If the first part of this series wasn’t enough for you and you’ve been waiting with baited breath for the next exciting instalment then your wait is over!
Here’s the final part of rules & tips to help make your ecommerce website a success.
Ecommerce has, for the most part, evolved far beyond the late 1990’s cliches of hair-wrenching, sanity-shattering slogs through yet another “clever” designer’s take on how shopping on the web should be.
Standards prevailed, usability won out, and we’re now free to spend our collective billions of pounds per year online.
That said… It can still get better. Online shopping is in, if not infancy, at least a toddler stage. The advances that brought us to where we are have made the process simpler and easier than ever, but some sites still haven’t caught on.
This is part 1 of a 2 part series that will provide you with some great tips for successful ecommerce design.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those people that constantly bashes Microsoft and having been a computer user since the days of the BBC micro I have, for the vast majority of the time, had no option other than the Microsoft operating system and range of office products.
However all of our production systems and databases have, for a very long time, been based on open source solutions using Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL (LAMP) whilst retaining Windows as our office platform to allow us to effectively communicate with clients.
However, the turning point was Windows Vista…
In a recent survey of executives; approximately 60 percent stated that images were turned off on their email clients. In some email clients, turning “images off” is now the default setting (Microsoft Outlook 2007). Corporate IT policies and personal preferences are resulting in image suppression being a de facto standard.
If, like me, you are called upon during the course of your average working week to produce email templates alongside regular day to day website work, then you too will no doubt have had the same fist waving, cursing and screen slapping experiences that I have had to come to terms with. Yes, creating html email marketing newsletters and flyers has become an unnecessary black art, having to abandon the ‘best practice’ principles we have had to learn over the past years with CSS, and instead travel Dr Who-style to a past of table based design. We’ve had to polish the dust off ’skills’ we thought we had long since waived bye-bye to.
At first it might seem like a really odd name for our blog and nothing to do with neteffekt, our services or anyone in our team.
But you would be wrong! It’s actually a standing joke in our office the became the obvious choice for the name.
How many salespeople would you expect to make a sale by just blandly stating the facts? Exactly!
So when it comes to selling on a website why do most companies ditch their personality, their ideals, and their sales patter and hope for the best?
As ecommerce starts to come of age, your website is just one of many hopefuls fighting for its share of online booty. And the upshot of that is - the more sites like yours there are the less loyalty you can expect.
However there are a few things you can do to make sure that your site stands out from the crowd and keep your customers returning again and again. What’s more, all it need cost is a little imagination.
Email marketing is still one of the best ways to communicate and to build a relationship with your customers but that said, a common question has always been - ‘What are the advantages of using a specialist email marketing service rather than sending emails using my PC?’
Well, there are a lot of advantages. I know you’re thinking ‘Of course there are!’ but before you make your own mind up have a read of the points and considerations we’ve put together. All of which should help you in the decision making process of deciding whether to use a specialist service like ours.
