Marketing & Advertising
The marketing of an ecommerce business is paramount to its success. Our coverage includes insights on email marketing, content marketing, pay-per-click advertising, social media marketing — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest — affiliate marketing, video advertising, and much more.
Content Marketing | Email Marketing | Google Ads | Influencers & Affiliates | Social Media-
Social Media
13 Facebook Marketing Apps Worth Your Attention
November 14, 2012 • Paul Chaney
Facebook’s modifications to fan pages — most importantly the shift to Timeline — has reduced the use of specialized, third-party marketing apps. However, that does not mean these apps have ...
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Email Marketing
Email Marketing: Planning Your Holiday Calendar
November 12, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Email marketing is a powerful driver of holiday sales. But haphazardly sending emails is not the way to optimize campaigns. Taking just a few minutes to think about what an email will contain and when it will be sent should help to improve results. What follows is an example holiday em...
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Content Marketing
23 Tools to Help Manage Content
November 12, 2012 • Sig Ueland
To ensure your customers have a rich experience with great content, you'll need more than just a content management system. You'll need a basket of tools to research, generate, market, and track your content. Here is a list of tools to help you with content. There are content search-...
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Marketing & Advertising
21 Pay-per-click Resources to Learn and Improve
November 8, 2012 • Melissa Mackey
If you’re new to pay-per-click advertising, or are responsible for training new PPC staff, you can never have enough training resources. With that in mind, I’ve assembled a number of resources for PPC beginners — and for PPC pros. Here are 21 blogs, websites, and books to learn and improve your PPC skills.
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Marketing & Advertising
3 Marketing Lessons from Goruck.com
November 6, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Goruck is an American manufacturer and retailer of high-quality rucksacks, bags, and gear that does an exemplary job of marketing its products. In fact, there are at least three lessons ...
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Social Media
Facebook Simplifies Ad Creation Process
November 6, 2012 • Paul Chaney
Facebook has simplified its ad campaign creation process. The changes address (a) the redesign of the user interface, (b) a concentrated focus on marketing goals and objectives, and (c) the ability to easily use different ad types. To create an ad using the revised system, follow thes...
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Social Media
9 Blogging Lessons for Ecommerce Merchants
November 1, 2012 • Paul Chaney
Blogging is a combination of science and art. The science part requires that bloggers use the latest search-engine-optimization tactics. The art is to hone writing and editing skills. But it doesn't have to be as difficult as that may sound. As a longtime blogger and journalist, I've ...
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Marketing & Advertising
How to Diversify Your Traffic Sources
November 1, 2012 • Dale Traxler
In “Understanding Google’s Algorithm Changes," contributing editor Jill Kocher explained the frequency and magnitude of Google's ongoing search algorithm changes. Having read that terrific article, it reminds me of the importance of diversifying your store’s traffic sources. As an ecomm...
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Google Ads
Google Shopping: 5 Optimization Tips
October 31, 2012 • Scott Smigler
With the Google Shopping transition completed on October 17, all of Google’s organic, free product listings — those that showed a product thumbnail and price in search results — disappeared. If you want your product listings to appear in Google, you now have to buy Product Listing Ads t...
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Social Media
LinkedIn Updates Member Profiles
October 30, 2012 • Paul Chaney
LinkedIn recently launched a new version of its user profiles. It will be available to all members in the coming weeks. More than just a design change, the new profile increases your opportunity to make connections, tell your professional story, and engage with others in your network. ...
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Influencers & Affiliates
Affiliate Marketing: Using Product Data Feeds
October 29, 2012 • Carolyn Kmet
A common error that merchants make when launching an affiliate program is not providing enough marketing support for their affiliates. Merchants sometimes assume that all they need to do is provide a few banner ads to their affiliates, who would place them on their sites. But many sav...
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Social Media
How to Set Up a YouTube Channel
October 23, 2012 • Paul Chaney
A "Channel" is YouTube's equivalent of a Facebook page. You must create a YouTube Channel to upload videos, comment on videos, or create "playlists" — collections of different videos by topic. In this article I discuss how to set up a YouTube Channel, to help market your business. ...
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Email Marketing
Email Marketing: Analyzing J.C. Penney’s New Approach
October 22, 2012 • Carolyn Nye
J.C. Penney has received a lot of press for the many changes made by its new CEO, Ron Johnson, who came from Apple. As a J.C. Penney email subscriber, I have noticed its email program has become more engaging. The subject lines are more compelling. The emails contain unique and interest...
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Social Media
YouTube’s Time Watched Algorithm Update
October 19, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
In the past, YouTube measured a video’s popularity based on the number of clicks it received. Last Friday the video search giant changed its algorithm — here's the blog post at YouTube — to take the time spent watching a video into account. As a result, ecommerce sites wanting to attrac...
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Social Media
Pinterest: Tap Shared Interests for Ecommerce Sales
October 17, 2012 • Paul Chaney
How many times have you purchased a product just because one of your Facebook friends did? Likely, your answer is, "Not very often." As retailers, we make a mistake to think that people rely exclusively on their social graph — the network of friends on social networks. More often, they...
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Social Media
Is Pinterest the Best Social Platform for Ecommerce?
October 16, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Pinterest may owe its popularity to human nature. Early this year, Monetate, the shopping-personalization firm, made headlines when it pronounced that Pinterest was reshaping social commerce and could be a leading source of social media traffic to online retail sites. And even if the M...
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Social Media
17 Social Media Cheat Sheets
October 15, 2012 • Sig Ueland
These days, small businesses use a variety of social media sites in their marketing efforts. Cheat sheets are a helpful way to keep the functionality of each site straight. Here is a list of cheat sheets for the major social media sites. There are infographic tools to identify keyboard...
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Social Media
LinkedIn Retools Company Pages
October 8, 2012 • Paul Chaney
LinkedIn recently launched a redesign of its Company Pages. It initially offered the redesign to a few select companies. But last week, it made the redesign available to all businesses. LinkedIn described it all in a blog post. Merchants should consider updating their company pages to ...
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Social Media
The 4-Step Social Media Content Strategy
October 3, 2012 • Paul Chaney
In a crowded online marketplace where smaller retailers are forced to vie against large ones, creating useful content is one way to garner consumer attention and trust. This is especially true when it comes to attracting prospects in social media. At the recent Dreamforce 2012 confere...
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Content Marketing
10 Great Retailer Blogs
October 2, 2012 • Armando Roggio
A retail blog can be an effective way to engage customers, improve branding, and boost traffic. Blogs give retail sites content that may be linked to or shared across social networks, via email, or through search engines. Customers who find blog posts informative, entertaining, or help...
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Social Media
A Social Media Marketing Paradox?
October 2, 2012 • Armando Roggio
A new study finds that social media influences just one percent of ecommerce transactions, meaning that thousands of merchants could be, potentially, wasting valuable marketing dollars. But consumers and small and mid-sized retailers are claiming social success. Is there a social media ...
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Influencers & Affiliates
How to Set Affiliate Marketing Commissions
October 1, 2012 • Carolyn Kmet
Before launching an affiliate program, merchants should establish their default commission structures. This is the base commission rate that will apply to all of your standard affiliates. You will still be able to customize terms for individual affiliates, but your base commission rate...
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Google Ads
Primping Your Holiday Pay-per-click Promotions
September 28, 2012 • Scott Smigler
A passive approach to pay-per-click advertising often results in missed opportunities. But achieving optimal returns from your PPC campaigns isn’t complex. For holiday PPC promotions, maximizing profits means doing three things well. Create a calendar. Plan your holiday promotions wit...
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Email Marketing
Ask an Expert: Appropriate to Send Remarketing Emails to Guest Shoppers?
September 27, 2012 • PEC Staff
"Ask an Expert" is an occasional feature where we ask ecommerce experts questions from online merchants. For this installment, we address a question about sending remarketing emails to consumers who abandon shopping carts. It comes from Kenny Kelly, general manager of Shops.com, an Okla...
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Social Media
Twitter Launches Redesign with New Header Image
September 26, 2012 • Paul Chaney
Twitter recently launched a redesign of the profile page, which includes a new header image that sits atop a user's feed stream. The image resembles Facebook’s Timeline cover image and provides merchants with a unique opportunity to showcase their brands. How to Set Up a Header Image ...
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Marketing & Advertising
5 Keys to Social Commerce Success
September 25, 2012 • Gagan Mehra
Many companies use social media sites to facilitate ecommerce sales. Some of them have attempted to sell products directly on Facebook. Others use social media to spur traffic and sales at their own ecommerce sites. The results of these collective efforts have been mixed. Some large...
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Email Marketing
5 Holiday Email Marketing Tips
September 20, 2012 • Carolyn Nye
For ecommerce businesses, September is crucial for planning a successful holiday-sales season. For email marketing, starting the planning now will allow more time for last minute changes and time-sensitive promotions. Below, I'll offer five tips to make the most from your holiday email...
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Social Media
7 Social Shopping Sites to Sell Products
September 19, 2012 • Paul Chaney
Social shopping sites can assist consumers to find products. You are likely familiar with popular sites that fit into this category — Etsy, Fab.com and Pinterest, in particular. But here are seven others that may be used by smaller retailers to list products for sale. 1. Blomming En...
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Social Media
Top 20 Viral Marketing Videos
September 18, 2012 • Sig Ueland
If you want to find brand videos having an impact, follow what's being shared. Here is a list of the top 20 shared marketing videos over the last thirty days. Included in this list are non-profit organizations, political campaign videos, and an education documentary. This information...
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Social Media
Twitter Advertising for Small Business
September 12, 2012 • Paul Chaney
Twitter offers two affordably priced advertising options for smaller businesses: "Promoted Accounts" and "Promoted Tweets." Promoted Accounts. Twitter looks at your current followers and then finds people with similar interests. When it discovers a match, Twitter recommends you in th...