Is Your Website Giving Visitors The Right Message?
Your ecommerce website design must give visitors the information they want about your products, your organisation, and your capabilities to deliver …. and you must give it to them quickly, in a concise, easy to follow manner.
The intention of your website should not be to entertain visitors with non-relevant graphics, flash, or audio presentations. Visitors come to your website because they are searching for a way to fulfil a need, not to be entertained.
They are probably visiting several websites in the process, including your immediate competition.
One of the traps many website owners fall into is thinking they have to make a BIG impression on visitors through fantastic web design, graphics, flash movies, and sound.
Yet if you visit websites of successful online traders - the ones making real money on the internet - such as Amazon, Google, MSN, LlBean.com, Landsend.com, etc, their websites get straight to the cut – product comparisons and the benefits they can offer consumers!
THEY ARE SUCCESSFUL because they give web visitors what they are looking for and they give it to them without a lot of fuss and bother.
The faster you can serve up relevant information to ecommerce web visitors, providing sufficient detail to enable them to make online product comparisons and test your offer against others, the more chance you have of a sale.
On arriving at your ecommerce website visitors are not looking for the cheapest price – they are more likely comparing reliability of supply, quality, product options, and features of your product or service that gives them benefits over what your opposition has to offer.
You need to offer benefits to the visitor that they cannot obtain from your competitor …. and that should not be just “lower price” unless you have a buying advantage that lets you do so.
Even in cases where online opposition is offering exactly the same product at a lower price, you can win the sale by providing a higher perception of your services and reliability through benefit-rich web content.
Non-relevant information, such as favourite links, over-the-top design, looney characters running around the screen, visitor counters, etc, simply distract visitors and encourage them to leave your website.
Your ecommerce website design must instil trust in your visitor.
Trust can be built through providing full contact information, i.e. legal name of company, street address, telephone numbers, the names of key people in your organisation, real testimonials from previous customers, and by ensuring your website looks professional.
A key factor to building trust is maintaining ongoing contact with your visitors. The best way to do this is by integrating an Email Newsletter and Promotion system into your website.
By offering incentives in your email newsletter, such as user tips, detailed product information, comparative shopping, discount vouchers, special offers, etc., visitors will be more inclined to opt-in to your ecommerce newsletter.
Visitors often do not buy on the first visit to your website. They may be surfing information to assist them in a buying decision at a later date, or they may be collecting information for someone else.
By keeping your business in front of prospective buyers you build their trust and position yourself ahead of competition when they finally do make a buying decision.
In summary, make you website content-rich, remove non-relevant content and distracting elements, and build trust through ongoing email newsletter contact. You will be amazed at how quickly your online business will grow.
For more information on how you can build a profitable online business through automated online catalogues, autoresponders, newsletters and promotional email, contact Mike Greenfield, Marketing Director, SiteDesignNOW.com specialists in designing and developing eCommerce websites for small business. mike@sitedesignnow.com
www.sitedesignnow.com
