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

Social Media
Facebook Changes Ads Manager to Improve Tracking

April 12, 2013 • Paul Chaney

Facebook recently made several changes to Ads Manager to make it easier for advertisers to track performance against goals and to better measure the return on investment. Ads Manager Changes Advertising goals highlighted. Ads Manager now shows the most relevant actions for your adver...
Social Media
Buffer: Timesaving Social Sharing and Management Application

April 8, 2013 • Paul Chaney

Sharing content to social networks typically happens in one of two ways: by clicking a social sharing button found on many blogs and websites, or by using a social media management platform such as HootSuite. Buffer, a new social sharing application, combines both of these functions. ...
Marketing & Advertising
Google Shopping Feed: 3 Things You Should Be Doing

April 5, 2013 • Mary Weinstein

Editor's Note: We welcome Mary Weinstein as our newest contributor. She will address selling on comparison-shopping engines, marketplaces, and other channels. Weinstein is an account manager for CPC Strategy, a comparison shopping-engine consulting firm for ecommerce merchants. Her fi...
Social Media
5 Social Marketplaces for Merchants and Shoppers

April 2, 2013 • Paul Chaney

Social marketplaces promote interaction between merchants and their customers, and enable product discovery in a social environment where shoppers can rely on the influence of friends to help them make informed shopping decisions. One successful social commerce model is bazaar-style ma...
Google Ads
PPC Advertising: 5 Daily Activities to Grow Profits

April 2, 2013 • Scott Smigler

My company recently surveyed 100 small and mid-sized online retailers that do not outsource the management of their Google AdWords campaigns. We asked a simple question, "How often do you manage your AdWords account?" According to the survey results, which are summarized in the graphi...
Influencers & Affiliates
2 Affiliate Promotion Case Studies

April 1, 2013 • Carolyn Kmet

Affiliate-marketing managers frequently offer bonus incentives to drive sales or increase traffic. My firm recently tested two different bonus-incentive strategies, both of which were successful. This article describes them. Plus-Size Fashion Retailer: Style Consultation and Gift Card...
Social Media
4 Tools to Simplify the Blogging Process

March 27, 2013 • Paul Chaney

Bloggers can spend a lot of time selecting topics and researching and writing the posts. Here are four tools I use to speed up the research process. Used in the ...
Social Media
Pinterest Adds Analytics Component

March 20, 2013 • Paul Chaney

Pinterest launched business pages a few months ago, which allow companies to create accounts specifically related to their websites. Last week, Pinterest took another step toward increasing the value it provides businesses by adding an analytics component. "Bloggers, businesses, and...
Social Media
6 Alternatives to Google Reader

March 19, 2013 • Paul Chaney

Google announced last week that it is retiring Google Reader, its longstanding RSS feed reader application, citing a decrease in use. The announcement created a furor across the Internet. Deliberating Google’s ...
Email & Text Marketing
5 Tests to Improve your Email Marketing

March 18, 2013 • Carolyn Nye

For email marketers, there are several key tests that will improve a campaign, and an ongoing program. Here are five basic testing strategies to optimize your email marketing efforts. Subject Line Testing Many marketers believe that a subject line’s purpose is simply to get people to...
Social Media
Facebook Changes News Feed; Implications for Merchants

March 14, 2013 • Paul Chaney

Facebook announced in a press conference last Thursday that it has drastically revamped the all-important News Feed, turning it into a “personalized newspaper” that emphasizes what friends are sharing.
Social Media
Understanding Google+ Design Changes

March 11, 2013 • Paul Chaney

Google+ recently made several design changes. The most prominent is to the cover image, which is now much larger. Google+ also changed the "About" page, and a "Local" tab was added to the left-column menu. The About page now consists of separate "cards" — such as Story, Places, Work, an...
Social Media
How to Use Google+ Hangouts; Benefits to Merchants

March 6, 2013 • Paul Chaney

Hangouts is a popular component in the Google+ platform. Hangouts enables live video chats with up to 10 people using Google+, your website, and mobile apps for Android and iPhone. With Hangouts you can: Host live, face-to-face conference calls with customers, suppliers, affiliates ...
Marketing & Advertising
How to Monitor Yelp, Other Review Sites

March 5, 2013 • Ryan Welton

In "Monitoring your Online Reputation in 2013," contributor Micah Buchdahl described the need to closely monitor what others say about your company online. Firms like Reputation.com have turned digital perception into a successful business, helping individuals and businesses manage how they are perceived online.
Google Ads
Surviving Google AdWords’ New Enhanced Campaigns

March 4, 2013 • Scott Smigler

In "Cheaper Clicks from AdWords Coming?," my article from Feb. 2012, I questioned whether the then unprecedented decline in cost-per-click rates would be a blip or a trend. One year later, Google apparently thinks it's a trend, as Google is requiring all advertisers to adopt its new Enh...
Social Media
Hashtag Your Products on Instagram

February 28, 2013 • Jason Lawrence

Instagram is a massive social network built around a beautifully designed — and addictive — mobile photography app. As of September 2012, Instagram reportedly had 11 million active users. It was famously bought by Facebook for $1 billion in April 2012. Instagram is creating new and exc...
Influencers & Affiliates
Online Coupons: Pros and Cons

February 27, 2013 • Carolyn Kmet

Using coupon codes to entice online consumers is a long-running debate. The pros are (a) easy to implement, (b) easy to track, and (c) consistent increase in conversion. The cons are (a) uncontrollable distribution, (b) tendency to drive non-loyal discount shoppers, and (c) reduction of...
Social Media
6 Key Twitter Practices for Smaller Businesses

February 26, 2013 • Paul Chaney

Many small business owners have told me they understand how Facebook is a good fit for business, but have difficulty drawing a similar conclusion when it comes to Twitter. According to a report from GlobalWebIndex, an analysis firm, Twitter increased its user base by more than 288 mil...
Social Media
10 Blog Topics for Online Retailers

February 22, 2013 • Paul Chaney

One of the best ways for an ecommerce site to rank highly in Google search results is through blogging. Most blog platforms are search engine friendly, and easy to use. But merchants sometimes struggle with what topics to write about. Here are 10 post types to spark writing ideas that...
Marketing & Advertising
Twitter for Ecommerce Merchants

February 21, 2013 • Dale Traxler

Many retailers have discovered that Twitter is an effective way to communicate with their customers and prospects. A recent study for Twitter by Compete reported that Twitter users are more likely to buy online, versus the general public. They are also 1.4 times more likely to make an ...
Social Media
Facebook Power Editor: Time-saving Ad Management Tool

February 19, 2013 • Paul Chaney

Facebook’s Power Editor can help administrators manage multiple ad campaigns and Pages with greater efficiency. Facebook created it primarily for agencies with multiple client accounts. But Power Editor offers benefits ...
Social Media
Search Result Domination with Social Media

February 15, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown

Social media and organic search work hand in hand, but not in the way most people think. Building up a grand social media presence will not drive link authority back to your ecommerce site. The major social networks have long since stripped the link authority from their outbound links...
Marketing & Advertising
6 Ways to Measure Social Media

February 15, 2013 • Yasmin Bendror

Measuring social media effectiveness can seem daunting. It is less clear-cut and more complex than other, more traditional marketing channels. But measuring your social media efforts is possible, and it's crucial to your overall marketing strategy.
Social Media
10 Google Chrome Social Media Apps

February 14, 2013 • Paul Chaney

Google's Chrome Web Store offers many applications for that browser. These include apps for businesses — to help with accounting, invoicing, creating documents, setting appointments, logging phone calls, and performing other critical business functions. They also include sales and marke...
Email & Text Marketing
Email Marketing: 5 Ways to Generate Immediate Sales

February 14, 2013 • Carolyn Nye

Email serves many functions for ecommerce businesses. It's a method of sending order confirmations and shipping notifications. It also delivers valuable content via newsletters. The goal of each function differs widely, depending on your site and the average sales cycle and order value....
Social Media
Facebook ‘Nearby’ Increases Mobile Search Capability

February 12, 2013 • Paul Chaney

Facebook knows a lot about what its users like. Thanks to a recent upgrade of its mobile app, a feature called Nearby turns that information into meaningful search data that local businesses with a Facebook Page and physical location can turn to their advantage. Considering that more th...
Social Media
Selling on Facebook Easier for Smaller Merchants

February 8, 2013 • Marcia Kaplan

The merits of selling goods on Facebook are a topic of much debate. Several large retailers, including GameStop, Gap, jcpenney, and Nordstrom, experienced disappointing results and shut down their Facebook stores within months. But according to Sucharita Mulpuru, retail analyst at For...
Email & Text Marketing
Making Emails Responsive to Tablets, Smartphones

February 7, 2013 • PEC Staff

In "Optimizing Ecommerce for Tablets and Smartphones," my article last month, I addressed responsive design, the practice of coding a website to automatically adjust to the size of a user's Internet device. This month, I extend that discussion to include outbound emails, so that the ...
Social Media
6 Twitter Marketing Lessons from the Super Bowl Blackout

February 7, 2013 • Paul Chaney

Several large brands — including Oreo and Tide — took advantage of Super Bowl 47's blackout to quickly create Twitter ads. Oreo's ad reminded followers that "You can still dunk in the dark," while Tide declared "We can't get your blackout. But we can get your stains out." Other brands...
Marketing & Advertising
The 5 C’s of Integrated Marketing

February 6, 2013 • Shirley Tan

The idea of integrated marketing is to make sure that the internal and external messaging of a company is consistent across all communication and sales channels. A big part of this is to make sure that ecommerce is not merely a platform for sales, but an opportunity to reach existing ...

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