E-commerce Blog

4 Tips To Create Better Videos

Published on March 21st, 2013 by Jessica Malnik

With so many great, cheap and easy-to-use tools out there, the barrier for creating high-quality videos is lower than ever. All you need is a smartphone and an idea or two to start recording videos these days.

In terms of editing, it’s almost that simple. YouTube has it’s own built-in, basic editing system. For someone who wants a bit more customization, Animoto and iMovie are both great, amateur options.

While at SXSW, we caught up with GoPro Community Manager Andrew Shipp. He provided four great tips for how everyone — regardless of what they sell — can create more compelling videos.

1. It’s all about the content.
“There’s incredible content out there,” Shipp said, “You just need to go out and find it.”

In every industry or niche market, there are stories just waiting to be told. This could include sharing your customers’ stories, interviewing thought leaders in your area of expertise or even doing a video explaining the crazy idea that led to you starting your now-successful store.

2. Keep it short.
Shipp recommends that you keep your videos within the two- to four-minute window. After four minutes, most viewers will begin to click off.

3. Post bumpers in the front and back of the video
According to Shipp, posting bumpers, which in some cases could be as simple as your store’s logo, at the front and back of all your videos is a great way to make sure you get some branding in. That way it’s all about the content and not so much pushing brand messaging during the video itself.

4. Figure out the core of what your consumers want to see.
Often times, the best ideas come from your own customers. Don’t be afraid to ask them what they want to see or hear more about.

Inspiration for your next video is everywhere. Ask your employees, go on YouTube for some added inspiration or browse some of GoPro’s latest videos. Thanks for reading! Please pose questions, offer comments or write your video tips below.

How to bring back visitors to your site with retargeting

Published on January 2nd, 2013 by David Callaway

Our good friends at Lexity are experts on advertising retargeting. They were kind enough to write a guest post for us explaining retargeting and why Bigcommerce clients should try it. Their Lexity Retargeting app can help you easily and automatically set up a retargeting ad campaign for your Bigcommerce store.

Ever gone shopping online, only to find that the same products you were looking at are now cropping up in ads on other sites? Congratulations — you’ve been retargeted!

Retargeting is a form of online advertising meant to bring customers back to buy items they’ve browsed in the past. It’s the reason that bag you were tempted to buy seems to show up all over the internet, and also why pacifiers and bibs are suddenly following you in ads while you’re browsing CNN, even though you swear you only visited that baby products site once.

Once a well-kept secret known only to experts, new technology is making this very effective advertising technique available to small business owners. Read on to find out why retargeting works and how you can start using it yourself — even if you’re not a technical guru.

What is retargeting?

Retargeting, also known as remarketing, is an advertising technique that shows online ads to people who have already visited your online store. It works by keeping track of people who visit your site, then displaying your ads to them as they visit other sites.

It’s a fact — only 2% of visitors to an online store will end up buying on their first visit. Retargeting tries to recover that other 98%. In other words, retargeting means displaying ads to lost prospects who have left your site in order to attract them back and convert them into buyers.

How does it work?

The reason retargeting works is that you’re advertising to a targeted, self-selecting group: people who have already indicated a high enough level of interest in your brand to have visited your online store and browsed your products.

Retargeting brings these “window shoppers” back when they’re ready to buy by keeping your brand foremost in their minds. Repeated exposure to your brand increases your credibility and the likelihood that a visitor will return to your site. A 2010 study by comScore found retargeting to be the most effective method among six different types of advertising, resulting in a 1,046% lift in visitor traffic to a site when compared to advertising without retargeting.

How do I use retargeting for my Bigcommerce store?

Thanks to new technology, retargeting is available nowadays even to small businesses. If you have a certain comfort level with Google AdWords, you can set up a campaign on it. You just need to:

1. Add a snippet of code to your site

2. Choose whether to advertise on the Search or Display networks (whether you want to display text ads via search or graphical banner ads)

3. Create a remarketing list within AdWords

4. Define a membership duration for your remarketing list

5. Add the list as an audience to the appropriate ad groups

Google has detailed instructions for setting up AdWords retargeting. Alternatively, apps like Lexity Retargeting automate some of this process to make creating your very own remarketing campaign even easier.

Whatever route you decide to take, we recommend trying retargeting for your business. We think you’ll see pretty quickly how much more effective it can be than traditional search and display advertising.

Don’t miss out on a major growth opportunity this holiday season (hint: it’s not sales)

Published on December 14th, 2012 by David Callaway

This guest post is written by Adeel Vanthaliwala, CEO of Incentivibe.com, a shared-giveaways site that pools businesses together so they can offer big contest prizes (e.g., a $500 gift card) by sharing a fraction of the prize cost (e.g., $19.99) with other businesses. You can integrate Incentivibe with your Bigcommerce store through our App Store.

The Golden Opportunity

The holiday season is heating up. And it’s about to get sizzling hot. Businesses are now pouring huge amounts of money into advertising and chalking up huge discounts, all in an effort to drive more sales. But in this crazy hustle and bustle, business owners are missing out on a golden opportunity to increase sales and marketing throughout the year.
The opportunity lies in converting more of your online visitors into leads (email subscribers, fans and/or followers) who you can market to for free throughout the year. Since 95% of your online visitors won’t be ready to buy on their first visit, turning even a small percentage of visitors into leads can really move the dial on your sales in the long run. Numerous studies have shown that people are more likely to buy from companies who they subscribe to via email, like on Facebook or follow on Twitter.

The Solution

Giveaway contests with big prizes are a great way of converting visitors into subscribers, fans and followers. Marketing experts such as Marketing Sherpa, HubSpot, Chief Marketer and others have detailed the awesome results of running giveaway contests to increase your leads so you can drive more sales throughout the year.
I’ve outlined four ways that giveaways help you get more leads, along with specific case studies that help you understand the power of giveaway contests with big prizes. And if you are on a tight budget, then you can use Incentivibe’s service to hold giveaway contests with big prizes at a fraction of the cost.

The Benefits

1. Increase email subscribers
a. The Sugar Trade Association ran a $200 Visa Card giveaway promotion along with grand prizes of a laptop and tablet computer. This added 3, 000 more email addresses to their database, an increase of 368%!
b. Expedia CruiseShipCenters added more than 100,000 email subscribers to its database by holding a month-long contest for a pair of cruise ship tickets.

2. Increase fans
a. Digitech doubled its fans from 4,000 to 8,000 during its two-week contest.
b. ProClip USA held an iPhone accessory giveaway that increased its Facebook fans by 30%.

3. Increase followers
a. Moosejaw increased its Twitter followers by 45% during its contest where they gave away their own products to the winner.
b. Kobo increased its Twitter followers by 43.5% during its 10-day contest for 3 Kobo e-readers.

4. Increase referral traffic to get more leads
a. Grove held a month-long giveaway contest with various Apple accessories serving as the prizes. It increased its Facebook referral traffic by 114%.
b. The Martha Stewart Show held a giveaway promotion where contestants were encouraged to share the giveaway to get additional entries into the contest. This brought in an additional 1,626 contestants and an increase in Facebook fans by 20%.

The Tips

Everyone gets different results from their giveaway campaign. The most important thing to do is have a single goal that you would like to accomplish by the end of a contest. I’ve listed some tips and valuable resources below to help you get the most out of your giveaway contest this holiday season. If you have any questions you can reach out to me via Twitter (@adeelv) and I’d be happy to help you.

Align your prize to the needs of your target audience to increase the chances of getting more visitors to participate in the contest and become leads.
Make sure you follow the rules and regulations of your country, as well as the social media platforms upon which you are running your giveaway. Some giveaway tools provide you with this information as part of their pricing bundles, while other do not. Incentivibe provides you with all the legal and administrative work required to run a contest within its pricing bundles.
There are plenty of good tips that you can find online. Some of the best ones that I have come across are from HubSpot and Unbounce.

Automated Emails: Winning Strategies and Dangerous Mistakes

Published on August 8th, 2012 by Brianne Brewer

Jaime Brugueras is a 10-year marketing analyst veteran and the co-founder of Mineful, automated email software (that integrates with Bigcommerce) where he collaborates on customer retention and segmentation with anyone who is interested. You can find Jaime on on Google+and Twitter.

Your business is all about customer response and interaction. Creative solutions for interacting like social media, community development and local deals are relatively new, but internet email marketing has long been a staple of direct outreach strategies.

HTML email marketing is a great solution for staying in touch with your customers long after a sale and retaining top-of-mind positioning for future sales. Here are some tips on how to make your automated emails encourage more business and pull in more conversions.

Consumers Actually Prefer Email Marketing Above Even Social Media

Social media is all the rage, and marketers are all hopping on the bandwagon and claiming that email marketing is dead in the water thanks to the Big Social. That couldn’t be more wrong!

In a 2011 marketing research study, consumers said that they were 200% more likely to be influenced by promotional emails than search engine results, traditional advertising, and word-of-mouth; and 300% more likely to be influenced by promotional emails than social media. The only influence that outdid ecommerce email marketing was prior familiarity with the brand—meaning people actually want to get your emails if they like your product.

Follow these tips, and the next time someone tells you email marketing is dead, just show them your repeat business and customer response rates. Or better yet—don’t! If marketers think it’s a good idea to abandon email marketing while you’re seeing results from it, that’s just less competition for your message.

Typically you’ll see automatic email in one of three flavors: Recurring, Transactional, or Threshold.

Recurring emails are sent on a regular calendar interval, and include birthday or anniversary messages and reminders for renewals and subscription updates.
Transactional emails are sent at the end of a conversion or transaction. This can range from a “Welcome” message upon subscription, a confirmation after a purchase, shipping information notices, and essential product information updates.
Threshold emails are sent after a special set of customer behaviors triggers an event. These often come in the form of product suggestions based on browsing history, discounts awarded from product purchases, and re-engagement messages based on a lack of use.
Each of these three kinds of automated email have the distinct purpose of engaging (or re-engaging) your customer base with your brand, and they accomplish it in many different ways.

There are some basic, but essential tips for good automatic emails that produce results:

Absolutely No Spamming: Sending too much over too little time will be seen by customers and email spam systems as garbage, and your messages may not even make it to the inbox.
Front-Load Subject Lines: Most email systems, on computers and especially on mobile devices, truncate long subject lines. Make sure your most important information is right at the beginning of the subject, or your emails won’t be nearly as compelling.
Make It Easy On The Eyes: Make sure your emails are consistent and well-designed, and try to make that design mobile-optimized if you can.
Test, Test, Test: A/B testing is absolutely essential. Constantly attempt to optimize your emails and keep a close eye on the response measurements.

Your E-Commerce Guide to Getting Started With Pinterest

Published on March 5th, 2012 by Erika Jarvi

Pinterest is a visually-driven website, where people can “pin” pictures or videos of their favorite things/places/people on a virtual pinboard. As a user, you can categorize these pinned pictures into multiple boards, all with their own theme. When a picture is then pinned, a short description can be written about it, and the picture is automatically linked to the place from which it came.

The ease with which you can post pictures, coupled with the social nature of the site (which uses Twitter-like “following” to watch pins from other users) makes it a great way for you, as an e-commerce store owner, to get your products promoted.

When you first get into Pinterest (it is a invite-only service right now, but after I requested an invite, I got in fairly quickly), you’re asked to specify a few interests of yours, and then you’ll automatically follow prominent members with those same interests. It’s a great way to start buying into the service.

Pinterest will also start you off with five common board themes (which you can change or delete, if you want) to start pinning your favorite things. There’s even a handy bookmark you can put in your browser’s link bar that will automatically start the pinning process without having to login to Pinterest if you’re on another website.

Pinterest can directly link with your Twitter and Facebook accounts, requiring you to login to one or the other when you first create your account. This means that pinning a product can be shared exponentially through all three avenues almost instantaneously.

How About Pinterest for E-Commerce?

From an e-commerce point of view, Pinterest should be recognized as a great source of free marketing. The only thing it requires of you is to pin your products, or have your products be pinned. Since it is a picture or video based board, you’ll want to make sure that your products have good pictures. The more enticing and interesting a picture is, the more likely people on Pinterest are to look at it.

Once it gets discovered, however, the ease in which the product can be shared is Pinterest’s greatest selling point.

Past that, the already booming user base of 7.2 million users (over 328% growth from last year alone), while still being invite-only, should let you know that it’s becoming a huge traffic source for people sharing their favorite products. It’s already passed the referral traffic from YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn, according to Shareaholic’s January 2012 Referral Traffic Report.

While Facebook still reigns in referrals, Pinterest’s ability to post directly to social media giant makes it a strong contender for you to reach as many consumers as possible.

Above all, Pinterest is an easy way for people to share what they love, including your products and others. Boards are about a way of life rather than a specific brand, and Pinterest wants to keep it that way.

So, at the very least, allow people to pin your products – it’s no extra work from you and you get free marketing. You can see that we’re in the process of rolling out a BigCommerce update that includes Pinterest integration by reading this post on our blog from last week.

After people start pinning your products, move on to create your own Pinterest board and include both your products and others from companies like yours. You can then share your board from your BigCommerce site if you like.

Pinterest is becoming a community, not just a repository of pictures, and communities are a place to start building your brand and to become known as a regular contributor.

Once you get started, you can also use Google Analytics to track your pins because of the unique URLs Pinterest gives each pin. You can even go to http://www.pinterest.com/source/yourdomain.com (replacing the last part with your actual domain), which will show any pins that are sourced from your domain.

Pinterest might even give you new ideas for how to market your store to get higher conversion rates and generate more revenue.

Your SEO Webinar Follow-Up Questions Answered

Published on May 4th, 2011 by Mitchell Harper

Last week we held the first live webinar for our new series called “eCommerce Tips for Displaying Trust, Effective Store Design and Better SEO” – and it was a MONSTER success with well over 600 people attending live and thousands watching the on-demand recording, which you can find here (40 mins).

The webinar was presented by JB Kellogg from BigCommerce certified design partner Madwire Media. There was a great Q&A session at the end of the webinar and JB came up with a list of those questions along with the answers that were shared on the webinar. I’ve included them below just in case you don’t have time to watch the webinar or simply prefer text to video.

I get good traffic, but how do you recommend I get more product reviews?

We recommend you contact previous customers by phone, email, or feedback survey to capture their product review and evaluation. Encourage them to post reviews on your store or ask for permission to post their review for them. Provide incentives for them to post reviews such as 10% savings for example.

Is the tab product page layout better then the non-tab for SEO or does it matter?

It does not matter. Search engines like Google can crawl the tabbed and non-tabbed layouts just the same. Therefore, the importance is in the content, not the layout. Go with whatever you feel looks best.

Does it make a difference to SEO if I use blog.storename.com for my blog or storename.com/blog for the URL?

There are arguments both ways for what is best. We have used both options for many websites we actively search engine optimize and have not seen that one way is better than the other. We’ve seen rankings increase with blog.storename.com and storename.com/blog. The important thing is building good, unique, consistent, content. Search engines will credit you for that content and links whether you use a sub-domain or sub-directory. With BigCommerce you can use the built-in “news” feature as your blog to keep it as a sub-directory, or install WordPress and host it separately on a sub-domain. Both ways work well for SEO.

Do image heavy designs hurt you for conversions and SEO?

No. That fact that a design is image heavy does not matter. What is more important is what the images are and if good call-to-actions are on the images. The Images need to “export dreams” to the viewer. They should reduce your bounce rate and increase your click-through rate. If your bounce rate is high, you need to change your images and try some different call-to-actions. Keep in mind, you’ll need some text content on your site for SEO. It does not need to be much, but should include your best keywords.

That Google ecommerce tracking is great, how can I set that up on my store?

It is not difficult, but there are some more steps involved then when you setup the standard Google analytics code. Here are some directions.

What was that address you recommended to check keyword traffic you gave?

Google Traffic Estimator

How can I watch the webinar again, will I be able to replay it?

You can re-watch it as much as you’d like here.

What was that webinar reference page link again?

It was this page.

Is Emedramps.com a custom store?

Yes. Although it’s not extensively custom designed. The product page layout is the most customized layout on that store. To see more custom store designs you can browse our portfolio.

How do I add promotional banners to my store like Emed has?

Here is a video that talks about adding banners to your store.

What is a good conversion rate percentage?

Anything over 3% would be considered very good. Average is around 1-2%.

Can I have a store on BigCommerce that has downloadable products?

Yes. Here is a BigCommerce support page about that.

What is the most important thing for conversions?

Driving the right kind of traffic and store design. The design has to include the important things we’re talking about today (such as trust and credibility) at minimum in order for you to be truly successful.

How do I get an SSL on my site?

Here is a support page that covers topics about SSL and BigCommerce.

Who do I call for a free design mockup to see what can help me get better conversions?

Call anybody here at Madwire Media on 888-872-3734.

Does it make a big difference how I use H1, H2, H3, etc. on my site for SEO?

Not huge no. But ideally you’d use your best keywords in a H1 or H2 heading, followed by H3, H4, and so on. The most important thing is to have relevant and unique content on your website. Don’t spam or stuff keywords.

My website does not have very much content on the homepage, just images, should I had content for SEO?

Yes. It does not need to be much, just a short paragraph is fine, but make sure it has your best keywords.

I like what you said about title tags, I need to do that but am wondering what keywords to use, can you help?

Yes we can. We can do a free SEO/keyword report for you. Visit our website to learn more.

Do you know how to do a competitor analysis to see what keywords they are using?

Yes we do. We can do a free competitive analysis report for you. Visit our website to learn more.

Can you tell what my competitor’s conversion rate is?

Based on our completive analysis we can give you a pretty good estimate.

What is considered a good bounce rate?

Typically below 30-40% is good. It sometimes depends on the target market however.

Can you tell me if my store passes the 2.5 second rule?

Sure. We can review your store and provide feedback.

Is BigCommerce the best shopping cart to use to do everything you’re talking about here?

Yes. We are about the most credible source you can ask. As a large design, development and eCommerce marketing company we’ve used many different e-commerce platforms and BigCommerce is by far the best. In fact, it’s not only our number one solution now, it’s our only solution. Watch our BigCommerce customer story video here.

How often should I blog to build content and what should I blog about?

Blog as much as you can. Make sure to blog about what your store specialized in selling. Research your competitors and see how much they are blogging…try to outdo them! Try to write well for your customers and the search engines.

Does product video help increase conversions significantly?

Yes it does. Product videos are very effective. We see a 30-400% increase in conversions with products that have professional product videos. The product video is basically your 24/7 sales person giving your product’s best sales pitch and showing the best images. Here are some product videos we’ve created recently (see the top of the page).

What are the best kinds of product videos for conversions?

Short (30 seconds or less), to the point, highlighting the best product features and images/video with a great voice over talent giving your best 30 second sales pitch!

I’m in Japan/London/Sydney/etc, should I do something different for SEO?

It depends, do you want to target a US market or the Japanese/London/Sydney market – or both. Depending on what market you want to target the strategy would need to be different. Feel free to ask us (Madwire Media) for advice.

How do I offer different languages for products in my BigCommerce store?

We suggest using the Google translator tool for basic translations. Go here to learn more:.

Archived Webinar: eCommerce Tips for Displaying Trust, Effective Store Design and Better SEO

Published on April 30th, 2011 by Mitchell Harper

A few weeks ago I announced that Madwire Media, one of our certified design partners, would be working with us to launch a new webinar series called “eCommerce Tips for Displaying Trust, Effective Store Design and Better SEO”. Well, the first webinar took place last Wednesday and was a massive success – over 600 people attended the webinar!

For those of you who couldn’t make the live broadcast, we’ve created an archived version of the webinar which you can watch whenever you like. Just click the image at the top of this post to watch it – and make sure you share the webinar on Facebook or Twitter because it contains a lot of FANTASTIC information to help you drive more traffic and get more sales from your BigCommerce store.

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