Some key themes:
- Use of social to drive sales and reduce content creation costs – companies are using social channels to like Instagram, twitter, etc. to encourage people to talk about their products and take pictures of their products and bringing that information back to their sites so new customer can better relate to content. It can also be cheaper for organization they don’t need to pay for the content. surlatable.com introduced a great feature called Shop Talk (can be found in the top nav). They asked customer after they checkout to fill out a short description of why they purchased a product. The form lists all previous purchases and the resulting comments can be found in a number areas of the site like the product detail page.
- Richer Omni-channel experiences – There is growing trend where richer content is being made available online to promote Stores, like specific pages for events being held at bricks and mortar stores.
- Basically, not having just a store locator function on the site but providing a more immersive and insightful experience for customers.
- This has resulted in employees running bricks and mortar stores working more closely with eCommerce teams to enable more in-store purchases and foot traffic as opposed to being a competing channel.
- Leading in-store customers to product information online – through the use of QR codes on products (or something similar) in store customers can get access to more product information to make purchasing decisions.
Detailed Site recommendations:
- Sliding banners – general consensus from usability studies show static banners are generally best as opposed to sliding carousel. Best to show in the static banner what is you most current sales item, or best sales item.
- People who use the search box convert 2 to 3 times more than visitors who don’t use search. So make it prominent.
- Need to make sure EDMs for discounted products are not sent to customers who had recently purchased that product.
- Navigation menu – max 2 to 3 levels.
- The faster the website is the more conversions you will have.
- Quick view of products is becoming popular. For time poor browsers, it enables them to hover over a product listing and see additional details.
- If making an image clickable you may find also adding a text link useful.
- Shipping costs should be present on the cart page as you may find customers drop off as they may think they will need to enter their personal details just to view shipping costs for their order.
- Don’t shy away from introducing a pop-up on first visit to solicit new additions to the newsletter database. The reviewers discussed how they had not heard of anyone’s conversions being affected when doing this. Don’t underestimate soliciting email addresses with good offers.
- Any long text can be hidden by a read me link.
- If being overwhelmed by live chat, think about just enable it through the checkout process.
- Customers tend to like big clear images.
- Aim for 100 to 200 words for product descriptions. Don’t just talk about the what but also talk about the why.
- Think about incorporate people who brought also brought into emails.
- You need to consider the 4 p’s of marketing product, price, presentation, place.
- Align everything on your site to your core values.
- · Don’t spend on marketing until you are able to get conversions from you’re site.
- Site optimisation never ends, you should be continuously tweaking your user journey.
- You have to have consistency between the website and email, everything from titles to sub titles.
Kaz on Commerce! 