July 2013 - Zen Den Web Design - Creativity and Security in One Place

A: Optimized Website Content

Converting eCommerce website visitors into paying customers is not an easy task. Thankfully there are a few fundamental techniques for optimized website content to help you when planning your new website.

1. Know your visitors

Before you start planning and generating your content, you should be able to answer the following questions about your website:

Who is your core customer?
Why do they want to do business with you?
Why are you different from your competition?
How do your visitors find your website (Search engines, marketing collateral, word of mouth, etc.)?

2. Present a clear value proposition

Within seconds of visiting your website, your visitor will make the decision to stay or go find someone else. Your home page should present a clear message on why your product or services is better than your competition.

3. Present a clear call to action

“Buy Now”, “Book Now”, “Sign Up”, are all examples of a clear call to action. Don’t make your potential customers hunt for these triggers. Display them proudly and predominantly throughout your site on every page.

4. Use emotional triggers

Presenting your product or service as “scarce” or “exclusive” gives your visitors a sense of urgency which intern will drive faster conversions. In other words, create the tipping point between gathering information and making a purchase.

Another example would be presenting yourself as an authority in your industry. Whether you’re the first, best, fastest, or most affordable, present yourself as number one through sophisticated design and a clean site structure.

5. Remove distractions

This is an extremely important step in deciding what content to display on your site. For every piece of content for your website, ask yourself, “Is this going to increase sales or conversions?” What may seem imperative to you personally may seem irrelevant to your customers and thereby becomes a distraction. Anything that distracts from a conversion or sale should be removed. Also avoid annoying your audience with excessive pop-up, or sidebar ad’s. Advertisements should be displayed alongside the content elegantly as if they are a part of your content.

6. Balance your written content and images

The sad fact of the visual world is that people do not want to read unless they have to. Web pages completely full of text with a tiny image at the top are a thing of the past. Create engagement and excitement through cleverly designed charts, diagrams, and images. If your customers are looking for information about your product or service, give it to them, don’t make them find it.

7. Display testimonials

People trust other people. If there are two coffee shops across the street from each other, one empty, the other has a line around the corner; statistics show that people trust the latter. Testimonials do the same thing for your website; Build trust by presenting your business as being popular and trustworthy.

8. Keep your site as fast as possible

Optimizing your content for the web is another task that is essential to creating conversion or abandonment. According to Kiss Metrics , your rate of abandonment goes up roughly 7% per every second your site takes to load. Keep your site speed under control by fully optimizing images, using clear professional code structure, and avoiding hacks and plugins whenever possible.

Brand/Identity Insanity

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Einstein believes this to be true, and we couldn’t agree more. Not too long ago, we noticed that we weren’t getting enough information about brand and identity of some of our clients during their initial design brief stage. We took a hard look at the brief and realized that we weren’t asking enough of the right questions.

To better guide clients through the branding process and craft a solid and unique identity, we conducted a complete overhaul of the brief with the following improvements:

Communication

Our new brief includes verbiage to effectively communicate the importance of building a strong brand identity, which consists more than just and understanding of the product/service. It is the complete perception of the product/service offering in the marketplace, including an implied promise to your customers that yours will consistently meet or exceed their expectations.

Accessibility

To top off the update, we scrapped the fillable PDF form and did what we do best; integrate it with the website. Now, clients can send fill out and send the Branding/Identity Brief through a simple form on the website.

Business identity relates to the internal components of a company — how it’s organized, its values, and how it is perceived in the marketplace. Branding, on the other hand, relates to how consumers feel about the company. Do consumers trust the company will provide a quality product or service? The feelings and emotions consumers associate with a brand apply to external factors that the corporate identity can influence.

At Zen Den Web Design, we believe arriving at a strong brand identity is a methodical process. A process that is not only creative but analytical at the same time.

Q: How Do You Convert Visitors Into Customers?