ECommerce with Social Media

Introduction
Online retail sales are anticipated to grow 10 percent annually for the next five
years, accounting for 53 percent of all U.S. retail sales by 2014.
- Forrester Research.
Females make up 57.9 percent and males 42.1 percent of internet
users who made any type of purchase online.

Ad spending has reached nearly $450 billion per year and the fastest growth
areas in digital are social media and ecommerce. In 2010, we saw the rise
of flash sale sites, such as HauteLook and Rue La La and the discount site
Groupon.Total advertising spending currently an $449.7 billion per year.
Of the global ad spend, web marketing will rise from 14 to 18 percent in 2013
mostly driven by video and social media.

Males and females almost equally use social sites (47% vs. 53%)
61% of Facebook users are middle aged or older, with the average age being 37
StumbleUpon Drives More Than 50% of Social Media Traffic.
18- to 24-year-olds don’t dominate any particular social networking site,
they’re spread out all over - Stats from Pingdom.


7 Tools for Social Media eCommerce


Twitter & Facebook Updates
Facebook and Twitter dominate the social media space. With their social
networking capabilities at your disposal, you can reach out to fans and
friends in a scope that word-of-mouth advertising could never come close to.

Blog
Blog is an online journal which for business owners can be a powerful tool
to keep your customers “in the loop” about your store’s news and updates.
Use a blog to post news about your upcoming products. Post some ideas
about how your products can be used, or offer your customers updates
about new features within your store. A built-in blog capability lets you
schedule and manage your posts, and provides an industry standard RSS
feed to provide syndication capabilities for your blog.

Facebook Store
You can create a Facebook Fan page for your business, and use it to
advertise your store. Acquire fans to your store and post business specific
updates about your business to them. But why stop there? With a Facebook
Application, you can easily link your online store directly to your Facebook
Fan Page within its own tab. Select which products are displayed, such as
products within a specific category, Home Specials or items “On Sale”.
What’s more, you can empower your affiliates with the ability to create their
own online stores within their Facebook profiles and choose which products
will be displayed.

YouTube Video Integration
Bring your products to life and improve your visitor experience by adding
video footage to your product pages. Product images are important, but
a full motion video of your product can really help you sell it to your
customers. YouTube video integration lets you easily search YouTube
directly from your store’s control panel, select a video – whether it’s
a product review, demonstration or viral commercial – and instantly display
it on your product page.

Social Bookmarking
Visitors to your site may not always buy at that specific moment in time,
but will likely return to your store when they’re ready to purchase. Make
it easy for them to return to their favorite products by adding social
bookmarking to your products. With Social Bookmarking added to
your item listings, your customers can instantly bookmark individual
products to their browsers, email, or even to the popular social sites
like Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg and Twitter at the click of a button.

Facebook “Like” Button
Add a Facebook “Like” button to your products and let your customers
advertise your products for you on their Facebook pages. Their friends
can see this and perhaps take enough of an interest in the item to become
your customer as well.

Embracing Mobile Apps
Mobile phones today are so much more than just phones. In fact, these are
essentially hand-held computers complete with Web browsing capabilities
used by consumers to share products, information and comments with
their friends in real-time. It is important to provide a complete mobile
interface for visitors shopping your site on an iPhone or favorite smartphone
You will want to include optimized pages for Home, Products, Categories,
View Cart and Checkout. That way, visitors can easily browse and add
products to their cart and checkout, all within the Mobile interface.


Five Social Media Tips for Ecommerce Marketing


1. Track Customer Communication Channel
Facebook,Twitter,LinkedIn and YouTube, there’s no limit to the number
of social networking channels available for your business to leverage.
Key to successful social media marketing for ecommerce is choosing the
right channels to reach customers.
Customer Survey: Customer polls can suggest the most prefered social
channel for interaction. Monitoring social sites: Use a free tool like Social
Mention or Trackur. For something far more robust use tools like Radian6
to discover how and where customers are talking about your brand, your
competitors or target keywords.
Leveraging the stats: Some sites like Facebook are transparent when it
comes to user statistics. Or leverage research conducted by third-party
firms like eMarketer.
Revivew: backlinks, job postings, news announcements and keyword
rankings of competitors on a regular basis to get a glimpse into their
online marketing health.

2. Track Competitor 
Whether your ecommerce business is new to social media marketing, or
just need to take your efforts up a notch, competitive intelligence can be very
useful. Spend some time by conducting a competitive audit of your top
five competitors on the social web. Include:
The social sites in which they are active
The type of content they publish on the social web
The number of followers/fans/views they have on each site
How they promote specific products, programs or events via social media

3. Promote Exclusive Offers Through Social Media
In order for your ecommerce business to gain a following on whatever
social channel you choose, entice customers with something they can’t
get anywhere else.
For example, promote a contest via social media in the client’s blog
and Facebook fan page to promote a Halloween contest to name the
best costume. This initiative not only drove additional traffic to the
client’s website, but also helped increase the number of Facebook fans.
Alternately, offer an exclusive item to social media followers or fans, such
as free shipping or a weekly coupon. You can also offer “breaking news”
that does not appear anywhere else, like pre-product release announcements
or an inside look at your company’s inter-workings.

4. Don’t Just Push Products and Promotions
The primary goal of your ecommerce site may be to sell products, but
your social media marketing strategy should encompass a wider range
of tactics that simply promoting offerings. With too much product pushing
and not enough engagement, you’re unlikely to experience optimal success.
Incorporate some of these ideas into your ecommerce social media
marketing strategy:
Share messages or news stories from external sources
Create a blog on your website and feed blog content to your social accounts
Ask questions, participate in discussions or poll your customers via social
media. Post pictures from company events or videos from your CEO’s
speaking engagements

5. Introduce Social Media Outlets
1-800-Flowers first ecommerce site to launch a Facebook store, allowing
customers to browse and purchase its products directly through Facebook
and JC Penny maximizes the use of social media for its marketing efforts.
1-800-Flowers may be an extreme case, but ecommerce sites large and
small can still indirectly sell products through their social profiles.
There are plenty of third party facebook applications for promoting
facebook ecommerce.
For example:
Best Buy provides a link to the order page on your website. It may not
be quite as simple as purchasing directly from the social profile, but it can
be just as effective.

Conclusion

If you aren’t discovering which in social networking channels your customers

spend time and include them in your ecommerce marketing mix, you’re
probably missing out on building relationships, community and increasing
new customer acquisition through online word of mouth.

Social media is the best environment where the ecommerce customer relationship thrives best.

References

1. http://smallbiztechnology.com/archive/2010/06/7-tools-for-social-media-ecomm.html/

2. http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/812-Employing-Social-Media

3. http://sparxoo.com/2011/02/02/ecommerce-social-media-stats/

4. http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/03/ecommerce-marketing-social-media-tips/

Email Marketing

What is Email Marketing
Email marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as
a means of communicating commercial or fund-raising messages to an
audience. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current
customer could be considered email marketing

Why Email Marketing
Almost all basic business communications are done via email not via social
networks. The perception is that it’s more secure, private and user friendly
(centralized contacts, integrates with calendar, easily accessible via mobile
devices). Another benefit of email is that it’s a direct private channel of
communication to alert customers on new product offerings or promotions.
At the same time, customers can use e-mail to provide feedback and
ask questions.


Essential Characteristics of Email Marketing.
• Legitimate mailing list.
Do not send spam. Spam is illegal in some parts of the world. In the US it
is illegal under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. Never buy or rent mailing
lists even if they are touted as "opt-in." A purchased email list is never
opt-in; it is always a spam list. If you send spam, you will be reported,
blocked by ISPs, harassed by SpamCop, blacklisted. Not only your email
address but your whole domain may find itself on blacklists and blocklists,
which can' be good for your SEO either. If you are on a shared IP address,
other users will suffer too.

• SignUp for Customers.
Create a signup center on your site, visible from all pages. You can also
use other techniques to get people to sign up. For example, take them to the
signup page when they click on "Lean more" information links. Or create
pop-ups inviting them to sign-up once they have posted a blog comment.
Always let them know that you won't share their information (and be true
to your promise).

• Email Policies
Always include your company’s physical address in each email message.
(This is required by the CAN-SPAM Act.)
Always include an easy unsubscribe option, preferably via a live link.
(This also honors the CAN-SPAM Act).
Include a prominent FTAF ("forward to a friend") link.
Creating valid HTML email newsletters and announcements with a
canonical link element may help marketers boost search engine optimization.

• Email Automation
Sequence and automate your email marketing campaigns with autoresponders.
Most email marketing software today supports schedulers and event-triggered
autoresponders. This is a big subject that can be researched independently.

• Email Delivery Tracking
Track delivery and open rates. The best email marketing applications today
have this ability. You will know how many of your messages bounced,
how many ended up in a junk folder, how many made it into the inbox,
how many were opened, and how many had the links in them followed
to your website.

• SMTP Options
Invest in a good SMTP (email delivery) service, don't just send via your
regular email provider. Such a service can provide you with a dedicated
email server and IP, scale and monitor your email campaigns, authenticate
your emails and perform reputation management for you, including dealing
with spam reports, ISP blocks and blacklistings (they call this black list
resolution).


Email Marketing Timing and Tips
• Provide advance notice
If you're sending out your Midnight Madness Sale email at lunchtime on
the date of the event you can expect that the majority of subscribers
may not even get to read it, let alone act on it, before it's all over.
You might not want to tip your hand to your competitors about special
sales, but the deepest discounts won't move merchandise
if your customers don't have a chance to shop before it's history.

• Specify dates & times – "Special offer today only…" and exactly when
 is "today"? Thursday March 23rd Only may not sound as marketing
-zingy as Today, but it's going to be more understandable to your readers,
especially the ones that don't read their emails every 8.3 seconds.
Remember that some of your customers may see your email appear on
their smartphones but may not open it until days later at their desktop or laptop
computers.

• Include the time zone
An inordinate number of email marketers feel that their city is the center of
the universe and that subscribers should not only be able to be prominently
aware of where the company's office is, but should also be able to
instinctively calculate the difference to their own time zone when responding
to time-specific offers.Keep in mind that 10 am in Greenville, Massachusetts
is 9 am in Greenville, Iowa; 8 am in Greenville, Colorado; 7 am in Greenville,
California; and 6 am in Greenville, Alaska.

• Track the delivery time
Not all ISPs deliver emails in nanoseconds, so you may find that while your
Gmail customers are swiftly receiving their newsletters, the Hotmail addresses
lag hours behind or vice versa. The variable delay situation is aggravated
should you be rash enough to dare to place an attachment with your emails
in which case some may disappear outright.
A good practice is to set up a number of seed email addresses with major
ISPs which you can use to determine the best- and worst-case delivery
scenarios for each and accordingly adjust your send times.

• Send at the time that they usually respond
You can track your response rate by time and thus understand the dayparts
where your customers may be more likely to respond.
By analyzing the timing data to group individuals who habitually open
and/or click at specific dates and times such "weekdays between 1 pm
and 4 pm" or "Saturdays between 9 am and noon" will allow you to optimize
your sending timing to that specific category of email subscriber.

• Don't send trigger based reminders
That friendly little reminder to ask
why they didn't open your email is a fast track one way ticket to
unsubscription or even worse, a spam folder relegation.
When your subscriber entered their desired frequency in your
preference center, they expected to have your emails land in their
inbox at the specified periodical level. Violating their expressed desires
will disembowel your subscription list.


References:

1. http://seoforums.org/seo-questions-answers/2444-email-marketing-search-engine-optimization.html
2. http://www.designdamage.com/how-to-integrate-email-marketing-seo-and-social-media/
3. http://www.practicalecommerce.com/blogs/post/867-The-Top-7-Ways-To-Master-Email-Marketing-Timing
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_marketing

Electronic Commerce

Electronic commerce (e-commerce) is the use of computers and telecommunication
technologies to share business information, maintain business relationships, and conduct
business transactions. Its origin can be traced back to the Electronic Data Interchange 
(EDI) activity in the 1960's. EDI refers to the set of activities that are related to the 
electronic facilitation of the transactions between vendors and buyers (purchase orders,
waybills, manifests and schedules). Currently, e-commerce depends mostly on the 
Internet as the underlying platform. Business transactions are events that serve the 
mission of a business.A transaction provides the primary medium by which a business 
interacts with its suppliers, customers, partners, employees, and the government. 
Transactions are significant because they capture and/or create data about and
 for businesses (Whitten & Bently, 1997). Examples of transactions include purchases, 
orders, sales, reservations, shipments, invoices, and payment processing.


E-commerce began in the 1990's and was largely driven by the invention of the
World Wide Web. The adoption of e-commerce has led to many new 
business models.The most important models of e-commerce are business-
to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer(B2C), and consumer-to-consumer (C2C).
C2C e-commerce refers to the use of the Internet by consumers to provide
goods and information to other consumers it offers an effective way to 
exchange goods and information between consumers. B2C ecommerce
mostly refers to the use of the Internet by a business to provide goods 
and services to customers; it offers consumers a fast and efficient way
to access various products and services from retailers all over the world
without leaving home. B2B ecommerce refers to the use of the Internet
between businesses to order products, receive invoices, and make payments;
it reduces production costs, accelerates ordering processes, and improves
inventory management. By exploiting efficiency, economy, and speed of 
the Internet, e-commerce simplifies and reduces the cost of processes
involved in business transactions.


References
International Journal of Information Science and Management