So your online business has always experienced praise for its crisp quality content from customers and admirers? But as of late, maybe you’ve noticed that your posts are facing a lot of stagnancy in reaching your perfect target audience? And after initial analysis, you may have realized that your social media messages somehow lacked the “visual magic” that is necessary for image success?  Below are some tips to get you back on track.

Social Media Tips for Image Success

Tying the Knot with Visuals

Images add that much needed zing to your text. Subject specific photos accompanied by fast paced text makes the messages move faster across several channels. Trash the readability woes of your clients by clearing off the content clutter.

Place the perfect blend of words and visuals into a trendy look and witness its reflection on the soaring sales of your products and services.

Your Business in Pictures

Tell the world what you do by garnishing your rich content with just the right photos. Try to have an interactive illustration or a pictorial layout through which you can pamper your clients with surprises and offers.

The pictures should be able to reflect the current scenario of your business: A sharp rise in sales can either have a graphic view or a couple of nice doodles.

Similarly, a new product launch can have images portraying the concept behind the new endeavor. You can celebrate the company’s birthday with visual surprises for your clients and customers.

Admiring a Montage of Your Work

Have you have picked a cluster of images but you’re in a fix as to selecting the most pertinent one to accompany your message? In this case, preparing a collage of high resolution pictures is the most suitable solution.

You can convey the different layers of a campaign through a photographic collage for image success.

Sharing Photos with the World

Connecting with your customer base is just a share button away. Social media platforms like Instagram, Pinterest and tools like Picasa enhance the reach of different products and services of your company through awesome photo sharing tools.

Create a platform where your customers can flaunt their photography skills and share images related to your business. These concepts go a long way in sowing the “you” seed in the minds of customers.

If this endeavor clicks, then they will start identifying your product with a necessity and not as an option.

Facebook Photos, a Perfect Branding Strategy

Photographs uploaded on Facebook, Google+, Digg and Tumblr weave wonders for your business. You will be amazed to see the high level of user engagement of major global brands across different social media platforms.

Some interesting Facebook trivia revealed that an image has greater potential in converting “Likes” into business more than links. The more photos, the more longevity of your brand.

Image is Mightier than Words

The logistics of a new service or product needs to be explained. Are you planning to burn the midnight oil in creating cerebral content? If so, just drop this idea and turn to visuals. If you are able to arrange pertinent images or illustrations in a simple and lucid manner, then you will surely get a thumping response from users.

Extend charts and illustrations to disseminate statistics based information to your users for image success. It becomes easy for them to understand the seemingly hard facts of your well toned business.

Visual Display of Your Grade

Testimonials carrying an image make a good impression, more so than slides. Similarly, a review of your product made by a user along with a photo can act as a great marketing tool for image success.

Once you have gathered a number of reviews and testimonials, you can share them on social media to seek a large following.

Show it with Words

Add variety to how your posts look by treating an image with typography. It is a fascinating art where a specific arrangement of words makes up a great image.

Say, you are trying to revive the USP (Unique Selling Proposition) of your brand. You can simply invoke your creativity by using a popular image of your brand with beautifully carved words for image success.

Achievements: Say Cheese!

Show off proud moments to the world with pictures and captions. Award winning products, appraisals from clients and hitting the bull’s eye in the sales of a particular product can all be archived in pictorial albums and used as a strong branding tool.

New users will get a perfect picture of your accomplishments.

Zoom in on Your #1 Quality

Explaining the superior quality of your products through crystal clear visuals is always a good idea to attain image success. You cannot accomplish this with words. The perfect close up of a product with some brief text will help your users embrace it.

They are getting a detailed view of how the item actually looks so the message conveyed is extremely transparent.

Begin to apply the tips above and you will begin to experience image success on your favorite social media platforms.  After all, it is said that a picture is worth a thousand words – speak less and show more.

Sucess Photo via Shutterstock

The post 10 Visual Social Media Tips for Image Success appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Congratulations for your new online store. As you now have an eCommerce website with a finely tuned check out process, you may want to know how to make your eCommerce platform more powerful. More importantly, how to make your customers trust your eCommerce store.

Well, it really depends on your hard work and the resources available. There are a plethora of tips online that can be used to generate buzz in the community about your products and services and it is possible to boost your website sales with customer service strategies.

Electronic Commerce: Make Your eCommerce Platform More Powerful

Fulfilment Structure Should Never Be An Afterthought

For most eCommerce merchants, fulfillment is an afterthought. This is a huge mistake.  A well-structured fulfillment process is important. In a nutshell, if you invest time and money into optimizing the fulfillment process, it will generate more profit. Some of the key fulfillment metrics that all eCommerce merchants should track include:

• Error rates on product shipped.
• Error rates on orders pulled.
• Total time for orders from the time of receipt to shipment.
• The cost of shipping and the rate charged.
• The total time taken to fill an average order.

The following flowchart shows the fulfillment workflow:

Ask your employees for input about where they think the challenging areas are and how to improve them. Measure the overall quality and performance of the fulfillment process to make your business run more smoothly and to provide better customer service.

Concentrate on Filtered Navigation

Filtered or faceted navigation is a combative point for every eCommerce platform. The most convenient, modern approach to filtered navigation is through using AJAX. However, you need to ensure that there is an HTML crawl path to all of the filtered products. Also make sure that you are not hiding any good organic landing pages within the AJAX navigation.

The following are a few rules for a search engine friendly filtered navigation:

• Do not hide an organic landing page from the crawlers.
• Let the crawlers crawl endlessly through filters.
• Robots.txt should be handled carefully while using it as a solution.

Integrate a Sitemap

Site maps help search engines to index your site’s page and augment search engine ranking of your site.  Indexing is a process through which search engines such as Google, process and categorize the pages of your website. Getting your page indexed ensures that your site will show up in the results of internet searches.

To put it simply, a sitemap is a list of your pages in a single page layout. It contains particular information about the different pages that make up your website. With a sitemap, the shopper can click on a product to find the right pages relevant to the topic. This allows them quick and easy navigation of your site. The site map is also beneficial for the search engines. They permit search engines such as Google to check how many pages are on your site.

Get Rid of Distracting Clutter

The majority of online shoppers have a short attention span. Surveys indicate that most Web surfers will not read beyond 200 words of text. The simpler and more streamlined your site looks and functions, the better it works for your shoppers. Web pages stuffed with animation, graphics and links makes the shopper immediately leave and move on to your competitor.

Simplify the Shopping Cart

It is important to consider the crucial elements of your eCommerce site and ensure that they are clear and visible. The “Add to shopping cart” button should be easy to navigate and most importantly, should be displayed prominently on your site.

Shopping Comparison Sites Can Work Wonders

According to research, approximately 68% of online shopping starts at a shopping comparison site. Shopping comparison sites offer an exceedingly cost-effective marketing mechanism as they are the best choice for every eCommerce vendor who has a limited budget.

With shopping comparison sites, you can enjoy prompt access to a larger volume of potential clients. In addition to this, your customers will be presented with your products whenever they are in a position to buy. Most importantly, comparison sites allow exposure and reinforcement of your brand identity.

Various comparison sites ask consumers for a post-sale survey to measure areas like customer service, product quality or ease of shopping. These reviews are displayed to potential customers and help boost the company’s credibility and provide you with an edge over your competitors.

Using the strategies above will ensure a strong eCommerce platform.

eCommerce Photo via Shutterstock

The post Six Secrets to Make an eCommerce Platform More Powerful appeared first on Small Business Trends.

It is natural that every etailer predicts future trends that fuel eCommerce growth. Some become successful in predicting the right trends while a few fail to do so. A healthy growth figure of eCommerce success can only be impacted by the integration of various strategies that can make online shopping more enjoyable and unique. However, these strategies are quick to implement.

If you are one such eCommerce entrepreneur reading this to learn about the prospective trends to follow for your online store, you have landed at the right place. This will provide you with a comprehensive picture of the factors that will drive the next eCommerce growth wave.

Factors Responsible for the eCommerce Growth Wave

Curated eCommerce

Shopping for lifestyle is more engaging and richer as analysis sees it across eCommerce industries. The powerful influence of various social media tools such as Pinterest or Facebook allows consumers to organize their favorite items and segment it into themed collections to share it with others.

This fuels personal expression in shopping and makes others reflect on their purchase decision. This is the evolution of influential personal recommendation.

Adoption of Multi-Channel Investments

Cross-channel investments are highly aggressive in augmenting both online and offline buying strategies. Multi-channel eCommerce business is an environment in which a company can sell through two or more online channels. Many stores are pushing endless-aisle initiatives and are being used as a warehouse for an online catalogue to enhance the speed of home delivery.

Sometimes a company also inherits legacy Web store from an acquisition.

Unique or Commoditized Products

Establishing a reputation and brand for quality products always drives demand. Commoditized products such as mainstream tools, consumer electronics or other equipment’s generally show less success while selling online. Even though these are the most popular online items, consumers prefer to buy them from renowned retailers such as eBay or Amazon.

Some small businesses have found success through affiliation with major retailers.

Remarketing

Businesses of any size have to be creative to stand out of the crowd. Ecommerce creativity emerges from multiple touches to produce continued interests in the products. In one word, this technique is popularly known as Remarketing.

When any potential customer visits a website but leaves it without purchasing any items, companies follow them online. The attitude of the customers can be changed through Remarketing. Remarketing can convince an online shopper to revisit a website to complete their purchase that they have previously failed to do. It is a method of conversion marketing which is a receptive marketing technique that endeavours to appeal a consumer response.

One can experience Remarketing if they notice any ads that are extremely reflective of their interests.

Maintaining eCommerce Sites by the Third-Party Provider

Creating an attractive and functional eCommerce site is quite a challenging task. However, a third-party eCommerce provider will make this task simple for you. They offer site set up and maintenance to entice businesses. For instance, some of the third-party eCommerce site providers do not charge any transaction fees once the items are sold. Instead, they offer monthly plans.

Besides, the emergence of digital services is gradually proving to be the leading driver for eCommerce growth. The rise of portable mobile devices and advanced videos is increasing the desire of the consumer to spend more time researching online for price matching and ultimately on their buying decision.

Let us find out the impact of mCommerce to drive eCommerce future progress. Research shows that 81% of the Smartphone users access the Internet on their mobile devices. Does the eCommerce store need any other reason to make their sites mobile optimized? (I guess NO). With the discovery of different innovative apps every day, eCommerce has matured extensively. It is not just the phones that are driving retail Web traffic, but, tablets are equally responsible in this context. Tablets are mostly used during evening prime-time hours, when the consumers are in their leisure state of mind.

Payment methods can make or break a purchase decision. The choice of payment methods offered to the consumer seems to be constantly evolving. Besides the growth of contactless payment methods with mobile transactions, there is a drastic change in the way people pay for their products. Services like Apple’s iTunes and PayPal have already initiated centralized payments on various mobile devices. Such liberties to accept payment will be invaluable for merchants of all sizes in the near future.

Nonetheless, eCommerce merchants have the freedom to incorporate richer media content than ever before. The increased use of videos to provide insights into products has undoubtedly made the shopping experience more delightful. Videos are a great alternative to give customers a virtual feel of products.

The eCommerce industry will continue to evolve and progress with the passage of time. Of all the upcoming trends, the only thing that will remain consistent is the need to build loyal customers through competing on value and by providing quality customer service.

eCommerce Photo via Shutterstock

The post Factors Responsible for the Imminent eCommerce Growth Wave appeared first on Small Business Trends.

How about using Google AdWords to advertise your products?

This can be one of the most cost-effective approaches for marketing your eCommerce store. All it requires is the constant monitoring of your campaign. You have to keep yourself up to date with upcoming and latest trends and development in the market.

Does that sound tricky and difficult to you?

Then read this thoroughly and learn the easiest tactics to handle your AdWords campaign, which will ultimately help you to turn potential customers into real ones.

How Google AdWords Can Help You

First and foremost, it’s important to learn how Google AdWords Conversion Tracking can help you with your e-commerce deals.

Ostensibly, you are using Google AdWords to increase traffic for your eCommerce business. For that, a portion of your marketing budget is spent on clicks per week. On the other hand, you also have to maintain your cost after utilizing your daily budget through your campaign setting.

Now, at the end of the week, you have much of the information you need, such as how many clicks you have received on your ads, the final calculation of the sale and the estimates of what you have spent on each click. However, there’s still a problem. You don’t know how many of these clicks are actually getting translated into sales on your site.

Oops! You probably haven’t thought about it, right? You must be thinking that if there’s no way to track the value and return of these clicks, then why would you spend money on pay per click ads?

Well, there’s a solution in the form of a powerful tool called AdWords Conversion Tracking (Google AdWords Conversion Tracking Guide PDF) , which helps you track ROI (return on investment) based on the number of clicks on your ads. Most importantly, it lets you know whether a click leads to a sale or an action on your website.

Conversion and Keyword Tracking

By this time you must be curious enough to learn why conversion tracking is important. With conversion tracking you can track specific keywords leading to a conversion as well the value of a conversion at a keyword level.

To begin with, let’s see how conversion tracking functions. Conversion tracking requires you to insert a code snippet on the landing page where the visitor lands after a conversion. This page can be either a ‘thank you for signing up in the newsletter’ or ‘thank you for shopping with us’ landing page. Google AdWords provides you with the code you need to insert on the related pages of your website.

For instance, if you want to track the sale of a party wear dress, you would insert the code snippet on the page the customer lands on after purchasing the dress. Here, is an example of when a click translates to a conversion:

1. The customer clicks on the ad and searches for the party wear dress.
2. They browse the website and make a purchase once they find the dress they want.
3. You can now track this purchase with conversion tracking. Moreover, the purchase is also equated with the pertinent keywords “party wear dress.”

Understanding the keyword matching concept is important in order to successfully run the Google AdWords campaign. The right keyword is one of the primary factors for your eCommerce store as well as for the Google AdWords campaign.

Keyword matching is simple. Google points out which keyword searches are the most appropriate for your ad.

Keyword Categories

There are a few categories of Google AdWords keyword matches. How are these categories best utilized to increase your sales?

Exact match:  Exact match helps you to run your campaign in an economical manner. Your ad will be displayed according to the exact term you have specified without any variants. It targets only those who are looking for the definite product you are offering.

For example, if you specify the keyword” red dress” the exact match keyword will only show ads on that specific word and nothing else.

Broad match:  The keywords specified to broad match will show ads on a wide array of variation of that particular keyword. The variation may include abbreviations, singular plural forms, or may be acronyms.

For example, if you specify the keyword ‘ dress’ to the ad group, your ad will also be displayed to someone who is looking for ‘short dress’ or ‘black dress’ or may be completely irrelevant as ‘skirts.’ You can receive a wide set of data concerning to the keywords the customers are using to find you.

Phrase match:  A phrase match keyword allows your ad to show for those keyword searches that match your keywords as well as words before or after it.

For example, the keyword is ‘red dresses.” Anyone who is searching for ‘party wear red dress’ is also eligible to view your ad. However, those looking for ‘red gown’ cannot view your ad.

If you have not started using Google AdWords for your eCommerce store, by this time, (I am sure) you will not give a second thought to it.

It is worth spending your money on AdWords to drive traffic and prosper in your eCommerce business.

The post Ecommerce Entrepreneurs: How Google AdWords Can Help You appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Mobile website design is complicated, since one mobile version of a site may not be compatible with every device. The designers have to be aware of best design practices to make your mobile presence meaningful and worthwhile.

There is a continuous debate among Web developers about which way of creating a mobile-optimized website is the best. There are three leading methods for developing a mobile website.

These are:

• Responsive Web design.
• Dedicated mobile websites.
• RESS: Server-side programming renders CSS and HTML, depending on the type of device.

Each method has its pros and cons. A Web developer has to be aware of each technique to implement the best one for the situation.

3 Ways to Design a Mobile Website

Responsive Web Design (RWD)

RWD relies on CSS3 media queries to align the layout of a webpage with the size of the viewing area of a device. The same HTML code is used to present different webpage layouts for tablets, mobile devices, desktops and other gadgets.

Benefits:

• Your website will have similar content and HTML mark-up, so mobile visitors will have the same experience, no matter what kind of device they are using.
• A single URL makes it easier for users to link to and share content. (If the webpage is available under more than one URL address, users can become confused.)

Drawbacks:

It is not possible to separately optimize mobile content. Therefore, a designer using RWD cannot tailor content separately for mobile users.

According to January 2013 data from HTTP archive, an average webpage is about 1.3 MB. However, most RWD sites are comparatively larger. This larger size decreases the performance of  mobile sites, making them slower.

Mobile users are more attuned to mobile-specific user interface design patterns. Moreover, mobile users are accustomed to multi-tasking. Unless the navigation structure is customized for specific devices, users can face problems when trying to accomplish several tasks simultaneously.

Dedicated Mobile Sites

This method improves the experience of mobile users by creating an entirely separate website.

Benefits:

• Simplicity of management: Separate changes are required for mobile and desktop sites. The changes made are limited to each respective version. This means changes meant for the mobile platform cannot be accessed from desktop.
• As you are developing a mobile-specific website, it becomes easier to streamline and optimize it specifically for that audience.
• Content and navigation structure can be customized for mobile users.

Drawbacks:

Sharing a webpage via social media becomes more difficult, since with dedicated mobile sites there are multiple URLs for pages. When desktop users click on mobile URLs shared on social media platforms, they may inadvertently receive the mobile version of the site rather than the desktop version.

In order to avoid duplicate content issues, the Web developer has to use rel=”alternative” and rel=”canonical” meta tags. If a mobile user searches Google and clicks on a desktop URL, the user will either view the desktop version or will be redirected to the mobile version of the webpage. If the mobile version does not exist, the user will receive an error message.

Creating a totally different website for mobile users means that the site will be tailored specifically for mobile users. However, to fulfill that purpose, Web developers have to cut out functionality and content, which turns out to be a nightmare for them.

Responsive Web Design+ Server Side Components (RESS)

This method depends on server-side programming to provide custom HTML and CSS for different devices. The code for mobile users will be different from that of desktop users.

The main objective behind this implementation is to improve the website’s performance. This method works well when combined with responsive Web design. Therefore, this implementation can be referred to as Responsive Web Design+ server side components (RESS).

Benefits:

• The navigation structure can be customized for different tasks performed by desktop and mobile users.
• Developers can remove page elements from HTML and CSS to achieve the desired display.
• It is possible to remove unnecessary JavaScript from HTML, which frees up the CPU resources, memory and cache of mobile devices.

Drawbacks:

• Dynamic HTML increases the load on the server.
• Device detection cannot be relied upon.
• HTML and CSS are optimized for mobile performance. Desktop version uses more HTTP requests and Java Scripts.

Which Method to Choose?

The decision to design a mobile-optimized site depends on the products you sell, your target audience, the investment required, your competition, conversion rates, etc. The design method that will work best depends largely on screen formats, operating systems, browsers and resolutions.

Most responsive Web design sites are not implemented optimally and as a result, these sites take more time to load. Since competition is fierce, you may lose customers if your site performs more slowly. A user will simply switch to another website that takes less time to open. Although it is possible to create websites with shorter load times with dedicated mobile sites, there are various drawbacks attached to this implementation, too.

RESS provides benefits of RWD overcoming its two main drawbacks. The main disadvantage of RESS is that device detection is unreliable. You have to test frequently for new devices to ensure that the process continues to work properly.

There are services like DeviceAtlas, WURFL and others that can detect new devices. It will be a great help to update new devices in your database.

Mobile Web design is successful only when a website is displayed properly on a mobile device. Although it’s a daunting task for designers to represent all the essential parts of a desktop site in a small, mobile window, every day new techniques emerge to make  mobile websites better, faster and more fully-featured.

Mobile Website Photo via Shutterstock

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