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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 ...
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Marketing & Advertising
Google AdWords Ad Rank Impacts PPC Success
October 20, 2016 • Armando Roggio
Bidding the most money per click for a keyword on Google AdWords won’t guarantee your ad will appear at the top of the search results page. Rather, AdWords assigns each ...
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Marketing & Advertising
You Started an Ecommerce Business — Now What?
October 17, 2016 • Armando Roggio
You’ve just launched a new ecommerce business. You can hardly stop clicking the links and marveling at your products. But the orders haven’t started to roll in. So now what do ...
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Marketing & Advertising
4 Predictions for 2016 Holiday Shopping Season
October 14, 2016 • Armando Roggio
Video content and free shipping will help to fuel growth in ecommerce sales overall and mobile commerce in particular during the 2016 holiday season, which starts now and runs through ...
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Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for November 2016
October 11, 2016 • Armando Roggio
Looking for content marketing ideas for November 2016? Try Thanksgiving Day, holiday shopping survival, famous folks with birthdays, how-to articles, and helping out a community. Content marketing is the act of ...
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Marketing & Advertising
How to Write Your Company’s Blurb
October 10, 2016 • Armando Roggio
Sometimes you need a short promotional description of your business for social media profiles, directories, or even the bottom of your press releases and product announcements. What you say about ...
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Photography & Video
How Much to Pay for Photography, for Ecommerce?
October 6, 2016 • Armando Roggio
What is a picture worth, in dollars and cents? Online retailers need product photography, relevant product lifestyle images, and even stock photos (for blog posts and social media). All of ...
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Business
6 Ways Machine Learning Will Impact Ecommerce
October 3, 2016 • Armando Roggio
Machine learning is a discipline aimed at having computers discover patterns or trends in some set of data without being explicitly programmed to recognize the pattern or trend. A counter example ...
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Email Marketing
6 Ecommerce Email Marketing Campaigns for Q4 2016
September 28, 2016 • Armando Roggio
Powerful retail holidays — Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas — dominate the fourth quarter and should be the focus of ecommerce email marketing. Email volume increases significantly in the last quarter of ...
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Marketing & Advertising
5 Interesting Uses of Customer Data for Ecommerce Marketing
September 26, 2016 • Armando Roggio
Each time a retailer interacts with a customer there is an opportunity to learn a little more about that customer and how to better serve him. There is an opportunity ...
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Marketing & Advertising
2016 Holiday Marketing Checklist for Online Retailers
September 21, 2016 • Armando Roggio
The 2016 Christmas shopping season will begin in earnest in just the next month. Now is the time to make certain that you have your ecommerce marketing plan ready. While there ...
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Content Marketing
YouTube’s 3H Strategy Can Fuel Your Content Marketing
September 18, 2016 • Armando Roggio
In a 100-page whitepaper, YouTube has suggested dividing content marketing into three complementary types to help your business attract, engage, and retain an audience of potential customers. Google released “The YouTube ...
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Social Media
How to Set Up a Twitter Card for Your Ecommerce Site
September 14, 2016 • Armando Roggio
With a bit of data, online retailers can improve the way products are shared on Twitter, defining a specific image and description to be displayed and improving tracking with Twitter ...
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Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for October 2016
September 13, 2016 • Armando Roggio
In October 2016, content marketers have plenty of opportunities to engage customers and potential customers by publishing articles or releasing videos about Halloween, the upcoming Christmas season, Breast Cancer Awareness ...
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Marketing & Advertising
How to Find Your Ecommerce Subscription Niche
September 7, 2016 • Armando Roggio
Subscription ecommerce is booming. There are thousands of “box” merchants selling everything from beard oil to brioche — weekly, monthly, and quarterly. Finding a distinct segment in the ecommerce subscription ...
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Marketing & Advertising
Individualized Coupon Codes Prevent Abuse, Enable Tracking
September 1, 2016 • Armando Roggio
Individual coupon codes assigned to specific shoppers help retail marketers avoid coupon abuse and make it possible to fine tune promotions. Promotional or coupon codes are simple. A shopper visits a ...
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Social Media
5 Twitter Lessons from Well-known Retailers
August 30, 2016 • Armando Roggio
Many well-known retail brands use Twitter to connect with shoppers, offer deals, and market the items they sell. Those brands can inspire small retail businesses to market with Twitter, too. For some ...
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Design & Development
Build a Responsive, Mobile-first Cart Page with Bootstrap
August 25, 2016 • Armando Roggio
An ecommerce shopping cart page is most naturally a display of tabular data, listing the title and price for each item a shopper has selected. But HTML tables can be ...
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Local Business
How to Bring Online Shoppers into Physical Stores
August 22, 2016 • Armando Roggio
Brick-and-click retailers, those with physical stores and an online shop, can use the rich data ecommerce provides to encourage online shoppers to visit the retailers’ physical stores or pop-up shops. Many ...
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Customer Retention
Using Referral Marketing to Fuel Ecommerce Subscriptions
August 17, 2016 • Armando Roggio
When your subscribers refer your ecommerce subscription service, they are helping your business grow. Both the customers who refer your products and the referred customers they bring in are likely ...
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Email Marketing
How to Think Like an Email Spammer
August 15, 2016 • Armando Roggio
Sending folks useless or unwanted emails may seem intuitive. But if you really want to infuriate and violate, you’ll need a plan. And remember, only a tiny percentage of the ...
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Shipping & Fulfillment
For Holiday Ecommerce Fulfillment, Success Starts in August
August 9, 2016 • Armando Roggio
To be successful during the short, high pressure Christmas shopping season this year, ecommerce retailers should plan now to make certain they have the products shoppers want and that they ...
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Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for September 2016
August 8, 2016 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce marketers can use content to connect with customers and prospects in September 2016, offering up compelling videos, shopping guides, seasonal how-to articles, or celebrating holidays like Talk Like a ...
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Business
Olympic Committees Seek to Restrict Content Marketing, Social Media
August 5, 2016 • Armando Roggio
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) are warning athletes and businesses not to use Olympic trademarks in content and social media marketing. The Olympics are ...
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Content Marketing
3 Easy (and Slightly Radical) Ways a Headline Can Spark Content Marketing
August 4, 2016 • Armando Roggio
Turn content marketing creation on its proverbial head and generate great content marketing ideas from killer headlines with these easy tricks. If you asked two professional writers whether you should write ...
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Design & Development
Make Animated GIFs in Adobe Photoshop CC
August 2, 2016 • Armando Roggio
Social media networks, including Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook, have sparked an animated GIF renaissance. More than a few online retailers are regularly posting GIF animations to attract and engage potential customers. Marketers ...
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Marketing & Advertising
A Brief Guide to Contrarian Ecommerce Marketing
July 31, 2016 • Armando Roggio
Search engine optimization, paid search advertising, and digital banner advertising are among the most popular forms of ecommerce marketing, but they may not be the most effective for every business.