Last year over 10 million US small businesses were prioritizing eCommerce initiatives (Forrester), yet the eCommerce world remains a nightmare of confusion and complexity. It’s that nightmare that BigTurns puts to rest with it's all-in-one software, a web-based application that makes running an online store easy by bringing together all the tools that business owners need to succeed. In contrast to existing solutions, BigTurns completely replaces the traditional website-ecommerce pair with a holistic “online business” approach that puts the spotlight on understanding your customers and getting better results – whilst saving time and money.



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Content is the basis for all marketing online. Content creates credibility.  Credibility leads to conversion. And conversion leads to new customers. Read the 4Cs formula

The 4Cs Formula

Create Content

Good content will address your customer's needs. You need to continually create, recreate, and build content. Search engines love good content and will reward you with sending visitors to your site.
Traffic coming to your site for your content is your traffic. You own the traffic and can decide what and how to greet the visitors.
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BigTurns is an online business platform.  What’s an “online businesss” platform?  If you’ve not come across this concept before you probably talk about a CMS (content management system).  BigTurns platform at its most basic level is a CMS system, but it’s so much more…

What BigTurns does is take all the elements that a traditional online business needs to be successful and merge them into one holistic solution.  The elements that I’m talking about are CMS, e-commerce, email marketing, CRM, analytics and reporting. 

Typically a business will run all these systems separately in different environments.  By doing it all in one place will save you money, but having these fully integrated can make marketing so much more targeted and accountable.  Calculating ROI on email campaigns and affiliate schemes is so much easier and can done “out of the box”. 

The system also helps to build accurate profiles of your customers because every interaction they have with your website, whether it be completing a form or buying a product is recorded against their CRM record as can every email you have with them.  This means any member of staff can pick up that customer and at a glance can see exactly their history with the company.

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I was recently asked to give some advice to a friend who wanted to have a web designer design her website. My friend runs a salon and she was one of those people who knew that she needed a website but didn't know about the business...

She had no idea what Web Designers charge, she didn't know how her website would work for her, she hadn't thought about what content she was going to put there, she just knew it was 2010 and every small business needs a website. Well, it was time to teach her a couple of things as a favour and help her with her strategy for her website.

I went through 5 strategies with her when I explained the opportunities with a website:

Goal 1: Selling Online

The most well known goal for eCommerce Businesses where you're looking for an extra channel to sell your products and services.

Strategy: To reach sales targets and reduce shopping cart abandons, you'll need to focus on an all-in-one eCommerce site complete with catalogs, products, shopping cart, shipping and a payment gateway and that provides an interesting and seamless shopping experience. Don't forget to add extras like upselling, recommended products, product galleries and plenty of credible product information to help meet your sales and orders targets.

But what happens when you can't sell online because what you sell is a physical service or you're not running a for-profit business? There's 4 other goals you can set for your Online Business to get return on investment...

Goal 2: Build Your Community

This goal applies particularly well to non-profit organizations like Churches, local Neighborhood organizations, Community organizations, Charities etc - they need to have online conversations/discussions with their current members and attract new ones.

Strategy: To build an online community, you'd need to nurture a social site with a discussion forum and post regular news on a blog to keep visitors coming back. Make a space for photo-uploads to show what's going on in your community, post podcasts of speeches or presentations for your visitors to download in a members-only area. Make sure members know about your site and that they contribute as well!

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Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) is a constant battle online. I call it "Shiny Object Syndrome". It is so easy to lose focus these days and bounce from one great idea to the next before we have fully executed on the first great idea.

That's why we need a plan that follows a the path to success. 

Decades ago, business owners had it easy - they weren't dealing with the rapid and volatile change we deal with today.There was a strategic, focused way of managing a businesses that you may remember - the 4 P's.

The 4 P's, aka the "Marketing Mix", is a combination of four marketing ingredients that you must constantly balance and control when running your business.

The 4 P's are still relevant today, and we have a bit of an update to applying them to the eCommerce Business:

Product

Offering static, cataloged products no longer wins the race. With comparison shopping sites and huge online stores like Amazon, how do you compete on Product alone? Google has changed the way we buy online and your customers now start with the goal in mind (a product), then choose which supplier to buy from.

If you're selling eProducts or online services then you still have the power to innovate and stay ahead of the game, but if you're selling tangible goods you need to be offering a valuable experience AND proving your credibility.  Here are a couple of proven techniques to demand credibility:

1. Allow customers to offer feedback with comment forms on blogs, announcements and products. This builds online credibility for your next round of customers to see, making them feel more comfortable doing business with you.
2. Offer a public forum where customers can discuss what they like/dislike about your product or service. You can always moderate the forum if you are concerned about negative feedback.
3. Give your customers individual, personalized attention through exceptional customer service.
4. Prove that you're an expert by creating content & educating you customers about the products.Give customers detailed photo galleries, videos, specifications and anything else they won't find in a "bricks and mortar" store.  Customers crave information in their quest to become more informed.

Price

Competing on price is a hard battle to win.
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Google and other search engines such as Yahoo! or Bing use software programs called "Search Engine Spiders” to search the Web for content "relevant" sites. These spiders travel across links, then index and rank the web sites. Their rankings can be then seen on search engine result pages.

To be listed on top of the search engine pages it is critical to establish "relevant" link relationships, building both outbound and inbound links to your site. To help being ranked as high as possible it's necessary to build as many "relevant"  links as possible.

The more "relevant" links you have the greater your chances will be to attract more visitors. It's an easy and very effective formula to boost traffic to your web site while it's also one of the least expensive ways.

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How to decide between blogging and a newsletter

Last night I was sorting all of my important paperwork: Car insurance, health insurance, credit card information, work stuff, tax information, and you get the idea. Then I put them into folders to organize. Let's do the same with your content and then decide where to include this content (Blog, Newsletter, or Both). 

1. Education - BOTH
2. Business ideas for feedback - NEWSLETTER
3. Showcase before and after photos - NEWSLETTER
4. FAQS - NEWSLETTER
5. Common Concerns - BOTH
6. Tips - BOTH
7. Coupons and Discounts and Specials - NEWSLETTER
8. Products - BOTH

There are a few caveats, so lets take a look at them.

Education:

You should never pass up an opportunity to educate. Customers like being in the know and they appreciate you keeping them up to date.
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This is the first Post for The eCommerce Blog from Sales and Marketing Automation. 

Our mission with this blog is to promote eCommerce Best Practices to Small business owners. We will be including topics that relate to building eCommerce Sites, marketing eCommerce Sites and managing eCommerce Sites.

We are not sure where this journey will take us but the general direction we are going to set out on is to expose the tricks that make successful sites sell.

We will discuss topics like eCommerce Technology, SAAS, Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Blogging, Content, Conversion, Customer Automation, and more.

I will be the main contributor to the blog postings, and all of our contributors will some how be related to BigTurns Business Systems, an eCommerce Consulting Company with an eCommerce Platform for sale and a team of eCommerce Consultants.

I Hope you like it.  Read More

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