Another year come and gone and the e-commerce world continues to expand.
2011 saw the untimely and much mourned death of Steve Jobs, a new congressional bill called SOPA stirred up vigorous debate about the future of the internet, Netflix spent the year running around like a chicken with its head cut off and of course, you can’t step anywhere anymore with hearing about the rise of mobile and cloud computing.
Here at Building Keystones, we want to end the year with a look at some of our top posts and reflect on the eclectic e-commerce tips and tricks we spent our year investigating:
Yes! You Need A Facebook Strategy Now – Everyone from Lady Gaga to 1-800-Flowers are sporting Facebook stores. This post highlights the reasons why companies in the digital product space need to seriously consider developing their presence on various social media networks and how doing so affects their customer relations.
How Do You Handle Subscription Renewals? – With the maturation of SaaS products, digital content paywalls and downloadable software products, there is even more demand for improved multi-period subscription billing. So how do you handle subscription renewals?
Four Tips For Increasing E-mail Deliverability – As we noted in last week’s post, e-mail is far from dead. Check out this post from earlier in the year and make sure your email marketing campaigns are as effective as they can be. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under Customer Service, Email Marketing, Facebook corporate strategy, SaaS, subscription billing
The continued triumph of email over the past twelve months is forcing us to revisit our email marketing strategies for 2012. In this post, we highlight the top trends in email marketing and what they mean for your email program.
Email is Dead. Not!
Despite the hullabaloo last year about how Mark Zuckerberg supposedly declared the death of email (he never really did), setting up email campaigns is still one of the more mature strategies in online marketing. But as advancements in technology progress, we continue developing new ways to view email. More importantly, as online marketing trends come and go, email proves its staying power by being accessible at any time.
In a blog post called Three Mistakes To Avoid In Email Newsletters, we talked about the importance of relevancy; knowing how your subscribers are reading your emails is just as important as the content you provide. With the rise in popularity of iPads and sundry tablets, your emails must adapt to a format that didn’t exist a couple of years ago. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under Email Marketing, HTML5, is email dead?, mobile email, Return Path
Fraud prevention has always been an important part of the strategy of any e-business, but simply preventing as much fraud as possibly may be detrimental to your bottom line and your customers’ satisfaction.
We all know the obvious cost of fraud: A payment is processed, the product is delivered and the charge is disputed. However, maximizing accepted orders is just as important as minimizing fraud. If you only have your eye on minimizing fraud you may be leaving a lot of money on the table.
There are also other hidden costs to anti-fraud such as the cost of anti-fraud employees, the cost of decreased customer satisfaction by delaying orders in manual review (especially if they expect instant electronic delivery), the cost of rejecting a valid customer who seems suspicious but is in fact valid, and the direct and indirect costs of lost chargebacks.
This can be particularly insidious, because rates over 1% can result in large fines from Visa or Mastercard in the short term, and lost merchant accounts in the long term.
Different Anti-Fraud Strategies for Different Delivery Methods
Fraudulent orders for physically delivered products incur additional costs associated with the loss of the product and the price of shipping, along with the somewhat higher tendency towards “friendly fraud” (customers claiming the product never arrived in the mail).
This leads to the next important point: creating an anti-fraud strategy to minimize cost and maximize revenue depends on the type of product you sell. Products delivered electronically tend to have different fraud than products delivered physically. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under Anti-Fraud Tactics, e-commerce Fraud, False Positives, Fraud Prevention
