You’ve done the research, taken the necessary steps to prepare, and are finally at the point where your new ecommerce website is live and open for business.
That website is now the single most important tool in your marketing toolbox. It’s a digital branch for your business that most of your other marketing materials point to.
For many companies, the ecommerce website is the lifeblood of the business. As the single most important marketing investment, your new website must tell your brand story and seamlessly serve your customers.
Your website visitors expect aesthetically pleasing, responsive and intuitive websites that make the search and purchase process as simple as possible. In other words, if you provide an easy, memorable shopping experience then visitors will choose your site over others in the future.
Together, the site design and ecommerce platform must synergize to deliver the experiences that customers desire. In this section, we illustrate the ins and outs of creating a beautiful and functional ecommerce experience that wows your customers and turns them into raving fans.
First steps to synergy
Building a one-to-one relationship with customers, especially in B2B, is the key to success. To do this successfully you need to understand your buyers’ needs and set your vision and goals.
STEP 1: Understanding your customers’ expectations
The first step is to gather data and mine it for customer insights. Collecting data allows you to find out how your customers are engaging with your website and helps you identify gaps in engagement delivery that you can fill to ensure they keep coming back. Customer data can come from several sources.
Inbound traffic
There’s a lot you can determine about your customers’ expectations by analyzing how they arrive on your website. You can learn more about your customers’ intentions based on factors like:
- Which page they landed on
- Search term used
- Referral website or email
- Device used
Onsite behavior
You can learn a lot about customers from their behavior on your website. To analyze onsite behavior, you should be asking questions like:
- What web pages are users paying the most attention to?
- What searches are they making?
- What path are they taking through the website?
- Which videos or other content are they interacting with?
Integrated data
This covers data from external sources such as your CRM, contact center, help system or ERP system where the customer has a buyer profile.
Profile data
Profile data is all the historical information collected on customers who can be identified, usually by an email address. This data can come from a website registration or a referral from an email. From there, more data can be collected by tracking the customer’s behavior to determine what they are most interested in.
Direct feedback
Perhaps the most crucial source of data to help you understand customer expectations comes in the form of direct feedback. You can gather very specific information on how your customers engage and want to be engaged with through:
- Surveys
- Emails
- Customer support representatives
- Voice-of-customer channels
- Forums
- Social media
- Review websites
Understanding your vision and your goals
New technologies enable competitors to enter already-saturated markets with ease. We can all agree it’s incredibly noisy.
STEP 2: Understanding your vision and your goals
With so much noise and choice available to customers why would they choose your website or offerings over everyone else? It all comes down to your differentiator.
How will you stand out? Is it your price? The customer experience? Your brand story? High quality products? Build a strategic plan focused on your vision and goals and determine how your ecommerce platform can help you reach them.
Here are a few elements to consider while crafting your strategy:
Business goals
- What are your business goals?
- How long will you need to achieve them?
- How will ecommerce help you reach your business goals?
Vision
- What value are you seeking to provide to your customers?
- Why would they choose your ecommerce website over others?
Mission
- How will ecommerce provide your customers value?
- How will ecommerce help you achieve business success?
Technology
- What technology resources will you leverage to support your ecommerce platform?
- How will they help you grow your business?
- How will they help you tell your brand story?
Stakeholders
- What partners will you turn to for support to move the business forward?
- What part will they play and how will you motivate them?
Engagement
- How will you keep your customers engaged?
- Why will they keep coming back?
- How will you continuously improve their experience?
When you understand your customers’ desires and have a vision and mission in place, you can focus on building beautiful and functional experiences.
The beauty of great user experiences
To uncover user needs and guide them in creating a cohesive and seamless user experience, many designers create a user journey map.
Tracing the user journey
User journey maps are visualizations of the interactions between users and the website at each stage of engagement. They help identify opportunities for providing a better experience and potential pitfalls in the user journey.
Good maps indicate the pain points of each journey and help kickstart the process to brainstorm for solutions.
Ultimately, they help designers understand how customers feel at every stage of their journey, what frustrates them, and what they are happy with.
Clean design
Ecommerce websites are heavy investments, so it becomes tempting to maximize the usage of the website to get the most out of each web page. But you should not give into this pressure and instead focus on clean design.
Clean design allows visitors to easily find the things they want to focus on, engenders trust in the brand, loads faster, is easier to maintain, and creates great user experiences for visitors. elements to consider while crafting your strategy:
Whitespace
A clean design needs whitespace to increase content legibility and allow visitors to focus on the areas that matter most. Whitespace also provides balance and makes a website look tidy and professional.
Call-to-action
The call-to-action button has the power to make or break ecommerce conversions. With the right choice of words, colors, size, and negative space, it commands attention. When paired with an offer that is compelling, it gets people eager to act and generates sales.
Imagery
Choice of images plays a crucial role in an ecommerce website’s performance and overall experience. Imagery in the form of well-shot photographs can trigger emotions, enhance trust, and tell a brand story. Well-designed icons, illustrations, and infographics can even have a direct impact on conversion rates.
Readability
If your content is not reader-friendly, no amount of witty words will get your message across. Clean design with a good selection in typography, font size, whitespace, and text placement play a huge part in ensuring readability for effective communication.
Thorough testing
If any component of the website does not work as the user expects, he or she may leave. Or worse, expose the deficiency on social media to the detriment of the brand. Therefore, it is critical that you conduct thorough testing before launch and regularly thereafter to ensure peak performance. Run tests for function, usability, security, performance, database, mobile, cross-browser compatibility, and content.
