Category

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 & Text Marketing | Google Ads | Influencers & Affiliates | Social Media

Marketing & Advertising
4 Facts about Mobile Commerce

September 3, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Shoppers are using smartphones and tablets to make purchases and research products and prices before making a purchase, meaning that mobile may be an important channel for both earning sales ...
Social Media
SEO: 5 Reasons Not to Ignore Google+

August 30, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown

Two years ago when Google+ launched, I had high hopes for its value as a marketing platform to rival Facebook and Twitter. Read my enthusiastic missal, “Google+: The Beginning of ...
Marketing & Advertising
2013 Holiday Ecommerce Preparedness Checklist

August 29, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Online Christmas sales should top $50 billion in the United States in 2013, according to some estimates. To get your store’s fair share, be certain that your ecommerce website is ...
Email & Text Marketing
Email Marketing for the Holidays, Part 1: Preparation

August 26, 2013 • Carolyn Nye

Editor’s Note: This is “Part 1” of a two-part series on using email for holiday marketing. “Part 2: Implementation” we published subsequently. Ecommerce merchants are increasingly promoting holiday-specific products earlier, to ...
Marketing & Advertising
10 SEO Tips for Interior Designers

August 25, 2013 • Chris Silver Smith

Search engine optimization for interior decorators is challenging, particularly in larger markets where there can be hundreds of businesses vying to appear on Google's first page and in the "7-pack" of business listings. Designers often have limited time for online marketing, working seemingly around the clock to design spaces, meet with clients, and oversee contractors.
Google Ads
Google Offers Paid and Organic Search Report

August 23, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown

Paid and organic search work better together. Because searchers inherently trust that search engines are recommending the best pages in search results, when brands rank well in both paid and ...
Marketing & Advertising
10 Great Ecommerce Ideas for August 2013

August 22, 2013 • PEC Staff

Practical Ecommerce periodically asks industry insiders to share a great, innovative idea that could help an ecommerce company. Here’s what ten of them had to say for the August 2013
Social Media
Using Owned, Paid, and Earned Media — on Facebook

August 21, 2013 • Paul Chaney

Social media has redefined the way retailers market products. Direct response advertising is still useful, but it is now accompanied by an ever-increasing emphasis on content creation and word-of-mouth, which ...
Marketing & Advertising
Google Dynamic Remarketing in 8 Steps

August 20, 2013 • Mary Weinstein

Remarketing ads typically have a lower cost per acquisition, a higher click rate, and higher conversions than other forms of advertising. Google recently launched dynamic remarketing, where product names and ...
Social Media
10 Brands on Vine

August 20, 2013 • Sig Ueland

Vine is Twitter’s video sharing app that allows users to record six-second looping videos on their iOS or Android smartphones. Many brands have embraced Vine as a fun tool to ...
Marketing & Advertising
9 Back-to-school Tips to Increase Sales

August 19, 2013 • Jerry Jao

Fortunately for ecommerce businesses, many back-to-school shoppers this year will shop online. According to a recent PriceGrabber survey, when asked where they would shop for back-to-school items, respondents selected discount stores ...
Social Media
10 Ways to Use Pinterest for your Ecommerce Business

August 14, 2013 • Paul Chaney

Social networking sites have become more visual. This is especially the case with Pinterest. The site, which consists of images and videos arranged in a bulletin board style layout, has become one of the largest social networks. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, which rely on content from ...
Marketing & Advertising
Multichannel Marketing Key for Reaching Online Shoppers

August 14, 2013 • Dale Traxler

Many ecommerce merchants are too reliant on Google organic search referrals. Some merchants depend on Google for 70 percent or more of their traffic. About five years ago that was fine, since that was where most shoppers began their shopping search. Today, this is simply not the case. ...
Marketing & Advertising
3 Christmas Ecommerce Marketing Strategies

August 13, 2013 • Armando Roggio

More than eight out of ten Christmas-season shoppers will look for gifts and gift ideas online before making a purchase, creating a significant opportunity for Internet retailers. But to cash in on Christmas sales, many merchants need to begin executing coordinated marketing campaigns n...
Marketing & Advertising
Using Forums to Generate New Business

August 12, 2013 • Jerry Jao

As a small business owner, I am always looking for channels to reach a new audience. One way to do this is via established forums. Forums help many small businesses to profitably grow revenue. In Nielsen’s recent “Global Survey of Product Purchase Sentiment” PDF, web-based forums tied ...
Email & Text Marketing
Text Messaging Effective for Retailers

August 9, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Short message service communications — text messaging — may help online retailers deliver better customer service and represent an important marketing opportunity. Worldwide there are more than 4.3 billion SMS-enabled mobile devices and in the U.S. approximately 96 percent of smartphon...
Marketing & Advertising
4 AdWords Settings that Work Against You

August 9, 2013 • Melissa Mackey

Pay-per-click advertising is a good way for companies to grow their businesses. Whether they are selling products online or trying to generate leads for services, it is cost effective and typically generates a positive return on investment. Google AdWords is the leader in paid search advertising, with an 80 percent market share in the U.S. While there are other PPC platforms, advertisers seeking maximum reach should include Google AdWords in their PPC marketing mix.
Social Media
Facebook Announces Updates to Algorithm; Advice for Merchants

August 8, 2013 • Paul Chaney

In a press event on August 6, Facebook revealed how it determines which content gets displayed in users' News Feeds and announced changes to its algorithm. The event was held in response to criticism from both the media and Facebook users about the lack of visibility surrounding how t...
Marketing & Advertising
Prepare in August for Holiday Ecommerce Sales

August 7, 2013 • Dale Traxler

As we approach the end of summer, ecommerce merchants should start preparing for the fall selling season. It's time to identify new products, inventory and supplier issues, and pricing competition. Importantly, start planning seasonal promotions: Labor Day, Halloween, Veterans Day, Than...
Google Ads
5 Pay-per-click Holiday Tasks to Do Now

August 6, 2013 • Matthew Umbro

The beginning of the holiday season is right around the corner. It is often the busiest and most profitable period of the year for ecommerce merchants. Now is the time to plan your holiday pay-per-click advertising campaigns. There are many pay-per-click initiatives that merchants can...
Social Media
Facebook Launches New Version of Insights

August 6, 2013 • Paul Chaney

Facebook just launched a new version of Insights, its analytics engine. One new addition is comparative, scorecard-style reports that enable businesses to evaluate positive and negative metrics together. Also, some elements in Insights have been renamed and the overall structure has ...
Social Media
How to Target Facebook Ads to your Audience

August 5, 2013 • Paul Chaney

One of the benefits of advertising on Facebook is its ability to target ads. Options include location, age, gender, interests, broad-range categories, and connections. This article outlines the different options in terms of their applicability and usefulness. Location Location incl...
Influencers & Affiliates
Affiliate Marketing: How to Recruit Bloggers

August 1, 2013 • Carolyn Kmet

Bloggers are often the most sought-after affiliates in the affiliate marketing industry. This is because bloggers have unique content and targeted, loyal audiences, which drives solid conversion rates and new customers. According to statistics compiled by BlogHer, a publishing network o...
Social Media
LinkedIn Launches Sponsored Update Advertising Program

July 31, 2013 • Paul Chaney

LinkedIn's new Sponsored Updates is a form of advertising that resembles Facebook Page Sponsored Posts. Sponsored Updates are paid Company Page status updates that, according to LinkedIn, appear in members' home page news feeds along with organic posts. Sponsored Updates can be seen o...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.

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