The Internet is swarming with Black Friday promotions and Cyber Monday deals. With the gift-giving season just around the corner, it’s time for e-retailers to let people know ’tis the season of social shopping.
But what about Halloween, President’s Day, Easter… Teacher’s Day?! How can digital internet retailers use social networking to capitalize on these special days?
Promotional Creativity
Social media gives you the ability to take some creative liberties to grab the attention of your audience. Reviews, recommendations and “likes” are a few ways to get consumers to follow your page and make purchases throughout the year. Another way to draw attention to your company is through a creative marketing strategy.
For Halloween, Sears created an original marketing campaign with their Zombie Shopper theme. The company adopted a ‘social shopping’ strategy and embraced the important social media platforms as venues for their tactics. They dedicated a Twitter account to help customers shop and even went the extra mile with a “Fitness for Zombies” video.
This campy video is not only entertaining, but it successfully markets Sears merchandise in a funny and engaging manner. Tying YouTube videos, landing pages and Twitter accounts into a single marketing strategy for special days is a great way to impress your audience and make you unforgettable. Read the rest of this entry »
Gartner is a well-known industry analyst firm with offices around the globe. Each year, they publish dozens of research reports, called Magic Quadrants, that cover the vendor landscape for a particular industry, such as web content management or social CRM.
Each Magic Quadrant identifies companies within that specific field as leaders, challengers, visionaries, or niche players. These designations are based on those companies’ “completeness of vision” and “ability to execute”. People use the Magic Quadrant as a benchmark and an input for making decisions about their e-commerce needs.
Once a year, Gartner publishes the Magic Quadrant for E-commerce that covers a topic near and dear to this blogger’s heart and it is that time again for 2011!
cleverbridge is currently offering this report, valued at $5,000, as a free download. Learn how Gartner views the e-commerce market by downloading your copy today.
When was the last time you reviewed your business performance in a period of time shorter than one year? With looming deadlines and new product releases on the horizon, it is increasingly difficult to fit monthly, or even quarterly reviews into our busy schedules.
But reviewing your business’ monthly or even quarterly performance is one of the most important ingredients for improving business performance. And who doesn’t want to improve business performance?
Surprisingly, many companies, large and small, do not actually conduct monthly or quarterly review meetings. When they do, the meetings are disorganized and unfocused.
In this post, we provide some effective ways to not only prepare and schedule a review meeting, but also how to properly conduct one.
Preparing for Review Meetings
The first step in measuring performance is deciding which metrics to review. Don’t try to review every little detail of the company or department; it is impossible and counterproductive.
A recommended range is between five and ten crucial metrics that you see as key performance indicators (KPIs). This number is manageable, and after a few review meetings, you may decide to change some of the metrics as the business shifts or opens up to new market opportunities.
Your KPIs define how your company measures success. Once they are chosen, it is time to set goals for the KPIs. To ensure that your goals are relevant, make them correspond to the SMART method. That means that your goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-based.
As a company that globally sells software online, you want to think beyond traditional “revenue” and “units sold” measurements. For example, don’t just say, “I want to increase conversion rates.” It is not specific enough. Instead, say, “I want to increase conversion rates in under-performing regions next quarter.” Read the rest of this entry »
