1800 677 656

Website Design “eResolutions” for 2011

Website Design “eResolutions” for 2011

A Marketing article written by Mike Whitehouse

2010 in Brisbane is now just a memory and it is time to consider how your website design and online marketing strategy performed for you

The New Year has arrived and you are now enthusiastically planning improvements to your website design and online marketing strategy. You have reviewed your 2010 results and are now considering what changes you made to your website design in 2010 which positively, or negatively, impacted your business.

Website Design questions you may ask yourself include:

Did your sales increase across your website? Did the GFC impact your online marketing results? Why or why not? Did your online marketing strategy achieve the planned goals? What could you have done to attract more visitors to your website? How can you further streamline your business including new features in your website design to achieve greater efficiency and profit?

There are many variables which can impact the success of your business and with the New Year upon us it is a great time to set your online marketing goals for 2011.

At Aspedia we want to see your business not just survive but thrive during 2011, and our entire team is committed to assisting you to determine how to best achieve your goals. We find the greatest challenge for most clients is to determine how to best utilise your time, efforts and resources to make it all happen.

To help you to get started we have listed below some website design eResolutions your company may want to make in 2011.

No 1: Improve your website design for better usability, reporting and conversion rates.

Your website design results must be measurable so you can better refine your online marketing strategies and tactics.

Enabling a constantly improvement process will greatly improve the results your business achieves through your website design. What is your conversion rate for new visitors to your website? Do you track repeat visitors? Is your website interesting? What marketing messages on your website are working for you? What products are visitors most interested in? Does your website design engage visitors and encourage interaction?

No 2: Generate repeat sales with your existing website clients.

It is always far cheaper to sell to existing customers as they already understand your value proposition and you have already developed credibility and trust with them during past website transactions.

Improving communication with your existing clients will encourage repeat visitors to your website and utilising good website design elements will encourage repeat purchasing. Do you encourage them to return and purchase again? Do you personalise your website offering to present products you know they need or want? Do you track their interest level in specific products and send special offers to encourage them to return? Do you maintain a VIP club allowing your best customers to receive privileges or discounts to support their loyalty to you?

No 3: Increase up-selling through better website design.

Getting new visitors or repeat customers to your website is critical to your success but once you have them and in buying mode you must maximise the transaction value to reduce your overall cost of support and freight per sale which in turn will increase your profit margin per transaction.

Simple website design changes can make a massive overall difference to the results you achieve. Is your value proposition being clearly presented? Do you encourage clients to purchase a specific value of product to get discounted or free freight? When interest is shown in a specific product do you present other related products for purchase? Do you offer volume discounts?

No 4: Create link bait to develop new audiences for your website.

There are many free article directory websites designed to stimulate new visitors daily who consume your published material and associated marketing adverts which generate their revenue stream.

Write informative articles and post them to directory websites with a back-link to your website. Effective link bait articles should contain useful information that others will want to link to or post on their site and include high ranking keywords in title and content. Do you have useful information to publish? Could you write articles for delivery to your own clients which could also be sent to these directories?

No 5: Improve SEO practices within your Website Design.

One of the most effective website design strategies to increase new visitors is the integration of best practice SEO tactics and processes to your website.

Good SEO includes fresh keyword rich content, regular blog posts and new pages added to you website design. Do you know what keywords you are currently optimised for? Do you know the optimal keyword which should be used in your website design? Is your website designed to take advantage of SEO? Is the technology used in your website design and development SEO friendly?

No 6: Think about the future - website design, eCommerce and CRM

Spending time implementing long term strategies will payoff consistently over a much longer term than short term goals with expected, but often not achieve, big payoffs.

Customer loyalty is becoming harder and harder to maintain due to the increased global competition all businesses now face on a daily basis. As a result it is critical all business put in place a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy which integrates seamlessly to their Website design and eCommerce processes. Do you track each customer contact point? Do you know in an instant what each customer has purchased? Does your customer service staff know what is on order with each customer so they can react appropriately? Does your sales staff know what support tickets (issues) have recently been lodged by their customers?

No 7: Pay better attention to your competitive position

The website design world is constantly changing so it is critical to stay abreast of new advancements in online marketing and eBusiness strategy.

There are multiple online factors which could impact your business but 3 primary focuses should be:
Comparison shopping. The Internet makes comparison shopping much is easier than ever which is reducing customers brand loyalty and generating a trend toward price loyalty.

Consumers today are looking for special offers, discounts, coupons, incentives, free shipping and other reasons to support a specific site or product. Does your website design meet the “price loyalty” demands? Are incentives easily understood? Do you congratulate customers of their good buying decisions to build loyalty?

Use rich media to aid sales. A recent study showed that using video as a part of the online shopping experience may increase sales by up to 64%. Website visitors also stayed at 2 minutes longer on the site. Does your website design utilise rich media to engage customers? Do you allow visitors to interact with this media how and when they wish?

Keep up with SEO trends. In September 2010 Google release “Google Instant” and Bing is planning to support "canonical pages" in early 2011. Companies who wish to have a strong website design presence need to be aware of these sort of changes and any other technical SEO changes to have the greatest success.

Depending on your business, there may be other website design eResolutions you may need to include but these should get you started.

You need to determine which resolutions you will focus your efforts on but please try to avoid the following pitfalls:

  1. More is not necessarily merrier. Do not set so many goals that you can't achieve them so choose your resolutions wisely so they offer the best returns for your business and are actually achievable.
  2. Be sure each and every goal is clearly defined and delegated to someone who will be ultimately responsible for accomplishing it.
  3. Engage professionals to support you where your internal resources lack the experience or skill to achieve the desired goal.
  4. Make sure clear metrics and reporting is agreed and take the time to assess how you are doing along the way with each particular goal. Review the strategy and make changes if it is not working as planned.

At Aspedia, we would love to sit down and help you assess your website design and online marketing plan to ensure your focus and goals for the New Year are realistic, well considered and achievable.

We have an amazing team of talented people available to see that your website meets all the latest web standards as well as writers, designers and graphic artist who would love to take your business to the next level. You can look us up and be sure to on check out our client portfolio to see what we can do to help you realize your New Year eResolutions for 2011.

In November / December 2010 Aspedia achieved a 500% increase in new leads for Fort Knox Self Storage to develop over 700 new leads in the first month after going live with their new website design.

Call us now - 1300 ASPEDIA to see what we can do for you.