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Planning a new website?
It’s actually hard work helping would-be online retailers get what you want website-wise. OK, so you might think it is hard picking a path through the techno-marketing waffle we potential suppliers throw up, so a little bit of education might go a long way.
At Pindar Graphics, we are often asked “what should we have on the new website we are planning?” Actually, it’s worse than that: frighteningly, businesses say “we’d like to sell more”. We then ask the question “how” and that’s when the hair scratching kicks in. Sometimes, we get the feeling that you hoped we wouldn’t ask that question and rather we just told you what to do.
Agencies of course just want you to spend as much as humanly possible on their services. Package vendor salesmen are trained to ask probing questions whose answers will uniquely highlight their offering (“so a real-time dotNet hub is mission critical”). Consultants won’t let you do anything without a full strategy and feasibility study (not a bad idea, really, despite the evident self-interest).
So when the business development manager from your new website company knocks on your door, this is how things are going to be. Unfortunately, she’ll go for your jugular and look for some jolly good reasons for why on earth you would want to spend all that hard-earned margin. Like what? How about what kind of sales you want to achieve over the next few years. You’d be surprised how many people actually ask us what they will do. Think of a number and double it. So at least we’ve got a top level plan now. What’s wrong with your current site? It’s not very good. It’s nowhere in Google. I can’t update it. I want to do more cross-sells. Basically, you don’t trust it to support the level of activity you want to put through it. Your current provider doesn’t understand about e-commerce or they are a friend of a friend who designed websites at college (as one does).
Wave that magic wand and three months of agony are behind you, the domains have been re-pointed and it’s live! How are you going to market it? What do you recommend, you say. Ah, you want the crash-course in online marketing. Well, that’s easy. 20% of visitors will come from typing in your URL, because they remembered or your catalogue told them too. 50% will type your brand (or variant thereof) into Google, whether its’ paid for via pay-per-click advertising or your adroit search engine optimisation got you there. 10% will come from the long-tail of general purpose searches that uncover various products squirreled away on your site, 10% will come from affiliates once that’s up and running, 10% will come from your monthly emails. My plan has you generating 2,000 visitors a day and a conversion ratio of 4% has you generating 80 orders at £50 each: looks like £100k per month isn’t mountainous. If you stripped those numbers down, you could even work out the advertising and email spend to achieve that level of traffic consistently. That’ll be about £3k a month on PPC and £400-500 per month to e-mail your database of 30,000, then. Seems like a plan? 2 businesses out of 10 conduct this kind of analysis. Most just want to sell more. The bitter truth is that the £32,000 you invest on a new website is quickly dwarfed by the marketing spend you’ll lob at it. Let alone the catalogues. Oh, and the photography (don’t forget the thumbnails, zooms, alternate views, lifestyle shots).
All too often you move straight onto designing the home page. The clever ones want it like Boden, John Lewis or play.com. They do happen to be the MD’s favourites. The not so clever ones want eye-popping images on the home page or they just want “a really good design”. For most online retailers worth their salt, it’s more about giving the customer a usable overview of your products (especially the popular products), your main product categories, current promotions and if you can simply, your service and value proposition. Zap that notion that the internet visitor will do you the bizarre homage of reading the chairman’s self-congratulatory prose. We’ll tell you that over 30% of all visitors will be off within 30 seconds. Close to 50% don’t even arrive at the home page so you’d better think about where on earth they do come in and make sure they get all that P-stuff. That will be category and product landing pages: most people just have a few thumbnails on category pages – ever so nicely laid out in rows of four.
How would you like your customers to navigate your product range? Men, women, kids and accessories. Tops, bottoms. Fine, what about browsing. Shirts, blue shirts, blue ties, silver cufflinks, red shirt, gift voucher. Your zealously crafted marketing descriptions are not going to cut the mustard. Think about how people will search, what they would type into Google – in plain English – and what other ways your expensively captured visitors will get around your site.
And now our usability experts have come up with the perfect structure, the dream information topology. It’s never more than two clicks to any product and 60% can be found in one. What kind of product information and photography can you provide. It’s a bit scant. The images are cut-outs, blurred and too small – there are better shots on Flickr. The copy doesn’t explain how it’s made, how to wash it, where it came from, how long it lasts, why it’s better than cotton or Velcro. We’re a bit busy with our catalogue and we don’t have a copywriter, but we’ll try and get it done. Great site, shame about the contents.
What makes you special? Why are your ginger truffles better than anybody else’s? Let’s face it: they’re hard to tell apart. You can of course, because you’ve lived and breathed for ten years so please don’t get shirty when you’re asked to explain that a little: I’m your friend in this trying to net you a load of new customers. It might not be about the product – we can get them cheap on EBay anyway. Very rarely have companies lined up their killer service proposition: no quibble returns, guaranteed overnight delivery, free shipping on all orders up to £50, gorgeous wrapping. Would you like that to appear in search engine listings? What happens if somebody wants to call you? Ah we have an 8 till late call-centre. Let’s put that on every page.
We spend 90% of that initial discussion about the sexy stuff: your brand, Google’s algorithm and clever merchandising. What are we going to do with the orders? We’ll be fulfilling them from our warehouse. Can we have an automated file? Sure, we’ll include that in our quote…wrong answer. Increasingly, a slick end-to-end process is a customer winner and the single most important part of your online sales strategy. We want to know what happens to your orders step-by-step till they go out the door. And stock. How is it ordered, managed and made available to your Internet customers. How and when will you relieve your customer of his card information and how long do you need to keep the security code to process the order? Most people have figured out that some kind of integration will save them time: but it’ll add it all back in spades if it breaks. Yes, internet connections break, servers crash, databases expand and disk space runs out. Unfortunately, you don’t want to pay for recovery, reconciliation and reporting. Did they all come down alright? Unplug your computer as it is downloading orders and wonder what’s happening. Have you any idea how hard it is keeping multiple computer systems up and running, communicating, throwing out orders, calculating stock levels, apply security patches, generating reports, throwing out affiliate feeds, confirmation emails and targeted special offers?
So it’s live now (again). What are you going to do with it? Take orders. We mean by way of promotional activity. Buy three and one of these and get 50% off your next order. Have one of these for half-price if you spend more than £100. Can we have it simpler or more exciting? Promotions drive repeat visitors and increase order values. Creative ways of sharing your gross margin with the online community are worth their wait in gold. We need to make sure they’re in the plan in the way you want them.
As for the rest of it – testimonials, wish-lists, cross-sells, weblogs, recently viewed items, best-seller lists and all those features you brainstormed last week and have written up in your website brief – they can all be added at your leisure, now or in the future as your sales grow online. If we get all the above right, you’re not leaving much to chance, you’re making a production line that can be cranked up to suit your pace.
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