WHAT DO REVAMPING YOUR WEBSITE AND GETTING YOUR HAIR CUT HAVE IN COMMON?

Your website is a retail window. Recognizing its importance, you want to give your site a fresh look. Or perhaps you have a new spin off; or you have decided to move to a new retail platform. So you have either hired or are about to hire website developers to revitalize or rebuild your site.

Whenever you go to a new hair dresser, the first thing s/he say to you is “Whoever cut your hair the last time did a terrible job” and then points out the flaws. It is like that with website developers – they are very good at pointing out previously committed mistakes. However, they are not always as good at making sure they don’t commit different flaws.

Creating a website is more than a creative venture or a technical/IT effort. While the process is logical, it is not simple nor is it always straightforward. It requires a coordinated effort among all of the stakeholders with clear goals, objectives, milestones, and testing. As a key consumer touch point for your Brand, you want to make sure it reflects your Brand image and values you want to impart to your customers.

We have just finished working with two clients who have created new websites – one for a new product spinoff and one for a manufacturer moving to a consumer focused site. We’d like to share with you the lessons we learned. Maybe you already know these things, maybe not. Although they may sound simplistic, it is amazing to us how many marketers don’t do the groundwork to minimize the pain, disruption, and unfilled expectations down the road.

While not exhaustive, this list touches on major areas of concern.

1. Convene a meeting of all stakeholders – Each department will have different expectations and requirements of the site and many will be blind to the expectations and requirements of others. While the technical folks will be building the site, they need to understand the goals, objectives, and expectations of the other functional departments – Marketing, Merchandising, Operations, Customer Service, Finance, Legal, Security, IT, Creative.
2. Set up realistic goals, objectives, and directives for the site. Make sure they can be measured. Examples of goals and objectives could include:
   1. X% of sales are expected to come from the site – these sales will be generated by paid search, organic search, online advertising, website drivers (postcard mailings, catalogs, mobile messaging)
   2. Website performance should be measured in terms of number of visitors, conversion rate, abandoned cart rate, most popular pages, purchase path on the site, how visitors get to the site, on which pages visitors exit the site
   3. Capture email address of x% of site visitors
   4. Encourage customers to write product reviews
   5. Site will link to social media (blogs, Facebook, Second Life)
   6. All customers will receive purchase and shipping confirmations as well as tracking information
3. If you are using an outside vendor, check references and ask detailed questions:
   1. Ask to see sample sites
   2. Understand the platform to be used, what it can and cannot do, how will it work with your current system(s), will it feed into your marketing database, what data can it capture, how does the site get updated, how easily can it link to other sites in a way that can be measured
   3. What analytics package(s) will work with the site?
   4. How does the vendor plan to optimize the site for search engines? (for the importance of this factor, please see You Don’t Need a Decoder Ring in this newsletter)
   5. How well does the vendor work with an internal project team?
4. Set realistic milestones.
5. Make sure there is an internal project team to work with the vendor that includes marketing, analytics, and operations expertise, to ensure that the site will be able to address all goals and objectives.
6. Allow 4-6 weeks for testing. Ask people to test the site who don’t know your product, who are curious and demanding, who will provide honest feedback. Use at least 25 testers. Talk with each person who tests the site and ask about:
   1. Ease of navigation, finding what s/he was looking for, is it clear how to navigate through the site
   2. Completeness of information; Were there unanswered questions? Is the product presented in an easily understandable way? How useful were the FAQ’s?
   3. Smoothness of operation, how easily can one check out, sign up for an email newsletter, track delivery of a purchase

As we mentioned above, your website may be the main or only consumer touch point with your Brand. You want to make sure that the customer’s experience on your site will encourage repeat visits. Marketsmith is available to provide counsel and/or oversight in ensuring your build goes as smoothly as possible.

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