This week, we welcome a guest post from our Senior Digital Strategist, Brittany Moreland.

Brittany helps our e-commerce clients utilize data to deliver omni channel marketing automation experiences. She specializes in combining data analytics, customer journey mapping, and research-based insights to develop scalable and profitable digital marketing solutions.

Personalization is vital to the success of any marketing strategy. As e-commerce becomes more and more competitive, it’s essential that brands engage existing and potential customers with hyper-relevant personalized experiences.

One way to provide a memorable personalized customer journey is through user-specific product recommendations. According to Accenture, 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands who provide relevant offers and recommendations.

Today, we’re digging in on how Episerver Product Recommendations helps enhance product discovery and increase cart value with smart product recommendations. Learn how Episerver Product Recommendations helps you achieve a 24/7 personalized buying experience across all channels.

One of the biggest frustrations web users face is waiting for a page to load. With so many alternative sites available at their fingertips, online shoppers don’t have the patience to suffer slow websites. Today’s digital world moves fast, and your site should too.

If your pages don’t load like lightning, users move on and you lose the opportunity to convert clicks into sales. In fact, according to top web influencer Neil Patel, 47% of consumers expect pages to load in two seconds or less. Every second counts – 40% of visitors will abandon a page that takes over three seconds to display.

Don’t leave your visitors waiting. Follow our four steps for identifying performance issues and optimizing your website.

The process of thoughtfully improving a website or digital product’s ease-of-use and user flow through customer-focused design, is half science, half art, but it’s key to retaining and converting visitors, and maximizing your website investment.

Aesthetically-pleasing design and flashy trends won’t safeguard your site from usability issues or guarantee a valuable customer journey. In fact, they frequently get in the way. Great user experience (UX), requires planning, testing, and investing in strategic design resources up front, but a well-designed and well-defined user interface reduces rework and wasted development time, decreases customer support calls, and, most importantly, increases customer retention rates and sales.

In fact, according to Forbes, every dollar devoted to user experience returns $10 to $100. Forrester agrees, finding that visit-to-lead conversions can be 400% higher on sites with a “superior user experience.”

Don’t turn off your prospects and customers with a sub-par, friction-filled website. Follow our 4 simple UX principles and best practices to improve your site’s ease-of-use, solve customer pain points, deliver memorable brand experiences, and increase conversions.

Your website is an essential channel to reach customers and prospects 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Your site drives sales, captures new leads, and provides customers valuable information about your products and services.

Too often, though, brands prioritize impactful design or trends over website user experience. The result is an expensive and aesthetically pleasing, but confusing and friction-filled website that bleeds users and skyrockets bounce rates.

We all want our digital brand representation to have a WOW factor – to capture audience attention and help us stand out from the competition.

Today, we’ll explain what User Experience (UX) is and why it’s good business.

As Danish usability consultant, Jakob Nielsen says, “your homepage is often your first — and possibly your last — chance to attract and retain each customer.”

What does your website homepage say about your company? Is it the “face” you want users to first meet? Does it put new users at ease and create a lasting impression? If you answered “no” to these questions, follow our three homepage tips for a winning website.

1. Your Homepage At-A-Glance

Are you a trendy footwear retailer? Do you offer face-painting services for parties? Is your homepage tailored to your unique audience? It takes a user a rapid 0.05 seconds to form an opinion about your website.

Your homepage should clearly state what your company does, why your user should explore further, what differentiates you from the competition, and what action you’d like the user to take. Try to keep your messaging simple, but impactful and descriptive, especially when it comes to headlines and calls-to-action (CTAs).

Photography is your friend here! Photography goes a long way to communicate your business objectives and values. Include simple lifestyle and product photography to draw attention, without looking too staged (stock photos) or cluttered. If you sell services instead of products, use environmental or human-interest (lifestyle) photography.

Step it up a notch by using GIFs or quality video content. Regardless of the medium, ensure the imagery makes sense and furthers your brand’s story.

Visitors to Hello Fresh’s website, instantly learn Hello Fresh is a home cooking service that provides simple recipes and pre-measured ingredients. The call-to-action to “view our plans” is front and center.

Continue reading 3 Homepage Tips for a Winning Website →

I was finishing up a craft project recently, when I realized I needed spray sealant stat – even Amazon same-day delivery wouldn’t cut it. What’s a crafty gal to do! Fortunately, I saw on Michaels.com that they stocked spray in a nearby store, so I panic purchased (we’ve all done this) the spray online to pick it up later that afternoon. I’ve been an “order online, pick up in store” convert ever since.

According to Invesp, 49% of shoppers say that same-day delivery makes them more likely to shop online. Not only that, more than 25% of shoppers would abandon a cart online if same-day shipping wasn’t available!

If same day shipping isn’t feasible for you, consider offering the option to pick up in store for online purchases. While this also requires infrastructures in place to ensure the product is at the specific store, it allows the customer to receive the product within 24 hours of purchase, with no shipping or handling fees.

Continue reading Shipping Options to Compete with Amazon: Order Online, Pick Up In Store →