Welcome to our weekly round-up of E-commerce marketing, web design, and development goodness from around the web! This week we’re featuring articles from 3 of the biggest names in E-commerce: Shopify, WooThemes, and BigCommerce. We’ve also included the low-down on Facebook’s newest feature for brand’s publishing content – Instant Articles.
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Designing the New Customer Experience: What Happens After Checkout?
By Tommy Walker – As E-commerce marketing experts, we talk a lot about customer experience, what that actually means, and how we can improve it to increase online sales. Unfortunately, too many marketers and E-commerce owners think that their job is over once a customer has made a purchase. In his latest post, Shopify’s Tommy Walker explains how E-commerce shops can turn new buyers into repeat customers by making a simple choice between:
a) Have a run of the mill purchase experience just like everyone else… or
b) Blow their freaking mind with how you pay attention to all the little details and make buying a fun, on brand experience.
How Personalized Product Recommendations Work
By Nicole Kohler – Most major E-commerce platforms offer some type of automated product recommendation functionality, but not every online retailer is taking full advantage of this feature. That’s a BIG mistake. As Nicole points out in her post on the WooThemes blog, the benefits of setting up automated, personalized product recommendations include:
- Eliminates the guesswork of assigning recommended products.
- Recommendations are made based on customer views and purchases, rather than assumptions.
- Has a high potential to increase order sizes and overall revenue.
3 Essential Email Workflows Every Ecommerce Company Needs to Utilize
By Susannah Morris – Despite the lingering perception that email marketing is an ‘old school’ tactic, it still works. Really well, in fact. According to the Direct Marketing Association, every $1 spent on email marketing has an average return of $45 to $51. Add in the fact that there over 3 billion email account in existence today, and you can see that the numbers make sense.
Even with those favorable numbers, the ‘spray and pray’ method is unlikely to deliver the type of returns E-commerce owners expect, and might even get them flagged for SPAM. Instead, create a well-thought email marketing strategy that includes workflows like the three outlined by Susannah Morris at BigCommerce. According to Morris, the goal of these email workflows is to “produce personalized email messages that address specific circumstances, and they do it without needing any manual trigger.” Sounds good to us!
7 Things You Need to Know About Facebook Instant Articles
By Joe Lazauskas – If you haven’t heard about Facebook’s latest offering, Instant Articles, here’s a quick rundown: in an effort to decrease article load time on mobile devices and bring richer, more engaging content experiences to mobile users, Facebook created Instant Articles. They’ve teamed up with 9 of the largest brands in online publishing – including BuzzFeed, NBC News National Geographic, and The BBC – to get Instant Articles launched and placed in Facebook user’s news feeds.
Below is a quick preview of how the new interactive Instant Articles look on the iPhone. Pretty impressive.
So what does all of this mean for E-commerce store owners? Contently’s Joe Lazauskas lays out 7 things you should know about Instant Articles, and what they might mean for future content marketing efforts for brands looking to connect with their target audience on Facebook.