Spring Cleaning
I wish I could write and tell you my sales are booming, and I need to update order fulfullment software because I'm swamped and we just can't keep up. We're doing ok, nothing exciting to report...
Well, unless you consider finding a company that wholesales purple plus sized rhinestone studded fine dress suits exciting.. WHICH I'm embarrassed to tell you, I do find sort of cool. It's hard to find plus sized purple clothes. Lee Ann is a whiz at finding products.
I also have a theory I'd like to pass on. Well, not so much a theory, as an observation I've made over time. It's crucial to show them something new, even as small as a new pen... to peak interest. When I show them something REALLY expensive and beautiful, they probably won't fly off of the shelves, but it will create interest, and make people click in off of my direct sales campaign. What it really comes down to is this... whatever you show them, on your home page or an email campaign should really take some thought. The photos should be colorful, and interesting.
I'm laughing at myself as I'm typing this.. I mean, duh, right? I'm a graphic designer! I'm always aware that strong visual can immediately move a consumer into my site. Pardon me for stating the obvious, but when you are your businesses web developer, direct marketing manager, mailing list manager. etc, etc, sometimes you want to just the the stinking email out! Or just get the product posted, I mean who cares if your supplier gave you a junky photo, it's a photo right? NO! This is one area that I think you can't skimp. Web design and product photography is critical to sales on your site, just as critical as making sure the "checkout" button is obvious. I have to think navigation through a bit more than the average consumer because my audience isn't as web savvy as others.
What keeps customers "in" your store, is design that is thought through carefully. Organize your product intuitively. I was on a website the other day shopping for swim suits. I left within a few minutes when I wasn't shown complimentary items.. ie tops and bottoms. So the company goes to the trouble to show me a mix and match section, but doesn't bother to show me which items go with each other. It isn't simply about color with swimsuits, it's about texture of fabric, too. I ended up buying from a site that put the exact mix and match items that work together... together! They made it REALLY simple for me. Look at it this way... If I walked into a swim shop to buy a two piece suit, and they put the tops in the front of the store, and the bottoms in the back, you'd never think to put them together, right? You'd probably never even know there were bottoms and then you wouldn't find what you were looking for, unless you asked. I hate asking. It has to be easy to find your product, and find the complimentary product. I'm not claiming that I do this perfectly. I do a lot of redesigning on my store. I move things around quite a bit, and have always seen things move that haven't when I've repositioned them in my store (ie showing them in a different department)
The other thing I'd encourage you to do if things aren't moving is rethink your departments. Sometimes I worry that I have too many departments. If the average consumer spends two minutes on my site, my impulse is to show them as much product as possible in any department they click on. However, I've revised this thought process to keeping my departments specific, and refining my navigation instead. I now offer my most popular sections in a navigation bar at the top of every page, that leads into a more detailed navigation from there, and a very prominent search button, and product rich in descriptions with keywords.
This is a hard one for me. And I have to set aside time to go in and work on this constantly. Product descriptions are important for a variety of reasons. Even if your navigation is lacking, good product descriptions will yield good search results for your customers. It's also important for the search engines, and will most likely be the text that shows up under your product when it's indexed on Google.
Another tip that I heard is that if your site offers Free Shipping, or another feature that sets you aside, put it in your product name... "Red Wool Hat FREE SHIPPING", and here's why: When the sites index your dynamic pages, and someone does a search for Red Wool Hat, guess what comes up for a result? "Red Wool Hat FREE SHIPPING". If you saw that next to 10 others that didn't, which one are you going to click on?
Now, I'm guilty of not doing that last one. I used to be good at it, but I have such an extensive product line, that I stopped doing it, simply because it was hard to put into everything. I think I need to take my own advice and refine that, because I think it helped us tremendously since we place high organically, and it's such a competition to get the click off the engines, anything different I can do is probably a smart move.
So that's my TO DO list this. It's really a bunch of spring cleaning and updating. I hope some of that info is helpful. Have a good week.
