Archive for the e-Commerce Category

5 Essential Functions for Every B2B Website

May 29, 2013
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“If you don’t have a website, you don’t have a business.”  By now, this maxim is well understood–and it is just as true for B2B businesses as for B2C ones, if not more so.  But what kind of functionality does your B2B website really need?  What website strategies should you pursue for business marketing?  Here are five must-haves for every B2B website.  Read the remainder of this entry »

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B2B Marketers Should Take Another Look at E-Commerce

April 29, 2013
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E-commerce opportunity is evolving fast, but only 25% of B2B marketers are taking advantage of it, according to a 2012 Oracle study.  Time for another look.  The typical B2B company selling online is the classic catalogers like Edmund Optics and Seton, which were fast to supplement their print catalogs with e-commerce.   But with the new functionality now available, just about any business marketer can find ways to reduce selling expense and attract new customers by integrating e-commerce into their go-to-market strategies. Read the remainder of this entry »

It’s All E-commerce: How Social, Local, and Mobile Affects Sales Online and Offline

January 16, 2013

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Yesterday’s Biznology® Webinar by our blogger Tim Peter was all about how the Web affects e-commerce.  Does your business have an online shopping cart? Use third-party sites like eBay, Amazon, Etsy, or Expedia? Or do your customers walk into your store? With the rise of social, local, and mobile, your customers likely do all three, often at the same time. What does this mean for your business in 2013 and beyond?  Read the remainder of this entry »

SEO is the Top Skill for Digital Marketers

December 6, 2012
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In case you didn’t know, I am IBM’s representative to the Google Tech Council, a consortium of B2B tech search engine marketing (SEM) leaders. We meet quarterly at Google’s offices to share best practices and new innovations in SEM. The last time we met, I asked the group what their top pain point was. Resources, as in human resources, was the almost unanimous answer. They all spend the majority of their time training and otherwise educating people from the greenest copy writer to the highest executive in SEO and SEM. Many of my colleagues on the Tech Council voiced frustration about this, because it seems like all they do is train, and retrain and train some more. But they don’t see a corresponding improvement in skills. Read the remainder of this entry »

Using emotion to close the deal in online marketing

November 5, 2012
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If you sell online, you know the problem. How many people place things in their carts but don’t come back? For some e-Commerce companies, they convert fewer than 20% of orders placed in carts, usually because they are withholding pricing (or shipping charges) before the item goes in the cart. But all e-Commerce sites find a drop off when some percentage of their customers abandon their carts. I recently saw an interesting approach–an appeal to emotion to complete the checkout. Read the remainder of this entry »