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 Marketing | Google Ads | Influencers & Affiliates | Social Media-
Email Marketing
Email Marketing Has Always Been Social
June 10, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Social marketing is one of the most important new trends in online retail promotion. It is effective, builds customer relationships, and offers a better return on investment than some other marketing techniques. But often, online merchants don't realize that they are already engaged in ...
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Email Marketing
Six Pointers for Formatting Your Ecommerce Emails
June 10, 2010 • Janine Popick
Ecommerce merchants from all industries are utilizing email as a valuable retail sales channel. However, some merchants may be confused about how to optimize their emails for the dozens of different email programs now available, as well as the plethora of mobile devices that their custo...
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Social Media
Social Commerce Spotlight: Payvment, a Facebook Storefront Provider
June 8, 2010 • Paul Chaney
Social commerce, the use of social media in the context of ecommerce, is becoming commonplace. Over the next few weeks, Practical Ecommerce will examine ecommerce platforms and applications that allow merchants to take advantage of this new trend. In this installment, we will discuss ...
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Social Media
The PEC Review: Twitalyzer Offers Analytics for your Twitter Accounts
June 7, 2010 • Armando Roggio
As more online retailers invest marketing dollars and time into social marketing, it is becoming increasingly important to measure the return on that investment. As with any concerted marketing effort, social marketing has real costs in terms of hourly labor expenses for time spent twe...
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Social Media
The PEC Review: TwitPic, for Sharing Photos on Twitter
June 1, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Social media marketing is one of the most potent new promotional trends available to ecommerce businesses. Services like Twitter allow you to build two-way relationships with your customers wherein you can get nearly instant feedback about your product offerings and promotions, and gain...
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Marketing & Advertising
The Skinny on Google Maps Street View
May 26, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
For years, Google has sent its search bots to crawl the web, indexing content and images in order to rank search results. As Google Maps has become more complex and accurate, however, Google has been crawling the streets, as well, using vans topped with 360-degree cameras. The goal is t...
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Social Media
6 Facebook Apps to Enhance Your Company’s Fan Page
May 26, 2010 • Paul Chaney
It was only a few years ago that businesses realized they needed a website. Now, everyone seems to be coming to the same conclusion about Facebook, and the best way for a business to establish a presence there is via a Fan page. We typically think of Facebook Fan pages as being a conv...
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Marketing & Advertising
Too Much Social Media?
May 25, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
Social media can be an excellent way to forge relationships with customers. It can also fall short on expectations of greater traffic or increased sales to an ecommerce site. I spoke with ecommerce marketing expert Michael Stearns about this topic. Stearns is a and CEO of HEROweb Mar...
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Social Media
Ecommerce News Around the Web for May 21, 2010
May 21, 2010 • Paul Chaney
"Ecommerce News Around the Web" is our weekly review of articles, blog posts and other news items that could interest ecommerce merchants. Symantec Set to Acquire VeriSign Security Business - Symantec Symantec has apparently signed an agreement to acquire VeriSign’s security busines...
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Social Media
Practical eCommerce Extends Presence within Social Media
May 18, 2010 • Paul Chaney
Practical eCommerce recently hired me to help the company build a strong presence inside the social media universe. My initial efforts have been focused on building a solid foundation of participation inside Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Even though we are just getting started (or re...
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Marketing & Advertising
April Survey Results: SEO Is Top Priority
May 6, 2010 • Kate Monteith
A monthly survey conducted by Practical eCommerce polled readers about the importance of search engine optimization and how much they understand SEO. The April 2010 survey asked four questions about SEO, with a comment section for each response. Readers who completed the survey, and t...
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Marketing & Advertising
Ask An Expert: Should I De-index Outdated Web Pages?
May 4, 2010 • PEC Staff
"Ask an Expert" is an occasional feature where we ask ecommerce experts questions from online merchants. For this installment, we address a question about removing outdated web pages that are indexed on search engines. It comes from Biba Pearce, a web copywriter and search-engine-optimi...
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Email Marketing
Five Steps to Improve Email Deliverability
April 29, 2010 • Ankush Agarwal
According to a study by Return Path, 20 percent of email in the United States and Canada is still not making it to the inbox. That may seem like a small percentage, but it is actually a huge number that can adversely affect your campaign if you are among the email marketers whose messag...
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Marketing & Advertising
Facebook App Embeds Product Offers in News Feeds
April 26, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
Most users who currently shop on Facebook do it using applications, Facebook Marketplace, or by using Flash-based applets on Fan pages. But Facebook and Twitter have both demonstrated that the live feed of links, photos, videos, comments and replies is what they’re really interested in....
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Email Marketing
The PEC Review: GetResponse’s Email-to-Speech Service
April 26, 2010 • Armando Roggio
In 2009, there were approximately 90 trillion emails sent, or about 13,200 emails for every one of the world's 6.8 billion residents. This is according to data from web monitoring firm Pingdom and the U.S. Census Bureau. Narrowed to likely email recipients, this staggering data indica...
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Social Media
Facebook Limits Fan Pages and Introduces Community Pages
April 20, 2010 • Paul Chaney
Facebook Fan pages are changing. This is due to the Facebook's desire to ensure that only individuals and organizations with official permission to do so create such pages. To replace those Fan pages created by, well, fans, Facebook has now introduced what it is referring to as Communit...
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Social Media
The PeC Review: Firefox TwitterBar Add-on
April 19, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Social media is one of the most cost effective ways that an online merchant can attract new customers and build relationships with existing ones. In social media, the aim is to become generally interested in your customers, including what they do and how they feel about the world. That...
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Marketing & Advertising
Social Media: Selling on Facebook
April 15, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
Facebook is set to allow developers to create shopping apps directly on merchants’ fan pages. This means that fan pages, which were once mainly marketing channels, can now be used as a point of sale, if merchants are willing to pay a developer to implement the apps. The first step in ...
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Marketing & Advertising
Video Strategies to Increase Your Site’s Exposure
April 1, 2010 • Michael Stearns
The cost of producing and deploying a reasonably high-quality video has dropped dramatically. Most every ecommerce business owner would therefore be smart to consider working video into his or her marketing mix. Assuming you can overcome the initial hurdles of video creation, let's look...
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Content Marketing
Make Friends and Boost Sales with a Content Marketing Strategy
April 1, 2010 • Armando Roggio
More than half of consumers surveyed in a 2009 study said that how much they trusted a merchant affected how likely they were to make a purchase. The findings, which were part of a ChannelAdvisor survey, are not surprising. In fact, it is almost common sense that shoppers don't like to...
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Email Marketing
Think Twice About Buying Email Subscriber Lists
March 24, 2010 • Ankush Agarwal
Buying email subscriber lists is seemingly the quickest way to build your email list. But acquired lists frequently present problems that merchants should weigh carefully. First and foremost, the email list you plan to acquire must be obtained from a reputable company. There are many c...
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Social Media
Social Media: The Mississippi Gift Company Uses Multiple Channels
March 23, 2010 • Paul Chaney
Editor's Note: Each month we highlight how an ecommerce business uses social media. This is the second of the series. I hail from the great state of Mississippi. Not only is my native state noted for its arts and culture, it is also the home of a very successful, long-standing ecommerc...
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Marketing & Advertising
Ask an Expert: Tools to Encourage Customer Feedback?
March 11, 2010 • PEC Staff
"Ask an Expert" is an occasional feature where we ask ecommerce experts questions from online merchants. For this installment, we address a question about how to encourage customer feedback. It comes from Rita Perdue, CEO and owner of Pick My Decor, an online store that sells home décor...
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Marketing & Advertising
February Survey Results: Social Media in Ecommerce
March 9, 2010 • Kate Monteith
Social marketing experts have been trumpeting the advantages of using social sites such as Twitter and Facebook to promote ecommerce businesses. We wondered how many of our readers are using social media sites as a marketing channel and whether it has helped or hurt their businesses. ...
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Marketing & Advertising
Microsoft, Yahoo! Search-engine Partnership: Frequently Asked Questions
March 8, 2010 • PEC Staff
The agreement for Yahoo! to use Microsoft's Bing search platform has been approved by U.S. and European authorities. We wonder what this agreement means for ecommerce merchants. Greg Laptevsky, a Practical eCommerce contributor and a seasoned search marketing expert, provides some answe...
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Marketing & Advertising
Visual Search to Grow with Mobile Commerce
March 4, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
Visual search is a new technology that's likely to impact the mobile commerce space. It allows mobile users to snap pictures of just about anything on their devices and then search for relevant online content based on the photo itself. This technology is useful for mobile users who ar...
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Marketing & Advertising
Ask an Expert: Examples of Social Media Marketing Success?
February 25, 2010 • PEC Staff
"Ask an Expert" is an occasional feature where we ask ecommerce experts questions from online merchants. For this installment, we address a question about social media marketing. It comes from Theresa Fox, managing director of direct and digital initiatives at Sounds True, an online sto...
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Business
Quick Query: Covario’s Stephan Spencer on Mobile Commerce
February 24, 2010 • PEC Staff
An increasing number of consumers access the Internet via mobile devices. This has looming implications for ecommerce merchants who must decide what platforms their customers will use in the future. Third party services can help owners migrate their sites to mobile devices and one of th...
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Social Media
Social Media: OTC Sports Uses Facebook, Twitter to Engage Like-minded Consumers
February 23, 2010 • Paul Chaney
Editor's Note: This is the first in series of interviews with ecommerce merchants on their use of social media. OTC Sports is a family-run specialty dealer of premium baseball and softball equipment. It targets serious, tournament-level ballplayers. We spoke with the owner, Jeff LeRic...
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Marketing & Advertising
The PeC Review: Google Buzz a No-brainer
February 15, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Google recently announced a new social media tool that is integrated into the company’s popular Gmail service. Google Buzz seeks to make it easier to start and follow social media-like conversations ...