Blogging Tips for eCommerce Merchants
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Ruth Ann
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November 10th, 2014
Halloween and the midterm elections were over inearly November, which means it's officially holiday shopping season! Let's make it formal to recognize that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are mid-cycle events. Ecommerce sites can focus on building up content to reach out to online shoppers, who will play as strong a role as they did last year.
Customers Pay Attention to Ecommerce Sellers with Something to Say
Many ecommerce merchants have already worked on their holiday sales outreach. They may have prepared email blasts and ads and special content for Twitter and Facebook. If you've done this, take the time to see how your content--organic and paid--have been received. What got people's attention: what had wide reach, wide shares, and lots of retweets?
Use these clues as you prepare content for blogs, emails, and social media messages, organic and paid. If you're considering an email campaign, remember that while email marketing has had lower overall conversion rates, people who responded to emails spent more, according to Monetate, which released a study on email marketing effectiveness last year. Clearly, some merchants were able to "create more engaging email experiences."
Regardless of the medium you use communicate with your customers, keep these tips in mind:
- Don't overdo it. No one wants to see myriad tweets, posts, or emails from the same source, whether paid or organic.
- Write great subject lines that include a keyword for your products. Here's a nice infographic from QuickSprout on writing headlines.
- Proofread your content before you send, post, or Tweet.
- Do not use all caps. It looks spammy and more filters agree.
- Use graphics. Make sure you have permission to use them--just because they're on Google Images doesn't mean they're free. Copyrights exist for artists, too.
Get Some Fresh Trend Research
If you aren't satisfied with the insights you're getting from your social network accounts, do some outside research on trends for your business and products, because this is what drives customers. They will read what interests them. Of course, no one email, blog, post, or Tweet interests everyone, so take look for a few trends that match your customers' general interests.
Writing for Practical Ecommerce, Paul Chaney suggests using Google News, Trends, and Images to see what's going on outside your site's world. Chaney also recommends searching Google Blogs, which is now part of the larger Google Search. Here's one way to see how your products like yours are doing during this time leading up to the holidays:
- Go to Google Trends (you will need a Gmail account to use it, but it's free)
- You'll see what's trending now, the trends for the past month, and ideas to explore in depth
- Click on one of these headlines and enter your search term in the search box that appears
You may find a whole new world of ideas to think about!
Also use the research tools offered by Facebook and Twitter. Those hashtags do serve a purpose: somewhere, there's an account or page devoted to it, where you can find similar topics as well for further investigation.
