Fall is in the air and Black Friday is a little over a month away. Your prospects and customers are hunting for the best holiday season deals for their family and friends. That means big business if you sell software online.
This month’s ecommerce digest begins with a number of suggestion for approaching holiday season ecommerce, and continues with general business advice that helps you drive revenue and puts your overall business performance in perspective.
Holiday Season Ecommerce
5 Ideas to Make This Your Most Profitable Holiday Season Yet | ConstantContact
According to the National Retail Federation, online sales for November and December this year are expected to grow 8-11 percent. eMarketer places this number for U.S. retail holiday season ecommerce at $72 billion. Software manufacturers can position themselves as a great option for last minute gifts since digital distribution bypasses the wait for shipping.
Infographic provided by National Retail Federation
Reducing Cart Abandonment
Reducing Abandoned Shopping Carts In Ecommerce | Smashing Magazine
If the goal of your online store is to increase customer acquisition and customer lifetime value then cart abandonment is one of your biggest obstacles. Still, more than two out of every three of the visitors to your site who populate a shopping cart will not complete the order or submit payment. This post from Smashing Magazine offers excellent suggestions for keeping the customer in the cart in the first place, and for getting them back to the cart once they have left it.
Software Piracy and Infringing Use
Who Knew? MPAA Concerned Online Pirates are Exposed to Malware | Ars Technica
Anyone who sells digitally distributed software tends to hate pirates. But, as we’ve stated time and again, software piracy is also a useful form of marketing. Creative messaging is all about educating infringing users about the benefits and drawbacks of using pirated software. Read this piece from Ars Technica and think about how you might utilize the danger of malware to persuade infringing users to become paying customers.
B2B Lead Generation
Why Email is no Longer the Workhorse of Lead Nurturing | Bizo
Without paying customers you have no business and without leads you have no paying customers. Though email is the tried and true method of communicating real time and personalized messages for B2C buyers, the path toward B2B transactions is longer and more circuitous. This post from Bizo stresses the need for B2B companies to understand that you don’t, and never will, have the vast majority of your potential leads’ email addresses. It behooves B2B software marketers to consider how they can use multichannel engagement to nurture propects into leads and leads into sales.
Business Management
Google Aims for “Faster, Better Decisions” | Wall Street Journal
This Wall Street Journal blog post focuses on a memo issued by Larry Page to Google employees. It teaches an important lesson for all businesses, especially those in the tech and software space. Innovation and disruption spread like wildfire in these industries, and those who want to keep up will need to figure out how to avoid the decline of the product life-cycle. According to Page, allowing empowered employees to make faster and better decisions facilitates product innovation, which in turn allows companies to stay competitive in their market.
