Principal Content Strategies for Top E-Commerce Sites

There are many techniques to transform your business site’s success. A simplest strategy is to create a schedule for news releases and adding new and fresh material to a site. Updated content encourages interaction between a company and the customer. A website can refresh its content by launching enticing strategies for users to interact with each other from the site. Here, we will go through some of the most effective strategies (acknowledged by almost all top business sites), which any business site must have, to keep it fresh and add more value.

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Learn to be Persistent

It is better to own no website than to own a website with no fresh content. A high-traffic website, which gets around a million page views/week, needs many changes on its front page each week.

Photo credit: StockProject

This is more significant if the products are ever-changing. If you sell just one product, it’s enough to ensure that the given information is latest and the user is comfortable to buy. If you release new versions, yes, update the site. Never change anything only for the sake of change itself.

A website, which does not offer visitors the information they’re searching — factual and latest up to the moment — cannot retain the client. Websites enriched with information, like Barnes & Noble, retain patrons’ loyalty not because they offer the lowest prices, but because they always have maximum knowledge and information on a product.

Public activity on its site increased when the featured article for an entire month is dispersed and published daily across the month. Users can wait one day for new article to come, but can they wait for an entire month.

Scheduling – Success Begins Here

Lot of work is done for the development of a website; therefore, it does not make sense if a website owner sits by and thinks his site will run forever without any more work. Change is a requirement of the web; therefore change should be a requirement of your website also. The level of changes depends upon the subject of a website.

Photo credit: RogueSun Media

Start by making a schedule for change. Humans live with their habits. If your visitor is aware that you add new content on Sunday, he is likely to visit your site each Sunday. Selecting a schedule depends on the nature of the content, e.g. a rugby website may require coordinating its schedule with major rugby events or games.

While developing a schedule, answer these questions:
Do you release a weekly newsletter/magazine? If yes, then fragment the featured articles and posts throughout the week.
Is your website associated with time-sensitive content? A website devoted to a Christmas may publish a lot of stuff in December only.
Do your visitors look for product details/news? Not all sites need updates every day. A cable manufacturing firm might just require updating once in a month.

Good and Fresh

Get the content. Look at what type of business you do. What do you sell or offer? Is your website for a manufacturer, construction industry, a medical firm, or a finance company? Every industry has specific instruments, items, and services. Analyze every product, instrument, and service by determining WHAT, WHY, WHERE, and HOW about them. When a client’s query is replied prior to his asking, the client’s trust with your services is enhanced.

FAQ

An excellent segment for any website is its ‘‘Frequently Asked Questions’’ – FAQ – segment. Contact different help desks/customer support centers for the very common queries by users. Make a list of the repeatedly asked inquiries and put them on your website. With the website’s expansion, segregate the FAQs for every service/product to enlarge the knowledge base.

Getting Great Content for Free

Why not to turn visitors into content contributors? Developing and producing fresh content is a long, time-consuming and costly task. As fresh stuff is essential, a website cannot depend upon itself only for producing content. Realizing this, famous websites utilize this strength to invite e-customers to contribute to a website.

Companies, like Amazon and eBay, allow their visitors to write about the available items. At Amazon, a buyer never needs to depend upon an expert critic’s analysis to evaluate any book. Amazon empowers original buyers to post their personal opinion to a critical review of a published book. The book reader is allowed to inform rest of the world about his personal liking and disliking.

Turning Selling Place into a Discussion Place

Creating online communities, which discuss and communicate with other, is a critical feature of the web. Communities can be created on any type of website. A successful strategy is to create a feature for the offered items to be not just a selling place but also a discussion place. If an offered item truly meets the desired level of the sales and marketing, the users’ feedback would be positive and boost the selling, whereas, if the users’ feedbacks are negative, the response will help in improving the item.

Online Chat Rooms and Bulletin Boards

Another technique, to invite visitors to have opinions, is through building online chat rooms and bulletin boards. Launching online chats, where company’s senior personalities and technology experts meet customers, assist in strengthening the company’s image. A buyer who finds that he will be able to meet and discuss personally to the company’s chief executive or manager is potential to be a regular and loyal customer.

Be an Advisor

Sell, sell and sell; this is the only attracting force for all websites. Buyers, visiting your website, search for product or service details, which are fresh and current. Buyers look for a company’s website to get product details prior investing their money. This especially works for high-ticket products, like machinery, electronics, motorcycles, cars, and heavy-duty vehicles. By well-timed publishing of accurate and comprehensive information, websites guide the buyers to think before investment and give them full knowledge about a product prior stepping into the showroom. Nothing is more annoying and displeasing to a buyer than reaching a site, where there is an expired, useless and out-of-date product detail. To give a product the required profile and exposure, create a launch schedule, like as below:

• Know the nature of the offered product/service.
• Prepare press releases for the fresh product/service.
• Exploit the content of the press release by placing them on the company’s website.
• Develop a segment on the website for the fresh product/service.
• Prepare a newsletter (send via an e-mail and link back to the website for complete details).

Edutainment

Delivering online education or training is an increasingly popular strategy being utilized to get visitors to a site again and again. There are products (particularly software and computer applications), which are complicated and need tutorials. Also, there are products (like books), which are not essentially complicated, but they always need detailed explanations.

Online tutorials and courses are an excellent medium to expand the client relationship to an advanced level. Through offering lessons, you are guiding your visitors towards becoming professional experts. Microsoft, I think, is the best example, which offers online tutorials and visual presentations for entire range of software and applications. If you want to educate yourself about any MS Office utility, just visit: office.microsoft.com/en-us/training.

The main objective of edutainment is to retain visitors at the site for more time, so they can be more likely to make purchases.

Develop and Promote Newsletters or E-zines

News and updates are delivered to recipients through an e-mail. Rich HTML may be utilized to design the newsletter, but it must be done professionally. Not every e-mail platform shows HTML with graphics or images by default, like MS Outlook, therefore your e-mail may have awkward look. You may select plain text, and though it is not as pleasing but it ensures that recipient will be able to read it. Try to give users an option to select either format.

A newsletter should be succinct. On average, your customers will get 20-100 e-mails every day. Most of the customers skim through the visible portion only. If there is any significant message, mention it at the top. The articles in a newsletter must be concise — 1-3 paragraphs. If the content is lengthy, then include a link directing to the complete featured article. Hot news (quotes or news release) must be placed as an article at the top. The following article must be associated with the original article, but cleverly connected. For instance, the primary article can be for a new car, and the next article can relate to the reduction of the fuel consumption for the new car. The third article can be one of any article series; like from series discussing car electronics, equipment, automotive tools and accessories.

Final Words

E-commerce is a high-profile feature of the World Wide Web. It radically changes the merchandising. Your website requires updates in two core areas; fresh content and the up-to-date technology. You can boost your sales by setting up a consistent schedule for updating the content as well as giving opportunity to the visitors to contribute content. As an alternative, e-zines are an effective strategy to remain in contact with the visitors and develop community.

The above mentioned strategies are implemented to expand the size of knowledge base on a website. Successful websites are equipped with a slew of techniques, which are utilized to make users repeatedly visit the website.

Which strategy has been the most successful in increasing your business? Have a say.

 About the Author:

Muddassir Hosein is a market researcher and an analyst with ever-growing passion and interests for the web development and design industry. He also writes for many online web design blogs and, you may not believe, he loves to make friends; say “Hi” to him at muddassir.hosein@gmail.com.

Published July 6th, 2012 by Mudassir Hosein