Another one of the buzzwords that gets thrown around quite a bit is “social commerce.” Like most of these buzzwords, the practice itself isn’t necessarily new. People have been using socializing to sell things since they first started trading. But new tools have allowed companies to extend socializing to bring much more value to their customers (and their bottom line). Let’s take a look at what social commerce means with today’s tools and marketplace.
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Jan
13
2011
Using Social Media to Understand Your Customers
On the flip side of yesterday’s post, Why Understanding Your Customers is Vital to Your Social Media Strategy, social media can also be an extremely powerful tool for understanding your customers. Before the wide-spread use of social media, companies would have to spend thousands of dollars on having market research, surveys, studies, etc. done so they could understand what their customers wanted and were willing to pay for. This pretty much left any type of customer or market research in the hands of large companies who could afford to pay for the information. With social media you’re able to gather much of this information directly by finding, listening and asking your customers online.
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Sep
14
2010
Why RSS Is Still Important for Your Business
In case you missed it, there’s been some talk lately about whether or not RSS is dead. You may be wondering exactly what RSS is — RSS stands for Really Simply Syndication (sometimes just called a feed) and it’s a method for one website to send out it’s content in a way that other websites and programs can easily read. RSS feeds make it really easy for people to subscribe to your website and get updates via email or RSS readers (such as Google Reader or iGoogle). Whether or not RSS is used directly by people, RSS is still important for your business because it used behind the scenes by many websites, applications and social networks vital to your online presence.
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Aug
12
2010
Is Exit Rate a Useful Metric?
Exit Rate measures how many people left your website from a certain page. It would seem like it would show you where people are exiting from your site so you can fix problems with specific pages. The problem is that everyone who comes to your website has to leave at some point. What if they came, bought something and then left? That’s what you want them to do. Or what if you blog daily and people come to read your latest post and then leave. While you may prefer they spend time on other pages, if they’re loyal readers, they’ve been keeping up with your posts. So is Exit Rate useful? Yes and no. Let’s look at it in more detail…
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Aug
10
2010
Be Ready to Respond if You Ask for Feedback
Engaging customers is all the rage with businesses big or small. Companies are adding communities, comments and reviews to their websites to encourage feedback and conversations. This is all good. However, if you ask for feedback from your customers, be ready to respond when they give it. Not responding is worse than never asking in the first place. [Read more...]
Jun
03
2010
Sazcast Episode 27 – eCommerce & Social Media with Joe Minock from Adrenaline Commerce
eCommerce and social media with guest Joe Minock from Adrenaline Commerce. Ways eCommerce sites can use social media to engage their customers & amplify their brand. Examples of success in using social media to promote an online store.
Oct
08
2009
Why Don’t You Want Customers to Contact You?
Ever done a bunch of research, finally decided to get a product, gone to the website and found the only way to contact them is through a contact form? While eCommerce websites are usually pretty savvy about letting their customers contact them through multiple ways, normal businesses sometimes give off the “go away” vibe unintentionally.
Sep
29
2009
Assigning Value to Actions
Pageviews, visits, unique visitors, followers, etc. are all great ways to measure success online, but what about actions that don’t lead directly to a conversion or lead (but probably will down the line)? How do you measure actions that may lead to something important later, but there’s not a direct connection online? Assigning a value to those actions may help…
Digital Marketing & Strategy
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