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-
Marketing & Advertising
Quick Query: SocialGrub Founder on Social Media Tools
December 7, 2009 • PEC Staff
Social media has become mainstream and businesses are increasingly turning to it to interact with their customers and boost the company bottom line. SocialGrub is a new service that brings social marketing tools to the restaurant and retail industry. For this "Quick Query" we spoke wi...
-
Marketing & Advertising
Social Media Marketing: Four Steps for Getting Started
November 24, 2009 • Lawrence Cramer
Let’s take a moment to map out a cheap and effective social media strategy. Understand that cheap does not mean easy. This will take a dedicated effort and a lot of hours. But those hours could be more valuable than a high-priced advertising campaign. Step One: Commit Yourself to Co...
-
Email & Text Marketing
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 & Text 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 sites ...
-
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 & Text 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 & Text 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 & Text 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 & Text 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 ...
-
Email & Text Marketing
Quick Query: MailChimp CEO on Email Strategy
March 23, 2009 • PEC Staff
Many ecommerce merchants rely on email newsletters and email marketing to drive sales, but the success of those email campaigns varies. There are frequently issues related to open rates, click-through rates and even deliverability of the email itself. To offer insight and suggestions on...
ChatGPT Shopping Is Coming
Get Your Products on ChatGPT Shopping
Why Your Loyalty Program Isn’t Working
SMB Ads Unchanged by Google Antitrust Ruling
New Ecommerce Tools: May 1, 2025
New Ecommerce Tools: April 24, 2025
Drive More ROI from Meta and Google Ads