On average, Business-to-Business (B2B) marketers plan to allocate approximately 12% of their budget on e-mail marketing, according to MarketingSherpa.  Our experience shows us that e-mail is a powerful way to increase your customer lifetime value and maximize the return on investment of your overall marketing programs.  However, we often see that most B2B companies are not using e-mail marketing and if they are using it, they are not using it in a way that delivers consistent results.

Why Do Most E-mail Marketing Efforts Fail to Produce Results? There are three key reasons e-mail marketing campaigns fail to produce results.

Lack of Marketing Strategy Many companies are unsure what to say or how to best use their e-mail newsletter list.  They may know what products they want to promote, or what events they want to build off of, but don’t have the internal resources to build that into a marketing...

Running a successful ecommerce business is hard work, and one of the hardest tasks of all is choosing which things to do first.

So many of the most important tasks are also the most time consuming: clarifying your businesses niche, understanding your target customer, building a community with email and social media, and developing a great customer service team. For starters, it’s far more productive to begin by picking the low hanging fruit. Here are five straightforward things you can do to make a big immediate impact, while also laying down a foundation to build on.

1. Add Great Product Photography Customers want to know as much as possible about the product they are buying. cxPartners, a UK firm specializing in usability testing, carried out eye-tracking studies that showed product images were the first thing a...

Not long ago, online marketers wondered whether mobile phones might someday become the preferred platform for ecommerce. Today the question isn't if but when, and the answer is coming sooner than you think.

According to Gartner Research, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide by 2013. According to Forrester Research, 40% of the interactive marketing professions they surveyed are using some form of mobile marketing with an additional 35% planning to target mobile users within the next year.

All this urgency begs a question in most emarketers: how can I be ready when the transition takes place in earnest? I believe that the best way is to seek revolution rather than transition. The new world of mobile ecommerce demands a clean...

Online credit card transactions can be a fabulous way of providing a 24/7 storefront -- both making it easier for your customers to purchase from you, as well as reducing your work for each purchase. Online credit card transactions can even be of benefit to non-retail businesses and organizations. You can allow clients to pay invoices online or members of your organization to register for events or make donations online.

There are four key things you need to know about accepting credit cards online.

Basics of Accepting Credit Cards Merchant Account This is an account that allows merchants to process credit cards. In order to accept credit card transactions online, you need to have a merchant account that is authorized to use Card Not Present transactions or Mail Order/Telephone Order (MOTO) transactions. Your web developer should be able to assist you in setting up a proper merchant account if you do not already have one. Many times if you have a merchant account for offline transactions...

Determining your shipping strategy for your web store can be difficult, to say the least. Your objectives to not lose money on shipping, to be fair to your customer, to easily administrate your web store, and to provide a shipping strategy that is easy to understand for you and your customer make this a hard job for anyone. Today, we will look at how online companies are dealing with this shipping dilemma, and what research has to say about the best practices for shipping.

Common Shipping Pricing Strategies Three of the most common methods for assessing shipping charges are (1) by order size, (2) by order amount, and (3) by order weight.

By Order Size Pricing your shipping by order size has the advantage of being simple for you to setup and simple for your customer to understand. However, you run the risk of either overcharging your customer, or losing money on your shipping. For example, if you set your shipping rates at $5.00 per shipment and an additional $1.49 per item, you...

Would you be surprised to know that most business owners don’t know how to measure the return on investment (ROI) they get from their website?  Discover the five steps you can use to calculate and improve your website ROI.

One common dilemma that we have seen companies struggle with is how to get a large number of products setup on their e-commerce site. For companies who are just starting an online store, this endeavor can set back the entire project by months. In the interest of helping businesses get their e-commerce site launched and having online sales coming in sooner, I offer these suggestions for getting products listed quickly on your e-commerce site.

Product reviews can assist an ecommerce site in building credibility, increasing customer confidence, and providing valuable information for the development of product descriptions.

In addition to tracking KPIs for evaluating your website, you should also be using your statistics to decide on what future content to develop.

Learn the key metrics you should be using to evaluate your ecommerce site.