At this very moment, bright minds are working hard to develop new tools and technologies to help businesses of all shapes and sizes drive their online sales operations. Thanks to their ingenuity, business owners are streamlining their sales and marketing activities with a level of sophistication not imagined just a few years ago. And it’s not just the sales and marketing departments that are benefiting. From fulfillment to eCommerce to finance, business units are leveraging smart systems that are bringing them...

As an eCommerce development firm, NetSphere Strategies constantly stresses the importance of website performance audits. From site speed to the overall user experience, when a business understands the inner workings of its online operations, it’s easier to make improvements. And the same could be said for a business’s marketing activities. When marketing assessments are employed, campaigns have more potential for success. Historically, pay-per-click advertising has been seen as an advertising expense, removed from real business metrics, such as revenue and profit....

Across the nation, kids are tossing on their backpacks and hitting the books. School is back in session! As most parents know, though, straight As won’t just materialize out of thin air. They must encourage their children to employ hard-work and diligence at every turn.    Likewise, eCommerce website owners must be hard-working and diligent to ensure that their websites score well on tests like WebPageTest.org’s web page performance test. When a website scores well on performance tests, it will also...

In the whitepaper titled, “From Ripple to Wave: The Ascent of Authentic Visual Content,” the editors at Olapic, a company focused on visual content, brought to light the flood of customer photos that are being taken every day. They also focused on the benefits that can come from taking advantage of all of those selfies and pics shared on Instagram on eCommerce websites.   “Customer photos are the most authentic and compelling brand assets available today,” the editors said. “Thanks to the...

A typical response to a deadline that's fast-approaching is usually something along the lines of, "I work well under pressure." Fantastic, right? Well, not so much. Unfortunately, there's no research that proves the procrastinator's often-heard claim to be true. In fact, the stress involved with being up against the wall can make it more difficult for the brain to properly focus. In that same vein, business owners would be hard-pressed to wait to the last minute to ensure that their websites...

At the beginning of the year, Forrester released its The Forrester Wave report: Lead-To-Revenue Management Platform Vendors, Q1 2014. In it, Forrester evaluated the leading solution providers in the space, including Act-On, Adobe, CallidusCloud, IBM, Marketo, Oracle, salesforce.com, Salesfusion and Silverpop. This was the first time that Forrester focused its research on L2RM automation vendors. Understanding the results of Forrester’s research, however, must start by understanding lead-to-revenue management or L2RM. According to Forrester, initial L2RM automation solutions came about with the...

To stay ahead of the game, smart eCommerce companies are already in prep mode for the upcoming holiday shopping season. With only 121 days until Black Friday, the somewhat official start to the year’s biggest sales rush, business owners are pinpointing their target hero products, and marketers are creating campaigns around them. All the while, development teams are working to ensure that the hopeful surge in traffic won’t compromise their websites.  To say the least, a website can go through a...

SEO can be a tough nut to crack and especially so when Google unleashes new ranking algorithms without warning – unless you’re one of those businesses fortunate enough to have a full-time SEO. And yes, for those readers that aren’t in the know, SEO isn’t just the process of improving digital visibility, it’s also a job title: search engine optimizer. The emergence of this position goes to show you just how prevalent the practice of SEO has become.  For many businesses,...

On July 17, 2014, Searchmetrics hosted its Visibility_14: Search Experience Optimization conference in Chicago. Tom Schuster, the CEO at Searchmetrics, kicked off the event with his forecast of SEO from a business perspective. During his opening remarks, Schuster commented on the obvious things that are happening in the digital revolution: mobile, social and data. But the obvious things that are happening were not his focus.  Instead, his keynote speech focused on the not-so-obvious transitions that are happening with SEO today: the...

The term “marketing automation” sounds like something that you can set and forget. Or, at the very least, it sounds like something that a tech-savvy intern can set up and monitor from time to time. As most folks know, however, that is definitely not the case.    Marketing automation isn’t something that can simply be put on autopilot. Instead, it’s something that must be carefully managed in order to increase brand awareness, enhance engagements and produce results. So what is marketing...