Web design tips to keep customers coming back…

Your website is fundamental for your online business.  Our Business of the Month for March Biscuiteers was a great example of how an effective website should look and operate.  But poorly laid out products and a difficult to use navigation system can spell disaster for your conversion rates.

Whether you are in the process of building your website or simply thinking about giving it a refresh, here are our top tips:

-Filter your products-Displaying products under age groups, best sellers, etc, will make finding suitable products much easier for your shopper

Retro sweetshop A Quarter of.co.uk

-Make sure your calls to action are clear-Also try to keep these above the fold.  How can your customers get in touch if they can’t find your contact details?

-Links are important -Link your company logo back to your homepage

-Never assume your shopper is done.  Once your customer has placed a product in their basket, redirect them back to the product pages

-Consistency is key. Keep font and text copy regular.

-Don’t make your pages too wide and keep content above the fold.  Your customer should be able to view everything without having to scroll around too much

-Have a maximum of four product pages per category.  Any more than this and your customer will quickly get bored of scrolling through pages

-Include lifestyle imagery.  Allowing your customer to imagine a product in their home is a great incentive

Not on the High Street

-Try to replicate the face to face purchase. Include rollover zoom to allow your customers to view products in more detail and provide colour swatching

-Test, test, test-Do some usability testing on your site or at the very least get some friends to have a play around on your site.

Tempt your customers with a breadcrumb trail…

In our most recent issue of Moving Money, we have included a round-up of the results of our 2011 e-business benchmark report as we prepare to survey e-businesses for the 2012 version.

As I was reading the article, I was thinking about how important the first page of your website is.  It really is fundamental in terms of encouraging potential customers to part with their hard-earned cash.  E-commerce is a competitive market with consumers increasingly likely to shop for comparisons before completing their purchase so when a shopper first hits your site, it needs to keep visitors interested, assured and enticed enough to get them to the checkout.

This month, I’ve picked out Sage Pay customer www.Biscuiteers.com as a great example of a website. Its welcoming, easy to use and exceptionally well thought out.  The business behind the site was set up by Harriet Hastings and her husband Stevie Congdon. They came up with the idea to set up a biscuit gift business online with a difference.  With the tag line “Why send flowers when you can send biscuits”, Biscuiteers craft beautiful hand iced biscuits delivered in gorgeous illustrated keepsake tins.

And as a solely online business, the Biscuiteers team know the importance of providing a rich, interactive shopping experience.  Along the top of the Biscuiteers site, there are clear links to the contact details, account log in and basket.  One of the things we found in our e-business benchmark report is that displaying a shopping basket on your home page and across your site is no longer a differentiator; it’s an absolute must.  Likewise, displaying your contact details clearly helps to reassure your customer that you are easily reachable should you not be happy with your purchase or if you have any queries regarding the service.

Always one for a bargain, I quickly spotted a special offer on the homepage of the Biscuiteers website.  We found in our e-business benchmark report that 76% of top performing businesses are using special offers to entice browsers to convert into browsers.

It’s good practice to display your security policy on your website to show customers that you take their personal data seriously and will use it responsibly.

We found that many top performing sites are differentiating themselves in their use of social media but there’s marginal difference between them and the lower performing sites we looked at.  This point is really important, as it’s not necessarily what you do, but how you do it that will make a difference.  It’s no surprise then to see over three quarters (76%) of our top e-tailers regularly luring visitors to their site through the use of social channels.  Biscuiteers are using Twitter and Facebook to engage in real dialogue with their customers, let them know about new products and when to expect a bargain.  They are also using YouTube to post lessons on baking and icing for anyone who wants to have a go at home!   Biscuiteers display these links as icons to aid navigation.

Top sites are recognising more than ever that customers not only want a good deal, they want it quickly.  Offering next day delivery was the most popular service offering.  If your business is able to offer this, don’t hide it away; it’s a great way to get ahead of the competition.

With a multitude of delicious products available, Biscuiteers have made navigation around the site as easy as possible for their customers by filtering all products, making finding suitable products easier for customers to find.

They keep this up to date with latest events so if you’re looking for some Olympic themed biscuits, then you know where to go – unfortunately they haven’t included the occasion ‘I just love biscuits and want to buy some for myself’ which is generally what I would be searching for!

Founder of Biscuiteers, Harriet Hastings told me ‘We’re really pleased to have won Sage Pay’s business of the month award.  It is a real tribute to the team at Tom&Co who have worked so hard on our website and the re-launch last September.  As an online retail shop, our website is our real and virtual shop and the heart of our business.  Customer experience  is critical in building sales and improving conversion rate.’

‘We didn’t use third party user testers but we did spend a lot of time testing the customer journey and functionality among ourselves before we launched the new website.  The biggest questions we had to answer were around navigation and visibility of our growing product range.  The most important decision we made was to make search by occasion the primary search tool.  We looked at best practice on other sites to make sure our social media strategy was up to date and appropriate to our business model.’

Well done Biscuiteers for being awarded as our Business of the Month.  As websites go, theirs really takes the biscuit and of course, the proof is in the pudding!

Twenty tips to help you get the most out of Twitter

Here at Sage Pay we are avid users of social media, and we know that many of you lot are too.  But once you’ve got your account up and running, what happens next?  We’ve been in contact with the team at MarketingDonut.co.uk for their top tips on how to make the most of Twitter.  Sonja Jefferson is owner of Valuable Content Ltd and an expert contributor to Marketing Donut, the marketing advice website for small businesses and she’s given us some invaluable advice below on how to get started:

Twitter is a remarkable social media platform for businesses. We love it as a way to connect with new people, keep in touch with those we know, find out what’s going on in our world and get our message out there. And all in 140 characters too!

But if you’re new to Twitter it can be more than a little confusing. You’ve set up your account but just exactly what do you say? What sort of information should you share? What rules do you have to play by?

Here’s a quick guide to the type of Twitter activity that works best:

1. Fill in your Twitter profile properly. You’d be amazed at the amount of people who don’t put any effort into their profile information. You have about three seconds when people check you out so make sure you write it well.

2. Have a good icon or image. Photos work best for a personal feed. Professional shots are best of all.

3. Include a link to your website or blog. This is VITAL if you want to be trusted on Twitter.

4. Find people to follow. Connect with others who you find interesting, people you know, clients, organisations you rate, authors, commentators in your field or journalists you admire. What type of Tweets do you respond to best?

5. Follow back. If people follow you and they look interesting, follow them back and see what they’ve got to say.

6. Be polite. Thank your new followers, acknowledge those who mention you or ‘retweet’ your posts.

7. RT, @, #, DM? Get up to speed with Twitter lingo. Learn from Twitter’s glossary here – http://business.twitter.com/basics/glossary.

8. Stay on message, most of the time. What do you want to be known for? Put thought into what you want to talk about. What’s the “red line” that runs through all that you do? Have an opinion. A strong theme to your Tweets really helps.

9. Write for your particular clients and customers. What do they want to know? What do they ask you? Educate, inform and entertain them. That’s the point.

10. Share valuable content. Post information you think they’d find useful or interesting – links to articles or video, share quotes, relevant news, books you’ve read, opinions, tips.

11. Make sure it’s not all about you. Me, me, me is seriously off-putting.

12. Use shortened links rather than full blown URLs. Bit.ly is good for this.

13. Don’t sell. This is not the place for a stream of high-pressure sales messages. Think of it as an online networking event, if you like that sort of thing. Promote your services occasionally but this should not be the main event. Far too many people get this wrong.

14. “Curate” good content. Share posts and articles by others that you think your readers will find valuable or back up your approach.

15. Engage. Talk to people directly by using @theirname. You’ll be surprised by the depth of relationships you can create here.

16. Ask questions. You can learn a lot from your followers (we’ve learned loads!). It’s incredible how supportive and useful this platform can be.

17. Tell them a bit about you. What are you up to? What’s news? Your choice about how much personal information you feel comfortable to share. You’ve got to find a voice that feels right for you.

18. Recommend others you rate and say why. Twitter is a trusted referral engine. Recommend suppliers, clients, commentators, friends, other Tweeters.

19. Organise your connections into lists. This will make it much easier for you as your Twitter connections build, and enables you to check into conversation on a particular subject.

20. Show up regularly. It doesn’t have to be every day (although that helps). Consistency is all. Check what people are saying about you often and reply promptly.

Whether you’re new to Twitter or you’re a Twitter pro, we’d love to hear from you about how and why you’re using this channel, so drop us a note below or send us a tweet!

You can find our accounts at:

Amy_Sagepay – Industry news and updates, events, press and PR, general chit-chat

Kay_Sagepay – Partner queries, new products and bolt-ons

Adam_Sagepay – Technical/Sales queries

System_Sagepay – Sage Pay’s live system feed

Are you experienced?

I’ve gone through a bit of a ‘personal journey’ (as the self-help gurus like to say) over the past few months. At Sage we’ve been putting increased focus in our business planning on the customer experience. How can we make a good experience better? Consistently better. So much so, that it becomes something out of the ordinary in fact. Well isn’t that an obvious thing to do you might say? Exactly what I thought…

What’s become clear to me is that there is a big difference between being customer focused or delivering a strong customer proposition, and deciding to differentiate on customer experience. First of all, what is the customer experience? Often we think simply about customer service or support, but the experience is everything, every interaction between a customer and a company, its product and its service. So take coffee as an example. Coffee beans are a commodity. Nescafe is a product, nicely adding value to the basic commodity by packaging it up and saving the customer the bother of roasting and grinding. Add more value to a product and you end up with an experience. So Starbucks have taken coffee further and provided the customer with even more convenience, a plethora of choice and a comfortable place to drink their coffee. In this scenario what makes for a good or bad experience goes well beyond the quality of the coffee beans or how the staff treat you. For example, Starbucks introduced as part of its proposition, an offer to remake your coffee if you’re not happy with it. The music is carefully selected as with all other aspects of the environment to appeal to a specific customer segment. [If you’re interested further on the general topic, check out books by Joe Pine.]

So how does all that relate to Sage Pay? Well we’re busy looking at every aspect of our customers’ experience and figuring out how to make it better. Some changes have already been introduced, such as our 24/7 telephone support and new website, making it easier and quicker for a potential customer, existing customer, partner or developer to navigate and find the information they need.  We are also about to launch our E-Business Benchmark Report which will allow you to plot where you are within your sector in terms of conversion rates, fraud prevention and bank chargebacks from a study undertaken by over 2000 online businesses.

As an infamous TV character says….”Simples.” There will be many other developments too over the course of 2010 so stay tuned!