E-commerce Growth Engagement & Marketing

Giving your company’s online presence a modern upgrade is more than just a nice-to-have, it’s an absolute necessity.

As today’s technology advances to meet consumer expectations, the most successful companies are rising to the challenge with high-performing websites that go beyond merely establishing a web-based property.

Managing content used to be fairly straightforward. Write the content, post it on your website, add it to another one or two websites, maybe send out an email notice about it, and you’re done. Multi-channel content management wasn’t on anyone’s mind.

If you're not using social media as part of your company's marketing efforts, then you're not marketing as effectively as you could be. And this could be frittering away your marketing budget.

In this digital age, social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ provide a way for you to boost brand awareness, reach out to a critical mass of customers and potential clients, and increase site traffic on your e-commerce site. But you first need a good plan to use social media as a marketing tool -- and that includes understanding how to measure ROI.

Bundling and kitting products is a great idea on a number of levels. Kitting (aka “bundling”) is the grouping/pairing, packaging, and marketing of separate but related, complimentary, and compatible products for sale or presentation as one unit. Multiple products are sold as an individual SKU. “Kitting” and “bundling” are interchangeable terms in this context.

Companies, merchants, and promotional teams love product bundling because it just makes their job easier, it makes them more effective, expands choices, makes their customers happy, and is a powerful tool for moving merchandise and increasing revenue.

Maybe you’ve heard of Snapchat.  It’s an app that allows users to send photos and short videos to other users – but after a limited amount of time, the material vanishes.  This feature made Snapchat notorious especially among teens, who found it easier to get away with sexting and bullying when the evidence disappeared. But Snapchat’s demographic is widening. Now moms love it too, and pretty much any female between the ages of 18 and 35.

In today’s business world personalizing web-based content, and its delivery, to meet each user’s needs is a competitive imperative for online enterprises. To be most effective, information should be tailored to individual users’ preferences and status, including the type of device they use.

Adrecom’s CMS Suite delivers the solutions you need to design and implement highly effective personalization techniques that offer tailor-made environments to visitors. By offering dynamic content that varies with user behavior, choices, status, and needs, you dramatically enhance your website’s utility, magnetism, and user comfort levels—which, of course, translates into higher conversion rates.

Nearly all products have options of some type or another and presenting them clearly is of great benefit to businesses.  I look at the benefits of how product variations can improve your business and make your customers happy.

A cosmetics website has many products, while each product has a number of color or shade options. The user interface was designed to feature color swatches related to the product. The product variations here allows the e-commerce and purchasing process to be simplified. The customer doesn't have to see the same product multiple times with the different colors but rather see a clear presentation of the products with its options. This example illustrates how product integration can improve navigation on the page and search results throughout the site.  This simplified presentation with the improved user experience leads to an improvement in the revenue stream.

The internet has created a number of social media and review sites that play a very important role in decision making and forming opinions about a complete range of products and services. 25% of search results are made up of these review and UGC orientated sites making them very powerful.  As various reports have shown gen-Y or millennials, following the baby boomers, constitute a major part of purchases and internet activity. They are group orientated buyers, primarily because they have been influenced by their baby boomer parents who have similar characteristics. 73% of millennials said that consumers care more about customers reviews than businesses does.  That clearly presents the power of UGC.

With sales of mobile devices increasing significantly over the years, users have incorporated their mobile devices to search for information and buy things, which has increased tremendously. 46% of Americans said that a mobile device is their primary way of accessing the Web and 2014. Ecommerce doubled from 2012 to 2013 with 2014 likely to continue. These figures show how important it is  for businesses to consider which mobile solution work for them and more importantly their customers.

Whatever type of mobile solution you choose, there are great services that bring great value to your mobile solution. Firstly you have the ability find out where your users are and provide services that are relevant according to their location. This is probably the most exciting added value for your application if it’s a native app or responsive website, it can really help you bring a great service to your customers. Others use the camera and the fact at the end of the day you have a phone that can access information with touch capabilities so you can make it easy to contact customer support.

Businesses have a website to communicate with customers online, best practices dictate that businesses further develop smaller mini sites along side their main site to reach a particular segment of the market that might be defined by language or a particular interest.  Without the necessary planning, businesses can find themselves without suitable website management. Each site might use different infrastructure making it costly to manage minimizing the effectiveness of the overall presence online and particularly each individual website. With the development of a full service, unified backend you can manage the full range of websites and a smooth transition to a mobile presence and complex marketing strategies.

As appealing as social media sites are to basic users, they’ll always be more appealing to advertisers and brands looking to increase reach and response. That’s because social networks are driven by advertising dollars and are thus constructed to be ad-friendly places, wherein a little bit of marketing really does go a long way.

That being said, though, it’s still important to realize that social media marketing isn’t necessarily an easy thing to do. There are many different hurdles out there to jump and a slew of different problems which may trip you up. So before you launch any type of marketing strategy, you should always sit down and take a closer look at what it is you’re trying to accomplish. Start by asking yourself some important questions related to social marketing.

In the world of developer’s and consultants supplying software to commercial clients, there have always been core issues which dictate the choice of one software solution over another. In the world of website development — more specifically eCommerce — the “core issues” which were once so numerous have now taken on a new wavelength - that of the open vs closed source software solution. What this article will set out to accomplish is to convey a more current understanding of the choices clients are evaluating and see if there is a 3^rd alternative that can bridge the gap between the poles of what is currently seen as the only two choices.

So you finally got promoted within your family owned business to take on the reigns of bringing your company's online web presence into the 21st century. If your company's experience is similar to many other businesses in its space - especially the manufacturing space - the odds are reasonable that you are sitting on what we call a "me too" website - just enough to complement your brand and logo and give people a way to connect with you but not much more. Considering our more than a decade of experience in managing companies' online web presence, the following is a summary of our step-by-step guide to designing a new high functioning b2b ecommerce site and moving beyond a simplistic brochure ware type of website. Read on as we dissect the challenge and give you some simple steps to look like a hero in a short amount of time.

Big brands like Pepsi and McDonald’s, with tangible products and live locations, certainly aren’t the only companies out there benefiting from social media sites like Facebook. Ecommerce businesses are also doing quite well with Facebook.

Of course, ecommerce is unique in the sense that the transactions are taking place solely online, but once you break it down, you realize that it’s really an even playing field. Nobody is able to sell their products directly from a fan page; everybody is simply attempting to build awareness to boost their brand with the ultimate goal of increasing sales. And, yes, your ecommerce business can benefit from this too.

Offering customers the ability to configure and personalize products is an increasingly feasible and successful way to bolster sales. And it’s very popular among buyers — especially amid today’s “express-your-uniqueness” consumer mindset.

eCommerce platforms can now be designed to include product “Configurators”, which allow customers to define many features of a product before ordering it, and before it’s made. No longer is it just a few basic choices, but high-level, true customization and personalization to fit one’s personal style and taste. Color, material, size, measurements, inscriptions and insignia, finishes, embroidered text, monograms, graphics and logos are just a few of the countless variables that customers can specify when ordering a product.