Author Archive

Customer Testimonials

Thursday, August 25th, 2011

Customer Testimonials

Building customer confidence

When customers visit your site for the first time they most likely won’t know what service you provide after purchase. Can they rely on you to delivery what you’re selling, can they trust you as a company. With a growing awareness of security issues, spamming, fraud and so on how do you let the customer know you’re legit? Many techniques can help build a customer’s confidence, one would be ensuring security is visible on your E-commerce site such as the Veri-Sign; another way is showing testimonials from past customers that had a positive experience.

Testimonials

Testimonials can be a quick and easy way of producing great fresh content for your site as well as showing to new customers what service you provide. Building up the confidence in your website is very important and can help improve conversion rates if approached correctly.

Steps for Requests:

  1. Wait for positive feedback from a customer – a closing email could be sent regarding the product or service highlighting the transaction is complete and that you hope they had a pleasant experience with the company.
    Avoid:     Requesting a testimonial when they haven’t responded with a positive comment yet.
  2. Once positive feedback has been received send an email template stating you have an on-site testimonials page and that you wish to feature the comment with their permission – good to ask if for their name and product/ service they used as reference.
    Avoid:     Asking them for too much personal information and making it mandatory.
  3. Wait for the customer’s response – if you have the go ahead you have a nice testimonial to feature on your website with links to relevant pages/ products.
    Avoid:     Sending multiple requests for a testimonial.
  4. After posting the testimonial on the site respond to the customer with a thank you and that it’s now Live on the website – at this point you can then drop a further request to another form of testimonial such as the reviewcentre.com or trustpilot.com.
    Avoid:     Requesting they go on more than one other site to post a comment.

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Increasing Product Page Conversion Rates

Thursday, August 11th, 2011

photoshop alternative blog image

Identifying key elements that help sell

Product pages are very important as they effectively are your shop window and must display that key information to sell that product. Price isn’t everything these days as customers like to know timescales, quality of the product and even things like the exact dimensions.

Breaking the screen barrier!

The trouble with online shopping is customers can’t physically see or touch the item you’re selling. This barrier can be broken with good functionality and interaction such as high resolution images featured in a dynamic image viewer with zoom or rotation. The reason why this helps is the more detail you show the more the customer can imagine the product in real life.

Special offers

Of course special offers and discounts will always help sell a product and with increasing customers doing price comparisons any genuine discounts can easily be spotted. Vouchers in directories can also help build up that important confidence in website discounts.

Reviews/ Rating

Reviews are becoming increasingly popular tool for customers to find and choose products. This is not surprising as you have personal experiences from other customers driving the decision to purchase. A product with reviews is more likely to be clicked on in a site search than one that doesn’t the same applies to good and bad reviews.

Lead times

Time-scales are very important when it comes to selling a product. For example if you had two products of a similar price and one has a faster delivery time you would most likely go for the faster delivery item even if it’s slightly more in price.

Information

Producing well written product descriptions can go along way; avoid spelling mistakes and tiny font sizes. Key information is vital; describe such things like what it’s made of, what benefit it produces and any other main features that can improve sales.

Dimensions/ Sizes

Depending on the product of course dimensions are very important whether it be a piece of clothing or a 52” TV. Good accurate measurements can make all the difference even to the point where you visualise the product with each individual measurement overlaid on the image.

Delivery

Not only do customers like to know how long a product will take to arrive but who is delivering it, can they book a delivery date/ time, can they track the progress and so on. Providing a good service from the website to their door increases return customers.

Top Tips

  • High resolution images showing as much detail as possible
  • Time-scales – what is the lead-time for the item to reach the customer
  • Bullet points or key information describing the product
  • Provide accurate dimensions & measurements
  • Reviews/ Star rating
  • Special offers/ Discounts
  • Delivery / Tracking options
  • Try to include at least three of the above in your site search

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Want to manipulate images without buying expensive software?

Friday, July 8th, 2011

photoshop alternative blog image

Try Pixlr a great Firefox add-on

Browsers are increasingly becoming more advanced and feature many impressive add-ons that help everyday office work. Pixlr is a great example of this by having many features similar to Photoshop. Examples of this are the ability to apply filters, have multiple layers, and keep track of manipulation history.

How do I get this add-on?

Firstly you need to have Mozilla Firefox installed on your computer, then simply go to a search engine and search for “Firefox add-ons”.

The official address is https://addons.mozilla.org.

Once on the site go to the search function and look for the term “Pixlr”. In the results you should see Pixlr Grabber – click add to Firefox where it will then be installed to your browser. After installation give it a test by going to any website and right click on the page. In the menu you should see a “Grab” feature that can grab the whole page or a defined area. Also while browsing you can right click on an image and in the menu you will see an “Edit Image” feature that will take the selected image and send it directly to Pixlr for editing.

We recommend

Add a bookmark to the main editor of the Pixlr add-on. This way it takes you straight into the editor where you can create a new image, open an image from your computer & so on.

The direct address for the bookmark is: http://pixlr.com/editor/.

Advantages

This great addition to Firefox is completely free and is fast and easy to use. So if you’re looking for a Photoshop alternative that’s free then Pixlr Grabber is Wisetigers recommendation.
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Making the most of your search

Thursday, May 12th, 2011

Improve Your Website Search

External search engines

With search engine trends changing it affects peoples view on how search engines work. Ideally all website search functions should try to keep up with how the big boys do it. Google instant provides a good example of a recent change. It effectively cuts down the amount of keywords people type in by instantly showing results. This means all website search functions should also show relevant content for less keywords typed in.

Building up your searches strength…

To improve the conversion rates and click through of content on your website you should analyse the market you’re targeting. Who is your target audience, how do they use the internet and what do they search for. Once you have acquired this information you can adjust your search accordingly by firstly making sure all of your main keywords and product related keywords produce the correct results. The target audience can help you target what their looking for and how they are presented the information. For example if your target audience are primarily 60+ it would be a good idea to research what sort of language they use in regards to the keywords they type in – as in comparison to 16-18 year olds the language they use could be shorter slang related terms.

Top tips for ecommerce website searches:

  • Build customer confidence with product reviews
  • Provide mouse over image enlargement
  • Grow the use of video’s within searches
  • A sorting function such as A-Z is always a good practice for filtering results
  • Good to have an ‘add to cart’ from the search results for price comparison users
  • Good to have a ‘wish list’ feature as it can provide return visits for people that like to shop around before committing to the purchase

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