Some retail, e-commerce, and e-mail marketing links that I’ve like to share with you today:
First up, clothing retailer Gap and deal of the day website Groupon teamed up yesterday to offer customers $50 of Gap merchandise for $25. This is the first time the deal of the day website partnered with a national retailer and reports are that over 400,000 coupons were sold in one day. Excellent day, I’m sure, for Groupon.
Bronto Blog has a roundtable discussion on 5 Ways to Get Your Newsletter Deleted. As usual, great advice and tips for anyone concerned with e-mail marketing strategy.
With the bankruptcy of several national retailers, retail vacancies are on the rise. Here in New Jersey, retail vacancies are at the highest point in the last ten years. This shouldn’t be too surprising since the area has been hit especially hard with the loss of chains like Linens ‘N Things, CompUSA, and Circuit City as well as store closings by Office Depot and Boscov’s.
And finally, Zippycart has a good advice for retailers, looking to drive traffic to their store, in their post 13 Ecommerce Link Building Tactics fr Your Online Store.
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Read more about: asbury park press, bankruptcy, bronto blog, e-commerce, E-Mail Marketing, e-mail strategy, gap, groupon, link building, New Jersey, newsletter, office depot, Retail, retail vacancy, seo, zippycart
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This week, Twitter has announced a new feature: the official Tweet Button. This feature will allow publishers to add an official button to share their content via Twitter. Mashable has more information on the button and what this means for publishers and site owners.
I really like this idea and hope that this leads to more analytics from Twitter, similar to the Facebook Insights program.
I’ve started adding this new button to a few sites that I maintain and thought I’d share the (very simple) code for adding this to a WordPress blog template so that it appears on every post.
On this blog, I’m displaying the Twitter Button with a horizontal count. The link is a direct link to the blog post and with the title of the post serving as the Twitter content. In order to populate that, I’ve inserted the following code into the WordPress loop in my template:
<?php $twitVia = "noturnonred"; ?>
<a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-url="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" data-text="<?php the_title(); ?>" data-count="horizontal" data-via="<?php echo $twitVia; ?>">
Tweet
</a>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
If you want to put this on your blog, just change the first variable from noturnonred to your own Twitter account name. After that, the permalink and page title will be properly inserted into the link and your button should appear on your blog posts.
For more information on the options available or to generate a different Tweet Button, visit the Tweet Button page on Twitter.
The Bronto Blog dissects a H&R Block e-mail campaign, talks about the season life cycle of an e-mail campaign, and illustrates the dangers of overmailing. If you are an e-mail marketer, there is good insight to be read there.
About two weeks ago, Visa announced a deal to acquire payment processor Cybersource for $2 billion. Now, Practical eCommerce has an interview with Cybersource CEO, Michael Walsh, which outlines some of the strategy behind the deal and where he seems Visa taking Cybersource.
Want to write better blog posts? If you are just joining the blogging game or someone who has been at it for a while, the always insightful Copyblogger has a great post worth reviewing: 17 Easy Steps to Brillian Blog Posts.
I was having a conversation with a colleague of mine who suggested that it would be interesting to see a list of all retailers’ Twitter accounts on one page. We agreed that it would be interesting to see how different retailers are using the same medium – are they promoting sales, offering ideas for their market, reaching out to customers?
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Missed this last week due to the holiday, but I wanted to share a link to Beth Harte’s excellent post called Want to Figure Out Your Social Media Plan? Consider a Plan. It’s an excellent primer on developing a business plan for social media and setting clear goals in order to measure ROI. Not only is the post informative, but it has spurred a great conversation in the comments on different ways to define and measure ROI with a social media plan. I’ve just skimmed through the comments, but I know I have a lot to read and digest tonight.
