In the first part, we talked a bit about what eCommerce is, getting a domain name, and setting up a merchant account. Electronic commerce is more than that, much more. To have a really great online presence that makes people stop and buy, you need a strategy for success. Your strategy should include your USP or unique selling position in the market. What makes you stand out from all the other online entrepreneurs looking for the same type of clients as you? Can you differentiate yourself from the competition based on quality, price or benefits? Once you know your USP, you can begin the monumental task of telling the world about your site. A truly unique selling position will give you an edge over all the competition, well that and a lot of planning and investment of your time and money.
FOCUS
Emphasize the benefits and results the customer will get from buying and using your product or service. You can discover the benefits by listing all the features and then turning them into benefits. List everything that your product or service offers. For each feature, list a relative advantage from the customer’s perspective. You can discover the customer’s perspective when shopping. Simply ask them, “Why did you place an order today or use our service?” BE very specific when creating your benefit statements. An example of this is, “You’ll save $100.00 sells better than “you’ll save money.” “You’ll lose 20 pounds in 10 days” sounds better than “you’ll lose weight.” Rank your benefits in order of importance to the customer. If you have enough , use bullet points for emphasis.
The emotion sells. People make most buying decisions with their hearts and not their heads. Paint a picture of the results the customer will get when they buy from you. “You will look 20 years younger.” “You will be $100 richer.”
Make sure to include a call to action. Do you want them to make a purchase decision today? Give them a reason to do it. Offer a junk (discount, bonus, something for nothing).
Your website should load quickly and function easily. If your site loads slowly, people will get impatient and go elsewhere. Do all your links work? Have you tested your order page by running sample orders? Have you tested the loading time using different connection speeds? You can get a free analysis by visiting Submitplus.com.
Make your website easy to see and read. I find that dark backgrounds tend to be harder to read than pale backgrounds. The overall look of your site should be clean and professional. When we first created the Women’s E-Commerce Association, International, we did everything in-house. Not really experts at HTML coding, we thought we could use a simple program to create a professional site. It was fine, but the one we have now is much better. Why? Because we hired a professional. You can create a website with a good template program. We are using e-commerce templates to create our new look for WUN posts. It is easy to use and relatively inexpensive.
When it comes to graphics, be conservative. Flash and graphics-heavy sites tend to take longer to load. If your site takes more than 3 seconds to do so, you will lose a lot of visitors and potential buyers. If you must use graphics, make sure the file sizes used have been reduced as much as your image editing/compression software will allow.
View your site using as many different browsers as possible. In addition to Internet Explorer and Netscape, there’s Opera, Mozilla, Lynx, and those are just the ones that run on Microsoft Windows. WebMonkey has a chart that is compatible with Macintosh, Unix/Linux and others. Also, many people will browse with their browser graphics turned off. Make sure you know what your site looks like without the graphics and that it’s still easy for visitors to navigate.
One Final Thought Make sure all important information is in the top half of the page. If you know visitors are looking for something specific and have them scroll down to find it, chances are they won’t.
Excerpted from The Principles of PMS: Powerful Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Business © 2005 – Heidi Richards
