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Top 2024 resources on matters

Best matters resource in 2024.
Learn more about matters to improve your e-commerce strategy.

  • Building an Ecommerce Business, Part 4: Copywriting Matters - Good copy sells. Spicing up your copy will give your online store a personality to stand above competitors. In this fourth installment in my series of conversations about building an ecommerce business, I visited with Neville Medhora, founder of Kopywriting Kourse
    Topics: product, email, ecommerce, appsumo, sold, matters, business, founder, company, good, rave, content, building, descriptions, copywriting.
  • Corporate Image: Why Your Brand’s Public Perception Matters More Than Ever Now - In 2019, Contently, a content marketing software company that connects freelancers with enterprise brands, made a controversial move — in an effort to increase profitability and, in turn, provide more creative opportunities to their freelancers, the company announced that they'd begin charging freelancers a mandatory service fee for every assignment they book.
    Topics: matters, corporate, companys, customer, image, company, values, brands, public, customers, service, brand, perception.
  • Diversity Matters: This Makeup Brand's Movement for Inclusivity - Tomi Gbeleyi is driving change with MFMG Cosmetics, the beauty brand she founded that creates products for deep skin tones. Tomi initially caught the attention of The New York Times through the writing on her blog, which focused on inclusion and diversity within the beauty community. Soon after, readers asked her to create her own products. In this episode of Shopify Masters, Tomi shares her journey from viral social movement to the development and launch of her inclusive makeup line.More
    Topics: matters, doing, wanted, blog, lot, content, instagram, really, inclusivity, movement, actually, makeup, brand, brands, think, diversity.
  • Futureproof eCommerce: What Does it Mean & Why it Matters - With every year, new trend reports aim to predict the future for the years to come. Within the world of eCommerce, we've seen drastic shifts in customer behavior and expectations imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic. However, these proved to accelerate the future predictions rather than depart from expectations. While some brands were able to adapt quickly, many struggled to keep up and eCommerce managers were left wondering first, how to catch up and second, how to ensure their brands wouldn’t fall behind in the future. This post will walk through the importance of 'futureproofing' your eCommerce solution and why you prioritize it now versus in the future. What is Futureproofing? Simply put, futureproofing is ensuring your eCommerce solution will continue to deliver value for your brand into the future. That's not to say that a single solution will last forever. Instead, it ensures that your eCommerce solution will continue to keep up with your needs as they change. For example, the ability to easily support new experiences like mobile-self checkout or, seamless integrate new technology. For a breakdown of crucial commerce trends, check out our Gartner's Predicts report post. Why Legacy Monolithic Solution Is Vulnerable Monolithic eCommerce software (or, legacy all-in-one solutions) by design provide interlinked functionality from a single package. Because each commerce function is 'tightly-coupled,' a monolith solution requires extensive work to customize or add new functionality. To learn more about monolithic solutions and how they compare to more modern headless solutions, check out our post here.  Most monolithic solutions have long release cycles; they will need several months to add a feature like curbside pick-up or mobile self-checkout, two experiences that gained massive importance during the pandemic. Adding new experiences to a monolith is constrained by the very nature of its architecture. Since each component is 'tightly-coupled,' they are not designed to work with new features easily. Any customizations or additions mean that long hours of implementation and testing are required to ensure a new experience works with the entirety of the rest of the existing monolith. Due to these long release cycles and the lack of control over them, brands running a monolithic eCommerce solution had no possibility of quickly spinning up these experiences, losing customers to competitors that were on future proofed solutions that allowed the rapid addition of these new experiences. Gartner sums it up well, "Monolithic digital commerce applications cannot support the agility and flexibility needed to support fast-moving digital business. Organizations will need to move toward composable commerce to keep up with the pace of change in customer demand."   Want to See How Elastic Path Commerce Cloud is Future Proof? Launch and optimize innovative experiences fast, with a modern, headless, SaaS, API-first, & microservices-based commerce platform. See the Future of eCommerce What is Composable Commerce? Is it the Solution? In a nutshell, Composable Commerce is an approach to digital commerce that enables your brand to create a 'best-for-me' solution comprised of third-party vendors and core commerce capabilities that fit your brand's unique needs. It offers a variety of benefits over a traditional monolithic solution, including and not limited to: Speed to market Speed to optimize/ change as needed Flexibility to tailor a solution with third-party features to fit your brand Unmatched scalability with could-native architecture Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Business-centric solution to manage multiple customer touchpoints across several channels (B2B, B2C, B2B2C, etc.). Microservices based features are designed to function independently, making them easy to add, remove, or swap as the market and your brand’s goals evolve To learn more about Composable Commerce, check out our guide here. A Composable Commerce approach is well equipped to seamlessly add functionality on the fly as your business goals and customer habits evolve. Take mobile touchpoints as an example; with Millennials making up a large percentage of buyers in today's market, it is as vital as ever to have a state-of-the-art mobile commerce experience to fit their expectations. Failing to add a mobile-self checkout or having an app or mobile site that is slow to load can lead to lost conversions and, ultimately, revenue. See our post to learn more about page load speeds and how they impact your bottom line. A composable approach isn't only about keeping up with the Joneses. It also ensures that you have the flexibility to test and innovate with third-party solutions for a particular functionality to ensure that you create a solution that works best for your brand's needs. For example, experimenting with adding a voice-enabled chat bot or AR showrooms to test if they improve your conversion rates. Compared with the underwhelming, restricted 'what you see is what you get' reality of a monolith solution, a composable approach allows continuous improvement and innovation. Free from coming up with workarounds to a monolithic solution, your eCommerce team can focus on quickly delivering customer experiences that help your brand stand out amongst the competition. What About 5 Years Into The Future? If you’ve been in digital commerce for a while, you’re probably experienced in wholescale re-platforming. At this point, you are likely wondering if there is a way to escape the never-ending cycle of re-platforming. It is a costly journey that your brand may have undertaken multiple times already. The reality is, with a SaaS-based, Composable Commerce solution, a full-scale re-platforming is not a concern in the next 5 years. While no solution will last forever, with a Composable Commerce solution, your brand will be in the best possible position to evolve with the rapidly changing world of eCommerce. You will never have to wait for a new 'release' of a monolithic solution to provide a consistent multi-experience offering to your customers. Ready for the future? Talk to us today to see how Elastic Path can help your brand solve your eCommerce needs today & tomorrow.
    Topics: means, future, futureproof, ecommerce, commerce, experiences, brands, matters, composable, solutions, monolithic, solution, brand.
  • How Brands Can Nurture and Develop Emotional Intelligence (and Why It Matters) - Emotional intelligence has long been discussed as a critical component of leadership.
    Topics: audience, nurture, brands, intelligence, target, develop, way, customers, unmet, emotional, brand, matters.
  • How to Calculate Standard Deviation in Excel, and Why It Matters for Marketers - If you’ve ever taken a statistics class, the words ‘standard deviation’ might intimidate you. This complex formula provides insightful information for datasets that averages alone cannot reveal, and thankfully, Excel makes calculating this statistic easier than putting pencil to paper.
    Topics: marketers, calculate, excel, population, formulas, sample, need, help, stdevs, standard, deviation, matters, formula.
  • How to Submit Your Website to Google (And Why It Matters) - So, you've developed an amazing site. You've put together some seriously valuable content, iterated on the design, and gathered a ton of feedback. Now, you're finally feeling ready to share it with the world. And as soon as you publish your new site for the world to see, all of your content will immediately start showing up in Google, right?
    Topics: matters, sitemap, page, crawl, pages, content, updated, submit, search, website, site, google.
  • How to create content that matters: 3 key actions from Taylor Coil of Tortuga - As retail marketers you want any content you produce to reach as many customers as possible; you also want to be showcasing the brand identity via the creative editorial pieces you send out or have on your site. While this may look amazing in their inbox, it’s important to ask -  is your content offering helpful to customers? Taylor, Marketing Director of Tortuga noticed a trend within content marketing that is halting retailers from making impactful content. We've taken her 3 key actions, as shared during her keynote, on how to create content that matters. “Every piece of content you put out should be a tool to help” - Taylor Coil, Marketing Director at Tortuga 
    Topics: matters, marketing, actions, customers, marketers, value, brand, coil, tool, content, retail, way, create, tortuga, key, taylor, think.
  • Image Alt Text: What It Is, How to Write It, and Why It Matters to SEO - Today, nearly 19% of Google's SERPs show images. That means, despite your best SEO efforts, you could still miss out on another organic traffic source: your website's images.
    Topics: keyword, example, write, seo, search, webpage, google, text, images, alt, matters, image, content.
  • Quality Score: Why It Matters and 6 Steps to Improve It - Running an ad campaign is no small feat. From narrowing down your target audience to designing your landing page, there are many pieces to the puzzle.
    Topics: score, puzzles, users, ads, page, google, user, quality, ad, matters, landing, steps, improve.
  • Revenue Marketing: What It is and Why It Matters - 91% of marketers are confident that their making marketing decisions will positively impact revenue. Are you one of them?
    Topics: efforts, goal, revenue, data, plan, metrics, matters, goals, marketing, campaign, sales.
  • Security & Android apps: why automated testing matters - Given the widespread adoption of Android as an efficient mobile operating system (OS), there is an increasing need for proper testing of its applications based on the specificities of the platform’s development model. Due to Android’s distribution ecosystem that is porous to poorly-tested applications. To this end, it has become imperatively important for app developers to ensure that they sufficiently test their Android applications before releasing them into the market.
    Topics: apps, behavior, applications, security, matters, testing, automated, app, developers, android, memory.
  • The Surprising Metric that Matters Most for SERP Rankings in 2023 (Hint: It’s Not Authoritativeness) - Google uses 200+ ranking factors when determining the search results. How do you ensure that your website gets more visibility and, thus, higher SERP positions?
    Topics: search, hint, mobile, page, pages, users, metric, serp, content, website, surprising, google, matters, trustworthiness, authoritativeness, rankings, seo.
  • What Does it Mean to Use Concatenate in Excel [+ Why It Matters] - Copy and paste shortcuts are handy until you have hundreds of data points to manually combine and reformat.
    Topics: combine, does, concatenate, excel, text, cell, strings, function, matters, cells, join, formula, mean.
  • What Is YouTube CPM? [+ Why It Matters] - YouTube is a powerful advertising platform with over two billion monthly active users. As a creator, this means you have numerous opportunities to earn money. Understanding YouTube CPM is key to unlocking its potential.
    Topics: advertising, advertiser, matters, youtube, video, cost, videos, cpm, ad, pays.
  • What Organizational Culture Is & Why It Matters - You'll often hear someone, when speaking to a friend about work, say, "So, what's the company culture like?"
    Topics: work, leaders, theres, company, culture, organizational, vision, matters, organizations, employees, good.
  • What is Context Marketing? Why It Matters in 2022 [+Examples] - While it's fair to say most marketers are on-board with the importance of content marketing, there's still an aspect of marketing that doesn't get as much love: context marketing.
    Topics: examples, matters, right, create, youre, offers, leads, smart, context, content, marketing, know.
  • What is Lead to Account Matching, and Why It Matters - As an organization gets larger, it becomes more and more difficult for different departments, and different employees within the same department, to communicate. Unfortunately, this can lead to a "left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing" scenario.
    Topics: organization, matters, lead, existing, matching, sales, company, account, leads, customers, waste.
  • What is Technographic Data? (And Why It Matters) - Digital transformation is more than just a buzzword — as noted by Forbes, 70% of companies have already deployed a strategy to improve digital service and solution uptake or are actively working on one.
    Topics: information, sales, potential, matters, technographic, companies, marketing, efforts, technology, help, data.
  • What is Trading Up, and Why It Matters for Marketers - To understand what the term "trading up" means, let's start with a scenario.
    Topics: matters, trading, version, feel, means, marketers, trade, brand, starbucks, consumers, product, consumer.
  • Why Customer Connection Matters - At INBOUND 2023, HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan introduced changes to the customer journey driven by the recent surge of AI technology.
    Topics: hubspot, journey, connection, companies, growth, customer, features, stages, lifecycle, matters, customers.
  • Why Local Marketing Still Matters in the Digital Age - When budgets are limited, local marketing creates better conversions and more reliable monthly earnings.
    Topics: local, store, matters, national, means, marketing, digital, potential, nationally, shop, online, market, age.
  • Why Page Load Time Matters - Have you ever been frustrated by an online shopping experience? Clicked on a link while scrolling social but abandoned it because the product page loaded too slowly? Increasingly, customers expect convenient and seamless experiences when buying online. These expectations can have a surprisingly impactful effect on your brand's bottom line. When it comes to eCommerce, an often-neglected aspect is website performance. How fast your website loads directly impacts your customer experience and outcomes. Is your website doing all it can to encourage purchases, or is it causing your brand to leave dollars on the table? Does it Matter to Your Brand? Over the past couple of years, you've undoubtedly heard about the increasing use of mobile to make purchases, both for B2C and B2B brands. Flashy stats and presentations often lead to knee-jerk reactions like setting up a mobile channel but fall short on delivering an experience that will help your brand convert more sales. As ever, the numbers don't lie. Here are a few stats to consider: “When pages load in less than 4 seconds they win 59% of the conversions, and those that exceed the four second mark experience 58% of the bounces” - eCommerce Speed Hub Each second of a buyer’s journey matters, ‘the Site Speed Standard benchmark data proves that reducing page load time by just 1 second results in a 3 – 5% conversion lift’ - eCommerce Speed Hub Before your customers can make a purchase, ensuring they make it through the door is essential to making a sale with the probability of a bounce increases 90% as mobile page loads go from 1s to 5s. Another added benefit is that your site speed directly impacts where you will rank on search. A few years ago, Google even announced it as an update, yet a significant number of retail sites still have poor load times. "Sixty-four percent of all online retail is from mobile, but conversion rates on mobile are only half that of desktop. That's more people browsing, but fewer people buying... In fact, we've seen that companies who commit to great mobile design are seeing 32% increases in revenue. And, get this, up to 400% improvement in conversion rates. " - Adrienne Clem, Director of Search Ads Growth and Optimization at Google. Check out our mobile commerce guide to learn more. This isn’t to say that mobile experiences should be the be the sole focus of your page speed optimizations. Providing seamless experiences across channels is a crucial benefit of a cloud-based Headless Commerce platform like Elastic Path; it's a perfect fit for your website's scalable, near-instantaneous performance. To learn more about how a Headless Microservices-based cloud platform, check out our guide to Headless commerce here.   Build Faster, Seamless eCommerce Experiences Start building the unique commerce experience your business demands with a faster, more flexible and scalable headless solution. Sign up for a free trial What Site Speed Should You Target and How Do You Get There? The holy grail of website performance is simple: a page load time of 3s. Two of the usual culprits for lagging performance are large images (file size), and the architecture used to build your site (from poorly designed coding to back-end systems like your eCommerce platform). Thankfully, there are a plethora of resources to help guide you on your optimization journey. We recommend Google's PageSpeed insights tool to start. The tool helps determine where you stand, and how you can start to make improvements. Optimizations will be an ongoing process for your IT team, however, it’s great to have the peace of mind that your eCommerce platform can help support your journey to stellar performance. Here’s a quick snapshot of what an Elastic Path powered site performs like. Versus a not-so-great performance on other Headless Commerce platforms. Ready to switch to an eCommerce platform that helps rather than hinders your website's performance? Chat with us today to see how Elastic Path can help your brand.
    Topics: page, speed, commerce, site, experience, headless, website, performance, ecommerce, load, mobile, matters.
  • Why Site Performance Matters and How to Improve It - Site performance (or lack thereof) is one of the biggest pain points eCommerce businesses face today, due in part to its direct correlation to conversion rate. If you don’t think site performance matters to your customer - your revenue, and your reputation, are at risk. I’ll cover why site performance matters and how best to improve it if you find yourself on the slower end of the speed trial. Consider this: It takes about fifty milliseconds, or .05 seconds, for users to form an opinion about your site and determine if they will stay or go. Think about your personal experience with a slower-paced load time on a site. How many times have you bounced off as quickly as you found it? From ordering a pizza to buying a couch, today’s consumer simply does not have time to wait.   Fifty-seven percent  of internet users say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed web application on mobile. Given the miniscule timeframe to make a good first impression on a consumer, plus the hefty influence of word-of-mouth first impressions by those same consumers (either favorable or less than), site performance is not a “nice to have,” it is critical. Poor site performance is expensive. Industries may vary as far as numbers, but let’s see on average what the damage looks like when it comes to what slow site speed will cost you. For example, if you’re running an ecommerce site that makes $100,000 per day, a one second page delay could  cost you $2.5 million  per year in lost sales. To put that in eCommerce behemoth terms, let’s take Amazon. Performance tests showed they would lose $1.6 BILLION every year if they slowed down by just one second. What is the Benchmark for Optimal Site Speed? The Google-recommended page load time is under  two seconds. Two seconds is the threshold for ecommerce website acceptability, while Google aims to keep load time under a half-second. Additional food for thought: 47% of consumers expect a page to load in two seconds are less, while studies show for every 100ms decrease in home page load speed results in a 1.11% lift in session-based conversion. Other factors that affect site performance to keep in mind: mobile device usage, bandwidth, and variable internet speeds by user region. So now that you’re aware of the high stakes of slow site speed, the good news is you have options for improving it. First things first, always be testing. Web Application Performance & Speed Testing Tools There are many products and services in the market to diagnose web application speed and performance. It’s important to have a clear picture of how your site is performing and be able to make tweaks quickly and easily. More benefits to these tools include: Find out how your site is performing across devices. Most users are visiting through a mobile device so optimization is key See how your site is performing across regions and countries Analyze and optimize for better rankings and UX Triage bottlenecks and make optimization decisions based on ROI and conversion rates Interested in Learning More About Elastic Path Commerce Cloud? Launch and optimize innovative experiences fast, with a modern, headless, SaaS, API-first, & microservices-based commerce platform. See the Future of eCommerce The Top Web Performance/Speed Testing Tools: Pingdom Speed Test GTmetrix Google PageSpeed Insights Yellow Lab Tools WebPage Test KeyCDN Website Testing Tools DotCom-Monitor Dareboost IsItWP Website Speed Tool GiftOfSpeed     Figure 1: A typical Web Performance Tool interface Source: Pingdom Next Steps: How to Improve on Speed and Overall Performance Now that you’ve invested the time in the proper tools to monitor and improve site speed, and understand the slim window to keep a user engaged and on the path to purchase, here are a few things to consider that affect speed: Dynamic vs. Static Content Management – The difference between the two is dynamic content is anything subject to change based on user input such as product, pricing, or descriptions. This content is stored in a database and is fetched when the user engages with it, otherwise known as async communication. Static content on the other hand is anything remaining the same in the experience such as the navigation menu. Both types of content have distinct yet crucial functions on a site but are managed differently. While static content typically loads faster there are ways to manage dynamic content to alleviate issues and slower load times. As you edit dynamic content you want to avoid editing the HTML code as this will cause breaks in your site. Additionally when managing dynamic content use proper caching and Content Delivery Networks (CDN) to bridge the gaps between dynamic and static content. Use a Faster Website Host – upgrading your website host can significantly affect your site speed. While you’d also be looking at site uptime, traffic volume (especially the ability to manage spikes during peak activity), customer support, and of course price. Here is a helpful Top 10 list of vendors to get started. You’ll want to review many providers and continuously comparison shop especially as you scale your business. Image Optimization - no surprise that visual content engages users. However, high quality imagery means larger files that eat up load time. Using resized and compressed files is a lighter lift for the server to load the image. Within imagery you’ll want to pay attention to the file format. There are four file types: PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, and SVG. A general rule of thumb is to avoid GIFs since they do drag on site speed. When choosing between PNGs and JPEGs, PNGs work well for graphics and screenshots, while JPEGs are ideal for photographs. The newcomer is the SVG file format, or scalable vector graphic that renders well in web applications and across other use cases. Lazy load plugins are also useful to only render photos where the user is browsing. Reduce HTTP Requests – HTTP requests occur when the browser sends a request to the server for information. The fewer requests a website must make the faster the site can load. The amount and the size of the requested files affects load times, however most engaging sites have both multiple and larger files. The best way to address this issue and is to run a full report on your site and assess what images are taking the longest to load and if in fact you need them. After you assess what’s needed, you can reduce the file size. Web Application Optimization is a Team Effort Web application design and management is a collaborative effort between IT and marketing teams. You’ll want to consider the user experience but also look at the technical load of what you’re providing to the user. Poor site speed results in bounce rates; essentially all the work you put into an engaging interface is null and void if the load times are sluggish. It takes the unique roles and goals of each side to create a memorable experience that consistently drives conversion.
    Topics: user, website, site, web, load, dynamic, matters, performance, content, application, speed, improve.
  • Why Workplace Authenticity Matters More than Ever, According to Credly's VP of Customer Success - Pre-pandemic, it was relatively easy to keep tight boundaries between our personal and professional lives.
    Topics: selves, vp, customer, credlys, matters, authenticity, according, way, success, work, bring, encouraging, coffee, workplace, team, employees, pandemic.
  • Why You Should Care About National Manufacturing Day - I grew up in Beaumont, Texas – a small town near Houston on I-10. The location had nothing to do…
    Topics: local, united, manufacturers, growing, event, day, family, nearly, matters, million, details, manufacturing, states, mfg.