The myth of digital commerce:
“Once you've set up your e-business, visitors come automatically.”
Today, brand managers understand that e-commerce can be a profitable way to market products or services directly to end users. Intermediaries and complex sales structures are eliminated and margins are attractive. We often talk to entrepreneurs who assume that just opening a brand store on the Internet automatically generates online visitors and sales.
Unfortunately, this is often not the case. Even successful brands often have difficulties using their level of recognition in the digital sector as well. In our long-standing cooperation with various brands, we were able to identify 5 alarm signals that point to fundamental problems facing an Internet company.
It's not about you!
As much as they are convinced of your brand, product or service: Visitors to your website are not interested in you! Potential customers are looking for a solution to their problem.
Find an answer for yourself: What problem does your product solve for the customer?
If you do not have clear concrete answers to these questions, you should be alarmed!
The problem: When you go through the texts on your website, you often come across (possesive) pronouns such as “We,” “Our”, “My,” “I”?
Keep reminding yourself that the texts don't have to be about you, but about your customers.
The solution: Change the appropriate pronouns to ones that relate directly to the customer, such as: “You,” “You,” “Your,” “Your,” “Your.”
Put yourself in the customer's shoes and develop your business model from this perspective. Speak from the customer's perspective.
Your customers are jumping off your site prematurely.
If your brand has just launched, you probably only have a few items that you can sell online. This runs the risk that your customers will quickly feel bored and only stay on their side for a short time.
Solution 1: Check these two factors in your analytics software:
- Your bounce rate: If this is higher than 35%, you should urgently revise your homepage and provide it with a clear “call to action”, i.e. a call to action. Consider how you can retain visitors to your site with relevant information.
- Length of stay: If the average time spent by a visitor is less than 2 minutes, we advise you to add more attractive content that will be read by your visitors.
Solution 2: Add a blog to your website. In it, report in an entertaining way about the history of your product and interesting background topics. Auf Zady You'll find a perfect example of great stories that have been beautifully inserted into the features section of the website. It's worth taking a look! Zady also works with guest bloggers and also promotes stories about Medium, to attract visitors to the shop. Read article 1 “It's not about you” again and consider topics that interest your potential customers.
Your brand new shop isn't running as expected.
Trends in the digital world and e-commerce are changing rapidly. Perhaps you have the feeling that your shop is already out of date, or is not working as expected. The conventional approach to web design involves a high risk and wastes immense potential. For this reason, many shop owners opt for a new type of web design and web development that focuses on continuous development. It is about meeting the needs and requirements of your customer.
Issue: They worked on their shop for months and had problems understanding the technical language of their IT specialist. Your shop is now online, but the expected results have not been achieved.
solution: Think about it agile growth-driven design concepts such as “growth-driven development” to target. If you've never heard of this agile development concept before, you can find a free e-book on “Growth-Driven Design/Development” on our resources page. A short description of this can be found here on our website.
You are not realizing the lifetime value of your customers
Imagine spending Euro 100.00 on Adwords & Marketing to attract a buyer who finally buys a product for Euro 80.00. At first glance, this doesn't seem like a good decision because you're losing money. But what if the customer returns 10 times and buys for 80.00 euros each time? Now the relationship has changed. You have invested Euro 100.00 and thus achieve a turnover of Euro 800.00! Remind yourself time and time again that the ultimate goal is to retain your customers. It is always much more economical to sell to existing customers than to a new buyer.
Issue: They feel overwhelmed by the countless opportunities to take initiative. Google Adwords, Facebook and all the many social media channels overwhelm you. That's why you've decided to do a little bit of everything and meander through it somehow.
solution: Discover the true value of your customer. Pick up a piece of paper and think about how you could inspire your existing customers. Pay attention to the little things.
Write down at least 20 different ideas and sort them together with your team by importance. Which actions make your product so unique that it gets stuck in the heads of your customers? Is it an email of 3000 words or a small bag of sweets that you include with the order?
Your page is too slow
Start-ups often spend a disproportionate amount of time on design and forget to invest in speed. Slow websites are one of the biggest obstacles that ensure that their customers won't stay on their site.
Issue: If your site is taking too long to load, you should look for a host that guarantees great speed through an appropriate server. Alternatively, you can work with a “hosted solution” such as Shopify.
solution: Watch yourself Google Page Speed Insights and follow the results of the website analysis.
Why growth-driven design is better!
If the 5 issues listed above sound familiar to you, you should dig into the topic of Growth-Driven E-Commerce. Take a look at the illustrations and compare the traditional methods of designing and developing websites and web shops with the “Growth-Driven” method.
Remember the 3 rules of the “Growth-Driven Design” method:
Keep the risk low:
Reduce the risk of a relaunch by focusing on the most important factors of the new site and then getting started quickly with a Launchpad website.
Learn & improve:
With the Growth-Driven Method, we constantly research and test the behavior of our customers and incorporate the respective results directly into current improvement measures. Through these continuous adjustments, we achieve top performance.
Marketing + sales:
Growth-driven design is closely linked to marketing & sales. The research results that we obtain from observing and analyzing customer behavior are continuously incorporated into improving marketing & sales strategies. If you're interested in finding out more details about Growth-Driven Design, contact us!
