You only get one shot at making a positive first impression. This mantra applies not just to people but online businesses as well. If you’re running an e-commerce store, your website needs to woo and impress visitors from the onset.
Although a professionally designed website is an excellent start, this should not be the stopping point if you want to leave a good impression on your visitors. Sadly, this is where many businesses do stop, so they can move on to other important matters.
Before you move on to the other vital aspects of your business, spend some time creating a great first impression on your website. Keep the following suggestions in mind to help you achieve this goal:
- Use White Space Properly
When redesigning your website, you need to remember that white space isn’t an opportunity to stuff more text and images to your web pages. Many businesses make the mistake of overloading online visitors with too much content and too many graphics.
The more careful you are with the design of your website, the higher chance you have that the right info will direct your visitor’s eyes to where you want them to go. Professional web designers will tell you right off the bat that white space is more than just free space. This design element creates balance and harmony, as well as leads a reader from one element to another.
When overhauling the look of your website, use white space to balance out the text and image on your pages.
- Highlight Engaging Content on Your Website
Your business website and landing page need some sort of hook to keep online visitors on the page. Special deals and promotions can work well on some occasions. They aren’t, however, effective in every situation.
The best kind of content that you should highlight on your site is content that urges web users to explore your website further. Oftentimes, this isn’t a sales pitch. Instead, it’s buzzy content that intrigues people and compels them to learn more about what you’re offering on the table.
This suggestion, in theory, may sound simple enough, but a lot of businesses have a difficult time with what content to feature on their website. After all, they only have seconds to woo their online visitors. If you need help with this part, consider consulting a professional web designer or a digital marketer for assistance.
- Tailor Website Content with Buyer Personas
When you’re revamping your website, you need to say no to generic content and opt only for personalized content. After all, making a good impression can be tough if you don’t know exactly who you want to impress.
This is why creating and refining your target personas are necessary.
Buyer personas are fictional characters representing your target market. This important document allows you to define your ideal customer’s means of communication, frustrations and challenges, among others.
An online marketing firm, for instance, can target two types of buyer personas.
The first is small business owners or newbie entrepreneurs who have little to no experience in digital marketing and have zero budget in building an in-house team. The second is marketing managers who take care of a big marketing department or team but want to hire a consultant to further improve their digital campaigns.
When you have a well-defined persona, everything in your tailoring tactics will follow. This includes the appropriate design for your website, campaigns and language.
- Make Your Messages More Dynamic
Coming up with dynamic content that you tailor to your user’s geographic or demographic data is another way to impress your potential online customers.
If you’re a clothing company sending out e-mail campaigns, for instance, you could use dynamic content showing women’s or men’s product suggestions based on subscriber data. This offers greater relevance to the material – and saves you the trouble of building out an entirely separate website campaign.
- Consider Using Introductory Videos
Some websites play an introductory video when a user lands on a particular page. Video is one of the quickest ways to understand info. When you only have a few seconds to make a first impression, faster is always better.
If you’re working to redesign your home page, you’ll want to upload a video on what your business or organization does and what it can do for your target audience. When crafting a video, make sure that the first few seconds of it are informative, engaging and entertaining.
- Optimize Your Website for Mobile Users
Google says that almost 75 per cent of internet users prefer a mobile-friendly site. If you want to create a positive first impression on mobile users, you’ll need to optimize your website effectively. This entails having a responsive web design and making sure that your site loads faster.
These six tips will help you impress your website visitors. Begin testing out these strategies with a renewed focus on your customer experience.
