Posts Tagged website design
eBrand Media shares site redesign tips that will increase conversion rates
By Tom Polanski, EVP, eBrand Media and eBrand Interactive
You’re spending real money driving traffic to your website but what kind of results do you have to show for it? Are your visitors leaving the site quickly? Are people abandoning their shopping cart before they’ve ordered? Are you having difficulty identifying the problems?
The industry standard conversion rate is 3%, which means that 97% of the traffic to a website isn’t sticking. Of course there are a number of reasons why this may be so, but most commonly, we’ve discovered that the majority of sites we’ve worked with, and that numbers in the thousands, are impediments to, rather than facilitators of sales.
An e-commerce site shouldn’t be a challenge for the customer, no matter the size of the product array. It shouldn’t be a spook house of dead-ends, false staircases and hidden doors. A basic understanding of the psychology of the online shopper; their interests, attitudes, opinions, and behavior, along with a concession to the fact that the internet is a super highway where people are searching and scanning quickly would lead to better site design. It’s important to understand what makes your audience tick, click, and stick.
We all suffer from a form of cultural ADD which means that we’re restless. The mouse, and better computer hardware, gives us the ability to move and groove from site to site. Take a look at your site, does it make it easy for a guest to find and get what they’re looking for? Or is the shopping process a series of frustrating friction points and irritants?
Click on the “Continue Reading” link to find a case study, shared with us by one of our partners, where one company increased their conversions with a simple redesign.
Posted by Tom Polanski in Website Optimization, eBrand Media on April 9th, 2009
eBrand Interactive discloses 10 common website design mistakes you should avoid
By Tom Polanski, EVP, eBrand Media and eBrand Interactive
Since 2002, we’ve been evangelists of marketing efficiency but not too many people wanted to listen. Why would they when there was so much low-hanging fruit? Every year an increasing number of people, flush with cash and credit, went online to shop. But those days are over and it really is time for companies to become more fully focused on efficient marketing.
My team of expert web designers and analysts have reached out to over 800 companies regarding providing a report that would include detailed, page by page analysis, of their site for the purpose of identifying anxiety inducing friction points, and other impediments, that cause abandonment of the shopping process.
Recommendations for site and conversion rate improvements were to be included in the report. To our surprise only two companies took us up on our offer (although several did attempt to learn as much as they could for free). Each of the companies we provided reports for have seen their conversion rates double.
Here is what Internet Retailer has to say about the importance of web site design based on good e-tail principles, and if you’d like, they’ve built a three day conference around it for you to attend: Web Design ’09 Conference
You may think your web store looks just great and you have a right to be proud of it. But did you ever sit with a focus group to see what problems they had with it? Did you ever have top web site designers analyze it to find flaws? And have you listened to e-retailers tell you how they’ve vastly improved online sales and conversion rates just by making basic design changes that eliminated the most common web site design faux pas?
Here are just 10 commonly known but often overlooked design mistakes referred to by Internet Retailer (we know of many more):
Posted by Tom Polanski in Growing a Business, Website Optimization, eBrand Interactive on November 19th, 2008