I hope your year started off well, with lots of conversions and completed checkout processes. To help those individuals and teams responsible for generating ecommerce revenue, we spent this month sharing knowledge and understanding for improving your performance. We focused on the importance of the customer experience and proactively managing your customer relationships; Google’s policy on unwanted software; and the importance of protecting all your data assets.
For this year’s January Ecommerce Digest, we’ve curated some informative blog posts centered on content marketing, different traffic sources, compliance management and how to appeal to consumers in Canada.
Content Marketing
Getting Started With Content Marketing | HubSpot
This blog post addresses a key concern of online businesses everywhere: how to stand out from the competition and generate leads for one’s business. Content marketing is increasingly seen as an effective medium for achieving both of those goals. With content marketing, you’re not just explaining your product features, or even that your business is an expert in its field. Compelling content marketing actually educates and assists your audience. It is a an excellent way to start conversations with prospects and those whose business you are trying to retain. With the advances in semantic search capabilities, content marketing is also an investment in SEO which increases the chances of prospective buyers finding your site.
This blog post teaches us nine important lessons that the author gained on the way to using content marketing to generate market qualified leads (MQL).
Traffic Sources
7 Ways to Get Traffic and Leads When Google Won’t Send Them | Moz
Though the YouMoz blog usually features content about SEO and improving your results on search engines, this post atypically, but helpfully, offers us guidance on generating traffic from channels other than search. As a follow up to the previous entry that discussed some of the why and how of content marketing, this post emphasizes using your content to generate traffic through social media, affiliate marketing, and incredibly, iTunes.
PCI and Compliance Management
Maintaining PCI Compliance a Showstopper for Many Retailers | Verizon
“Of all the data breaches studied, Verizon’s findings clearly show that not a single company was fully PCI-compliant at the time of the breach.” – Verizon’s PCI Report
A new PCI report from Verizon divulges two startling pieces of information. The first is that not one company named in the report who experienced a data breach was PCI compliant: In fact, according to the report, less than one third of companies maintain their PCI compliance for an entire year. And, as we noted in an earlier blog post, PCI standards alone are not enough to protect all of your information assets from illicit exposure.
Canadian Customer Experiences
Brand Loyalty, Trust Keys to Canadian Consumers
This post sheds some light on the concerns of Canadian consumers. It explains that while consumers in the U.S. are typically motivated by finding the best deal, their neighbors to the north are more concerned with finding the best relationship. And this understanding ties in very well with a focus on providing better customer experiences. The goal then, is not to focus on mere transactions, but on your customers’ needs as a whole.
For further advice on improving your ecommerce performance check out our Six Guides on Ecommerce Essentials
