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Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for March 2017
February 8, 2017 • Armando Roggio
Whether your business is starting a podcast, launching a magazine, or just celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, March 2017 is full of opportunities to use content to promote your company and ...
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Social Media
Designing Pinterest Posts That Encourage Clicks
February 3, 2017 • Armando Roggio
Pinterest provides online marketers many opportunities to engage potential customers, including encouraging clicks to products or content. While the act of creating pins is an art, there are practices that ...
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Conversion
Ecommerce Product Reviews Help Shoppers in Era of Distrust
January 30, 2017 • Armando Roggio
Product reviews and ratings help ecommerce shoppers make important buying decisions. Small online retailers, particularly those selling unique items, should encourage reviews and listen to customer feedback. “Consumers have long relied ...
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Customer Retention
5 Reasons to Offer Ecommerce Subscriptions
January 26, 2017 • Armando Roggio
The ecommerce subscription model offers retailers several operational benefits, including relatively better marketing results, higher customer retention rates, improved margins, easy inventory management, and less expensive shipping. Subscription ecommerce businesses take ...
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Conversion
8 Ways to Encourage Ecommerce Customer Loyalty in 2017
January 23, 2017 • Armando Roggio
Loyal, repeat customers boost an ecommerce company’s bottom line without requiring expensive marketing campaigns or intensive customer service. Repeat customers convert at a higher rate than first time buyers. Repeat customers ...
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Product Pages
Generate Product Descriptions with Natural Language Software
January 20, 2017 • Armando Roggio
Software solution providers are using templates and product data, such as brand name, price, and specifications, to automatically generate thousands of ecommerce product descriptions in practically no time. Ecommerce product descriptions ...
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Content Marketing
Content Marketing May Boost Customer Lifetime Value
January 15, 2017 • Armando Roggio
Business-to-consumer content marketing that focuses on providing useful, informative, or entertaining information may play a role in retaining customers and, thereby, increasing customer lifetime value and profit. Customer lifetime value (CLV) for ...
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Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for February 2017
January 12, 2017 • Armando Roggio
February 2017 could be a good month for content marketers, thanks to events, holidays, and history. Content marketing is the act of creating, publishing, and distributing content like articles and videos ...
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Shipping & Fulfillment
6 Expensive Ecommerce Shipping Mistakes
January 9, 2017 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce shipping mistakes like choosing the wrong service level, using too much packaging, or even not researching what it will cost to ship a given product can cost online retailers ...
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Conversion
Monitor Inventory Sell-through Rates to Boost Performance
January 5, 2017 • Armando Roggio
Sell-through rate is a retail inventory key performance indicator that can help stores track product sales, strike a good inventory balance, and, ultimately, earn relatively more profit. For many retail businesses, inventory ...
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Marketing & Advertising
5 Questions to Answer before You Advertise
January 3, 2017 • Armando Roggio
For small and mid-sized ecommerce companies, advertising is part of doing business, necessary for getting customers and earning profits. But before those companies’ owners or marketers spend money on ad ...
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Business
Ecommerce Packing Tips That Will Please Customers
December 29, 2016 • Armando Roggio
An online retail transaction is complete only when the shipment arrives safely at the customer’s door. No amount of website design, creative marketing, and friendly personnel will matter to your ...
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Content Marketing
Shoppers Relying on Mobile-friendly Content
December 26, 2016 • Armando Roggio
Many online shoppers now find products or discover brands on mobile devices, and use mobile search or mobile apps for social media. This trend toward mobile-friendly shopping inspiration may suggest ...
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Conversion
Free Shipping, Free Returns Critical for Online Shoppers
December 21, 2016 • Armando Roggio
Online shoppers want free shipping, free returns, on-time delivery, and accuracy. Internet retailers that deliver on these consumer desires may earn loyal customers and gain a competitive advantage. Order fulfillment —
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Marketing & Advertising
Planning Post-holiday Ecommerce Revenue
December 19, 2016 • Armando Roggio
The holiday shopping season is the most important time of the year for many online retailers. But the weeks and even months after the holidays can be a slow period for retail ...
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Design & Development
5 Signs of Bad Ecommerce Customers
December 14, 2016 • Armando Roggio
Successful online retail businesses focus on delivering good value and good customer service. These stores want to help customers. But not everyone who comes to your site to shop is ...
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Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for January 2017
December 11, 2016 • Armando Roggio
From creating a video series or publishing a book to celebrating the Chinese New Year, January 2017 is full of content marketing opportunities for your business. Content marketing is the act ...
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Content Marketing
5 Ecommerce Content Marketing Trends for 2017
December 8, 2016 • Armando Roggio
In 2017, content will continue to be one of the most important marketing tactics for ecommerce businesses. Look for content marketers to produce a greater number of videos, focus on ...
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Amazon & Marketplaces
No, Your Small Business Cannot Compete with Amazon
December 4, 2016 • Armando Roggio
Amazon, Walmart, Target, Costco, and other large retailers have competitive advantages over small ecommerce or brick-and-click businesses, making it difficult to compete on identical products. But this does not mean ...
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Shipping & Fulfillment
UPS SurePost, FedEx SmartPost: Slow, but Less Expensive
November 27, 2016 • Armando Roggio
Managing free or low-cost shipping can be one of the most confusing and difficult problems online retailers — particularly small ones — face, as customers want a superb and a ...
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Design & Development
How to Create Color Separations in Adobe Illustrator
November 25, 2016 • Armando Roggio
If your business designs and sells t-shirts or other imprinted items, you may need to generate color separations so that contract manufacturers can easily produce your products. Online t-shirt shops abound. Ecommerce ...
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Shipping & Fulfillment
5 Holiday Shipping Tips for Online Retailers
November 20, 2016 • Armando Roggio
When the holiday season peaks, some small and mid-sized ecommerce businesses often struggle to meet customer demand and customer expectations. While there are many factors that contribute to just how you ...
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Marketing & Advertising
5 Co-op Advertising Tips for Retail Businesses
November 17, 2016 • Armando Roggio
Often product suppliers will help small and mid-sized retail businesses pay for the cost of advertising and promotion. The thinking goes that when a retailer, like an online store, promotes ...
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Business
Using ROAS to Measure Advertising Results
November 11, 2016 • Armando Roggio
Monitoring how your advertising campaigns directly impact your company’s profitability or revenue may help you make better marketing decisions, reduce advertising waste, and improve your business. While you could choose one ...
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Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for December 2016
November 9, 2016 • Armando Roggio
Holiday how-to articles or videos, a look back and ahead, and any of several quirky holidays offer plenty of opportunities to create engaging content in December 2016. When you entertain ...
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Business
If Your Ecommerce Business Fails, Consider These 4 Things
November 4, 2016 • Armando Roggio
Not every online store is a success. In fact, many experts believe that most ecommerce businesses will fail. But failure is not the end for an entrepreneur. It is, instead,
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Schools & Resources
5 Ecommerce Site Design Trends for 2017
November 2, 2016 • Armando Roggio
In 2017, ecommerce websites will really be mobile websites. Designers may begin to think of the site design as mobile and adapt that design to larger laptop and desktop screens.
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Email Marketing
Google ‘Email Markup’ Helps Transactional Emails Stand Out
October 28, 2016 • Armando Roggio
An informed customer is often a happy customer. Online shoppers expect to hear from merchants when an order is received and shipped. And most merchants dutifully send adequate order confirmation ...
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Marketing & Advertising
5 Ways to Promote a New Online Store
October 26, 2016 • Armando Roggio
A new online store is often empty. Shoppers don’t yet know your shop. They haven’t had time to learn about your products or your customer service. So if you want ...
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Business
Applying the Scientific Method to Ecommerce Marketing
October 24, 2016 • Armando Roggio
Using a process derived from the scientific method, ecommerce marketers may be able to make their ads and other promotions more effective, increasing return on advertising spend and encouraging growth. The ...