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-
Social Media
Twitter to Offer Early Bird Advertisements
July 8, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Twitter, the microblogging site, said that it would soon begin tweeting special, time-bound deals and offers from advertisers to its users. The program, called "@earlybird," would allow "select" advertisers to offer exclusive, short term deals on Twitter, potentially putting the social...
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Marketing & Advertising
Language Translation: Man Versus Machine
July 8, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
Anyone who has visited a foreign country knows the difficulty of buying products in a foreign language. This confusion can be overwhelming, whether haggling on the street or buying online. But, for ecommerce merchants considering language translation, determining which countries and l...
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Content Marketing
Free Blogs vs. Hosting Your Own: Pros and Cons
July 6, 2010 • Lorrie Thomas Ross
Should you host a blog on your own website with your own domain name, or use one of the excellent free blog sites? There is no universal "right" choice There are pros and cons to each option to consider for immediate and long-term blog success.
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Social Media
The PEC Review: Dlvr.it for Social Media Distribution
July 5, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Blogging, social marketing, email marketing, onsite merchandising, and search engine advertising are just some of the tasks that an ecommerce marketer must manage on any given day. Dlvr.it is a new online service that can help you automate at least one portion of that marketing worklo...
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Marketing & Advertising
Ecommerce Redesign: Five SEO Pitfalls to Avoid
June 24, 2010 • Amanda Barnes
A new website launch or redesign requires the integration of management and marketing staff, as well as members of your design, content and tech teams. Each of these groups plays an integral role in the site’s overall success. A new or redesigned website will also want to drive traffi...
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Email Marketing
Tips for Formatting HTML Emails in Microsoft Outlook
June 23, 2010 • PEC Staff
Roughly one-third of all email recipients use Microsoft Outlook. But that program famously distorts HTML-formatted emails when other email clients, such as Yahoo!, Gmail, and Thunderbird, render the same email messages differently. The result is that email marketers, such as ecommerce ...
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Social Media
Social Commerce: Shopping Carts Extend Reach Into Facebook, Other Social Sites
June 23, 2010 • Paul Chaney
Editor's Note: This is part two of “Social Commerce Spotlight,” our series on the mix of ecommerce and social media. Part one, "Payvment, a Facebook Storefront Provider," we published previously. With the growth of social commerce, especially on Facebook with its 500 million members, a...
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Social Media
In Social Media Era, Nine Techniques to Improve Conversion Rates
June 21, 2010 • Pamela Hazelton
With the ever-growing popularity of social media, online sweepstakes and contests, just how important is the actual conversion rate of an online store going to be in the future? In simple terms, the conversion rate is a measure of the number of unique visitors (potential customers) tha...
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Social Media
Ecommerce News Around the Web for June 11, 2010
June 11, 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. Shop.org and NRF Weigh in on Boucher Privacy Bill - Shop.org Online privacy is a hot topic these days, both among consumers and in Washington. Con...
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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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