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Ecommerce 101: 5 Questions To Ask When Creating An Online Store

Posted on January 14, 2014 by Hosting

The post Ecommerce 101: 5 Questions To Ask When Creating An Online Store appeared first on HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing . Whether you’re a charming local shop or a big-time business, online retail is a huge opportunity to take advantage of. The bonus? Building your own online shop is not as difficult as you might think. With the right solutions, some design know-how, and attention to the critical components of customer satisfaction, your online shop can take shape, starting today.   What do I need? With an online store becoming an expectation of retailers, solutions have been built that help get your shop online as quickly and effortlessly as possible. eCommerce solutions, such as WooCommerce , facilitate your product catalog, shopping cart system, and logistics more readily than a ground-up shop. While it may not possess the unparalleled flexibility of an in-house solution, putting your wares on the Internet sooner rather than later is the goal. With a working site in place, it’s important to facilitate transactions for obvious reasons. Customers are more likely to purchase your products if they are provided with payment options they trust. Here, PayPal fits the bill nicely, though the 2.9% plus $0.30 fee per transaction can add up quickly. For this reason, there’s no better solution than enabling credit card purchases, which means setting up merchant accounts with card vendors.   How Should It Look? If your business has an existing website, then your online shop should mimic it as closely as possible. Doing so avoids confusion and helps capitalize on the reputation your brand has earned from your prior marketing efforts. eCommerce solutions provide this functionality, though sometimes at a premium. At the very least, each service allows you to select a color scheme and upload a company logo, which is an excellent basis with which to start. For a modest fee, you can further customize the appearance to better match your original scheme, so it’s important to gauge what your brand image is worth to your organization.   How Should I Present My Products? Shoppers have very specific expectations when shopping online, outlined by the unique context of digital purchases. Without the in-store opportunity to touch materials and observe product quality, online shoppers need more convincing through visuals and pertinent information in order to turn a view into a sales conversion. The key is to eliminate the pain points of the process. Make the price clearly visible so that customers know what they’re getting into. Reinforce this with product specifications that are relevant to its quality. Finally, approximate the in-store experience as much as possible with multi-angle, high-resolution images and a few shots of the product being used/worn by someone “in the wild”. Doing so helps instill confidence in the purchasing process, and allows customers to see themselves using the product in their own life.   How Should I Handle Logistics? The next two essential components of your online store are shipping and returns/exchanges. When shipping products, it is best to build a relationship with a carrier. Having an account with an established carrier will help you earn discounts and improve their service. Shipping calculations then go through your carrier, and most eCommerce platforms will display the shipping costs to the customer based on this information. When handling returns, it’s important to have a clear policy and protocol. Customers are far less likely to do repeat business with a company whose return policy is inconvenient. Provide pre-paid shipping labels or, at the very least, coherent instructions that make the process understandable. Whatever you do, avoid putting the responsibility of shipping on the shoulders of the customer, as lost returns, bad experiences, and wasted clerical time will cost you far more in the long run than a few pre-paid returns.   How Can I Promote My Store? Once your store is online and all the pieces are in place, it’s time to publicize. The Internet is a crowded place, and standing out requires making an impression in the minds of current and potential customers. Recent marketing research has shown that a “multi-channel” presence will raise awareness of your site by repeatedly delivering a coherent message on each of the channels where your customers exist. Find out where your core audience resides and build your strategy around those channels. Create a hashtag for Twitter that exemplifies your brand in order to spread the word. Post pictures of new products on Pinterest and reach out to your customers. Keep your branding consistent and your presence prevalent, and your store, and sales will benefit. Creating an online store is an exciting endeavor, but getting your ducks in a row is a vital part of the process. Start by gathering the needed solutions and then design it to match your business website. Present your products with the customer’s needs in mind and promote your presence through fruitful social media channels. Finally, handle logistics with a dedicated carrier and do what you can to facilitate seamless and simple transactions. Your business success is built upon a strong foundation, and with these considerations in mind, your foundation can deliver future success in droves. web hosting Continue reading →

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Make A Better First Impression On Your Homepage

Posted on January 9, 2014 by Hosting

The post Make A Better First Impression On Your Homepage appeared first on HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing . There was a time when having a website was quite the accomplishment, but since the days of AOL and dial-up Internet, everyone from the pet shop down the street to the multinational conglomerate has a website. In this crowded ecosystem, it’s important to stand out, and that means building a strong first impression. In an increasingly web-based world, the homepage has become the “handshake” of sales, and a firm, confident grip and winning smile will do a lot to improve your brand perception and comfort customers in the process. In this post, we’re offering a few recommendations on how to make a better first impression on your homepage.   Be Available Creating a website is an excellent first step toward better contact with your customers, but it is by no means the end of your work. As a matter of fact, the presence of a business website actually establishes expectations for basic functionality and information that you’re required to fulfill in order to convert sales. Doing so takes many forms, from the rudimentary to the complex, but in all efforts, creating the understanding that customer needs will be met is job #1. This begins with contact information. When customers view your business, they bring with them certain fears. Fears of buyer’s remorse, fears of being scammed, and fears of missed opportunity. As profound as this ordeal may sound, it’s very real and putting your contact information on the homepage of your website will help immediately quell them. This way, if customers have worries, they know how to get in contact with you, and that trust will go a long way in the future. In addition to human contact, customers want to know that assistance will come even after business hours. For this reason, having a clear organization and working links to the information on your website on the front page will help allay their fears and improve their experience. With more companies recognizing the importance of quality web design, creating a site that’s usable will become just as important as delivering a quality product.   Establish Expectations But quality is still a part of the picture, and using your first impression to communicate its importance to your business is excellent practice. The initial visit to a website, just as with first meetings with human beings, determines a lot about customers’ future perceptions, so establishing expectations prior to purchase will help sales conversion and develop customer relationships. This means using aesthetic and tapping into web trends to demonstrate that your company has an ear to the ground and a modern approach. Start with eye-catching visuals . Inundated readers have become scanners , which means that our content, and our websites, must change to curry their favor. Attractive and descriptive photographs and graphics more effectively communicate information, and establish the kind of first-impression we’re looking for much more rapidly than text. What’s of note in employing visuals, however, is the importance of content. Irrelevant visuals, butterflies for a software company for example, are more likely to turn customers off than appeal to their sensibilities. Visuals should describe your business and set standards, not come off as contrive. With the newfound nature of Internet readers, the front-page has evolved, from a gateway to more information, to the residence of your primary sales pitch. Instead of waiting for visitors to bite and click further down the site navigation, savvy developers have seized the bull by the horns and put key product specifications, demo videos, and testimonials of satisfied customers right up front for people to see. Doing so helps avoid the small, but significant, down time between initial viewing and product research, leading to better conversion rates and happier customers.   Communicate, Communicate, Communicate At this point, you’re being asked to put quite a bit on the front page of your website. From visuals to product specs to copy, there’s a lot going on at first glance. In order to prevent this torrent of information from becoming an unintelligible mess, designers have developed ways to effectively organize content, gleaning the aforementioned benefits without taxing the patience of hesitant users. Two methods have developed that have seen widespread adoption. The first involves what are called large “hero areas”. The term harkens back to the days of print media, when a large visual and accompanying typography presented a powerful first-impression, justifying the occupation of extra space with the resultant impact. These days, it’s not uncommon for the entire screen of a browser to be filled with a single image and impactful tagline. Doing so creates a strong impression, without compromising the integrity of the following content. The reason this practice resonates is due to the accompanying, second method: scroll-based layouts. Conventional web design focused on dividing content between pages, but new designs are dividing pages into browser-sized sections, delineated by common typography, background color, and a large, distinguishing visual. By dividing your homepage vertically into sections, you can effectively deliver a presentation of your product or brand’s benefits without the risk of lost traffic, catching eyes and attention in the process. Web design has grown by leaps and bounds since the days of dial-up, and with it, the expectations placed upon business websites. But your firm can keep up with, and surpass, the Jones’ with a little know-how and some modern design techniques. Make your company available to your customers with contact information and working navigation. Establish your first impression with optimized content and relevant information. Finally, consider implementing some higher-level design that keeps your customers reading and puts your site on the cutting edge of the evolving web. You’d wear a suit and carry business cards to a sales meeting, and applying the same concept to your homepage will have similar results, making the ironing and tailoring worth the work. web hosting Continue reading →

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A Beginner’s Guide to Using Psychographics to Improve Your Marketing Efforts

Posted on January 3, 2014 by Hosting

The post A Beginner’s Guide to Using Psychographics to Improve Your Marketing Efforts appeared first on HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing . In marketing practice, buzzwords are as ubiquitous as copy. Some come, and some go, but the ones that stay are of far-reaching, intrinsic value that better your efforts and customer satisfaction in some way. With this in mind, it’s a fair bet that psychographics are about to demonstrate some impressive longevity. Through a more comprehensive understanding of what drives customer actions, using research and analytics to fuel the endeavor, your materials and distribution can see greater permeation than ever before.   What They Are Despite the curious title, psychographics are not as bewildering as their name might imply, and understanding their nature, use, and acquisition can breed a great deal of success in marketing efforts. At their core, psychographics are profiles of individuals that focus on lifestyle, habits, and tendencies, reaching beyond traditional demographic information and seeking more valuable data from user behavior. For a better understanding of exactly what comprises one of these profiles, let’s look at a hypothetical user and see what we can learn from them. We’ll begin with John, a 32-year old office worker from Los Angeles, California. For the sake of thoroughness, let’s assume that he’s married with two children, has an income of approximately $60K per year, and owns his own home. While all of this information has some kind of use, it doesn’t tell us much about him outside of raw data. What we want is information about interests and habits in order to better understand his motivations. A look at John’s Facebook page shows likes on pages related to fantasy football and an application that tracks player injury status. His Twitter page shows pictures of his family in a snowy location, holding ski poles and wearing goggles. Each of these social channels has some kind of activity, but a look at his Google+ page shows that most of his time is spent there. What we have now is a wealth of information regarding John. He lives in Los Angeles and probably commutes. He enjoys fantasy football and skiing. He has a wife and two kids, all of whom are also active and athletic. He spends most of his time on Google+, and is young enough that he probably uses multiple devices to access information on the Internet through various media channels.   How They Work The power of this profile is manifold. As marketers and business owners, you want to understand where to put what information and when, so that the right people see the right things and think better of your brand or purchase product. To this end, John’s psychographic is a boon to our work. First of all, as a working commuter with multiple channels of access, we have a better understanding of John’s browsing habits. He likely checks social networks and news channels in the morning and at night, before and after work, possibly stopping during the day to check his mobile phone during breaks. He uses Facebook and Twitter but is mostly found on Google+. Therefore, assuming John is the type of customer we want to recruit, our marketing is best published across multiple social networking channels, preferably Google+, during the morning (before 8 AM), afternoon (around lunch time), and evening (after 5 PM). But logistics aren’t the only use of psychographics. A better understanding of user behavior gives us the added benefit of what kind of content should be published. As we noted, John likes to travel, ski, and play fantasy football. In terms of sales deals, airlines could offer discount tickets around wintertime, restaurants can offer deals for customers with a valid lift ticket, and sports magazines can offer price cuts on subscriptions around fantasy draft season. In terms of content, a travel magazine could create a review of the best ski slopes in Colorado, a sports website could offer insider information on sleeper picks, and an eCards website could offer templates for email postcards incorporating winter sports. The incredible thing is, all of this came from a better understanding of customer behavior. Multiple industries, multiple businesses, and multiple aspects of marketing all arose from discerning the interests and habits of a target customer. With this kind of information available from only a judicious application of research, the last question that remains is how to obtain it.   How to Get Them Start by leveraging the information you already have. Website analytics, past purchases, and social networking activity provide a sort of “back end” approach to customer research. Pay attention to what articles or offers performed well, what channel has seen the most success, and what kind of engagement your current topics are seeing. By looking at past successes and drawing some ideas from them, you can save money and build a decent bank of knowledge. But customer behavior isn’t limited to online engagement. A thorough understanding of user interests and habits requires a great deal more insight; insight straight from the source. Customer surveys are a good place to start since they offer a large sample size. The key is to ask the right questions, looking specifically for behavior and interests, offering the chance for open-ended answers where applicable. In your approach, be honest about your intent. Personal information is more guarded than ever in an increasingly privacy-aware society, but explaining your intent is an excellent way of disarming respondents through trust. Furthermore, most customers are more than happy to share this kind of information if it improves the relevance of information and product offerings. Reinforce this broad-base data collection with customer interviews and focus groups. By inviting customers to meet or offering to converse with them over the phone, you’re providing an opportunity to ask responsive questions and delve further into fruitful areas, instead of relying on rote questionnaires. In addition, putting a human face on your efforts (and including refreshments if the meetings happen in person) is an excellent way to show customers that you care, increase engagement, and build relationships in the process. Between these methods of research and an intelligent understanding of the worth of the data obtained, your business stands to expand its reach and its relevancy through psychographics. Focus on the characteristic behaviors, habits, and methods of communication that drive customers’ day-to-day lives and use that information to better craft content and logistics of publication. With an open ear and an aim toward seeing people instead of numbers, your content, relationships, and bottom-line, will all benefit. Register a cheap domain name at HostGator.com Continue reading →

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The 101 Guide to Data-Driven Design

Posted on December 19, 2013 by Hosting

The post The 101 Guide to Data-Driven Design appeared first on HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing . The web is constantly changing. It isn’t magic; there are thousands, if not millions, of individuals out there who continue to work on their website until it’s reached “optimization”. It either has something to do with the culture of innovation, motivating even good solutions to always push forward, or it’s related to the accessibility of websites and the fact that changing one line of code takes less time than a drink of a cup of coffee. But intrinsic to tech culture is the desire to move forward the right way. There’s improvement for improvement’s sake and then there’s clear, defined, intelligent design decisions that make a product, and a business, better. This, again, is not magic. It’s a matter of understanding your data and applying it, intelligently, for the betterment of product and consumer understanding.   The Concept This is what the industry likes to call “data-driven design”. The idea is that numerical and non-numerical information can be used to change the configuration of a product or website in order to improve sales conversion and revenue. Does it work? The short answer is yes. According to Extractable,  71%  of businesses surveyed experienced site improvements from the use of data and data-driven design. This is, obviously, fairly compelling evidence. The problem is that people are utilizing the wrong data. 66% tracked impressions, which indicate traffic, but not intent. 46% track time on site, which suggests engagement, but in a very loose way. Are customers sticking around because they’re interested, or because they can’t find what they want? So what are businesses doing wrong? According to web authority  Smashing Magazine , marketers and web designers need to understand the core of data-driven design in order to reap its very real potential.   Be Specific There are two types of data at work. Quantitative, which includes numerical data, demonstrating the “who, what, when, and where”, and qualitative, which includes all non-numerical data that demonstrates the “why or how”. Data is collected in multiple ways, quantitative from platforms like Google Analytics and qualitative from user testing and surveys, but understanding what data delivers value requires a little focus. As attractive as all metrics are, and as tempting as it may be to draw conclusions from them, if only to give your efforts direction, good data is both empirical and specific. Empirical data refers to any gathered through observation or experimentation. This means that what was gathered came from a purposeful effort. “Specific” data means that it is isolated to a particular page, piece, or idea. This is because each page, subpage, type of content, and call-to-action has a specific goal in mind. A high bounce rate on a page may seem bad, but when you realize that it’s intended to direct people to a vendor or sponsor, suddenly that looks pretty good. The key is to look at each page, understand its intent and purpose, and focus on relevant metrics in order to determine whether or not the goal was achieved. The reason this approach is valuable is because, unlike aggregate data, specific data guides action. If a page fails to achieve a particular goal, then it’s time to do some user testing. This is where qualitative data comes in. Focus groups, surveys, and comments allow you to determine why a page didn’t hit its target and make smart design decisions as a result.   An Example Some of this may not be so simple, so let’s take a look at a hypothetical that should help clarify things. In this scenario, we’ll examine the website of a cleaning service business who encourages appointment bookings through an online form. In addition, the site has a blog where it publishes cleaning tips, and a page full of cleaning product recommendations. Each page has a specific goal. For the appointments page, we want form completions, a relatively low “time on page” metric, and, a mid-range bounce rate. This is because new customers will hopefully check out their more informative content, while returning customers will likely just book an appointment and leave. On the blog, we want a low bounce rate, due to the fact that our content is intended to convert viewers into customers, and a decent “time on page” metric to indicate that our content is being read. Finally, the product page should see a high bounce rate as customers stop by and then head out to Amazon to purchase our recommendations. Each of their metrics appears to be okay, except two. The “time on page” metric on their appointments page is high and their form completion rate is low. It’s easy to assume that this means that people are getting frustrated with the form and leaving, but jumping on this assumption would be to ignore the qualitative aspect of the approach. They take the time to do some focus testing, interviewing current customers and brand new customers, and discover that many of the fields on the form are irrelevant or the information is hard to attain. They change accordingly and with this change, the time drops, but not too low, and the form completion rate rises, reinforced by follow-up interviews that indicate that customers are much happier with the new configuration. Diligently applying both human and analytical insights in order to improve products, websites , and services is an intelligent way to advance your business. Understanding that both qualitative and quantitative data play a part and using them in tandem will help make the most out of your approach. Be specific in what you measure and always back up design choices with data of both kinds. The combination will not only solve some headaches from an organizational standpoint, but quickly clear up customers’ pain points as well, meaning more revenue and a better relationship with the people who keep you in business. Register a cheap domain name at HostGator.com Continue reading →

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Eight Great Free Original Content Creation Tools You Should Be Using

Posted on December 17, 2013 by Hosting

The post Eight Great Free Original Content Creation Tools You Should Be Using appeared first on HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing . The strength of content marketing is well demonstrated, but creating strong content takes innovation. This means enlisting the help of some simple but powerful tools that combine user engagement and attractive presentation to facilitate brand perception. Here’s a look at eight great resources you can use to take your content to the next level.   ThingLink If engagement is the key, then ThingLink is the tool for the job. Research shows that images  engage customers and resonate to a notable degree on social networks  and, for this reason, should be used extensively. But images embedded on web pages should offer more than a reiteration of the graphic that curried the visitor in the first place. ThingLink can be embedded on web pages and used to mark up static imagery with accompanying videos, social networking buttons, annotations, and more. In addition to making already engaging content more dynamic, each image that utilizes the service comes with attribution, so that users who view your creation over social channels know who’s responsible.   Skitch Collaborating on content is no small task. Creative ideas bounce back and forth and expressing visual concepts in verbal language always seems to fall just short. Enter Skitch. The brainchild of note-taking powerhouse Evernote, Skitch allows designers, content creators, and managers to add robust indicators, color coded text, and shapes to screen captures, uploaded images, PDFs, and data copied to the clipboard. In addition to making content commentary more attractive, the myriad options enable visual communication that a Skype call or email simply can’t touch.   Word2CleanHTML Writing copy requires an effective Word processor. While hardly groundbreaking information, the caveats of each copy-writing platform can cause headaches down the road. Solutions like Simplenote offer format-free writing but no formatting options, and Word offers extensive formatting but in its own anachronistic language. Converting copy to web content should be easy and Word2CleanHTML offers exactly that. The platform not only remedies some of Word’s more frustrating idiosyncrasies, but also replaces tabs, bold text, italics, and smart quotes with HTML friendly alternatives, which should greatly facilitate the transfer to your blog.   Google Fonts With design rising in the minds of consumers and mobile screens offering unique display challenges, typography is seeing more consideration as a factor in effective web design. Unfortunately, previous attempts at customizing text appearance required that users have the designated font installed on their machine, leaving out many attractive and superior options and replacing them with lesser alternatives. Google Fonts uses their straightforward API to allow you to embed fonts on a page so that your text is displayed as you intended. In addition, the site offers a gage that indicates how their inclusion will affect page-load times, optimizing both appearance and performance.   Canva Attractive content is replacing informative content as tired eyes judge items on a moment’s notice, but attractive, informative content is the end game. Canva provides this marriage by offering en vogue design resources and a user-friendly interface that makes creating aesthetically pleasing visual resources a snap. The service does provide premium content for $1, but even at this expenditure, the value delivered per dollar may far exceed that of private design help.   Infogram Infographics are a hot commodity these days and for good reason. Communicating interesting and valid information through facts provides authority while presenting them in a pleasing manner attracts viewers. But while most of us have information to share, few of us have the design acumen needed to create something worth its salt. Infogram helps shortcut the process with an engine that allows for data entry, expression, and arrangement, meaning high-quality infographics in a short time. The solution is no substitute for distinctive design work, but for firms on a shoestring budget, it’s a resource worth a look.   Haiku Deck The boring PowerPoints of old team meetings are becoming a thing of the past. The din of content and information is requiring that firms both internally and externally adapt to the nature of the human psyche, which requires a little more than plain text to hold attention. Haiku Deck, like the previously mentioned platforms, offers high-end design knowledge so that you can leverage it to improve content. Offering a gallery of templates, beautiful typographic options, and embed capabilities, delivering high-quality presentations has never been easier.   Storify The web revolves around communications. Sharing on sites like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter may seem frivolous the lion’s share of the time, but real news and real events unfold on these social channels. Storify recognizes this phenomenon and harnesses it to create more engaging content that’s driven by users. By embedding tweets, photos, videos, and more from a wide variety of sources, your blog’s content can carry the extra element of involvement by directly citing web media. In addition, the platform notifies sources that their information has been shared, opening conversations and connecting you with customers. Putting content on the Internet is a needed first step to attaining greater market share. Doing so optimally, leveraging the power of interactive media and attractive design, will turn your words into meaning and your viewers into customers. Utilize these simple tools to enhance your blog posts and videos and open the door for conversation between your organization and your customer base in dynamic new ways. Register a cheap domain name at HostGator.com Continue reading →

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