• Wedding dress/es
• Reception decor
• Gifts for bridal party and family members
• Invitations, Save the Date and response cards
• Jewelry and Accessories
• Cake toppers
• Favors

*Stats from The Wedding Report

June

• National Trails Day- June 1 (Go hiking!)
• D Day(WWII)- June 6
• National Chocolate Ice Cream Day-June 7 (We’re in.)
• Flag Day- June 14
• Father’s Day- June 16
• National Candy Month

Marketing Ideas for Summer:

• Create a Pinterest board dedicated to all things summer, including your products!
• Is your product perfect for travel or vacation? Post a blog featuring a vacation checklist, with products you recommend taking along on trips.
• Many people travel during the summer months–have a contest where customers take a photo of themselves and your product wherever they travel to and post the photo. Not only does it help promote your business but it’s fun to see where people use your product!
• Does your product have multiple uses? Post a few blogs on how to use your product in different ways during the summer–for example, if you sell women’s clothing, feature a few dresses that could double as a beach cover up. Get creative!

What marketing and promotion ideas are you planning this summer?

 Ideas for your online kids clothing store:

• Eco-friendly, fair trade and organic clothing are big trends!
• Find unique, modern items to carry to set your online store apart. Search out local artisans or attend major trade shows to find interesting products.
• Consider branching out and selling other kid related items that pair perfectly with clothing like toys, accessories, modern looking diaper bags, etc. to boost sales and interest.
• Bundle similar or complimentary items together to create gift sets, perfect for a baby shower or birthday.
• Specialty items that can be customized, such as embroidered dresses, are great for special occasion gifts.

Tips to grow your online business:

• Find your niche. Do your research and answer key questions: What type of products are you excited to sell? Who buys this type of product? By answering these questions, you’ll help narrow down your niche and give your business direction.
• Start blogging! Blogging is a great way to grow organic search traffic to your website. Be sure to write quality, rich content that relates to your demographic and product. Informational, fun posts that are lifestyle related are the most engaging for readers. For example, if you sell children’s clothing, don’t assume you need to only blog about that. Incorporate subject matter related to your demographic or product, like how to make your own baby food or cloth diapers vs. disposable, in addition to featuring new products on occasion.
• Use social media tools like Pinterest to boost your sales. Pinterest boards featuring babies or children are extremely popular–and those boards include kids accessories, clothing and just about anything else you can imagine. Women also make up about 70% of the Pinterest user base. Our favorite thing about Pinterest? You can add your products and link back to your e-commerce site, making the process of product discovery to purchase happen in a flash.  With CoreCommerce, you can add the Pinterest button to all your products so customers can share too!

More blog articles to inspire you:

CoreCommerce Mompreneurs: Why I Love My Online Business

Why Moms Are Your Best Marketing Asset

Ideas For Starting An Online Business

1. If your customers are reading it, it matters. 

Any time you have information to share with your customers, whether by product description or any other form of communication, it is an opportunity to make a good impression. Be sure that your product description is accurate, unique, uses good grammar and reflects your branding.

2. Using the manufacturers product description is not good for SEO.

If you resell products in your online store, you most likely have a product descriptions from the manufacturer. However, you don’t want to use those! Not only are those descriptions usually pretty boring but it’s bad for SEO. Since everyone else is using them, Google recognizes the product description as duplicate content as other sites using the same product description and assumes it isn’t important enough to give a high rank to. Along the same lines, be sure you don’t “keyword stuff”–write for your audience: customers.

3. Product descriptions are essential in “closing the sale”.

Since you aren’t there in person to tell customers about your product, a product description is often the primary means of informing a customer about basic information. Taking a boring product description and put it in your own words, as if you’re explaining it to a customer standing right in front of you, is key. Think about how your customers think and what terminology they may use to refer to your product as you’re writing the product description.

Tips for writing product descriptions:

• Have fun with it!  Add life into your product description with creative adjectives. Injecting a sense of humor(when appropriate) can really go a long way too.
• Add a quote. If you’ve received praise about the product you’re writing a description for, include it. Be sure the quote is short, specific and relevant, like this: “Our customer, Anna, says our silver necklace is ‘chic— perfect all year round!’”.
• Offer a tip or unique use idea. Customers are a great source of tips or unique uses for your product. If you sell leather shoes, for example, and your previous customers have used special kinds of oils to deepen the color of the leather, consider including the tip.
• Keep it informative, yet brief. Try to keep your product description to three or four sentences max. If you have a lot of info to convey, try using bullet points instead of a paragraph form.

Examples of great product descriptions to inspire you:

• From Spark Living’s Laguna Wool Rug: “One part rug. One part work of art. Made 100% of New Zealand wool, naturally durable, stain resistant, flame retardant…”
• From Delicate Fortress Creations’ Mari Punjammies: “Trendy and super stylish, these punjammies are oh so comfy! Featuring delightful hues of olive, burgundy, mustard and peach. Made with 100% cotton. The purchase of these punjammies will support women of the International Princess Project who have escaped prostitution.”
• From The Chocolate Season’s Artisan Chocolate gift box: “Our luxurious 12 piece is beautiful inside and out. A unique size that is the perfect gift all by itself! Our artisan chocolates are individually made by hand, each with a unique chocolate ganache or creamy caramel infused with herbs, fruits, liqueur and spices.”

•  The number of women-owned firms has increased by 59% since 1997.
• The states with the fastest growth in number of women-owned firms over the past 16 years are Georgia, Texas, North Carolina, Louisiana and Nevada.
• Privately held woman-owned firms have added 175,000 jobs to the U.S. economy since 2007.
• One of the top sectors for woman-owned firms was retail trade, health care/social services related businesses and professional/scientific services such as attorneys, consultants and public relations.

If you are inspired to start working on your great business idea, check out our blogs to get started:

Ideas For Starting Your Online Business

Entrepreneur Stories: The Chocolate Season

Why I Started My E-commerce Business

*All stats from The State of Women Owned Businesses 2013 

Our guest post today is from Molly Thornberg, mompreneur/blogger extraordinare at Digital Mom Blog. Molly has great insight into why blogging can be so beneficial to your e-commerce site and overall business. 

Mompreneurs you need to be blogging!  Maybe you have heard that advice before and while sure you would love to, you just don’t have the time.
You already have enough on your plate between the kids and running a business. Dirty diapers and expense tracking. Feeding your family and increasing revenue. I totally get it.

Let’s look at the why blogging is so beneficial and then determine if blogging is something should be added into your weekly schedule.

1. SEO – Search Engines Love Blogs

Search Engine Optimization – this is key for growing your organic website traffic.  Why do search engines love blogs?  Blogging produces original content on your website and provides regular updates to your website. Both key factors when it comes to search engine love.

When you start blogging, cover a wide range of topics that relate your company and your products to provide rich content (yet another thing search engines love).

2. Give Your Brand a Voice

3.Connect with your Audience

4. Cost-effective Marketing

Gone are the days of press releases, here are the days of blog posts with up-to-date news!  Take 15 minutes and brain storm on your current marketing efforts. How can blogging work with those? What could you write in a blog that you want customers or potential customers to know? How could you use a blog to sale a product (maybe, a video or personal customer testimony)?

“Operating babyobaby.com from home via CoreCommerce has given me the freedom to work around my family’s various needs and schedules. PRICELESS!” -Alison

“Having the flexibility is key. I own/run my online store, BobbleRoos. When my kids were younger, I would work while my kids napped and at night after bedtime. Now that my kids are in elementary school, I have the flexibility to volunteer in their classrooms, chaperone field trips, and take them to various after school activities/practices. A few key benefits – I am able to make my kids a homemade, hot breakfast each morning to start their day off right, be there after school to help with homework, and take care of a few household chores (like starting laundry) and errands during my lunch break so we have more of our weekends free for family time.” -Renee

“I am a mom and I operate my business, Pacific Coast Dance Supply, from home when my family’s schedule allows me to do so. My father-in-law previously owned the business but he never had an online store. He took all orders over the phone. I knew I could not be home all the time to take orders because I work around my mom duties (grocery shopping, cooking, playing with my boys, swim lessons, etc.). The first thing I did when I took over the business was look for a service that would allow my customers to order online. I did a lot of research on different services and finally decided to go with Core Commerce…and I am so happy I did! I love the service and it really makes things so much easier for me…which allows me to spend more time with my husband and little ones! Thank you, Core Commerce!” -Tanya

“I’m a Civil Engineer turned-stay-at-home-mom. My two young boys keep me on my toes. I started my online business, eCloth USA, a year ago with CoreCommerce and it’s been a great success. The fiddling with the website/blog/facebook keep my mind occupied but I still have lots of time to play with the boys, get the meals ready and clean the house. Well, maybe not clean the house!” -Kate

“I started Beauty Cafe back in 1997 as a part-time hobby. When I got divorced in 2000, it became a full-time gig. I was able to work the business around my schedule as a single mom. I did my orders early in the morning, dropped daughter off at school, ran errands, went back home to work, and then picked her up after school and then it was all about my daughter. I was truly blessed to be able to have the best of both worlds and not have to feel like I had to be super woman.” -Lisa

First Prize:

• Free Design Package(a $1999 value) from the CoreCommerce Design Services Team
• $100 Target giftcard
• Blog feature on the CoreCommerce blog
• A CoreCommerce t-shirt

Second Prize:

• Free Professional(a $69.99 value) for six months or it’s value towards an Expert or Premier Plan
• $50 Target giftcard
• Blog feature on CoreCommerce’s blog

Third Prize:

• Free Professional(a $69.99 value) for six months or it’s value towards an Expert or Premier Plan
• $50 Target giftcard
• Blog feature on CoreCommerce’s blog

TO ENTER:

1. Submit an essay of 200 words or less, telling us about yourself and your business, including:

• Your name, business name and location
• The story behind your business and how you got started
• How being a mompreneur has changed your life

2. Submit your essay to contest@corecommerce.com by May 31, 2013 by 5:00pm CST. Please see rules to ensure eligibility. Winners will be notified on June 6, 2013 via e-mail.

*No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited. Open to mothers over the age of 18 who are legal U.S. residents.

• 20% more moms used social media in 2013 than did so in 2011
• Moms who are 18-34 years old were more likely to spend time on a social networking site: 260% more times than the average user
• 77% of moms use YouTube versus 61% of overall internet users
• 24% of moms use Pinterest versus 15% of overall internet users
• 92% of social moms said they shared family milestones on Facebook
• Getting advice was noted as a top reason why moms use social media
• The number of U.S. moms using social networks is expected to rise to nearly 30 million by 2017.

So what do these impressive stats mean for your e-commerce business? Here are our top reasons why moms are your best marketing asset:

• Women share products they love. Social media is more important to your business marketing strategy now than ever. Women make approximately 90% of household purchase decisions and often turn to friends, family and brands to get advice and learn about new products via social media. Moms are very vocal when it comes to sharing products they love, whether by social media or word of mouth.
• Women stay connected. Social moms share family milestones and happenings on social media, staying consistently connected to others in their circle. If your brand is posting consistent, quality content, moms are more likely to see it and interact since they frequent social networking sites.
• Women foster community. Most moms have a circle of family, friends and other moms to lean on, asking advice and sharing experiences, especially via social media. They tend to be more conversational and enjoy sharing experiences and recommendations with other moms they trust.

How you can engage moms through your marketing efforts:

• If your business has a blog(and you should!), integrate articles with advice on how to choose your product/s and using your product creatively. Use customer testimonials and quotes to add a personal element!
• Target moms who are ages 18-34 through tailored marketing efforts on social media.
• Pinterest is a fantastic way to attract more customers. Be sure to post a great photo and description of your product!
• Ask open ended questions on Facebook that are aimed at women–they love to share their experience with your product or helpful advice for others. Use it to engage them, find out what they love about your product and foster a sense of community.

*Stats from eMarketer and photo from iStockPhoto