We are talking about your winning website, as well as the ultimate challenge of how to drive traffic and customers to your website. So what even is that? Your winning website is obviously your shopfront. That’s what the world sees when they land on your site for the very first time. So we want to make sure that they’re getting a really great first impression, because it’s the equivalent of your bricks and mortar store. If you had a physical shop, you would make sure that it’s inviting and attractive. It’s well displayed, there’s a customer service person there to help them, that there aren’t you know, trip hazards that aren’t boxes you know, at the front door, there’s no cobwebs, it doesn’t need a coat of paint, we have to emulate what a bricks and mortar shop would be for your customer in your website.

So you need to think about how you can make the experience online, the equivalent of what you would offer them if it was in a bricks and mortar situation. So making sure that you have a winning website that really appeals to your ideal customer and audience that showcases your brand effectively, and also highlights your products in the most attractive way, making them irresistible and encouraging your website visitors to add them to cart to go through and click so there is a little bit of a formula around this. To give you an overview of what you need to consider in your website design, it needs to like I said it needs to look professional, it doesn’t necessarily have to, you know, you don’t have to go and spend 10 to 15k having someone build it, you can you can probably build it yourself if you’re using something like Shopify or wordpress, however, it needs to look like it’s a million dollar online store. So customers when they land there feel really confident and won’t feel like it’s sort of an amateur side hustle business and won’t be afraid about putting down their credit card details where you need to make sure that they’re really really confident when they land on your site. And often this is a case of faking it until you make it. And the way we do that is by having a really professional looking site. So go away and investigate some of this, the businesses that you aspire to be or that you have purchased and had a great experience and have a look through that site and see what elements it is that have instilled that confidence and impressed you so you can come away and try and replicate that same experience for your customer.

Your website not only needs to look professional, it needs to be attractive and sticky. And what I mean by sticky is that it needs to encourage people to stay there as long as possible clicking around and all the different pages looking through your collections and your products because if it’s not sticky, they will bounce which means they will land on your website on one page and they won’t go beyond that page before exiting. We want to make sure that they’re having a good look around. We also need to make sure that it’s really easy for them to navigate. They need to be able to find what it is that they’re looking for. A perfect example of this is only yesterday my children are on school holidays right now at the time that I’m recording this podcast and I just thought I’m gonna have a look at my iland co. website from my mobile while I’m sitting here on the couch watching telly. I didn’t realise that with the navigation there were actually a few issues with it. I have a few different collections for example shop all and then I’ve got kimonos, I’ve got dresses and underneath those drop down menus I then have you know maxi length kimonos short length kimonos, leopard print kimonos etc, etc. But what I couldn’t do was actually just click shop all kimonos there was no button for that it wasn’t working.

While it actually works on a desktop, it wasn’t working on my mobile. So for customers not really knowing what it is that they wanted to look at. They were having to go through and click on each individual collection page, so maxi length, mid length, short length, cocoon, all the different things right. And same with the dresses, there were short dresses, long dresses, there were kaftan dresses, there was, you know, crystal bedazzled dresses, and there wasn’t an option on the mobile to just click and shop all dresses. So it’s you know, even though I’m eight years or so into my business, this is something that you need to check regularly. So it needs to be easy for customers to navigate. Because if it’s not, they’re just going to click off. Everyone’s so busy in this day and age, they’re not going to hang around and try and find it. So we need to make sure that it’s easy to navigate. Because all of these things ensure that it’s a great user experience or UX they call it in the digital marketing world.

And then lastly, we also need to make sure that we provide the least number of steps for a customer to be able to purchase. So click click buy is my motto. I’ve been saying it over and over for many years. Now we want to make sure that people can click to add it to cart, click to put in their credit card details and click to confirm, the least amount of steps possible. Because with each additional step that you make a customer take online, the more chances are that they will not finish them. You’ll also want for your winning website to make sure that you need to keep things like FAQ’s, T’s and C’s all up to date. But also keep them down maybe below, you want to make sure that those top navigation options are mostly shoppable links. And you also make sure that your homepage is really strong and enticing because that’s more often than not where people actually land. That’s your prime real estate. So making sure and insider tip, like I said, I just did this yesterday, be sure that you test your website on other devices, especially mobile phone, because more than half of your website visitors will be doing their shopping on your site from a mobile phone.

Now this next and most important piece of the puzzle of launching your online store is driving traffic or customers to your site. And this I could talk about every day for a year. But I’m just going to give you a quick snapshot for the sake of time today. Because once you’ve launched your online store, that’s the equivalent of I guess I often say this: birthing the baby and coming home from the hospital with that beautiful little baby baby you’re so in love with and so proud of and then all of a sudden the first night comes and that gorgeous little baby doesn’t want to sleep. That’s when the work kicks in, that’s when you’re faced with the oh, this is my reality. Now that I’ve launched the online store, I’m now going to continually send people to that store in order to reach my sales goals. Because think about how many online stores there are in the world, there are a lot and no one knows you even exist unless you’re sending people to your site. So you need to work on a constant traffic system, which will be made up of different marketing methods in order to constantly and consistently be sending people to your website.

So this will be made up of organic, organic social media. So posting on Instagram or TikTok or wherever it is that your ideal customer is. So the goal there is always inviting people to click through to your website. Email marketing is really, really important. That is going to be one of your most important traffic channels and retargeting channels is inviting people to sign up to your newsletter, and then sending them emails to have them come back to your website. It’s things like paid advertising, Google ads, social media ads, and influencer marketing because you will need to be doing all of these things on a regular basis in order to send people to your traffic, the time and time again in order to purchase because also you will find that people won’t necessarily buy on the very first purchase, you’ll need to keep inviting them back and it might not be to that fifth or that sixth visit to your store that they come away and purchase. So my tip for you here is to focus on three to four marketing channels in the beginning and do them well. You don’t have to be absolutely everywhere. But you do need to have three or four that you’re doing consistently and hopefully sharing the same sort of marketing messaging across them with your ultimate goal of sending people to your website. So start with three or four and then build on that and determine which of those is the most effective.

Check out part 1 here and part 2 here.