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
Google+: The Beginning of a Revolution?

July 29, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

The pieces are rapidly falling into place for Google’s increasing integration of “social signals” into its search algorithms. With the oddly isolated “+1” button launch at the end of March ...
Google Ads
For Google AdWords, It Pays to be on Top

July 27, 2011 • Scott Smigler

The new “Top vs. Side” segmentation report announced by Google has led my firm to valuable new AdWords’ insights. We confirmed just how important it is to ensure your ads ...
Social Media
How to Create Facebook Ads, Part 2: Campaign Management, Overall Best Practices

July 26, 2011 • Paul Chaney

In "Part 1" of this series on creating Facebook ads, I showed you how to set up a campaign, design an ad, and target the precise audience. In this "Part 2" installment, I'll explain how to manage your ad campaign, offering 10 best practices. Ads Manager Each Facebook ad has to be tie...
Email & Text Marketing
Using Surveys to Grow Sales; 4 Tips

July 19, 2011 • Carolyn Nye

Ecommerce merchants frequently reach out to new and existing customers. Whether they use methods such as email, paid search, search engine optimization or banner ads, the goal is always the same: to drive qualified traffic back to their sites. Unlike brick and mortar stores, however, th...
Social Media
How to Create Facebook Ads, Part 1: Setup, Design, Targeting

July 18, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Facebook advertising is becoming more popular. In this article — “Part 1” of a two-part series — I will describe how to set up a Facebook ad using the self-service ...
Content Marketing
18 Writing Tools for Grammar, Style, Content

July 13, 2011 • Sig Ueland

Content is king. If you run a blog, most of your content is language. For an ecommerce site, you write promotional copy, product descriptions, policies, procedures, and more. You need ...
Social Media
How to Measure Social Media Marketing; 3 Steps

July 12, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Social media marketing, like other forms of online marketing, needs to produce a return on investment. Otherwise, its usefulness is marginal and the time spent on it is wasted. But social media's effect on the bottom line is not always easy to measure. In social media's case, ROI does...
Email & Text Marketing
Email Marketing for Mobile Devices: 5 Insights

July 11, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Between 12 and 19 percent of email marketing messages are now read on mobile, Internet-enabled devices like smartphones or tablets. To continue to get good results from email, marketers should consider mobile user behavior and device capabilities. Last year, eROI, a digital agency, con...
Content Marketing
Write Better Blog Posts, Pyramid Style

July 6, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Use a classic writing technique popularized in the newspaper industry's heyday to improve blog content and communicate with precision. The inverted pyramid is a writing structure that places a summary of the most important information about an article in the first paragraph and support...
Email & Text Marketing
4 Tips for Encouraging Email Subscriptions

July 5, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Email marketing is one of the most potent promotional tactics available to online retailers when, in fact, those merchants have customers to send emails to. Email can boost site traffic, drive conversions, and help build strong relationships with shoppers. The hard part is getting thos...
Social Media
Google+: Overview, Ecommerce Use

July 5, 2011 • Paul Chaney

On the day news broke about the sale of MySpace for a mere $35 million, Google announced the launch of its new social network, Google+. The search giant is rolling out ...
Social Media
5 Influence Measurement Tools

June 28, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Prior to the Internet, if consumers were dissatisfied with a company, its products or services, they would tell a few friends who might also tell a few others. Maybe the consumer would write a letter to the company or call the customer service department to complain. For the most part, ...
Social Media
5 New Social Media Management Platforms

June 21, 2011 • Paul Chaney

A new class of social media management platforms for small businesses makes social media marketing — such as posting to Facebook and Twitter — much easier. In this article, I review five of these platforms: Postling, Breeze Social, Roost, Sendible and Social Guides. My review will add...
Email & Text Marketing
7 Steps to Improve Your Email Marketing

June 20, 2011 • Armando Roggio

A successful ecommerce marketing strategy is an ever-changing blend of techniques and tactics aimed at achieving specific, predetermined goals. If executed well, email marketing is often one of the most ...
Email & Text Marketing
4 Ways of Capturing More Email Addresses and Increasing Conversion

June 14, 2011 • Charles Nicholls

There is a very strong link between website conversions and email. A recent study by my firm showed that once traffic has gotten as far as the shopping cart email was the largest source of ecommerce conversions, ranking above a direct entry and search. This is a useful reminder that the...
Social Media
One Merchant’s Experience with LivingSocial and Groupon

June 13, 2011 • Paul Chaney

APARTStyle.com is a retailer that is focused on selling affordable fashion clothing to working women. The company — founded in September 2009 and headquartered in New York — sells ...
Email & Text Marketing
4 Tips for Improving Your Email Conversion Rate

June 9, 2011 • Carolyn Nye

Sending timely and relevant communications to your email file is a necessity in driving qualified traffic to your site. Simply increasing your traffic numbers may be the first step, but ...
Social Media
5 Good Reasons to Use Tumblr

June 9, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Tumblr is a social blogging platform that allows users to upload multimedia posts, follow other users, and engage in communities without some of the constraints found on Twitter or Facebook. As a platform, Tumblr has been growing rapidly, and some retailers are now using the service as...
Google Ads
How to Hire a Pay-Per-Click Manager; 10 Common Mistakes

June 7, 2011 • Scott Smigler

My firm is in the pay-per-click advertising business. We've managed PPC accounts for hundreds of companies for roughly a decade, and we've developed strong opinions as to what makes for a good PPC manager, and what does not. To be sure, there are many terrific PPC management firms othe...
Social Media
How to Install the Google +1 Button on Your Site

June 6, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Google is positioning its +1 button as a way for consumers to leave recommendations for their social media friends, just when those friends are in need. "Sometimes it’s easier to find exactly what you’re looking for when someone you know already found it," Google said on the +1 landing...
Social Media
12 Popular Retail Companies on YouTube

June 6, 2011 • Paul Chaney

The most popular YouTube videos involve talking animals, pop stars and news channels. But retailers have found a home on the site, too. Here is a list of 12 popular ...
Social Media
Selling to Facebook Fans and Twitter Followers

June 2, 2011 • Paul Chaney

One of the more controversial ecommerce-related topics is the use of social networks like Facebook and Twitter to increase sales. There is ample evidence to suggest that, in spite of its popularity, social media produces a dismal return on investment. Respondents to a January 2011 Pract...
Social Media
How to Use Facebook’s Photo Strip; 7 Examples

June 1, 2011 • Paul Chaney

When Facebook added the photo strip to the Wall on Fan pages, it left page owners and administrators wondering just how to make use of the new feature. Not only that, the Fan page version lacked one attribute present in the personal profile version: the ability to arrange photos in a ...
Social Media
Facebook’s 10 Social Plugins; Benefits to Merchants

May 31, 2011 • Sig Ueland

Facebook social plugins are a quick and easy way to extend your social reach and engage your website’s visitors with social interaction. The Facebook social plugins are easily installed. On each plugin’s page — noted below — in the Facebook Developers section, the configuration tool le...
Google Ads
5 Tips for Increasing Pay-Per-Click Conversion Rates

May 27, 2011 • Scott Smigler

Google’s Farmer/Panda update serves as a reminder to online merchants that their non-paid search traffic is subject to an algorithm that constantly evolves. Pay-per-click advertising, on the other hand, allows ...
Marketing & Advertising
Should Online Retailers Embrace SMS Marketing?

May 26, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Texting ads and promotions to customers is an excellent way to announce sales and drive foot traffic to brick-and-mortar stores, service providers, and restaurants. But can text messaging drive site traffic to online retailers, too? Dutch Bros. is a regional, drive-through coffee shop ...
Social Media
7 Ways to Build a Brand Using Blogs

May 25, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Branding is more than just a business buzzword. It has become the crux of selling in the new economy. If the old marketing mantra was “Nothing happens until somebody sells something,” the new philosophy could be “Nothing happens until somebody brands something.” If you are not currentl...
Social Media
Facebook’s New ‘Send’ Button: How to Use, Install, Benefit

May 24, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Facebook's new "Send" button functions similarly to a "Forward to a Friend" plug-in that you often see in broadcast emails. The difference is, in addition to sending a message to any email address, users can select specific Facebook friends to notify, and send the message as a post to F...
Social Media
Managing Negative Facebook Page Comments

May 16, 2011 • Paul Chaney

A small business owner contacted me recently. She had received a comment on her Facebook page criticizing the price of her products. In her way of thinking, it would be better to have no comments at all than to give disgruntled customers the opportunity to use her Fan page as a platform...
Social Media
Top 51 Facebook Pages with Stores

May 12, 2011 • Sig Ueland

Facebook commerce is here. But what is sold on Facebook, and how it is sold, is still up in the air. Here is a list of the 51 most popular — based on the number of "Likes" — Facebook pages with stores. For the purposes of this article, a page is considered to have a “store” if there ar...

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