Last week Kevin Hillstrom wrote about optimizing for the wrong measurement. He was implying optimizing for orders received or total sales on Cyber Monday when in-fact the business should be measuring profitability. This optimization happens all the time and it's an easy trap to fall into. Traffic is one of...
Tomorrow is the first holiday weekend since the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend. Hopefully it won't be as crazy for you but still busy. Good busy. Not "I-want-to-pull-my-hair-out-from-these-customers" busy. This weekend is a good time to try an experiment or two that you built for this season. Now that the initial...
Today marks the start of a new customer cohort. Customers who ordered last month fall into the November cohort which are usually the early shoppers of the holiday. December's customers will be the remaining holiday shoppers along with a few minor groups (e.g. self-gifters, the end-of-the-year business shoppers, etc). While...
With the holiday season underway, it's important that your data collecting systems are running correctly. Collect the right data and you can see how your customers are behaving. Repeat Customer Insights takes a monthly Customer Grid snapshot at the beginning of each month. This snapshot makes it easy to visualize...
Cyber Monday. The day when ecommerce is supposed to shine. Make sure to avoid treating your customers like robots today. Customers can tell when they are just a transaction to you and are quick to return the treatment. Each customer is a person and you have the opportunity to delight...
Today's the official day to see if the work you've done recently has paid off. Just be ready for competition to increase. Acquisition and ad costs are going to go crazy over the next month. Stores who have been working on their SEO all year should see it starts to...
This weekend I started cleaning up the garden beds for winter. A big job is adding compost to the soil so over winter and into spring it can feed the soil. The problem is that I didn't create enough compost this year. The first batch I used elsewhere so I'm...
With a certain social network imploding, it's as important as ever to remember that any social media strategy has the risk of getting shutdown at any moment. A friend of mine built up a huge following on Facebook years ago. Then Facebook started to charge them each time they wanted...
Contacting customers for a promotion is a regular tactic in ecommerce. Typically the events are based on the calendar. Black Friday. First day of summer. Back to school. There are more reasons to contact customers than days in the year. There's a problem with using only date-based events though. Each...
While there's only a week left before the holiday rush starts, you still have time to work on attracting organic sales. A week is not enough time for most SEO. You might see some results next month but SEO generally is something that should be done six months ago. SEO...
Each tip includes a way to improve your store: customer analysis, analytics, customer acquisition, CRO... plus plenty of puns and amazing alliterations.