Page 177 – Practical Ecommerce

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Email & Text Marketing
How to Write an Email Newsletter in 90 Minutes

July 29, 2013 • Pamella Neely

Writing a newsletter is one of the most difficult marketing stumbling blocks for a small business owner. You know it’s a task worth doing, but every week or month the email newsletter deadline rolls around and you think, “What I am going to say in the newsletter?”
Email & Text Marketing
New Gmail Tabs Impact Email Marketing, Expert Says

July 26, 2013 • Armando Roggio

MailChimp, a popular email marketing solutions provider, says that the new Gmail tabs that are intended to help users clean up their inboxes have negatively impacted open rates for email marketing campaigns, but that there is no need to panic. Google began introducing its new tabbed Gm...
SEO
SEO: 2 Months of Algorithm Updates

July 26, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown

If your organic search metrics have been fluctuating more than usual recently, you’re in good company. Google rolled out four notable algorithm updates in the two months between May 21 and July 15, including a Panda update and the much-anticipated Penguin 2.0 update. Each of the updat...
Business
Lessons Learned: Stardust Memorials Urns Its Success

July 25, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

Jordan Lindberg must be the only online retailer who earned a bachelor's, master's, and doctorate in philosophy from, respectively, Albion College (1991), Michigan State University (1993), and University of Missouri-Columbia (1997). A professor at Central Michigan University from 1997 ...
Design & Dev Tools
5 Tools to Personalize your Marketing Efforts

July 25, 2013 • Jerry Jao

In "8 Tools to Personalize your Ecommerce Site," I discussed methods to customize visitors' experiences on your website. In this article, I'll list five tools to help personalize your advertising and marketing efforts. PadiAct Not everyone is going to buy from you on the first visit....
Social Media
Create a Social Hub for your Ecommerce Site

July 24, 2013 • Paul Chaney

The number of social networks in which merchants participate is on the rise. In addition to the big three — Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn — we now have Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and many others. Keeping up with all these from a merchant perspective is difficult enough, b...
Local Business
Ecommerce and Brick-and-mortar Retail Converge

July 24, 2013 • Armando Roggio

While there may still be plenty of room for pure-play ecommerce businesses, retailers with physical stores should look to expand online as consumers stop seeing a distinction between shopping online and in a store. Increasingly, physical retail outlets are being transformed into a sort ...
Design & Dev Tools
8 Tools to Personalize your Ecommerce Site

July 23, 2013 • Jerry Jao

Personalizing an ecommerce site doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive. Often, it’s just about finding the right tool, implementing it on your site, and letting the software do its magic. If you’re thinking about adding more personalization features, the following tools and services ...
Email & Text Marketing
Email Marketing Dos and Don’ts for Ecommerce Merchants

July 23, 2013 • Dale Traxler

In "Email Still an Effective Marketing Tool?," we addressed why email marketing is highly efficient, inexpensive, and easy to measure. This is unlike social media marketing, which for smaller merchants is often difficult to manage and track. I used email marketing extensively in my pr...
Design & Development
Mobile Ecommerce Sites Should Be Fast and Robust

July 22, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Internet users, and online shoppers specifically, want fast and robust online experiences regardless of whether they are using a desktop computer or the most basic smartphone. Ecommerce businesses competing in this era of the emerging mobile web must take steps to provide useful and ric...
Business > Merchant Voice
Book review: Custom Nation

July 21, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

If you sell online, you can customise online, and if you don't, you're leaving money on the table. So says Anthony Flynn, creator of the customised energy bar company, You Bar, and his co-writer sister Emily Flynn Vencat. Flynn writes a compelling case in his book Custom Nation (BenBe...
Keyword Research
SEO: Using Google’s New Keyword Planner

July 19, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown

Keywords are the foundation of search engine optimization. They’re what searchers type in Google’s search box, and what marketers incorporate into their web pages to attract searchers to their sites. Google recently launched a new tool that changes the way we research keywords: AdWords ...
Email & Text Marketing
Using Email to Maintain and Build Site Traffic

July 18, 2013 • Carolyn Nye

When I managed email marketing for a leading ecommerce site, I would receive calls from our IT department almost every Tuesday, asking if I had sent a large email campaign. The trouble was that we were sending too much traffic to the site at once. This was a good problem to have, but we...
Business
5 Things I Wish I Knew Before Opening an Ecommerce Business

July 18, 2013 • Armando Roggio

You might be prepared to open an online retail business. You have the funding, cash flow planned, inventory managed, and even a marketing campaign ready to launch. But there are some other things you’ll want to know before you start doing business. U.S. ecommerce sales grew 13 percent ...
Social Media
7 Keys to Facebook’s ‘People Talking About This’

July 18, 2013 • Kunle Campbell

In "10 Ways to Improve EdgeRank on your Facebook Page," my previous post, I covered how Facebook sorts content in users’ News Feeds using its EdgeRank algorithm. This article is a follow-up and covers a metric that closely ties with EdgeRank: "People Talking About This," or PTAT.
Payments
Beware Credit Card Processing Fees, Especially Refunds

July 17, 2013 • Phil Hinke

Merchants periodically send me their credit card processing agreements after they have negotiated new pricing with their existing provider or when changing providers. Usually, I find that the merchant has done a good job of negotiating rates and monthly fees. However, some of the peri...
Analytics & Data
Google Analytics: How to Avoid Data-wandering

July 17, 2013 • Tim Wilson

When it comes to Google Analytics, a common question users ask is, “Where do I start?” They have logged into the tool multiple times and stared at the default report with its default timeframe of the last 30 days. They have pondered whether there was anything actionable buried in that c...
Social Media
4 Tips for Better Contest Forms

July 16, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Contest marketing is a good way to engage potential customers, increase your social media fan base, give folks positive things to say about your store, and collect data that can improve both your business’s bottom line and your customers' online experiences. Consider for a moment just ...
Fraud Prevention
Cyber Security for Ecommerce

July 15, 2013 • Marcia Kaplan

Anyone using the Internet should be aware of security issues. But companies that engage in financial transactions and collect customer data need to be especially careful. While much of the emphasis for ecommerce merchants is the protection of credit card information, in the age of big d...
Analytics & Data
Ecommerce Analytics for Multiple Devices, Channels

July 12, 2013 • Feras Alhlou

Many ecommerce owners use analytics to measure page views, traffic, and conversion rates. That is all well and good, but it is old-school. In today's multi-device, multichannel world, marketers are finding it challenging to connect the dots between the web, mobile, and their backend da...
Marketing & Advertising
Using Content for Ecommerce Marketing

July 11, 2013 • Dale Traxler

There is a lot of buzz about content marketing. Much of it applies to business-to-business marketers that develop sophisticated lead nurturing campaigns. But content marketing is also important for ecommerce businesses. Many are experienced content marketers and don’t realize it. What...
Business
Nurturing An Unrealistic Value for your eCommerce business

July 11, 2013 • Manish Shah

Nurturing An Unrealistic Value Many of us can still hear the admonition of our parents, “You’ve got to learn the value of a dollar.” From our first piggy bank to our current savings and investment plans, we have been faced with the value of our hard earned dollars. What happened when ...
Social Media
6 Tools to Monitor Social Media Conversations

July 11, 2013 • Paul Chaney

It is common for consumers to seek recommendations and advice from their peers on social networks, forums, or rating and review sites when considering a purchase. Whether or not you choose to proactively engage in social media, it is important to pay attention because what people say ...
Conversion
Optimizely Exec on A/B Split Tests

July 10, 2013 • PEC Staff

Leading online retailers continually test different aspects of their websites to help drive sales. This can be as simple as testing various fonts and colors, or more sophisticated tests, such as pricing and product descriptions. Optimizely is a leading testing platform for online bus...
Marketing & Advertising
5 Ways to Get More Site Traffic

July 10, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Online stores need shoppers and getting more potential customers to visit an online retailer’s site is an important part of ecommerce marketing. Many Internet merchants rely primarily on search engine optimization to drive traffic — and spend a lot of time focused on good title tags. T...
Conversion
Key Site Search Features that Drive Conversions

July 9, 2013 • Dale Traxler

There are many previously published Practical eCommerce articles about site search. They include tips about features that are critical to delivering a world-class customer experience. Review them and learn more about both technical details of site search and leveraging reporting to deli...
Google Ads
4 Lessons from Google’s Dynamic Remarketing Ads

July 9, 2013 • Matthew Umbro

Google recently announced the launch of a sophisticated new ad feature called Dynamic Remarketing. It works much the same as general remarketing, but the ad units showcase products that visitors viewed. If a shopper came to your site and viewed, say, a specific running shoe, you can in...
SEO > Merchant Voice
SEO and Magento Ecommerce

July 8, 2013 • Richard Stubbings

Magento has been labelled as very Search Engine friendly, but what does this mean? Why is this important? The bottom line for any Ecommerce site is selling products. The idea is (or should be) to make money. In order to do this you have to get people to visit your site, and once there ...
Shipping & Fulfillment
6 Order Fulfillment Extras your Customers Will Love

July 8, 2013 • Jerry Jao

Order fulfillment is a critical part of the ecommerce customer experience. As ecommerce operators, we need to ensure that our customers are taken care of even when the merchandise lands in their hands. Here are six examples of extra services to offer customers when you ship their orde...
Schools & Resources
18 Resources to Make a Logo

July 8, 2013 • Sig Ueland

A logo is a way for a business to convey its identity and purpose. But hiring a designer to create a logo can be an expensive and intimidating process. There are a wide variety of online tools available to create a unique logo without spending a huge amount of money. Here is a list of ...