This is Part 1 of a guest post series "Inbound Marketing is the Future of eCommerce" by Katie Hudson (@kt_hudson).  Katie is the Marketing Manager for Demac Media, an award winning eCommerce agency headquartered in Toronto. She is directly responsible for the company’s Inbound Marketing strategies, blog, social media channels and corporate events. Katie's skill and experience have helped position Demac Media as a major thought leader within the Canadian eCommerce landscape.

$97.680.10*

That’s a big number. Do you have an idea of what that might represent? It could be many things, but it’s actually the amount of revenue made every minute of every day during Q2 of 2012 for Amazon.com ….. I’m just going to let that sink in for a minute.

Abandoned cart nurturing is the process of sending emails to visitors whom have started a checkout process, but did not complete the checkout process.  According to 19 different studies containing statistics on e-commerce shopping cart abandonment, the average cart abandonment rate is 67%.  That's a lot of potential customers getting to the final stage of purchase without actually becoming a customer.  You as an eCommerce business should ensure that you are doing the best you can to convert these visitors into paying customers.  An effective tactic to do so is a process called abandoned cart nurturing.  All-In-One Marketing tool HubSpot has a whole suite of tools to help increase your business, the one I am going to feature today is Abandoned Cart Nurturing.

eCommerce SaaS Economics

We once had an eCommerce marketing team come to us with a confusing and devastating problem: their competitor was massively outspending them per click in Google search engine advertising, which both this team and their competitor relied on to drive the majority of their business.

Blogging Strategies for eCommerce

There are very few things can be said with absolute certainty, one of them, however, is that it is difficult to be successful – almost impossible to be successful – at inbound eCommerce without blogging. Blogging in content creation is the fundamental linchpin for driving organic traffic. Of the many factors affecting organic traffic, blogging is one of the most critical to master. Since organic traffic frequently has the lowest cost of customer acquisition, it is inherently some of the most valuable. 

Buyer Persona Product Descriptions

Buyer persona product detail pages communicate the most important primary benefits of a product in a way that is most appealing to the majority of store customers.  The user centric approach also helps brand the information of a company while reinforcing a persona attractive to an ideal consumer.

Buyer persona product descriptions can deliver positive results because the ad copy is written in such a way that is appealing to the target demographic. The effort required of user-centric product descriptions requires that we understand how certain descriptors, contexts and inclusions of details affect the target user, and that we then put our discoveries into action. Ad copy for a clothing retailer with a target demographic of ages 15-35 with extensive outdoor knowledge should be much different than a clothing retailer with a target demographic of women ages 25-45 whom aspire to be like the ladies in reality television. As Dr. Timo Saari and Dr. Marko Turpeinen, authors of “Towards Psychological Customization of Information for Individuals and Social Groups” suggest, individual differences in processing information implicates dramatic variances in type and/or intensity of psychological effects, such as positive emotion, persuasion, and depth of learning.

Blog Article Keyword Best Practices

One of the greatest challenges that most marketers have to overcome is discovering and implementing the topics and titles that drive high velocity keyword relevant blog content. The first step to writing an effective blog article is selecting the keyword or keyword phrase around which the blog article is intended to drive traffic.  This keyword or keyword phrase should be relevant to the business or industry while also providing the business an opportunity to rank higher in organic search results.  

Analyze your website for keyword search ranking placements using analytic tools.  Good keyword analytic tools should, at a minimum, show a business where they are currently ranking for a keyword and the associated traffic that the keyword or phrase is driving.  Proper use of an analytic tool will help define and put structure to keyword optimization. 

Blog Article Problem Oriented Optimization (POO) Best Practices

Blog article titles are good place to exercise problem oriented optimization. Instead of focusing on writing articles about what a product or service does, focus on writing articles that iterate or address the problems that consumers face. These topics will likely contain longtail combinations of keywords designed to drive specific, targeted traffic.  

Problem oriented topics can also be general problems that are relevant to a specific customer base. For example, if a company specializing in small business debt mitigation will certainly want to optimize for keywords relating to small business debt.  This business should create blog content around problems relating to small businesses and finance. By writing articles that help small businesses address how to work with credit, how to raise capital, and other critical small business finance issues, this blog will become a valuable resource for prospective customers as well as bring in high quality search traffic and prospects who – although they may not fit your immediate exact targeting parameters – are also potential customers.

Blog Article Image Best Practices

Although not frequently considered a critical part of a well-crafted blog article, repeated studies have shown that blog articles with images perform better. Typically, an image that either refers to or directly graphically conveys the general subject matter of a blog article oriented in the upper right-hand corner of the article with the first paragraph text wrapped around it is the general standard and a best practice. Images serve to break up a blog article text while preventing the text from overwhelming to the reader.  

Images also help to give context to the blog article. As they say, a picture is worth 1000 words. However, since search engines only see pictures as an image filename and alt tag, in blogging a picture is worth substantially less.  Thus a properly optimzied article should use images to supplement article copy with graphical representations of the topics. The key factor of using images for search engine optimization is the proper application of the image filename and alt attribute. Frequently forgotten or neglected, the image filename and alt attribute are the only elements currently being textually indexed by search engines.

Blog Article Call to Action Best Practices

One of the great values of business blog articles is the fact that they can be optimized to be found organically and socially for longtail keyword phrases.  Properly optimized articles will l frequently generate possible leads or prospective customers.

Blog Article Title Best Practices

All search engines consider the title of the page to be extremely relevant to what that page is supposedly about. Similarly to how you might choose what articles to read in your morning paper or e-mail to read first by looking at the headline or subject lines, search engines use the title of the page and blog article is a very strong indicator of what that page or blog article is about.

The title of the blog article should be housed in the URL slug – where the extension coming at the end of the blog article URL – as well as in the H1 tag on the page. The title should also be reflected in the HTML header element title. Aligning these three elements with the blog article title will reinforce to the search engine that this blog article is about this specific longtail search query and any relevant keywords that the search engine associates with the keywords in the title. Therefore,  it’s extremely important that you put a level of strategic and tactical application of SEO thought into crafting your blog headlines.