Marketing & Advertising Archives

Emailer Provider GetResponse Releases Robust API Library

November 23, 2009 • Armando Roggio

GetResponse, an email marketing solution, announced a new application programming interface (API) aimed at helping small-to-medium sized businesses integrate their platforms with the company's email marketing tools. The new GetResponse Developer Zone includes some 30 API hooks that ma...

Social Media

‘New Community Rules’ Is An Introduction to Social Media Marketing

November 16, 2009 • Armando Roggio

An increasing number of online retailers are recognizing that it is possible to earn more money and have happier customers simply by engaging those customers in authentic and personal ways. When an industry is in its infancy (such as ecommerce was just a few years ago) it is possible t...

Marketing & Advertising

Ecommerce Know-How: Four Keys to Twitter, Facebook Success

November 9, 2009 • Kevin Patrick Allen

The debate over whether Twitter and Facebook are fads or sustainable businesses has yet to be resolved. Their popularity is indisputable but whether Twitter, in particular, can avoid erosion of its user base, let alone continue its impressive growth, has been questioned. But for the ec...

Marketing & Advertising

Search Engine Rankings: Google Continues Dominance

October 15, 2009 • PEC Staff

Google continued to dominate the U.S. search market in September, according to comScore, the Internet tracking firm. Google sites accounted for 64.9 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! sites (18.8 percent), and Microsoft sites (9.4 percent). The analysis focused on t...

Email Marketing

Quick Query: Constant Contact Author on Effectiveness of Email

October 12, 2009 • Kevin Patrick Allen

An online merchant’s customer email list is typically a crucial part of his or her marketing plan. And Constant Contact is a leader in the email marketing field. Eric Groves is the senior vice president, global market development for Constant Contact. He’s written a new book entitled Th...

Social Media

Ecommerce Know-How: Consider YouTube Promoted Video

October 7, 2009 • Armando Roggio

YouTube Promoted Video lets ecommerce merchants combine the power of television commercials with pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. Internet video is one of the fastest growing media forms in the world. From June to August 2009, American Internet video consumption grew from 19.4 billion to...

Social Media

Book Excerpt: Niche Online Communities Can Benefit Your Business

September 24, 2009 • Paul Chaney

Editor's Note: Paul Chaney is a longtime contributor to Practical eCommerce. He's an expert in social media marketing and he's written extensively on how ecommerce firms can best utilize social media to grow sales. Chaney is also the author of a new book on social media called The Digi...

Social Media

Book Excerpt: Social Media Helps Overcome Consumer Skepticism

September 10, 2009 • Paul Chaney

Editor's Note: Paul Chaney is a longtime contributor to Practical eCommerce. He's an expert in social media marketing and he's written extensively on how ecommerce firms can best utilize social media to grow sales. Chaney is also the author of a new book on social media called The Digi...

Marketing & Advertising

Search-engine Success: Don’t Forget Description Tags

September 2, 2009 • Jeff Muendel

The description tags in search engine snippets have improved in recent years. Years ago, many search results would include snippets in the top results that were just plain nonsense. However, search today usually returns more quality snippets even in deeper results. Part of this may be d...

Marketing & Advertising

Bloglist: Full Sail University’s Jake Johnson

August 20, 2009 • PEC Staff

Staying abreast of Internet marketing trends and information is no easy task. But following several leading blogs can help. “I mainly focus on the topic of SEO, so I visit ...

Social Media

PeC Traffic Report: Generate Buzz and Traffic With Contest Marketing

August 11, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce marketers can use contests to boost traffic and improve sales. If I guaranteed you an additional $10,000 in annual sales just for reading this article and posting a comment, would you do it? What about if I said you had a 1-in-100 chance of getting an additional $10,000 in a...

Marketing & Advertising

Social Media Sites Are Also Search Engines

August 4, 2009 • Jeff Muendel

Blended search results by the major search engines sometimes include postings to social media sites in search engine results. But some of the major social media services are themselves becoming search tools, which increases the need for ecommerce sites to get involved with social media....

Email Marketing

The PeC Review: GetResponse Is A Capable Email Campaign Tool

July 28, 2009 • Armando Roggio

GetResponse 6.0 is an easy-to-use email campaign management tool that makes customizing HTML newsletters and email promotions relatively simple. It will also automatically update a blog or Twitter account with newsletter content. GetResponse has an impressive design and a number of fe...

Google Ads

Survey Results: Online Merchants Likely to Use Bing Pay-per-click Advertising

July 17, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Two thirds of respondents to a June 2009 Practical eCommerce survey said they were either using or would use Microsoft's Bing search engine for pay-per-click advertising, and an additional 25.3 percent said they would consider Bing. Altogether, some 92 percent of survey respondents sai...

Marketing & Advertising

Blogging Builds Trust, Demonstrates Expertise

July 9, 2009 • Sarah Worsham

Blogging is extremely important to ecommerce businesses. It's one of the easiest ways to update the content on your website, and it also demonstrates your expertise about your products. When done correctly, blogging can complement your products and offer a reason for people to return to...

Email Marketing

Email Marketing: Optimize the New Subscriber Experience

June 24, 2009 • Matt Carroll

Response rates are almost always higher for new subscribers to an email list. According to the "Email Marketing Benchmark Guide" by MarketingSherpa, subscribers click through at a 25 percent higher rate in their first month than in their second, and 67 percent higher in the first month ...

Social Media

Ecommerce Know-How: Use Twitter to Build a Community of Loyal Customers

June 9, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Microblogging site Twitter has the potential to be a powerful marketing and brand-building tool for ecommerce businesses interested in engaging their customers and being part of a community. But successful marketing on Twitter, or any microblogging site, requires more than just posting ...

Marketing & Advertising

Wolfram|Alpha: A Search Engine Not Ready for eCommerce Merchants

May 29, 2009 • Jeff Muendel

Wolfram|Alpha is a search engine that aims to deliver answers to factual queries. Many search-engine-optimization blogs have referred to Wolfram|Alpha, and one colleague of mine – a sharp SEOer, and evidently a total SEO geek – even professed on Facebook to having “Wolfram|Alpha Fever.”...

Social Media

The PeC Review: Tinker Sorts Your Twitter Tweets for Brand-Safe Marketing

May 27, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Tinker sorts and organizes Twitter.com tweets around brands, products, and other topics or events. This potentially gives ecommerce businesses a new, brand-safe way to market via social media and a means of monitoring popular trends. Tinker allows users to create so-called events based...

Email Marketing

Email Marketing: Split Testing Improves Results “Up to 191 Percent”

May 26, 2009 • Matt Carroll

Split testing of email marketing campaigns can improve open rates, click through rates and even purchase conversion rates. More email service providers are offering split test functionality, making it possible to upload two or more versions of a single broadcast and send them to random ...

Social Media

The PeC Review: Share This Makes Adding Social Media a Breeze

May 14, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Share This is a JavaScript-based widget that merchants can easily be embedded on their websites, allowing visitors to email web content to friends, send links as text messages, or post the content to a couple dozen social sharing sites like Facebook, MySpace, or Digg. Each week, "The P...

Marketing & Advertising

Negative Keywords Improve Pay-per-click Performance, Save Money

May 5, 2009 • Greg Laptevsky

Implementation of negative keywords to your paid search account is one of the most effective methods to improve its performance. Negative keywords allow you to filter out unwanted traffic and only pay for clicks that have a higher probability of converting. Here’s how it works. Negativ...

Google Ads

The PeC Review: Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool Lets You See What Spiders See

April 24, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool can help ecommerce merchants find pertinent keywords specific to a given URL, potentially improving search-engine-optimization and pay-per-click-advertising campaigns. Using URLs from your AdWords account, the Search Based Keyword Tool (SKTool) "dis...

Marketing & Advertising

8 Tips for Choosing an SEO Professional

April 21, 2009 • Greg Laptevsky

Editor's Note: Greg Laptevsky is a longtime Practical eCommerce contributor and a professional search-engine-marketing consultant. We asked him for tips to help ecommerce companies hire SEO firms. What follows, below, is his response. The checklist below will help you choose the right ...

Social Media

Quick Query: Comodo CEO on Hiring a Social Media Officer

April 16, 2009 • PEC Staff

There's much talk about social media sites and there's also talk of how companies can use social media for marketing purposes. One company doing just that is Comodo, a firm that provides online security solutions. Comodo has recently created a “social media officer” job position and Com...

Email Marketing

PeC Traffic Report: Six Measurements to Improve Email Performance

April 16, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Good ecommerce merchants know that email campaigns built around opt-in lists are an effective way to reach potential customers. But more than 18 percent of email marketers in the U.S. either don't or cannot measure the return on investment for their email campaigns, according to a new s...

Marketing & Advertising

The PeC Review: The SOC Exchange Offers A New, Inexpensive Selling Channel

March 24, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Selling online can take many forms and merchants can use several channels to market and sell their wares. The SOC Exchange is a new online storefront that lets merchants post and sell products for as little as $10 per year with no hidden fees. The site allows ecommerce businesses to ...

Social Media

The PeC Review: Elgg Lets Any Business Create an Online Community

March 17, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Elgg is an open source platform to power any kind of social media community, and it is a tool that online merchants can use to help develop a loyal flow of site traffic. Social media communities similar to Facebook and MySpace are extremely popular. For example, eMarketer, a marketin...

Influencers & Affiliates

The PeC Review: Google Affiliate Network is an Effective Marketing Tool

March 3, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Affiliate network marketing offers online retailers an effective, performance-based advertising channel with good conversion rates and a propensity to boosts sales. Like many affiliate programs, the Google Affiliate Network connects merchants with a network of website publishers. Aff...

Social Media

Ecommerce Know-How: Use Facebook, LinkedIn to Promote Your Store

February 23, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Online communities like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tangle allow members to join groups, post content, and respond to other's activity. While some marketers have tried to exploit the media, there are positive ways for online merchants to participate in linking networks and build stronger re...