Do you think the party’s over once your customer purchases? Wrong!  Keep the customer engaged with your brand by continuing the conversation. We’re talking about optimizing order tracking pages to maintain the same seamless user experience you’ve worked so hard to achieve.

Shipping confirmation emails often include plain text and a simple tracking number linking directly to USPS, UPS, FEDEX, or DHL. Yawn. Did you know many platforms allow you to customize the order tracking page with images, email sign-ups, promotions, and branding?

We’re sharing some of our favorite brands’ optimized order tracking pages.

Continue reading 3 Order Tracking Platforms Optimizing the Post-Purchase Experience →

Skipping social media, because it’s just for millennials? Think again. According to Pew Research, 78% of Americans age 30-49 use at least one social media platform; followed by 64% of Americans aged 50-64 and 37% aged 65 and up.

Social media offers a huge opportunity to build your brand, grow your audience, and encourage customers to show off your products (an implied testimonial).

Whether you’re a social media novice or expert, everyone can use a little social media inspiration. To help, we’ve rounded up our favorite examples of brands going the extra mile on social media and tips for creating your own social campaigns.

Continue reading 4 Social Media Trends and Brand Inspiration →

“Oops! The page you are looking for no longer exists.” We’ve all landed on a website’s 404 error page when trying to find a product or information. Error pages are an important opportunity to motivate browsers to stay on the website and search for a new item, instead of jumping ship and searching for another site.

We’ve rounded up our picks for best and worst 404 error pages. The error page wins are clever, on-brand, and entice us to keep exploring the website. The error page fails need to be overhauled – fast.

Winning 404 Error Pages:

These error pages get an “A” for on-brand design, copy that made us chuckle, and clear calls-to-action (CTAs).

Website: World Market
What’s working:
World Market extends an uninterrupted user experience with a branded landing page, clear CTA, and product category imagery, making it super easy and compelling to continue shopping.

Continue reading 5 404 Error Page Wins and Fails →

Let’s say you’re an online retailer selling a variety of products, and the only navigation option on your website is “Shop.” With no further breakdowns or filters, shopping your website is overwhelming and frustrating.

A clean design and easy-to-follow navigation is one way to help website visitors find your products without getting frustrated. Another often overlooked step is streamlined and intuitive product categories.

Products grouped by category help customers find what they’re looking for. Your products could be categorized by product type (“candles” or “frames”), by room (“living room” or “kitchen”), by mood (“cozy comforts”), or by color (“blue” or “earth-tones”).

Once you’ve created product categories that make sense for your offerings and audience, how do you make a great category page? To help you brainstorm, we’re sharing creative features we love on product category pages.

Continue reading 4 Features That Turn “Eh” Product Category Pages to “Yeah!” →

User experience (UX) is a vital component of every successful website. A poorly designed website is disastrous for brand credibility. Users decide within seconds whether to stay on your site, or abandon for an alternative, based on design and experience.

In fact, a Forrester study found well-designed user interface could raise your website’s conversion rate by up to a 200% and a better UX design could yield conversion rates up to 400%.

User testing, the process of watching and listening to users while they interact with your website, helps get UX right and allows you to stay ahead of your competition. User testing should occur before the project starts, during development phases, and after project completion. This exercise unearths site issues, like broken links, complicated navigation, or confusing checkout processes.

By identifying what works and what doesn’t early-on, you gain guidance, inspiration, validation, and discover areas of improvement, ultimately reducing development time and user friction. Ready to add user testing to your website development and maintenance strategy? Get started with our 5 tips for successful user experience testing.

Continue reading Web Tip – 5 Tips for Successful User Experience Testing →

Our Holiday Website Inspiration Gallery shows you how big brands updated their site last year to engage and convert gift seekers.

We hope you get holiday promotion ideas to try out on your own website!  (If you need specifics, read our 4 Website Tweaks to Convert Holiday Shoppers.)

Don’t miss out on Amazon Prime Day! This year, Amazon Prime Day begins Monday, July 10 at 6 p.m. and lasts until Wednesday, July 12 at 12 a.m.

It’s time to get your products ready for the busiest shopping day of the year. Today, we’ll walk through five quick tips to optimize your products for Amazon Prime Day.

What is Amazon Prime Day?

Introduced in July 2015, Amazon Prime Day boasts considerable discounts on tons of products, like Kindle e-readers, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Echo speakers, and more.

More than 90,000 TVs and two million toys were sold on Amazon Prime Day 2016, doubling sales from 2015 and receiving the “biggest day ever” praise of one online retailer.

Amazon Prime Day features three types of deals – Spotlight deals, Lightning deals, and Savings and Steals. Spotlight deals are the best deals of the day, and Lightning deals are only available for a limited time. New deals are released every five minutes.

Amazon Prime Day is exclusive to Prime members. To take part in the deals, sign up for a free, 30-day trial (just don’t forget to cancel it afterwards if you don’t want to retain your membership). Continue reading Web Tip – 5 Tips to Boost Sales on Amazon Prime Day →

Whereoware clients, prospects, and industry friends frequently ask about our technology partners, and why we chose them.

Today, we’re giving a shout out to our CMS and commerce vendor pal Episerver.

See how Episerver played a part in bringing Whereoware’s vision to fruition, and why the experts are taking notice.

Seeking: A Personalization Partner

As a website design and development agency, Whereoware is always on the lookout for technology partners, platforms, applications, and tools to expand our solutions and capabilities. We have a diverse client base, so we employ a wide-breadth of technical talent and cross-platform expertise, rather than limiting ourselves to just one platform or tool.

In 2013, Whereoware was seeking a CMS partner to help bring our vision to life: combining automation, analytics, and personalization to build authentic relationships online.

As brands upped their online game with personalized services and offers (COUGH Amazon), all consumers would expect these hyper-relevant and personalized online experiences. (My shopping experience is so simple on Amazon – why can’t it be this easy everywhere?)

We wanted to bridge the experience gap – helping clients create the same simple, pleasant, personal, and genuine interactions online they achieved offline (and vice versa).

We had extensive expertise in automation and personalization, but were seeking a simple and intuitive, cloud-based platform that’d let us deliver a holistic, personalized user experience from email, mobile, and digital ads, to the e-commerce and content-based websites we built and designed for clients.

Enter Episerver

Whereoware ultimately partnered with Episerver, a global provider of a single platform to smartly manage digital content, commerce, and marketing in the cloud.

Episerver balances commerce and content in a flexible, cloud-based platform. They’re uniquely well-versed in B2B and B2C e-commerce business requirements, and those of Service companies.

Episerver is flexible and agile enough to integrate with our automation platforms and other third-party tools. We also loved that it was exceedingly simple to use; letting marketers drag and drop products or messaging to create targeted product pages, or develop hyper-personal visitor groups, in minutes.

We’ve had considerable success using Episerver to build personalized e-commerce and CMS websites for clients. Check out a sample site from Mud Pie.

In the News

We’re not the only ones praising Episerver recently. Check out what the experts are saying in some recent press below:

• 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce. The Gartner Magic Quadrant report evaluates 21 providers of digital commerce platforms to provide context and clarity to organizations considering vendors and platforms. Gartner named Episerver a “Challenger” and awarded top marks for the critical capabilities of Agility, Customer Experience, Time to Productivity, and Total Cost of Ownership. Read the full report here.

• The Forrester Wave™: Web Content Management Systems, Q1 2017. This report evaluates web content management systems providers based on their current offering, strategy, and market presence. Episerver was included as one of the 15 most significant web content management systems, and categorized as a Leader for its core web CMS extensibility and architecture, testing, and personalization functionality. Read the full report here.

Want More Info on Episerver and Whereoware?

Whereoware is a longstanding Episerver partner. In recent years, we’ve won Episerver’s 2016 North American Ascender of the Year award, 2015 Commerce Site of the Year award, and 2014 Best Digital Marketing Site award. See examples of our work here.

Want to talk about Episerver and Whereoware’s combined capabilities? Reach out to us.

When you’re developing a content piece, website, or email, your audience sometimes morphs into faceless figures, instead of the real, everyday people you’re trying to reach.

To engage real people, you need to tailor your messages and incentives to be relevant to their individual needs, address their concerns, demonstrate your value, and persuade them to convert (all at an appropriate time in their purchase cycle and without being too aggressive or annoying).

Luckily, developing user personas – mapping out fictional characters representing your core audience – helps you engage individuals with the right approach, timing, and messaging to move them down the conversion path. (Our Persona Worksheet makes mapping our personas easy! Get it below.)

User personas work

User personas help you personalize interactions with your customers + personalization simply works:

How to build actionable user personas

Identify characteristics that offer insight about customers and factors driving their decision making. The goal is to group similar customer representations together, until you’re left with a manageable number of personas, representing about 80% of your audience (3-5, depending on your organization’s size).

When developing user personas, you must collect actionable information that tells you something about the person, so you can respond to their behavior with persuasive, impactful marketing.

Remember, you’re trying to understand intangibles like motivations, concerns, turn-offs, and position in the buyer lifecycle, as well as tangibles like location, age, and education level, to paint a clear and divisive picture of the different types of people making up your core audience. You must also plan how you’ll identify these personas in your various channels (website, email, mobile push, etc.) to deliver the right content.

Continue reading Persona Worksheet – 4 Steps to Actionable User Personas →