As we close out 2014, we’re directing you to some of our favorite ecommerce related publications. Like this blog, these sites and their attendant posts exist to help you improve your ecommerce performance. Read on to gain the knowledge and understanding you need to make 2015 an even better year for your ecommerce.
For our favorite posts and infographics of 2014, click here and here.
Email Marketing
Publishers Struggle With Email Marketing Basics | eMarketer
If you create content to promote your brand, then you are a publisher. In some form or another, this definition places most online businesses in the publisher category. Email marketing is good for promoting your content, driving revenue and improving brand awareness. But it’s not always so easy to be successful. According to eMarketer, the top challenges for email marketers are:
- List growth
- Personalization
- List maintenance
- Mobile optimization
- Analytics
- Segmentation
These challenges are interdependent: Without segmentation and list maintenance you’re not going to have good analytics, and without mobile optimization you’re not going to be able to personalize content. If list growth is your biggest challenge you definitely want to focus on your plans for creating content and distributing it.
Pricing Strategy
There’s no Such Thing as One Right Price in Retail | Econsultancy
Your pricing strategy determines your income, and so, has the ability to vitalize or kill your business. This post on Econsultancy stresses that B2C companies should know how to maximize revenue through dynamic pricing, which is a way for retail businesses to automatically display different prices for different consumers at different times.
Localization
Don’t Get Lost In Translation: How To Conduct Website Localization | Smashing Magazine
We have long encouraged those who sell software online to consider the impact of global expansion on their bottom line. Of course, if you decide to enter new markets, then you must adapt your checkout process (including text, prices, currencies, payment methods and form fields) to that new market. This post gives an excellent overview of the ins-and-outs of doing so.
Affiliate Marketing
Five Simple Tactics to Boost Last Minute Christmas Sales in Affiliate Marketing | PerformanceIN
While it’s too late to cash in on these suggestions this year, now is the time to start thinking how you can take advantage of all the ecommerce bonanzas that are sure to abound next year. This post examines how ecommerce marketers can work with their affiliates not only to plan for year-end success, but can also change their marketing approach based on useful reporting. Our audience will be especially interested in the subheading “Go digital.”
Sales Tax
Could the Sales Tax Loophole Debate Revive Over Alibaba? | RetailDive
This is a new blog that I came across through an email I received from a LinkedIn group chat discussion. We’ve been covering the sales tax issue for several years now, and the story is quite compelling: A victim-turned-oppressor in the form of Amazon first fighting to keep online shopping tax free and then turning its back on less dominant comrades. Of course, now the battle of giants is occurring between Amazon and Alibaba who has taken on the role previously held by Amazon.
Well, that’s it for 2014. We hope you had a successful year that yielded a bounty of conversions, high average order values, and increased profits, and we hope that we had a small part in helping you accomplish that success. All the best in 2015. See you next year!
