Optimize your website load speeds. Your ecommerce business is only as strong as your website. Still, the takeaway here is not that you should eliminate photos and graphic elements from your ecommerce website design entirely. Target existing customers, using remarketing ads and email campaigns. Two great strategies for engaging with these people are: "remarketing" ads and email campaigns. Email is still a highly effective tool for contacting customers, especially web-savvy, smartphone-toting customers who are comfortable shopping online. When designing landing pages for your ecommerce website, remember to eliminate distractions, provide a clear call to action and make it easy for the customer to complete that call to action. And, shopping cart abandonment is an issue that all ecommerce businesses face. It can help you improve conversions, remarket to existing customers, reach mobile users and increase awareness of your brand. Work with your web designer and graphic designer to find the best way to execute these strategies.
If your website takes more than four seconds to load, you’ve already lost a quarter of your visitors.
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The ecommerce industry is growing rapidly every year, but that doesn’t mean that all ecommerce businesses are growing at the speed they’d like.
Related: Use These Web Design Tricks to Grow Your Business Exponentially
Whether your sales are actively lagging or just okay, if your business is like most, you want to grow your revenue faster. And, here, good design is one of the most effective growth tools you can put to work to get there.
What does “good design” comprise? It covers nearly every aspect of your ecommerce’s external elements, from your company’s logo design, to your website’s appearance, to your marketing brochures, to the user experience itself. All must be smartly designed. The reason is simple: Poor design will undermine your business.
So, now that (hopefully) you’re convinced that strong, smart design is for you, here are six strategies to help you achieve it:
1. Optimize your website load speeds.
Your ecommerce business is only as strong as your website. If visitors are met with inept design and slow load speeds, they’re going to leave before you’ve had a chance to engage them, much less make a sale. Research from Stanford reveals that 75 percent of internet users surveyed will make judgments about a business’s credibility based solely on how its website looks.
A Kissmetrics infographic, moreover, shows that by the time your website hits four seconds of loading time, you’ve already lost 25 percent of your potential viewers.
To reduce your load speeds, think about what you want your ecommerce website to include. If it’s laden with data-intensive graphics and photos, load times will be longer than what you’ll see with a sleek, cleanly designed website using minimal graphics. Still, the takeaway here is not that you should eliminate photos and graphic elements from your ecommerce website design entirely. Instead, the lesson is to use design elements smartly for maximum impact and quick load speeds.
That’s what Basecamp (project management software) does on its home page and product pages. It uses large fonts, a few smart colors, fun illustrations and great copywriting to explain its product. Its pages load quickly and are highly readable.
Next are those photos: Many ecommerce stores out there remain photo-heavy, and that can be problemmatic. Make sure that you minimize your photo file sizes as much as possible while still maintaining good photo quality.
Then there’s color: Artful and intentional use of color, white space and text can go a long way to your achieving smart design. Throw in a few minimal brand-specific graphic elements to create a website that is a pleasure to navigate.
But, overall, when you work with your website designer, be sure to communicate that quick load speeds are a high priority.
2. Target existing customers, using remarketing ads and email campaigns.
It’s more cost-effective to sell to existing customers than it is to acquire new ones. If you want to grow your ecommerce business quickly, focus some of your marketing efforts on gaining repeat sales from current customers. Two…
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