Phantom Revenue
Secrets To Recover E-Commerce Revenue is a free webinar on Tuesday, March 29th with experts from Curagami, Exinent and eBound Hosting.
Want to discover your ghost in the machine? Join us!
Simple E-commerce Stories - How To Tell Them shares storytelling secrets such as how details create trust & why a little romance in About copy is good.
Google is allowing brands and celebrities to add content directly into search. Google's test combines "internal" and "external" searches into a powerful "branded search" result.
Five Penguin SEO Problem Recovery Steps is a summary of creative steps you to take when your website's traffic gets hammered by seo problems.
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Creative Steps to SEO Recovery
We didn't want to share the same 5 steps everyone shares. Getting titles, anchor text and body copy aligned is important to recover from a SEO shock, but we wanted to share 5 steps you may not be thinking about such as:
* Increase your PPC buy
* Email more frequently
* Use Google's disavow tool
* Write an App
* Strengthen email subscription and build community
What about you? What creative steps have you taken to recover from a SEO drubbing?
Community Is New Affiliate Marketing because smartphones & content shock killed the old model. We buy from brands we love & love those who love us back.
IBM Watson APIs is about how the future comes to everyone. Can IBM Watson save our predictive analytics future? Maybe
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Can IBM Help SMBs?
IBM isn't the first name that snaps to mind when we think about helping Small To Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs). But IBM has opened their Watson APIs (Application Program Interfaces), and that may help our online merchants not starve as they live next to the largest grocery store in the world (the Internet).
Opening up those APIs was smart. Now the question is can we model a predictive community / commerce future to identify intent, aspirations and...well everything.
The post we shared on Curagami explains how our Community In A Box (http://www.curagami.com/community-in-a-box/ ) quickly leads to starving living next to a grocery store. 100 Ambassadors sharing User Generated Content (UGC) every three days and we get 73,000 pieces of data. Small numbers become BIG NUMBERS fast in our world.
If all of that sounds like we must have a predictive analytics engine funny that is what we were thinking too. Will report back on our work with IBM's APIs.
You might have heard the old sales saying, "Buyers are liars." Are buyers liars or is something else going on? Let's get to the bottom of this issue.
Martin (Marty) Smith:
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Buyers and Sellers
We agree with @Cendrine Marrouat - https://www.cendrinemedia.com. Neither buyers who have a tendency to walk differently than they talk nor sellers who talk differently than they walk are "liars".
How we see the world is contextual and instinctual. In some context I'm a buyer, at other times I sell. I think of myself as a marketer so my self-definition falls more in the "sales" category than buyer.
Cendrine's cal for "walking in the others' shoes" empathy is smart and rare. We tend to see the world filtered bubbled (see Eli Pariser's TED Talk on filter bubbles). It's no mistake our preconceived notions are confirmed over and over again.
This "auto-confirmation" built over time and "muscle memory" mean Martin as "seller" may appear dissonant to buyer persona X. Buyer persona X has as many auto-confirmations running as I do with one very big difference. Where my auto-confirmations are all about seeing myself as a sales / marketing person Buyer X's world is confirmed as BUYER.
Not to play the same broken record, but creating online community is the best way we know to create an "empathy bridge" between "buyer " and "seller" personas. Community features such as profiles, forums, comments, reviews and loyalty programs with social kudos make it easy to form "like me" tribes, establish "us" vs "them" identities and reinforce brand aligned and wanted behavior such a social shares.
No one is a liar. Everyone is telling their "truth" and smart web developers build in community to build "empathy bridges".
VR Inside The Dali Store
Watching Goodby Silverstein & Partners’ brilliant retelling of the Salvador Dali experience via virtual reality (VR) should have every e-commerce team reading this email sitting up, paying more attention and wondering what is it for them to start thinking about vr, experiences and the future of a new kind of online commerce.
Marty Note - Improving Site Load Times
Let's say you own and manage a $3,000,000 website. You spend 5% of your site's top line to market on Google, with emails and content. Your $150,000 marketing budget pays for team members and vendors.
Your muliti-channel site is cooking along, but you notice customer complaints increase mysteriously on Tuesdays. Tuesdays is also when you drop emails to your 50,000 subscribers. See the problem?
Ecommerce merchants can contribute to one of their biggest illnesses as the Kissmetrics infographic on the link shares - slow load times. Lack of speed kills SEO, community and your website if you aren't careful, very careful. Ways you can slow down your website:
* Dump emails in too big a cluster * Use your production admin UI during sales times * Don't use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) * OR Misconfigure your CDN * Huge images (less of an issue with cloud by why tempt fate) * Bad code * Too many addons, plugins and doodads haning off your blog or website every additional thing adds TIME so ask is it worth it
Now ask yourself, among ALL the hard work and cool campaigns you will create this year are you guaranteed a 10% to 20% sales increase?
Why more online merchants aren't attacking site load times with a vengence the millions they could make SO EASILY is a mystery we hope to help one of our clients, http://www.Moon-Audio.com unravel this year. We want their load times to average 2 seconds and bet that improvement will drop thousands to their bottom line.
Will report back as we evaluate ways to speed up the Moon.
E-commerce Bounce Rate Calculator
Bounces are frustrating. When a website visitor leaves after viewing a single page (doesn’t have to be your home page) and without engagement (clicking, subscribing or buying) they “bounce” and your SEO goes straight to HELL.
If you are prepared to feel real pain when you see the sizable website out there in the cloud, the visitors you are bouncing away, strong drink is recommended. We used an example of a $3M website with a 55% bounce rate. For every 20 points recovered the site would gain $1M in sales.
Another way to state that statistic is for every 20 points the site would grow more than 30%. Did you need to create an amazing campaign to grow 30%? Nope, but you do have to change your thinking and that is always the hardest thing to do (lol).
Attempt to use our calculator without strong drink and we can't be held responsible if you jump off a tall building after seeing the ghost site you could be managing. Just saying :). Marty
Website Migration Trauma shares 5 tips to take befoe you move your site, 5 tips sure to reduce trauma and protect your hard web marketing work. - Up Your PPC Spend.
- Tighten Your Site Maps & create SILO based maps (advanced).
- 301 never 302 and Watch Webmaster Tools like a hawk for 404 Page Not Found.
- Create highly social & shareable content like contests and games.
- Know your 80:20 Rule and creating supporting content BEFORE the migration.
Dumping WooCommerce
The DIY don't need to know code to build a great and scaleable online store may be mostly myth. Like all bell curves there may be one or two highly profitable Shopify, Volusion or Big Commerce sites but those few "rich getting richer" sites stand on the shoulders of many little guys just scaping by.
If that sound like a rigged game we agree. We shared all the reasons we dumped WooCommerce including our own idiocy in this mythbusting Curagami post:
http://www.curagami.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/curagami-logowide.png
There may be hundreds of tactics that you could consider content marketing. So the six content marketing tactics briefly described here are certainly not an exhaustive list. But this short list does, perhaps, represent some of the best, easiest to understand, and most common content marketing options for small and mid-sized ecommerce businesses.
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Commerce - Community & Content rubicons Are CSF's
No way you win online these days without crossing one of the toughest rivers in my Director of Ecommerce tenure -- making content, commerce and community sing happily around the campfire. Good tips here and I will weigh in soon.
New E-commerce
New E-Commerce and a Video Game Steal says e-commerce merchants should steal customization, collaboration and community from video game developers and explains how.
Curagami Customer Hunt on LinkedIn
Curagami is half app development company and half search marketing agency. We've helped e-commerce and B2B relationship sellers create content, strategies and tactics to win hearts, minds and loyalty online.
We manage content, social media and strategy for 2 to 4 customers a year. We currently have one possibly two openings. We say one possibly two because we never know how much time a client will need to achieve their online marketing goals.
If you need help or know someone who does use our Curagami Customer Hunt form at the bottom of this post to share your story:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/curagami-customer-hunt-martin-marty-smith
Who are the best Magento Developers in America is the wrong question, better to ask who are the best Magento developers for our online store and brand.
5 Best Ecom Stores
Next installment of our 35 Holiday Ecommerce Secrets in 7 days ( http://www.curagami.com/holiday-ecommerce-tips-magazine/?v=7516fd43adaa ) is sharing 5 "Best" Ecommerce Stores including:
* REI.com = Movement Marketing
* MomA's Store = Email Marketing
* WaNeLo = Mashup and Mobile
* Massdrop = Social Shopping
* Casetify = DIY Marketing
We didn't select these five sites because they are BEST in the normal things e-commerce sites must do (nav, pictures, products, shopping carts). We selected these five to demonstrate 5 important trends. Think of each of those trends as a tectonic plate moving even as we write this and you will know why we seledcted these great online stores.
Learn more about thse tectonic e-com trends on Curagami:
http://www.curagami.com/holiday-ecommerce-tips-magazine/?v=7516fd43adaa
35 Ecommerce Secrets in 7 Days
Time to dump every ecommerce secret we have out in the world and let them do some good. Every day this week we share 5 tips sure to help your online store make more money. B2B marketers will find some tips applicable for their online marketing too.
Monday is 5 Ecommerce Storytelling Tips
http://www.curagami.com/holiday-ecommerce-tips-magazine/?v=7516fd43adaa
5 More Secrets Tomorrow
Ecommerce Tips Magazine
How did we make over $35M in online ecommerce? Sure we tell you then you tell five people and before you know it everyone knows our secrets (cool with us). That's why we will be sharing our favorite ecommerce tips every day next week at
http://www.curagami.com
Be there or don't make as much money this holiday selling season as you could.
Buffer's Social Failure / Watershed
Last wee Buffer wrote about losing 40% of their "social traffic". While key metrics such as conversion rates or the value of the lost traffic weren't included their panic was unmistakeable.
Never panic may be the hardest lesson my team and I learned during my 7 year tenure as Director of Ecommerce for a multimillion dollar website. We didn't start that way.
We started as frightened and panic stricken as Buffer. We learned the hard way how little panic matters. The web is MATH and GAMBLING. Sometimes the math turns FOR you and sometimes against.
@Cendrine Marrouat - https://www.cendrinemedia.com makes great points in her LInkedIn post (linked along with my comment with a jump link on Make Buffer's Social Failure Your Success (http://www.curagami.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/buffer-failure-your-success.png ). One of my favorite points, and one overlooked by the Buffer team, is LOOK TO THYSELF.
Cendrine points to a harsh new truth - the world is FASTER, LEANER and more VISUAL than before. She notes how poorly Buffer has tuned their content to our new mobile, social and gamified world. Brilliant point well made (as usual form a favorite #mustfollow curator),
My point is Buffer ISN'T asking the right questions in the right way. They assume they want their traffic back, but they don't explain what if any deeper meaning their traffic has to their WHY - the reason they exist, the reason users love them. I point out that if traffic goes down but conversions go UP life is good since Buffer would be paying less for more subscribers.
The abject terror in Buffer's post would seem to indicate conversions are off too. As I noted in my original post, conversions are a TRAILING indicator and so unlikely to be off nearly as much as their traffic. Another way of saying that is losing some of their "social traffic" is nothing but net (good).
If I were part of Buffer's team we would be exploring Cendrine's important point - has our content and so our brand lost touch with our customers? What do we stand for? Why do our customers love us? Why might a new generation of customer love us?
None of those questions seem to be on Buffer's agenda. Instead they are on a "traffic hunt", a mistake so many make since meaningless metrics such as followers, traffic and likes abound. As I point out in our Curagami post - NO METRIC MEANS ANYTHING ON IT's OWN. Every metric is TIED to some other metric.
We tied traffic to money. Our $ by visitor was a great way to VALUE traffic in a meaningful way. When traffic went up or down money per visitor usually trailed. If traffic was down 40% money per visitor was probably down 15% or 20%. Eventually those lines cross or reach zero and you don't want that (lol).
Best way to avoid having your metrics reach zero is to avoid PANIC (it doesn't help and can distract), test, create a new plan, seek input and ask for help. Buffer is doing some of those, but they are using community tactics in a pedantic way - telling instead of showing, asking for help but not curating responses, not handing their keys over to the kids (their community).
So they started GREAT but have slipped back into the solipsism virus that effects so many web marketers. Cendrine's brilliant point about the TYPE of content being created is getting more of an airing on my blogs and social than Buffers (not good).
What about you? Are you experiencing "social traffic decline"? Have you stopped using tools like Buffer recently? Why? What do you think Buffer can do to recover?
Share your answers here, in comments on the Curagami post or email martin(at)Curagami.com and we will curate your thoughts in with a link back. Thanks, Marty
5 Super Secret Marketing Trends: nowists, share keys to your digital kingdoms, appify and gamify your content and developing blue oceans to win in 2016.
Crossing Ecommerce Rubicon
We are making progress on adding Woocommerce to Curagami. The goal is to cross the content / commerce rubicon. The gulf between effective content and commerce is large. The promise of Woocommerce, an ecommerce shopping cart and database appended to Wordpress, is elimination of the artificial and rapidly useless separation between content and commerce.
The Social / Mobile / Connected times we inhibit require a new approach to online commerce. We plan to relaunch Curagami.com next week. Stay tuned, join us for coffee (subscribe http://www.curagami.com/signup/?v=7516fd43adaa ) and we will journey across the rubicon together :). Marty & team Curagami
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