Top 10 Things You Should Be Aiming For On Your Promotional Merchandise Website
1. Mobile Friendly Responsive Design
On April 21st 2015 Google announced that they would boost mobile friendly websites in search results to mobile users. This means that you should really be providing a more mobile friendly website.
2. Fast Accurate Search with No Page Refresh
Having a fast ‘search as you type function’ allows an end user to refine search results without refreshing the page. This allows the end user to find information faster and hold their attention longer. Remember more than 3 clicks to find information is the rule.
3. The Ability to Purchase There and Then
Seem like a no brainer? I’ll let you in on a secret. In this industry the only way you can realistically do this is with tokenised payments. I.e. record the user's card details and charge the card after all aspects of the order have been checked. To the end user it’s still a seamless e-commerce experience.
4. Live Help Chat Support
The ability to connect to your customers via live help or instant messenger can be very powerful. It turns your static portal website into a much more personal experience and can often be the point at which you collect a valuable enquiry. It also allows you to see who is visiting your website and the paths they take to enquiry in real time.
5. Clear All in Pricing
End users often hate the promotional merchandise industry for add ons and extra costs on everything. Be an exception to the rule and combine your prices into one ‘easy to understand’ single cost. Keep it simple and your clients will appreciate how easy it is for them to stay inside their budget.
6. Reviews and Testimonials
Recently the bpma introduced reviews on their bpma business pages. These are provided by www.reviews.co.uk you should check them out. They are far better value for money than some other providers and are nice people to boot. Once you have 30 business reviews they will submit your reviews to adwords and google shopping so you get a star rating next to your adverts, this reduces cost per click on advertising.
7. Filters and Tags
With so many products in this industry it helps to be able to filter products bytags such as “best seller” and industries such as “Dental Industry” or even byColour this helps you tailor parts of your website to specific groups of people and serve them products that meet their needs.
8. Google Shopping Feed
Up until recently google shopping was one of the cheapest most effective traffic sources you could get. You could get 700+ hits a day for around 0.14p a click. It’s not anywhere near that good now since more people started using it and google removed “relevance” as an option and purely based it on cost per click. But even if it’s not as good as it was, it’s still hugely better than adwords alone which can get ridiculously expensive.
9. Reporting Facilities
It’s no good throwing your marketing ‘rod’ into the water and not knowing what bait is bringing in enquiries or orders. The ability to report on enquiry sourceshelps you calculate ROI and in turn gives you the ability to decide what is the best marketing plan to implement.
10. Good Design & Speed
This is at number 10. But it probably means a lot more than the position it has been given. Functionality in a website is paramount. But if it looks awful then that puts a user off more than anything else. The same with speed. If it’s not loaded in 5 seconds a user will be back at the search results looking for the next supplier.