The importance of getting your website content right

For an ecommerce retailer, your online presence is your shop front. It’s fundamental to have an effective ‘content merchandise’  to encourage sales and provide good customer service.

By Maria Wasing, VP of European marketing, EPiServer

Websites should always be designed to deliver an engaging user experience. To succeed, marketers need an understanding of how online communication works and they need to be clear about how a business can serve the needs of its customers from an online perspective.

The websites that are succeeding online are the ones that concentrate on the delivery of quality user experience, functionality, and added value elements such as personalisation, to really engage with visitors.

Here are my five top tips for ecommerce marketers to ensure their content strategy delivers the desired results:

Identify and engage your target audience – Your content needs to be easily accessible and relevant to your target audience, therefore identifying them beforehand is a vital exercise. Having multiple audiences is an important consideration as they’re likely to have different purchasing needs, so consider the type of information they’re likely to want.

Personalisation is a great way to tailor your web content to potential customers, and increase your conversion rates. It will enable your site to provide relevant information to visitors based on data such as location and user behaviour, to highlight products that your customers are most likely to be interested in purchasing, for example.

Making the customer experience as smooth and effortless as possible therefore needs to be kept in mind when considering web content.

Define sales strategy and goals – When setting your goals, make sure they’re as bold and specific as possible and ensure they are tied to real revenue targets. The ability to measure whether your content is ‘fit-for-purpose’ is a valuable tool and will help in the improvement and development of new material in the future.

Quantitative metrics, such as page views or Twitter followers, are potential revenue generators, but won’t provide the insight and information needed to assess whether or not your content strategy is fruitful. So you may want to look at metrics such as dwell time and return visits. There is no need to say that conversions are the most important metric for retailers. When you set your goals, make sure that you define what a conversion is.

There are a number of questions that need to be asked when it comes to defining your strategy:

- What will your content creation plan look like?

- Which collaborators need to be involved – internal and external – and how will you ensure deadlines are met?

- How often will you review your strategy against your goals to see if changes need to be made?

- Can you use social media and user generated content?

- Can you get the audience to actually help you improve your content by giving them input?

- Do you have external resource you can use or that your should consider employing?

- Which metrics will you use so that you can define what good content is for your organisation?

- Can you develop a content quality scorecard and use it as one of your KPIs?

Research, research, research – Scoping out the competition can be a useful exercise. Look at what other companies with a strong ecommerce presence are doing. What aspects of their web content do you admire? Which companies have content that mirrors the approach you think will work for your current and future customers?

Take advantage of the activity they’ve already tried and tested, learning from their mistakes and improving on other examples you see out there will save you valuable time further down the line.

Tried and tested – It’s important to test your online content to see if the changes have a positive or negative effect on conversion rates. When you are not testing different content variations, you are wasting time. Don’t expect to get it right the first time, or even the hundredth time.

Appoint and train your content creators or editors – Deciding who is actually going to create or edit your content is something many companies overlook, but it’s a crucial step in any content strategy. Making sure the person you appoint is aware of your company’s strategy and goals needs to be kept in mind when employing resources to generate the content itself.

EPiServer.com