Marketing

Target is engaging Facebook to help determine how half of a $5 million back-to-school donation is allocated. The retailer plans to donate $5 million to schools as part of its “Give With Target” initiative this fall. The two-part giving campaign provides $2.5 million in grants to in-need schools, as well as up to $2.5 million in Target GiftCards to local schools through votes on Target’s Facebook page. The Give With Target campaign will include $25,000 grants to 100 in-need schools just in time for the start of the school year.

This week I conclude this series of columns about big data and what it means for marketers with a seven-minute video. I promised at the end of "E-Commerce Moneyball" that I'd show you the tools that Amazon.com developed internally and leveraged to become the dominant e-commerce market leader. In the video, I deconstruct Amazon's category (landing page) and product pages to identify the features that online retailers can duplicate with some of the big data tools that have come to the market recently.

PriceGrabber just released additional results from its Back-to-School Shopping Forecast, revealing that while consumers are planning to spend more money on back-to-school items this year, they continue to look for ways to stretch their dollar and take advantage of retailer incentives to save. According to the survey, 74 percent of consumers chose free shipping as the top retailer tactic that would entice them to make a back-to-school purchase this year. Conducted from May 22 to June 5, 2012, the survey includes responses from 4,450 U.S. online consumers, with 1,509 of the respondents planning to shop this back-to-school season.

Mark Zuckerberg and his senior management team will spend two days at Wal-Mart's Bentonville, Arkansas home office this week, meeting with executives of the world's largest retailer and discussing ways to "deepen" their relationship. The Facebook team will meet with Wal-Mart CEO Mike Duke and his lieutenants on Friday, in the first such meeting between the two corporations’ senior management teams. Zuckerberg and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg will then speak to hundreds of Wal-Mart employees on Saturday at the retailer's monthly meeting.

You've invested time and money in your website - developing great content, optimizing it for search engines, and investing in online advertising. But once visitors find you, how do you get them to buy, click, or call? You have to build trust. Give your customers peace of mind - from search to browse to buy - with the Norton™ Secured Seal, the most recognized trust mark on the Internet. The Norton Secured Seal is an indispensable tool for increasing your customers' perception of safety and trust when they do business online. When visitors see the Norton Secured Seal, they know they can trust the link, trust the site, and trust the transaction. Displaying the Norton Secured Seal on your website can help make your visitors more likely to convert from visitors to customers and less likely to abandon their shopping cart.

Choosing the right security solution is critical to the success of an online business. Look for trust-based security solutions that deliver protection and consumer peace-of-mind through cutting edge technology and integration with complementary third-party solutions.

Now more than ever before, small businesses need to implement strategies that build and improve consumer trust. If a user doesn't feel safe on a website, they'll leave, and the chances are high they'll never come back even if nothing has necessarily gone wrong.

Even the best search engine optimization (SEO) can't help if users don't perceive your site as credible.

Learn to establish a strong online relationship with your customer that is built on trust by bolstering security and authenticating your site.

Download this white paper to learn about the importance of providing your customers a secure and trustworthy online experience and technology available that helps online businesses protect sensitive customer data, authenticate themselves, and build consumer trust.

SSL stands for "Secure Socket Layer." It is a technology that establishes a secure session link between the visitor's web browser and your website so that all communications transmitted through this link are encrypted and are, therefore, secure. SSL is also used for transmitting secure email, secure files, and other forms of information.

Innovative companies are responding to the challenge of supporting an increasingly mobile workforce. Providing secure information is not without its difficulties. Symantec uses an end-to-end multi-layered approach to protect Exchange and the data it holds. This enables you to: Keep bad things out - Keep good things in - Be ready to handle the unexpected.