E-commerce is a thriving industry. It’s so lucrative that more and more entrepreneurs with the same products and services go online to get just a sliver of their market. In this environment, your website is your storefront which means you have to leverage it as an asset to out-compete your competition. You have to make an excellent first impression on your customers because you only have a few seconds to stop the mouse from clicking away. When visitors are engaged you have the chance to convert them, so what’s going to be your unique approach to engaging customers?
Below are some of the most effective tips to make your website memorable to your target audience and get them to convert:
Post Engaging Content
Content that is compelling and engaging is one of the best ways to capture your audience and stand out from the crowd. Communicating with your audience through compelling content is a great way to establish your brand and showcase your products. Depending on your industry, customers want an experience and an understanding of how your product might impact their lives.
Investing in good content, photography, video, and testimonials will pay for itself over and over again. You can recycle this content on social media channels and other marketing assets and rotating it throughout your website will help those returning customers know there are people behind the brand they are shopping with.
Going beyond the standard investment of great photography and exciting videos of your products are leveraging those mediums to show actual customers using your products. If you have customers who love your products, ask them to share that in photos and videos. You don’t have to worry about the quality because the content will be gold for potential buyers.
Quick Tip: Less is more when it comes to homepage text. Because your goal is to entice the customer to interact with your store, too much content can actually reduce your conversion rate. Excite and delight your audience through easier to grasp content forms like images, and save the heavy content for product descriptions, blog posts, or “about you” pages.
Stick with Simple Designs
Your home page is absolutely your storefront as it is the first page most of your visitors will hit first, for obvious reasons. Ensuring your homepage makes it clear what you sell and why customers should choose you over the competition is something you really have to invest in because again, you only have a few seconds with those customers making their first visit. Given that we just said you need to do everything to stand out from the crowd the logical approach would be to find a very unique and different design for your website. This all depends on your brand. Striking a balance between bland and recognizable is more important than finding the craziest, most complex design imaginable, especially if that doesn’t represent your brand.
Less can be more when it comes to the layout of your home page. If you have invested in great images and video, focus on showcasing that and reducing the amount of text on the screen, and direct all of your calls to action to the transactional pages of your website. Make sure you’re not overcrowding sections if you have a lot of products, give everything room to breathe. 5 small photos of a product might be worse than one large one, especially on the home page.
Make Your Website Mobile-Ready
We can’t stress this enough and yet, we find many websites are altogether not optimized for mobile or need usability improvements. Test your website’s appearance on various screen sizes and see what jumps out to you as different between desktop, tablet, and mobile. It should be comparable in terms of user experience and e-commerce performance and you need to consider how your visitors will interact with the site on different devices. Placing calls to action on the upper left side of the screen might be okay for desktop, but on mobile, that’s a LONG way for someone to stretch their thumb.
Don’t risk losing sales because your website isn’t compatible with the most recent mobile devices. Performance or design issues will eat into that precious first impression time you have and at the very least, create a poor user experience for your customer who is literally trying to spend their money with you.
Don’t Hard Sell
Does anyone like a pushy salesperson? It can appear unprofessional and untrustworthy if your homepage is crowded with a multitude of different sales pitches.
Look, your website is at its core solely to sell your products, that’s already a given, so instead of rehashing that fact, use your website as a great platform for showcasing the products and providing information to your visitors so they can make an informed buying decision. Focus on creating an elegant site design that clearly states your offerings in your authentic brand voice. Your visitors will appreciate not having to deal with the hard sell and instead enjoy the experience of discovering your offering.
Utilize Effective Call-to-Action Buttons
It’s impossible to know what will trigger each visitor to your site to click on a button and dive deeper into your site, which is why you need to consider each call-to-action carefully. Maybe they get all the way down to the bottom of the home screen and finally decide to move forward, maybe the hero section is enough to entice the. To boost click-through rates and conversions, strategically arrange call-to-action buttons with the content you are displaying on your site. It’s worthwhile to devote some effort to determining these vital links’ ideal location.
Use A/B testing and adjust call-to-action placements. Even minor adjustments can have a huge influence on your conversion rates. Call-to-action buttons must be obvious and stand out in a way that entices user involvement, whether they link to more information, contact forms, or product purchases. Get creative with the wording of the buttons themselves as it relates to your brand’s voice. Maybe “learn more” is too formal and you should go with “check it out”. These subtle, conscious changes will resonate with your visitors and create a consistent experience throughout the site.
Conclusion
The competitive landscape of e-commerce means you need to take the time and investment to carefully curate your great products in an easy-to-use, content-driven website. You need to be willing to try things and use real user data to make decisions and you need to make sure you have a strong, established brand to guide your approach. Do all of this and you can grow your slice of your market exponentially.
If you want a premium e-commerce web design, don’t hesitate to contact Torch Digital Labs. We help businesses achieve their digital goals by leveraging amazing digital marketing tools. Check out our services today!
