What is one way that a small business can ensure visitors have a great page experience?
To help small businesses optimize their websites, we asked PR experts and business leaders this question for their best interface advice. From ensuring that your pages are scannable to adhering to accessibility guidelines, there are several tips that may increase your user experience for your site visitors.

Here are nine ways small businesses can ensure they have a great page experience for site visitors:

• Ensure Your Pages are Scannable
• Be Informative and Available
• Create Local Landing Pages
• Prioritize Optimization
• Think About UX
• Speed Up Your Website
• Use the Accessibility Guidelines
• Add a Call to Action
• Implement a Site Maintenance Plan

Ensure Your Pages are Scannable

Most website pages are scanned by users, not read word for word. It is an SEO best practice to utilize headers to break up content by topic. While John Mueller of Google explains that using keywords in headers is not necessarily a ranking factor anymore, utilizing H1, H2, and H3 headers appropriately creates a better user experience so readers can easily scan the content and find what they’re looking for!

Kayla Centeno, Markitors

Be Informative and Available

Answer customer questions in multiple ways. That may be accomplished by providing useful information in an article or pricing page. For our company, we go one step further by having LiveChat and a clear phone number on our stair lift page so that customers have every option to connect with us. By having several contact options, customers can feel comfortable getting their questions answered.

Liz Riggleman, Arrow Lift

Create Local Landing Pages

Creating local landing pages ensures that the customer receives the right and relevant information according to their location. For example, our denture center lists out local landing pages for our four different locations. This ensures that our patients in Boise have a different website experience than our patients in Caldwell, and receive the correct information like address and phone number.

Henry Babichenko, Eurodenture

Prioritize Optimization

The first step to ensure a great page experience for your customers is to focus on optimization instead of a fancy design. When you get too deep into the design aspects, you can lose sight of making the website easy and simple to use. I’ve seen many big venture-funded brands focusing a lot of capital and resources on intricate designs instead of optimization. Simple, elegant, and optimized is still the most powerful formula for success. Additionally, I learned the importance of spending equal time on desktop design as well as mobile. It’s no secret that the majority of shoppers use mobile. This should be the easiest to use and most optimized piece of your website. My biggest tip here is to limit the amount of scrolling. Give your potential customer the easiest path to checkout!

Brandon Monaghan, Miracle Brand

Think About UX

Since our company is launched on an app, we made sure our website is an extension of what our users can find on their smart devices. Consumers can still subscribe to user profiles, view customer review videos, and purchase products with external brand links. We wanted our consumers to have fun being involved in our community platform, so we livened up our website with bold colors on video thumbnails. We also always feature the reviewer’s faces when we post their videos on the feed.

Savannah Scott, Supergreat

Speed Up Your Website

Both Google and your website visitors will be pleased if they don’t have to wait for your website to load. Speed up the loading time. Use GTMetrix, a free service, to check your site speed. Try to keep your loading time at two seconds or less. Remove needless plugins. This helps speed up your site.

Janice Wald, Mostly Blogging Academy

Use the Accessibility Guidelines

From my personal experience and our business expertise, the most important part of e-commerce is having an accessible website and an accessible customer service system. This ranges from making sure your web developers and web designers adhere to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG standards) when creating your website and marketing materials but also having a range of customer service and support channels. For example, a deaf person might prefer instant messaging to a voice phone support system. In travel and hospitality, common issues relate to inaccessible date pickers and graphical captchas, which prevent some populations from buying your product.

Dale Reardon, Travel For All

Add a Call to Action

If your website doesn’t have an easy-to-find Call to Action (CTA) button on your homepage, you’re missing out on a major opportunity to convert potential customers into paying customers. The CTA button is a classic marketing method for a reason — it easily boosts your revenue by directly asking for what you need from your potential customer. Design an aesthetically pleasing CTA button that will stand out on your homepage, and include enough relevant information around it to let your potential customers know what they’ll gain from clicking through. That relevant information is key to transforming your CTA button from a marketing tool into a one-two punch that builds trust in your website and your company through education. The more transparent you are about your product, the more your customers will trust your website.

Bill Glaser, Outstanding Foods

Implement a Site Maintenance Plan

To make sure a site is properly maintained, there should be a regular plan in place to check it monthly. Some tips are to check the webmaster tools data to ensure everything is running smoothly, keep track of the traffic data to see your audience, make sure the software is up to date, and look out for any feedback. Most importantly, run security scans so you know how the site is running internally and externally.

Nina Jensen, 8×8

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What is one way e-commerce companies should segment their customer list for email marketing? 

To help your company segment their customer lists for email marketing, we asked marketing experts and business leaders this question for their best advice. From reaching out to customers with abandoned carts to analyzing customer spending patterns, there are several pieces of advice that may help you with your email marketing.

Here are nine ways e-commerce companies should segment their customer list for email marketing: 

• Track Your Promoters
• Complement Their Past Purchases
• Reach Out With Their Abandoned Carts
• Target Your Engaged Audience
• Analyze Customer Spending Patterns
• Segment By Platform
• Organize By Location
• Target Last Website Visit
• Streamline Follow-Up Campaigns

Track Your Promoters 

Promoters. Some customers are so happy with their purchase that they will promote your brand through beneficial actions like leaving a review on an e-commerce site or sharing their purchase on a social media profile. Tracking which customers are your “promoters” can be a beneficial way to segment and reward customers on an email list.

Daniel Richmond, Tic Watches

Complement Their Past Purchases

The best way to segment an email marketing campaign for an e-commerce company is by looking at the buyer’s past purchases. The easiest way to do this is to start sending out email recommendations for similar items that you sell that would go well with the buyer’s previous purchases. This will ensure that you are capturing the right target market! 

Kayla Centeno, Markitors

Reach Out With Their Abandoned Carts

We have a shopping section on our website for the products we sell. There are many ways to segment customer lists from e-commerce for email marketing. For instance, creating lists of those who abandoned carts can be useful to eventually follow up with those customers. They were obviously interested in our products in the first place, so there is still a chance to gain their interest and eventually gain more conversions.

Matt Seaburn, Rent A Wheel

Target Your Engaged Audience

It’s important to segment engaged versus unengaged audiences. Many e-commerce brands send out their email campaigns to their whole newsletter list. We recommend sending out all campaigns to just your engaged list—this helps with spam, open rates, etc. It’s also important to have a strategy to warm up unengaged users or remove them after a win-back series!

Hannah Byrd, Absolute Web

Analyze Customer Spending Patterns

As with all things in marketing, there is no right or wrong way to segment your customer list for email marketing as every business is different. The one thing that holds true across all businesses, however, is the need to thoroughly understand your customers and their spending patterns, i.e., how often they shop at your store, what their average basket ring is, what products are commonly purchased together, etc. With a solid understanding of these metrics, you can create powerful segments that target your best customers, repeat buyers, and even the ones that don’t convert with highly targeted promotions. My one rule of thumb is that the customer metrics being used to develop these segments must come from first-party sales data, as no one knows your customers better than you!

Amy Zwagerman, The Launch Box

Segment By Platform 

One quick and easy way that e-commerce companies can segment their lists is by how they arrived at your website. So if it’s through social media, drill down more and find out which platform, like Instagram, Pinterest, or Facebook. Analyzing the different platforms and other ways customers found you, such as organic search or ads, will help you create a more customized customer journey for the people coming to your website.

Gresham Harkless Jr., Blue 16 Media

Organize By Location 

Location is an important way that ecommerce businesses should segment their customer lists. Segmenting by location has been shown to increase open and click-through rates. This is because location-specific targeting creates value for the customer. You are sending them something that is of interest to them and is relevant to where they are.

Joe Flanagan, VelvetJobs

Target Last Website Visit 

Segmenting by “last website visit” is big for us. We know that if a user has visited our site within 30 days, they are likely to be more receptive to marketing emails, and we can send them more. Conversely, if a user bought something last year and we never saw them again, we don’t want to be emailing them weekly until they show back up on our site. In short, we let them determine how close they are to buying again and, therefore, how many emails they should be getting.

Quincy Smith, TEFL Hero

Streamline Follow-Up Campaigns

People dislike getting spammed with similar emails. If you plan to send a follow-up to a marketing email, most email marketing tools offer the option to segment and target users who did not open the first email. Doing so helps create values for users who inadvertently missed the first message while avoiding sending the same email to users who already opened and engaged with the first email. Failing to omit engaged users can lead to poor user frustration and a high unsubscribe rate.

Hung Nguyen, Smallpdf

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