Top Ecommerce Resources for August

While we're all soaking in the last few weeks of summer and finding every opportunity to escape our offices for a bit of extra sun, the back-to-school season is just around the corner. Hand-in-hand with backpacks, lunch boxes, and school buses comes major retail sales and the holiday season in the not-so-distant future. As such, we've assembled another run down of the best ecommerce articles and apps that will help you and your clients get ready for the upcoming sales season.

While we're all soaking in the last few weeks of summer and finding every opportunity to escape our offices for a bit of extra sun, the back-to-school season is just around the corner. Hand-in-hand with backpacks, lunch boxes, and school buses comes major retail sales and the holiday season in the not-so-distant future. As such, we've assembled another run down of the best ecommerce articles and apps that will help you and your clients get ready for the upcoming sales season.

Ecommerce Articles

The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Retargeting

The developer of the Facebook retargeting app, Retargetapp, has put together a pretty comprehensive guide on setting up Facebook retargeting. Even though their app is aimed at helping to manage some of this process, the guide is fairly agnostic and provides a lot of detail on Facebook retargeting for online businesses — including how to add tracking pixels, set up campaigns, segment audiences, and optimize your ad.

7 Ecommerce Tips to Drive Back to School Sales

For many ecommerce companies, the back-to-school season represents a huge opportunity for sales as students re-stock on school supplies, expand their wardrobes, and upgrade their electronics. This article, published by the folks at Justuno, offers a number of tips on how to help your clients capitalize on this season.

Improving Ecommerce Email Marketing by Building a Customer Hub

It's unfortunate to see how many ecommerce companies look at their email marketing strategy and consider the once-a-month 'newsletter' a comprehensive way of engaging with their customers. With the plethora of marketing automation tools and advanced customer segmentation platforms available, sending the mass 'blast' to all of your customers is simply no longer acceptable. This article discusses the concept of creating a 'Customer Hub' where you can build a rich profile of your customers and create unique groups based on patterns across those customers. Those groups can then serve as the basis for creating highly personalized emails sent to the right customers, at the right time, yielding higher engagement and more revenue.

How Two Non-Technical Co-founders Grew & Sold Their Startup for Millions

This is a great read for anyone interested in hearing how a few savvy entrepreneurs were able to bootstrap their way to building a multi-million dollar ecommerce company. The authors provide both tactical and philosophical advice within the context of a fairly interesting narrative. This ecommerce article is highly recommended both for its inspiration as well as its insight.

Ecommerce Apps

Sauce

Most ecommerce store owners have at least a handful of different apps and platforms they use to run their online businesses. Many of these platforms can serve as powerful sources of data that can inform merchants about who their customers are and how they behave. Sauce is a 'customer segmentation' platform that pulls in data about your client’s customers from a number of different sources to create a rich 'profile' of customers on an individual level. Once those profiles are established, Sauce allows your clients to segment based on shared attributes such as location, buying history, attribution source, etc. Once those segments are created, you can 'push' those groups to your respective marketing platforms to create unique customer groups to better tailor your various online marketing tactics.

Privy

Email marketing represents a fair amount of revenue for many ecommerce companies. It goes without saying that growing your email list as an ecommerce entrepreneur is a valuable activity. Privy is a platform that provides a number of different tools — such as popups, banners, landing pages and more — to help you grow your email list. In addition, they have an 'offers management' platform that helps provide incentive for customers to join your client’s email list and tracks customer behaviour all the way until they redeem the offer.

What ecommerce resources did you find useful this month? Tell us in the comments below.