little to keep the glow going.  The problem is that winter’s starting to get us down and we find ourselves in need of some positive reinforcement, so we’re fishing for compliments.  Lucky for us, people are already saying nice things about the new Android app…

“This is great, thanks!”

So there you have it.  Two great tools for tracking your Volusion store’s revenue when you’re on the go, whether you’re an iPhoner* or an Androider**.  Enjoy them as our (FREE) gift to you!

* We don’t believe “iPhoner” is actually a word and frankly, it sounds vaguely dirty.  We apologize for its use.

** “Androider” is clearly not a word, but at least it doesn’t sound dirty***.

*** Okay, it sounds a little dirty.

Okay.  That was kind of an abrupt lead in, but we wanted to make sure you got the message in case you’re one of those people who only reads the first paragraph of anything.  Anyhoo, now that we’ve got that out of the way…

AutoResponderMax is the autoresponder that Brand Labs created specifically for Volusion.  It’s a fully automated, multi-featured direct marketing machine and so far, it’s enabled our clients to send over one million emails directly to their customers.  It’s easy, it’s affordable and it works around the clock.  It gathers product reviews, sends customized sales pitches and a bunch of other stuff to help you keep in touch with your client base.  It can also help you to reclaim sales lost to abandoned carts and anecdotal evidence shows that AutoResponderMax delivers a 7% – 17% conversion rate.

See how we brought that right back around?

There are plenty of great ways to distinguish yourself from your competition.  Some are expensive and time-intensive and some are completely affordable and just call for a bit of creativity.  Today, we’d like to talk about an idea that falls squarely into the second group.

One of our longtime clients, Hot Dog Collars,  has a completely adorable site.  Seriously.  First of all, it’s pretty much devoted to dog collars, so that’s pretty cute already.  Second, its mascot is a delightful, google-eyed cartoon dog that our in-house illustration team created just for them.  See?  Adorable.  So when the time came to build an identity for their brand, Hot Dog collars knew just what they wanted: seasonal headers featuring their official spokesdog.  Since that time, we’ve created a whole bunch of seasonal and holiday headers for them, each one featuring that same smiling mutt.  On the brandbuilding expense spectrum, this is a pretty affordable option and it offers a lot of bang for your buck, especially if you have a lot of repeat business.

Click through to see a gallery of our Hot Dog Collar headers.  They’re delightful!

Here’s the original header illustration.  Already adorable, right?  Well let’s have a look at the rotating offering (in no particular order)…

We’ll end here with our little puppy friend covered in snow.  It seems appropriate since we’re finally getting some measurable snowfall here in the wilds of southeast Michigan.  (Just in time for us to start wishing for summer.)

In the ecommerce world, it’s super easy to get trapped into thinking that you only have a few well-worn avenues to exploit when you’re building your brand.  Hot Dog Collars reminds us that there’s opportunity around every corner – or at the top of every page.

In addition to designing and building Sunshine Systems’ new Volusion template, we also designed a billboard for them.  It’s currently appearing along roadsides in the Chicagoland area.  It features some of those secret, basement tomatoes we were talking about… but what if it doesn’t?  What if everything that we believe to be true is nothing more than a computer simulation like in The Matrix?  Like… what if we only think we designed the billboard, but actually we’re lying motionless in a lab somewhere while some alien scientists plant false memories of designing billboards and Volusion sites?  What if we’re not an ecommerce company at all, but just a bunch of human slaves trapped inside a hellish experiment from which there is no escape but we totally don’t know it because the aliens are keeping us sedated with an implanted digital reality?  Whoa…

Dude… my hands are so huge right now…

We’re not just spreading the word about the wonders of ecommerce.  We’re luring manufacturers to the magical world of Direct-to-Consumer communication.  Whether you’re targeting the wholesale market or the retail market, Brand Labs can help.

Manufacturing, wholesale, retail – D2C or lead generation… it’s all about commerce and so are we.  So, if you happen to be in Chicago and you’re looking for innovative and exciting ways to talk to your customers, stop by booth 2481 at the MD&M Expo.

… man.  We really wanted to make a joke about playing doctor here, but we decided that it was way too unprofessional, so we’re not going to.

… but it’s killing us.

Of course our ever-vigilant leaders would never leave us unsupervised without a very good reason – two very good reasons, actually.  Brand Labs’ president, Kevin Harman, is exhibiting with Volusion at Shop.org’s annual summit in Boston.  We’re sharing booth #1113 in the exhibit hall and Kevin is always eager to network after the show, so you should hit him up.  He’s like a business-card-hurling free drink machine.

At the other end of our great nation, you’ll find Dane Downer (Brand Labs’ VP) at the very exclusive Google Analytic Partner Summit.   You know why you never heard of it?  Because you totally weren’t invited.  It’s an invitation-only affair for Google Analytics Partners.  It’s our understanding that all attendees will actually be able to get their pictures taken sitting on the Google Bunny’s lap!  We’re very, very jealous.

Clearly, Volusion isn’t a “real” word – at least in the sense that it doesn’t mean anything other than “ecommerce powerhouse” (as we just mentioned).  Now we don’t know exactly what led Volusion to choose their name and we really don’t like to look things up, so we’re just going to wildly speculate about Volusion’s decision process without a trace of factual information whilst at the same time deftly avoiding all research.  You may not want to quote us.  (Seriously.  Don’t quote us.)

See our unsubstantiated theories after the jump…

Theory #1: Kevin Sproles’ middle name is Volusion.  (Granted, this theory is pretty unlikely, but it’s also the first thing that occurred to us, so we thought we’d throw it out there.)

Theory #2: Volusion takes its name from a Transformer that was left on the cutting-room floor: Volusionus Maxo – a neutral party in the Transformer wars who turns into a Coleman grill when he’s at rest.

Theory #3: Volusion is an old English word meaning “to conduct business through the ether using the stuff that lightning is made of.”  Perhaps expectedly, this is a word that never quite caught on.

Theory #4: Volusion is a word created specifically as a name for the powerful ecommerce platform in order to ensure complete domination of all search-engine activity related to their company.

… our money’s on that last one.  If it isn’t true, at the very least it’s an excellent idea.

Let’s say that you’re going to launch your own product.  First, build it (that’s probably the most important step).  Next, you’ll want to tell the world about it, so you’ll need to call it something.  Now you’ve reached a critical fork in the road: do you want a name that reflects what your product does, or do you want a less descriptive name that will be entirely unique?  Each approach has its merits.

Let’s say you go with a descriptive name… you’ve made a disposable diaper with the highest load capacity in recorded history, so you call it the High Load Capacity Disposable Diaper© (patent pending).  There will never be any question about what you do, but the descriptive nature of your name is a bit of a double-edged sword.  While it may bring you some organic traffic simply because all of your keywords are included in the name, you’ll also be fighting for some pretty valuable real estate in cases wherein you’re bidding on those same keywords.  Just to dominate searches for your actual product name, you’ll be bidding on the words “disposable” and “diaper” and that’s going to cost you a load of cash.  If you’re fortunate enough to have a strong organic ranking, it’ll get cheaper and easier, but your early days will be quite a slog.  You simply won’t have any branding elements that are uniquely your own.

If, on the other hand, you choose a name that is entirely created by you from the ground up – a name that, when Googled, returns zero (or almost zero) results – then simply by having a web presence under that name, you’ll have staked out a patch of Internet land that you can call your own.  This will magnify all of your marketing efforts because every time your product is mentioned in any small way out on the Intertubes, it effectively makes a straight line directly back to you, since you’ll be dominating any searches that result from that mention.  So, perhaps better than High Load Capacity Disposable Diaper©, you may want to consider something along the lines of Mount Vepoovius©.  (Editor’s Note: Due to the apparently poop-obsessed nature of our society, it was nearly impossible to craft a poo pun that hadn’t already been registered as a domain.  Side Note: Interested parties may want to consider registering mountvepoovius.com immediately.  Also, please note that crapatoa.com is taken.)

Of course, the employment of a truly unique name is an act of faith.  You’re counting on the idea that you’ll be able to distinguish your brand in a way that causes people to associate your product with it’s unique name – so much so that they remember a word that they’ve never heard before.  That need to distinguish your brand is a good reason to consider the nature of your product/service/store when you’re making this decision.  If you’re a funny t-shirt company and you’re looking for ways to set yourself apart from the bazillions of funny t-shirt companies out there, you may be better off with something catchy, rather than something fabricated.  Sad Walrus Tees, for instance.  Right now, you’re picturing a sad walrus, and if you aren’t, this should help:

via buzzfeed.com

Now that’s in your head, which is good, because it’s probably a little more difficult for your clients to picture your specific t-shirts (in a world that’s overflowing with t-shirts).  It’s easier and better to just remember the sad walrus.  (Editor’s Note: sadwalrus.com is available)

If, on the other hand, you’re developing a product/service/store that by its nature is unique – an ecommerce platform, for instance – then your specific feature set begins to form its own picture in the client’s head and then it’s up to you to assign that picture a name.  The more singular your product is, the likelier the success of an entirely fabricated name, simply because your uniqueness positions you very well to define yourself with a unique word.  If you doubt this fairly bold assertion, imagine a t-shirt store called Volusion.  (Proving points and dropping names simultaneously!  BOO-YA!)

One last thing to consider if you’re going to go with a fabricated name.  You’re going to want to buy a lot of creatively-spelled interpretations of your new word.  Take our example name – Volusion.  Vulusion.com.  Volootion.com.  Vawloushun.com.  (You get the idea.)  Volusion actually dominates searches for the number one misspelling of their name, “volution“, but that’s a task that would have proven easier if they owned volution.com (which would have been tricky, since volution is an actual word and is also a company that’s been around since the Internet was just a twinkle in Al Gore’s eye).  Of course, all of us web folks who’ve been around for a while have 20/20 hindsight about the relative SEO value of our names and domains, so it’s our sacred duty to pass along what we’ve learned to ensure a better Interwebs for future generations.  More accurate searches!  Better SEO!  Go PPC! (We really need some catchier phrases to chant.)

In conclusion, we suggest one thing: when choosing your business/product name, do so carefully.  Don’t fall so in love with any single idea that you use it at the expense of any of the considerations we’ve mentioned here.  If you’re lucky, you’ll be living with that name for a very, very long time.  Be sure that your name is a durable as you hope your business will be.

(Editor’s Note: The original headline for this post was “A Sproles by Any Other Name”, but we were afraid that it sounded vaguely suck-up-y so we ditched it.  “Salute Your Volusion”, was similarly dumped for possibly being too Detroit-centric and just a touch hipsterrific.  Also considered but discarded: “Use Your Volusion: Volumes 1 and 2″, “Welcome to the Grand Volusion” and “David Ecommercefield: Professional Volusionist”.)

Ecommerce experts, patrolling North America (and specifically the metro Detroit region) to bring quality online sales and marketing solutions to manufacturers and retailers in need – they live by their own set of rules (governed largely by ecommerce best practices) as they work for truth, justice and massive conversions.  If you have an online problem and you can find them on the exhibit floor in Booth 317 at the Military Vehicles Exhibition and Conference this Wednesday and Thursday (August 10 & 11), maybe you can hire the… B-Team!

… that’s “B” as in “Brand Labs“, not like there’s an “A-Team” that’s better than us, ‘cuz there totally isn’t.

… except for the actual A-Team, who are completely awesome.

… the original guys with Mr. T, not the new ones with Liam Neeson and that guy from The Hangover.

Voguette is a fierce fashion site (unless “fierce” is no longer the fashion adjective du jour, in which case you should feel free to substitute the current equivalent).  Since fashion is all about being up-to-date, Voguette’s newsletter is a critical component of their marketing and outreach program, so they’re always on the lookout for new ways to gather subscribers.  With that in mind, we present their brand-spanking-new, one-time-only homepage newsletter signup pop-in!

Of course you want to encourage your customers to sign up for your newsletter, but you don’t want to be a pest about it, right?  Well Voguette’s new homepage signup request only appears the first time a customer visits the site, then the site drops a cookie in the client’s browser (regardless of whether or not they sign up) and they’ll never be bothered by that pop-in again.  It’s a great, low-profile way to expand your mailing list without constantly bugging the people that you rely upon for your income and we can do it for you, too.  Plus, we can alter the content of the one-time message to suit your specific needs.  Got a big sale coming up?  Put up a banner.  Want to introduce a great new product line?  Put up a picture that links to the products.  The possibilities are endless!

So, to sum up: Volusion – great platform.  Brand Labs – great custom programmers.  Also, cookies are awesome.

… both kinds of cookies.