By DoItYourself.com Staff
In order to track the statistics of communication flow in your e-commerce business, your marketing department needs a way to manage the communication programs you develop. Some of the most important questions in this aspect are:- How many users have signed up for a newsletter?
- How many of them have provided further demographic information?
- How many of them enjoy golf as a hobby?
- How do you create an e-mail list that includes just the golf fanatics who have never purchased from you before?
Enabling Required Technologies
While Commerce Servers nowadays are light years ahead of the previous versions in making it easier to track information about your customers, you'll probably need to tweak the standard tools to get them just right for your company's requirements.
Much of this marketing functionality, especially data tracking, may require custom programming. You should be aware that the aim of some companies is to provide products for performing data tracking. Some of the products available are complete but also complex and expensive. For example, a company known as Coremetrics (www.coremetrics.com) can modify each page on your site and add a small piece of code that places the necessary tracking information into your site's database. You need to approach this type of solution with the proper caution and respect: a solution that puts information into a database with every page view is going to place an incredible burden on your data tier, and you need to make sure your data tier can handle the load. This may require a separate database server, or even a cluster of active database servers, to handle the necessary traffic.
Content Development and Deployment
You'll need to decide who in your company is responsible for putting content on your website and how they will do it. Although the initial build of your site may be performed mainly by your technical staff, or by outside technical contractors, and although they may have no problem uploading pages to the site via FTP, your long-term goal should be to remove as much of the burden of content development from your technical staff as possible.
Crafting Search Engine Optimized Content
To understand exactly what functionally you will need, determine exactly how the content of your site will be built and rolled out to your production web servers. You still have several techniques you can use for developing and deploying content, and you can combine these techniques to meet your company's exact needs. The main techniques for creating content are as follows:
- Create pages from scratch using a Web development tool like Microsoft Front Page.
- Design a set of page templates. Page content is then entered into an administrative interface and stored in a database; programs are used to create actual pages by combining the content with the templates.
- Design a set of page templates. Page content is then entered into the templates using a Web development tool like Microsoft Front Page.
The main problem with manually creating pages in a tool such as Front Page is that it generally requires the author to be technically savvy. If your content developers have the expertise, then those methods provide the most freedom and flexibility. Using page templates enables you to maintain a consistent look and feel across your site, and combining templates with a database allows for content creation by non-technical authors.
Explore the vital points in this article regarding tracking data of online customers and their performance in your e-commerce and Internet store and install necessary tools and tasks with the help of your coders. Remember, progress is the most important product in your e-commerce business.
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