Each of your online store’s pages should be designed with a specific outcome in mind
It’s amazing how few online business owners properly acknowledge that their site needs to not only target the right potential customers, but also take each of those customers on a journey. Each page on your site is likely to represent a step on a potential customer’s journey – but have you actually designed each of your e-tail store’s pages with a view to taking them on a journey towards a sale?
In fact, a sale is far from the only goal you should have for your site’s pages, although we’ll focus a bit more on that subject shortly.
The key thing to remember is that, whatever a given page’s goal happens to be, it should have a goal; there should be no such thing as a page on your website that’s just there for the sake of being there.
What journeys will your target customers be embarking on?
Before we get a bit more specific about the desired outcomes you should design your online store’s pages around (save, of course, for the ultimate goal of making a sale), let’s consider the other stages of the customer journey, starting from the beginning.
By that, we mean: when the target customer first lands on your website, where have they come from? Has the customer come from a status update or tweet made on one of your brand’s social media pages? Or maybe they’ve clicked through from one of your marketing emails, an advertisement, or even organic search?
This is an important question, because the answer will guide your efforts to construct the rest of the customer journey. It’s why online stores often have very specific landing pages for very specific purposes, targeted at very specific audiences.
Every page of your site will form part of a customer’s journey, and you will naturally want that journey to culminate in a sale – or at least, another major step that will help you achieve a sale.
So, in the case of each and every page on your site, you will need to ask yourself what you want to achieve with that page. This will mean the page can be designed in a way geared towards making that goal a reality.
How can you begin to decide what pages should have what goals?
As we stated above, there should be such thing as a page of your site that is ‘just there’ for no particular reason.
After all, even once a customer has made a purchase, that won’t be the end of their journey with your brand. So even a ‘purchase confirmation’ page, for instance, shouldn’t be a dead end; there should be something on the page to tempt the customer to continue their relationship with your brand. That could be an invitation to follow your social media pages, perhaps, or even to contribute a rating or review of the product or the service they have received from you.
But what if you’re still unsure what exact goals your site’s various pages should have? Well, a good starting point is to list your ideas for such goals, other than the purchase of a product. Certain pages of your site may be designed to convince the customer to subscribe to your brand’s email newsletter, refer a friend to your store, or request information from you… the possibilities are (almost) endless.
This process can be followed by listing all the public pages of your site, and deciding on the goals that each page will have. When you do, consider – in each case – what stage of their journey the customer will actually be at. If the customer will have only just landed on your site from an organic search page, for instance, asking them to leave a review of your product will make little sense.
These are all aspects of website design that a lot of online business owners don’t spend as much time thinking about as they should. So, for advice and help with such aspects, or in relation to other areas of expertise of ours such as graphic design, search engine optimisation, or database solutions, please don’t wait any longer to get in touch with Piranha Designs.
