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Tag Archives: shopping
Get Your Small Business Online Fast with a Website Builder
The post Get Your Small Business Online Fast with a Website Builder appeared first on HostGator Blog . For years, people have been saying your small business needs a website. You know it’s true, but you’ve been busy, you know, running a small business . Who has time to drop everything and throw a website together, especially when you know nothing about building or designing a website? Nearly a third of small businesses still don’t have a website. That makes sense if you think about how busy small business owners are and how overwhelming the skills required to build a website seem. But it makes no sense when you think about how much of our lives — and shopping habits — have moved online. 5 Reasons Your Small Business Needs a Website…Fast Maybe you’ve had good, understandable reasons for dragging your feet so far, but having a business website is no longer optional. Every day your business goes without one, you’re leaving money on the table. Still not convinced? Here are five important points that may sway you. 1. The majority of people in the U.S. shop online. And we don’t just mean a few over 50%, a full 96% of people do some of their shopping online. You probably do it yourself. It’s easy and it saves time. Shopping online means avoiding crowds, traffic, and parking. And if you’re not giving consumers that option, your competitors are winning that business. 2. Even when they shop in store, consumers like to use online tools. That doesn’t mean people are done with heading to a store to shop. In fact 79% of people still do at least as much of their shopping in person as they do online. But even for the customers willing to come to you, the internet plays a role. When they’re trying to figure out where to go to buy the item they need, where do you think they turn? They go online. If they want to compare the prices of similar items at a few different stores or check if the store has an item they need in stock, same thing. A lot of people now take some time to do online research before heading out to do their shopping. Without a website, you’re at a disadvantage during the research stage. 3. A website makes you more discoverable. Right now, the people who can find your business are those who already know about you, those that they tell, and the people who happen to drive by. Maybe that’s been enough for you to stay afloat, but think about how many people those three categories don’t cover. How many potential customers never become actual ones because they simply never learn your business exists? If you don’t show up when they search online for businesses in the area, you might as well be invisible to them. 4. A website gives you a way to alert customers to your hours and specials. Have you ever showed up at a business ready to spend money, only to find they were closed? It’s a frustrating feeling, especially if the drive to get there was at all long. You can save your customers from that frustration when you have a website that lists your hours. Even better, you can entice them to come in at times they wouldn’t have otherwise by using your site to advertise all your specials and sales. You get more business, your customers get a better experience. 5. A business website makes you look more legitimate. People expect legitimate businesses to have websites. In a world where scams abound, the first place people turn to make sure a business can be trusted is Google. If they don’t find a website, it makes you look suspicious at worst, behind the times at best. Either way, it doesn’t help your case. Obviously, you need to get your website up fast. But how? That’s easy: you need a website builder. What Is a Website Builder? A website builder is web design tool that makes it easy for anyone — even if you have no coding knowledge — to create your own website. Website builders typically come with a number of templates you can choose from so you don’t have to start from scratch and an intuitive website editor that makes it easy to make changes to the template. You can change out colors, add original text and images, and move elements of the page around, all without having to mess with html or learn complicated web design skills. How to Get Your Website Up Fast With a Website Builder Here are the steps to take when creating your business website using a website builder. 1. Choose your website builder. You’ve got options here. A number of different companies offer easy-to-use website builders. A few are free, but most use a subscription model where you pay every month or year for as long as you have your website. One way to save money and time on choosing your website builder is to go with one that includes something else you need to run a website, such as web hosting. HostGator’s web builder plans come with our website hosting included, so you can launch your website as soon as you’ve built it. 2. Establish your priorities. If your goal is to get a website up as fast as possible, then you don’t need your website to do everything right away. That doesn’t mean it’s okay to throw together a sloppy website — it’s still needs to look and be professional — but you can create a good website quickly by figuring out the most important things you need it to do right away. Ask yourself: what are the most important things your customers need to know? That’s what your website needs to communicate on day one. This likely includes: Your unique positioning – what your business does and why customers should choose you over your competitors Your contact information Your address Your hours You can work on adding more valuable information and marketing elements to your website later, if you want. For now, make sure you have a website that looks good and covers the basics. 3. Decide on your color scheme. You want every page of your website to visually communicate a cohesive brand identity. One of the best ways to do that is to use the same color scheme throughout the whole site. If your Home page is yellow and blue and your About page is black and green, confused visitors will wonder if they’ve navigated away from your website. Does your store or logo already have a clear color scheme? If so, go ahead and stick with those colors when building your website. If not, decide now what colors you want to represent your brand. Make sure they go well together and are pleasing to the eye. 4. Choose your theme. Go through the templates your website builder offers to find one that’s a good fit for your website. Remember that you can make as many changes to the details of the theme as you want. It’s only a starting point for you to work from. Don’t worry if the example website in the theme is for a business in a different industry or they use different colors than you want — you’ll be changing all that. Pay attention instead to the structure of the pages and the visual style of the theme, if those come close to what you want, you won’t have to make as many changes to get your website ready to go. 5. Decide what pages to include. Let the priorities you decided on guide you here. It’s standard for business websites to include a Home page, an About page, and a Contact page. Beyond that, you may want to create pages for all of the main categories of products or services you sell. Over time, you may want to add in product pages for each specific product you offer or even convert your website to an eCommerce store, but since the goal right now is to get your website up fast, those plans can be on the backburner. But do consider now what your long-term hopes are for the website. It will help you create a solid plan for how to organize your website so it stays intuitive as it grows. 6. Edit the theme with your chosen colors and style. With a good website editor, this should be pretty easy. You can select the colors you picked for your color scheme and fill in different parts of the page with a few clicks. Once you do this on one page, you can make a copy of the page when you’re ready to start on the next so you don’t have to re-do your color changes. 7. Load and position original images. Your theme probably includes some stock images. Replace those with original images that are relevant to your store. Add your logo to the top right corner of the page. Add photos of your store or products, or illustrations that communicate something about your brand. 8. Add original copy. Take time to make the words on your website purposeful. Use them to explain what your business does and make a case for why visitors should buy from you. Make your copy customer-focused. When describing what you do, make it less about how that work looks on your end and more about how it makes your customers’ lives better or easier. With time, you may want to hire a professional copywriter to improve upon what you write now. Good copy can be powerful in getting your visitors to choose you. But today the most important thing is that it’s clear, it tells your visitors what they need to know, and it’s free from embarrassing typos and errors. To achieve that last part, make sure you proofread every page twice and see if you can get a friend to read over it as well to confirm that it’s all clear and looks good. 9. Create a website plan for moving forward. All of the steps here are focused on getting your website out there to begin with. That’s a really important step to take and one that already makes a big difference in how visible and accessible your business will be to people. But to get the most out of a website once you have it, there’s more work to do. Make a plan now for how to improve your website over time. That could be as simple as doing regular website maintenance , updating your hours for holidays, and adding information on the website each time you have a sale. Or you could create a full plan to launch an eCommerce store and start doing online marketing. Either way, don’t publish your website once and forget about it. Your website will need some care to stay up to date and do its job for you in the months and years to come. What Are You Waiting For? Sounds easy enough, right? So no more excuses. Choose a website builder and get your website up and running fast. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading
Posted in HostGator, Hosting, VodaHost
Tagged colors, competitors, customers, hosting, hours, internet, shopping, small-business, vodahost, web-design, website-builder
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Use Your Website Analytics to Prepare for Holiday Traffic
The post Use Your Website Analytics to Prepare for Holiday Traffic appeared first on HostGator Blog . If you run an eCommerce store, it’s already time to be thinking about the holidays. The holiday season is exciting for online stores because it means an influx of sales. But it’s also stressful, because it’s the most important time of year to be on your A-game so you don’t miss out on the profit opportunities of all that gift giving. For the next couple of months, you want to make your website and holiday marketing strategy do as much for you as absolutely possible. One of the best ways make the right movies to get those holiday dollars is by making your analytics a key part of your planning for the holiday season. 8 Ways Website Analytics Can Prepare You for Holiday Shoppers Here are eight ways your analytics can help you craft a more successful holiday marketing campaign this year. 1. Revisit last year’s analytics. Start by looking at the analytics for October through early January of last year. Pull up all the different data sources you have so you can get the big picture of what worked during last year’s holiday season. This likely includes: Google Analytics PPC analytics Email analytics Social media analytics (both for unpaid social media marketing and paid advertising) In addition, you may have analytics from your SEO, CRM, audience listening tools, and any other piece of marketing technology you use. Identify all the different sources of analytics you have so you can bring them together to do your analysis. You want to be able to spot how different analytics tell a larger story – was that boost in traffic for a particular blog post in December because you emailed it to your list or promoted it on social media? Did the gift guide you put together drive sales to the products you highlighted? The most important data to analyze here is that from the holiday season, but don’t stop there. Take a high-level view of all your analytics from the past year. This will help you spot trends in what your audience responded to throughout the year and if there have been any changes to the channels they care about between last year and now. If the past few months saw an uptick in results from Instagram, for example, you don’t want to leave that out of your holiday marketing planning. The overall trends from the past year will help you gain a better understanding of who your audience is and what they respond to, while your data from this time last year provides insights into how they behave during the holiday season. Looking at both will help you gain a clear picture of what works for your target audience so you can craft your holiday marketing strategy accordingly. 2. Identify your top marketing channels. With all your data in front of you, start figuring out which tactics and channels most consistently lead to sales and, more importantly, which provide the highest ROI. Google Analytics will show you where traffic is coming from and allows you to set up conversion tracking (so you can connect website behavior to eventual sales). Your other analytics sources can help you dig deeper into the data for each visitor —your email marketing data can reveal which email drove a specific visit, and your social analytics show which specific posts contributed to your social traffic. Keep in mind here that some of your tactics that don’t lead to conversions right away may help drive people to the channels that eventually pay off, so don’t discount those social media posts that got people to your website even if the visitor didn’t convert to a sale on the first visit . This is why you’re working to see the bigger picture — so you can draw connections between how everything fits into your larger strategy. With this information, you can begin to rule out the tactics that aren’t leading to sales and determine the ones you should definitely invest time and money into this year. 3. Analyze the timing of purchases. Conventional wisdom about holiday shopping may be that most shoppers will buy gifts on Black Friday or last minute in the weeks leading up to the holidays, but research from CPC Strategy found instead that over a third start shopping before Thanksgiving. This is why you should trust data over conventional wisdom! But don’t just assume CPC Strategy’s averages apply to your customers. Sit down and figure out for yourself when your audience does their shopping. Analyze your purchase data from last year to figure out what portion of your customers did their shopping well in advance and which tended to be last-minute shoppers. You may well have a mix of both, but if your audience tends to buy within a particular time period, then that should be when you do the biggest push in your marketing. Send out persuasive promotions to your email list, increase your PPC maximum budget, and do a big social media push. This data can also help you figure it out if it will pay to offer faster shipping options when it gets closer to Hanukkah and Christmas day. If a majority of your customers are last-minute rush shoppers, then you can make the decision to buy from you easier with guarantees that the products will get there in time. 4. Figure out which keywords lead to conversions. This is key for both your PPC and SEO strategies over the next couple of months. You don’t just want to track which of the keywords you targeted led to increased traffic, you want to figure out which of those visitors turned into customers. Based on what your analytics show, you can craft a PPC strategy for the holiday season that targets the types of keywords most likely to lead to actual revenue. And you can create a content plan that incorporates the keywords that bring in your most high-value visitors to improve your holiday SEO. HostGator’s expert team of PPC pros can help you spin up a lucrative holiday campaign quickly. Contact us to learn more. 5. Repurpose your best content from past seasons. Content marketing may be a long game, but that doesn’t mean that seasonal content can’t pay off big if you do it right. Look at the holiday content you created over the past few years and which pieces brought in new visitors and purchases. This can not only help you generate new ideas for content to create this year based on what you know resonates with your audience, but you can take the concepts you know pay off and rework them to replicate those results. Was your gift guide a hit last year? Create a new one for this year, or make a few different versions for different audiences. Did people really respond to your blog posts about holiday giving? Create a video tackling the same topic. Repurposing is a tried and true tactic for making the successful content you’ve created go further. 6. Highlight your best products on your most popular pages. In the Behavior > Site Content section of Google Analytics, you can see which pages on your website get the most visits. Each of these is an opportunity to drive more conversions. Look at the products and promotions that performed the best during the holiday season last year and use your popular pages to promote them. By getting the items your visitors are most likely to buy in front of more of them on those pages, you increase the chances of turning visitors into conversions. You have to make sure that your products don’t feel shoehorned in here, but an attractive image that links your visitors back to the product page can likely be worked into the design of the page without it distracting from what your visitors came to the page for to begin with. 7. Send personalized emails to your list. Your email marketing analytics provide a wealth of data on what your subscribers have opened and clicked on in the past. And unlike the rest of your data, most email marketing software providers let you break down the data in terms of the behavior of specific people. That means you don’t just see that 1000 people opened your email, you can see who those specific people are. Use the data you have on what individual subscribers like to create a personalized email campaign during the holiday season. Put together emails that highlight the kind of content and products that were popular during the holidays last year and create segmented email lists to get the most relevant holiday emails to the right people on your list. 8. Do A/B testing to collect better data for next year. Everything you do for the next few months will create the analytics you use to repeat this process next year. Use the opportunity to establish even better data to shape next year’s plan with A/B testing. See what happens when you offer free shipping on some days and not others, or pit a free gift-wrapping option against faster delivery to see which gets more people to buy. Try A/B testing emails with different subject lines or CTAs to see which get people to open and click. And try promoting different products and packages to see if some lead to higher conversions than others. Don’t Forget Your Site Analytics This Holiday Season This is the most important time of year to get things right. Use the analytics you have now to create a strategy likely to increase sales and revenue throughout the holiday season, and generate more useful analytics at the same time to take things even further next year. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading
The 2018 Online Holiday Shopping Season: Is Your Ecommerce Site Ready?
The post The 2018 Online Holiday Shopping Season: Is Your Ecommerce Site Ready? appeared first on HostGator Blog . Yes, It’s Already Time to Get Your Online Store Ready for the Holiday Shopping Season No matter how hot it is right now where you live, it’s time to start thinking about the winter holidays. That’s because you have several weeks to set the stage for strong Black Friday weekend sales. Now’s the time to make your site more mobile-friendly, plan your holiday-sale merchandise offers, hatch a gift wrap plan, and find out how your small business can offer same-day delivery. Make Your Store as Mobile-Friendly as Possible We write a lot here about the importance of mobile-friendly websites because the mobile channel is a large and growing part of e-commerce success. Most shoppers use their phones to browse and they’ll complete their purchases on their phones if checkout is user-friendly enough. Otherwise, they’ll move on to more mobile-friendly competitors or (maybe) switch to their computer to finish their order. How can you streamline the checkout process to keep shoppers from abandoning their carts? Offer the online payment methods your customers like most and don’t make them key in a lot of data during checkout. PayPal is the best-known payment method for this type of convenience and popularity, but Amazon Pay and Google Pay are other options to consider. Now’s the time to research and compare payment methods in terms of processing fees, ease of use, and popularity with your customers so you can get everything set up, tested, and ready for Black Friday sales. Create Exclusive Black Friday Weekend Promotions Black Friday weekend and Cyber Monday are the biggest US shopping days of the year. What do people buy? Everything. Electronics, toys, clothes, and video games are always popular. But your customers are going to be looking for deals from your store, so you need a custom game plan. Think about what sells well all year long and what’s been most popular with your customers during past holiday seasons. How much of a discount can you offer—or do you even need to offer—on popular items? Can you create limited-time-only product bundles? Is it possible to debut a new product similar to your bestsellers for Black Friday weekend or offer a bestselling item in a new color or style only during the sale? Plan your offerings in detail now so you can have your products and promotions ready to go well before Black Friday crunch time arrives. Consider Adding a Gift-Wrap Option When your customers snap up your Black Friday deals, they may want them gift-wrapped. Offering gift wrap for a small charge, or for free on expensive orders, is a way to set yourself apart from the competition. Both online retailers and brick-and-mortar stores have been dropping their gift wrap services , leaving shoppers to deal the task themselves. However, before you commit to offering gift wrap, it’s important to understand why so many retailers have bailed on it. First, gift-wrapping orders takes time and can create holdups in fulfillment—no small issue when so many shoppers want same-day delivery (and we’ll look at that below). Also, gift wrap isn’t free, and it can be hard to estimate how much you’ll need. Run short and you might disappoint customers. Overbuy and you’re stuck storing it. If you have the budget and space to proceed, think about how you can wrap orders as efficiently as possible. For local orders that you’ll deliver the same day (see below), consider gift bags and tissue paper rather than paper, tape, and bows. Or you can bake the gift wrap into your packaging, delight your shoppers, and skip the wrapping stage—a search for “holiday product packaging” will turn up more than enough ready-to-order and DIY options. Whatever gift wrap option you go with, remember to promote it along with your Black Friday deals. Show shoppers what their gifts will look like when they’re delivered and show them that you’re ready to help save them time. Find Faster Deliver Options In 2017, Amazon raked in 40% of all US e-commerce revenue , according to Forbes. One reason? Fast delivery, including same-day service in many cities. Because many shoppers are now used to same-day delivery from Amazon and grocery delivery services like Instacart and Shipt, they expect that option whenever they shop. One local-delivery startup found that 78% of shoppers plan to look for same-day delivery when they do their holiday shopping this year. And it’s now possible for local businesses in many cities to give these customers what they want. Companies like Deliv and Dropoff were founded to help local businesses provide same-day delivery. These companies serve dozens of US cities and help level the playing field between giant e-retailers with their own delivery infrastructures and small businesses. If these companies don’t operate in your area, research local courier services or consider hiring a seasonal employee to make daily deliveries. Before you write off the idea of same-day delivery as too costly for your business, remember that major carriers may add holiday surcharges again this season, as they did in 2017. The difference in cost between same-day and rush shipping may be smaller than you think. Whatever shipping options you go with this holiday season, be sure to build the cost into your pricing if you offer free shipping. When you have a same-day delivery plan in place for the holiday season, make sure your customers know about it well in advance of Black Friday. Create a same-day delivery map and notice for your site. Share the news on social media. Craft an email for the local segment of your customer email list. Have a brick-and-mortar store? Post the news there, too, so your in-store shoppers will know they have options during holiday crunch time. Prep Now for 2018 Online Holiday Shopping The more planning and prep work you do now, the more value you can offer your customers during the holiday season. Want more e-commerce holiday tips? Get inspired by these marketing campaigns. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading
Posted in HostGator, Hosting, VodaHost
Tagged black, black-friday, customers, ecommerce, gift, holiday, hostgator, shopping, shopping-season, web hosting
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The Best Ways to Survey Your Small Business Customers
The post The Best Ways to Survey Your Small Business Customers appeared first on HostGator Blog . What are your customers thinking? One way to find out is to actually ask your customers. By surveying consumers, your team can learn how to improve the shopping experience. From customer service to product inventory, discover what makes your target audience excited. Their opinions do matter. And by soliciting feedback, you can transform your small […] Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading