We just launched the second video segment of our Ecommerce Website Best Practices series entitled, Get Found: Driving More Traffic to Your Ecommerce Site. In the video as well as in the white paper, we look at how implementing SEO and SEM can substantially drive qualified new traffic to your site and how using these techniques is the only sure way to deliver a continuous stream of traffic to your site.
This morning I happened upon an article by Mark Jackson from ClickZ called Why Host a Blog on Your Corporate Website that gives you another way to easily drive SEO on your site: host a blog.
Before you tell me why blogging isn't for you and that EVERYONE is hosting a blog, consider Jackson's reasoning: Blogs develop lots of links for your site and blogs present you as a thought leader in your industry.
The linking thing is a no-brainer. Creating quality inbound links is the number one way you can drive SEO for your site, plain and simple. Jackson's data for his blog shows quickly how a blog can drive some serious link traffic to your site.
The idea of "thought leadership" is another critical reason to host a blog on your corporate website. It's important to be the source of information for your customers and target audience. If they aren't getting their information from you, they are probably getting it from your competition. Don't give them a reason to meander over to your competitor's site--start offering essential and timely industry information now via your very own corporate blog.
The more information you share in your blog, the more links you will get, which makes your blog a turbo-engine for SEO. And it's largely free to host a blog, outside of the time it takes to post a couple of times a week. Need some ideas on where to get a blog hosting platform for free? Check out this link to 40 free blog hosts.
One more point that Jackson mentions and that can't be mentioned enough--your blog isn't a mini commercial for your product. (Resist the urge to sell! It's hard, but you can do it!) Your blog is truly an informational resource for your target audience. The moment your audience starts to feel like they are being sold to, they'll disappear. They don't want to be sold to--they want information. And if you help them with their questions without trying to "sell them," you stand a better chance of getting their business when they are ready to buy.
In a recent blog post, Ecommerce Web Best Practices: Above the Fold, I looked at which information your ecommerce website should keep "above the fold," or placed on the part of a web page that visitors can see without having to scroll downward. In that blog post, I told you that your company's contact information is one of these important little tidbits--but I didn't realize exactly how important it actually was until I stumbled on an article from Internet Retailer that gave me a shocking statistic:
72% of respondants said they will spend less than three minutes searching for contact information on a website before switching to another site.
Now, maybe you're thinking that three minutes is plenty of time to find your "Contact Us" link. If so, I challenge you to consider how long you look for a company's contact information as a consumer. Personally, I bet most of us are in the less than a minute range unless the product or service we are trying to buy can't be purchased anywhere else. And if that's the case, what does it say to your customer that they can't find a way to communicate with you? The silent, but less than subtle message is "We don't want to talk to you." And the subtext to "We don't want to talk to you" is "We don't want your business." Ouch.
Now consider the tail end of the statistic--what happens when a customer can't find your contact information? They go somewhere else. In most cases, "somewhere else" equates a competitor. At any rate, you won't be getting their business.
So, what's the moral of the story? Make it easy to find your contact information. Super easy. Easy, as in your-five-year-old-nephew-could-point-to-your-company's-phone-number easy. Place your contact number in an easy-to-see place "above the fold" on your page. Better yet, put your contact information above and below the fold: in your site's top navigation bar and in the small print at the footer of each page. Don't give your customer any reason to go looking for another place to do business.
For more suggestions on how to maximize the design of your ecommerce site, check out our Ecommerce Best Practices white paper, Sell More With Stunning Design--Increasing Ecommerce Conversions and Reducing Cart Abandonment.
I stumbled on a very interesting article today called "Tips for Designing for Colorblind Users" by Joshua Johnson (Read the article here.) While not specifically aimed at ecommerce website design, this article calls out a number of issues that should be considered when designing any website. With the recent launch of the first segment of our Ecommerce Website Best Practices Series and how website design impacts a site's sucess, this article couldn't be more timely. (Download the white paper, Sell More With Stunning Design: Increasing Ecommerce Conversions and Reducing Cart Abandonment here.)
It's estimated that 8 out of every 100 men and 1 out of every 200 women experience some level of colorblindness. If that doesn't sound like a large number to you, consider that in 2008 there were 312 million people in the United States. That's 24,960,000 colorblind men and just over 1.5 million women. Sounds like a bigger audience now, doesn't it?
Johnson uses visual examples coupled with detailed explanations of how a colorblind user might see them and follows up with how a designer can make changes to improve user experience for those with colorblindness. Much of this improvement comes in understanding that colorblindness isn't so much about color choices as about the shades of the colors used together, especially when using two colors that might be perceived as similar or the same. Starker contrasts are generally easier to see.
I particularly liked Johnson's suggestion to add more than a color change to a mouse-over to ensure that those with colorblindness are able to see the change. Johnson suggests that you "add a stroke, drop shadow, or anything else you can think of to make for an increased visual difference that doesn’t simply rely on a color change." He then shows a sample of how adding a white stroke (or line, for those that aren't in-the-trenches-designers) around a button makes that button so much easier to see.
If you are considering a site redesign or want to optimize your ecommerce site for 26.5 million more people, I encourage you to check out his article.
(View the Ecommerce Website Best Practices Series video on website design, Sell More With Stunning Design)
We just launched a new video campaign that takes a look at how you can improve your ecommerce success by implementing Ecommerce Best Practices. The first segment is all about web design and the role it plays in the success of the site. (View the video, Sell More With Stunning Design: Increasing Ecommerce Conversions and Reducing Cart Abandonment)
One fundamental web design consideration is keeping essential information "above the fold." A holdover from the print news business, in print "above the fold" refers to the news that appears on the front page of the newspaper when it was folded in the news rack. Since only the information that is visible in the news rack will entice people to buy, the juiciest headlines and stories are displayed above the fold.
In web design, the concept of "above the fold" refers to the area of the web page that the visitor can see without having to scroll downward. Here are some key elements to keep above the fold on your website:
- Your company logo and branding. Make sure your visitors know that they have come to the right place. Clearly display your company brand at the top of each web page on your site. It's also standard practice to link your logo to your home page, allowing visitors to go back to the beginning if they need to.
- Navigation menus. Sounds obvious doesn't it? But without a clearly visible nav menu, visitors won't be able to move further into your site.
- Search bar. Don't hide your search bar. Help your visitors find the product they need by displaying the search bar prominently on each page. Search bars are most commonly found in the upper right hand corner of a web page and people instinctively look for them there.
- Your company's contact information. Whether your phone number is plainly displayed or you make your information available via an obvious link to the information, make sure this vital tidbit is easily located above the fold. It's frustrating to have to hunt for your contact information and makes it seem like you don't want your customers to contact you.
- Key calls to action. Putting your key calls to action at the top of the page increases the chance that visitors will engage those calls to action and move to the next step.
- Shopping cart. Make it easy for your customers to do busines with you--if they can't find the shopping cart, they can't buy!
- Key merchandising, promotional, and company messaging. If you have key messages to share, make sure they are visible without having to scroll downward.
Maximize the reach of your website by making sure that the most mission critical information is visible immediately by placing it above the fold.
In ecommerce, it's what you don't see that will sink your ship.
Ecommerce is here to stay. Companies of all sizes and kinds are bringing their products online for purchase by B2B and B2C customers. There are a prolific number of companies in the market who are willing to develop and launch e-stores for each of these companies. You can even build your own website using one of a plethora of templates available.
So, I bet you're thinking, "What's BAD about all of that?"
Before we go any further, let me go on record as saying that the mass move to ecommerce is a great thing for the companies in question, for their customers, and for their bottom lines. What troubles me is the thought epidemic out there that all you need to do is put an ecommerce site on the web and you're set to do business. What's worse is the idea that, "...once we go live with our ecommerce site we will be pulling in orders hand over fist and our entire business model will be transported into the 21st century!"
Um, yes and no.
Consider the Titanic. Billed as the unsinkable ship, the Titanic was beautiful and offered many amenities that its passengers weren't expecting to find on the open sea. It was supposed to revolutionize the world of ocean travel. The ship's designers were sure that this was the greatest ship on record. Unfortunately, they didn't consider the reality that no matter how beautiful, big, or unsinkable the Titanic was supposed to have been, it still had to navigate the open sea--and that the sea still had a few icebergs to navigate around. We all know how that story ended.
Okay, back to ecommerce.
A successful ecommerce initiative is more than putting a website with shopping cart capability on the web. (I can almost hear the collective gasp as I write, but it's true.) Launching an ecommerce website is merely the first step, the tip of the iceberg. Without some considerable thought about what happens after the site goes live, your ecommerce venture can be as treacherous as sailing the Titanic in iceberg-infested waters.
"But our site helps customers order our product so easily," you say.
Yup.
"And there's no need for them to talk to customer service!"
Probably not.
"And we are attracting new sales! We have more sales than before!"
Fantastic! But I'll still wager that your new-fangled ecommerce site is sailing a course directly into the largest iceberg in the ecommerce ocean: lack of integration with your back-end systems. And as more orders come in via your site, the bigger your lack of integration problem will become. What's more, without integration, your ecommerce site isn't much more of a revolutionary sales tool than your fax machine. (Gasp!) It's true.
Remember when faxed orders were all the rage? Customers could order without having to talk to a sales rep and the orders just rolled in on that weird curly paper. It was a great way to capture sales orders, but the reality is that someone still had to take the paper copy, enter it into your order system, pick the order, and enter the information into the shipping system. Then accounting had to verify that the order shipped, bill for the shipment, and reconcile inventory.
Sound familiar? It should. If you are operating an ecommerce site without integration to your ERP, CRM, or other back-end systems, all of these steps are still being completed manually, only the orders come in on your website and aren't printed on the curly paper. As your site picks up steam, these manual processes are a huge risk for your company.
Integrating your ecommerce site with the rest of your business functions will make your business run smoother. Fulfillment will be easier and faster for your staff, and automating the ordering and shipping processes will save you money. Orders will no longer need to be inputted manually into multiple systems--integration will make each system communicate seamlessly with each other. Customers will enter the order once and the rest of the process will flow from department to department until the order is complete. Sound good? I bet it does.
As you look to create your own ecommerce website or upgrade your current site to include all the industry-leading bells and whistles, make sure of one thing: Make sure that any company you work with understands that integration is really the thing that will make your ecommerce initiative successful. Any company can create a pretty website. Can yours steer you around the iceberg of ecommerce integration?
"70% of our decision to buy is based on how we are treated as people." ~John McKean, the Centre for Information Based Competition
Hmmm. If you're like me, the statistic above is simultaneously surprising and, at the same time, a bit of predictable common sense. On one hand, it surprises me that such a large percentage of the human decision to buy is based on how we are treated, and on the other, the common sense side of my brain yells, "Duh! Of course how we are treated greatly impacts our decision to buy!" When was the last time you were compelled to spend money with a company where you were disregarded or were frustrated by the shopping experience? Exactly. Like the rest of us, you'll go out of your way to avoid spending money with companies that treat you poorly, unless there is no other way around it.
While most readers will immediately think of this statistic in regard to a bricks-and-mortar shopping experience, I challenge you to consider how your ecommerce website is treating your customers. Are you losing sales because the customer feels disregarded or unimportant? Is your shopping experience frustrating for the customer? What can you do to make sure that the your ecommerce shopper feels valued?
Whether your audience is B2B or B2C, simple changes to your ecommerce site can make it much more user-friendly. For example, adding the opportunity for users to create product reviews and the ability to compare two or more products side-by-side allows your customers to get a better understanding of which product they might prefer. Unique customer logins that store recurring product orders and track order history is another way to make your online customers feel more connected to your site. Strategic cross-selling or up-selling can also enhance your ecommerce site's user experience by suggesting additional or different products that might appeal to the customer, using a consultative selling approach.
Making sure that your shopping and check out experiences are smooth and hassle-free is another way to make sure customers buy from you and come back. Sounds pretty basic, but how many times have you put an item in your online shopping cart only to be redirected back the homepage to continue shopping? Making sure that your customer gets redirected back to where they were shopping when they added the item to their cart is a no-brainer way to make sure they have a good shopping experience. Likewise, how many times have you tried to buy something online only to struggle through the checkout procedure or have the shopping cart function crash mid-checkout? The final part of the sale, the check-out process, is often the most cumbersome and should be as simple as possible to avoid having the shopping cart, and its contents, abandoned.
So, now I want to hear from you. What are you doing to improve your ecommerce website's user experience?
It's been said that the cobbler's kid has no shoes. Too busy making shoes for other people, the cobbler inadvertantly runs out of time to make shoes for his own child. And so Junior runs around without shoes at all. While it's ironic, it isn't on purpose--it just sort of happens that way. At Insite, we've experienced a similar phenomenon.
For the past six years we've focused 100% of our energy on building the most deeply integrated software solutions for our clients. In the process of developing ecommerce sites that include B2B and B2C industry best practices, and helping our shipping clients optimize their shipping and fulfillment functions, our corporate site was a tidge neglected. So, we set out to make sure that this cobbler's kid has a pair of shoes that not only covers his feet, but shows off the handiwork of the cobbler. Welcome to our new website!
To be completely honest, we are thrilled to have a new site to showcase the work that we do! Our new site design pulls together product information from four individual sites to create a cohesive Insite Software brand and online presence at www.insitesoft.com. Our new logo and branding visually links InsiteCommerce, InsiteShip, and InsiteManifest with Insite Software and helps the user understand that while these software platforms can stand alone, they can also work in concert together to provide a fully-integrated enterprise solution.
We think you'll enjoy some of the industry must-haves that we included, such as links to product videos; direct links to social networking sites including Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn; this nifty, industry-focused blog; as well as details about Insite Software's leadership team, history, philosophy, and current job openings. This is in addition to the robust product information that we've always had.
Take a look around the site. Feel free to post a comment or two in the comments section of this blog. Follow us on Twitter or subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog to keep tabs on what's going on behind the scenes at Insite. We think you'll love it and we look forward to seeing where our new "shoes" take us on the next leg of our journey.
Did you know that Insite Software is active on the three most connected social media sites? We are! Are you following us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn? If not, you're missing out on the opportunity to get up-to-the-minute InsiteCommerce, InsiteShip, and InsiteManifest product updates; insights on ground-breaking industry trends; and search engine optimization (SEO) and ecommerce marketing tips delivered directly to you! Each of these sites also provides you with the opportunity to interact directly Insite Software by commenting and providing input and feedback! Got an idea? Tweet it to us, post it on our Facebook wall, or drop by and connect with us on LinkedIn!
Follow us on Twitter (@insitesoftware), Facebook, and LinkedIn by clicking on any of the links below. We will be using this blog as well as each of the social media sites listed to keep you up-to-date on what you need to know about ecommerce best practices; integration with your ERP, CRM, and CMS systems; as well as breaking news about relevant topics like mobile commerce and using social media marketing.
Feel free to follow us--and chime in with best practices, suggestions, ideas about how to make the Insite family of products even more useful for you, cool links to industry-related news and trends, or whatever is on your mind! We look forward to chatting with you soon!
Blogging for the good? What in the world is that supposed to mean? Good of what? Good for who? Who says "it" is good?
Which is exactly the point.
Enterprise manufacturers and distributors are quickly learning that they may be late to the ecommerce table. For years, it was assumed that selling products directly from the corporate site was taboo. It would conflict with the long-standing and hard earned relationships with their B2B (business to business) sales channels.
That myth is quickly being dispelled and more importantly, everyone is benefiting from the change. The manufacturer can now use their website to create visibility for their products AND drive more business to their business parters. Rather than creating a channel conflict, they are creating synergy to drive more revenue for themselves as well as the sales channels and distributors.
In other words . . . good for everyone.
So why blogg for the good? Because someone needs to tell the story and we want to create the forum for everyone to share their success. Rather than suggest that we are the thought leaders for the industries, we want to create a thought forum.
Do some good. Share your thoughts. It is good for the enterprise - yours and your industry.