• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
Next Wavelength Logo

Next Wavelength

Full Stack Digital Marketing Agency

  • Home
  • About Us
  • Services
    • Analytics
    • Branding
    • Content Marketing
    • E-Commerce
    • Marketing Automation
    • Performance Marketing
    • SEO
    • Social Media Marketing
    • Website Design & Development
  • Next Hub
  • Get in touch
  • Call +971522718034

E-Commerce

11 eCommerce home page guidelines to boost your sales

January 13, 2022 by nxtwvlgth

Your eCommerce store’s home page is your storefront and represents the soul of your brand. It shows what your website sells and highlights your call to action.

Your online store home page is usually the highest traffic page on an eCommerce site. Done right, it will entice visitors to stay and explore your products resulting in increased conversions and sales. On the other hand, ignoring eCommerce home page best practices can lead to less engagement and increased bounce rates – thus, you’ll lose customers. This single page is responsible for establishing trust, driving sales, and creating long-lasting customers.

Visual hierarchy is a key principle behind delivering your message clearly to potential buyers. Meanwhile, your call to action offers a clear next step to move visitors beyond the home page and toward your product pages. Together, the most important components when it comes to designing a high converting eCommerce home page. The following 11 guidelines will help you succeed with both.

Keep your design simple

Northernism’s design is very uniquely simple and it stands out by placing images and text on a grid, which isn’t done by a lot of eCommerce stores. Their commerce website has a modern design with plenty of white space and contains simple images, making it feel much luxurious and less crowded.

northernism - uniquely simple design
Northernism – uniquely simple design

Display your Unique Selling Proposition

Ecommerce websites need a clear USP to set them apart from competitors. This means you need to explain to the visitor what you’re offering as soon as they land on your home page.

The tagline from Two Chimps Coffee is displayed soon as you land on their home page and perfectly summarises what they’re selling. “Awesome Coffee. No Nonsense”. They’ve generated a lot of buzz for their clever branding and high-quality coffee, which positions them uniquely in the customer’s mind.

Two Chimp Coffee
Two Chimps Coffee – clear tag line display

Have a visually appealing sale section

It’s important to have a distinct sale section on your homepage. You want the bargain hunters to be able to find it and access it easily. You may want to be bold and big if your promotion is the most important campaign at the time. Or you could be subtle to get a regular stream of discount-loving customers.

Newegg uses a big banner to display their ongoing/upcoming sales promotions.

NewEgg
NewEgg – sales promotions display on home banner

Add a robust search bar for products

Your eCommerce website will be incomplete without a search bar. Adding a search bar will increase your conversions as visitors are most likely going to use the search bar to find products they might need. Many eCommerce stores don’t return relevant search results and you need a search software that can return relevant search results.

Amazon’s search bar is one of the most popular ones.

Amazon - robust search bar
Amazon – robust search bar

Be clear about your shipping and return policy

Shipping and return policies should be displayed clearly on the homepage, either on the right or left side. This is especially if you offer free shipping or if your return policy is better than what your competitors offer.

Kigurumi - clear shipping policy
Kigurumi – clear shipping policy

Display genuine testimonials and reviews from customers

Testimonials turn the spotlight away from the seller to the customer. Potential buyers were once in your customer’s shoes, debating which product to buy, comparing prices etc.

When the visitor hears what your product can do – from someone they can actually relate to – then their trust deepens and their chances of purchasing rises.

Lucky Paws shows its testimonials in a creative and quirky manner.

Lucky Paws - testimonials
Lucky Paws – testimonials

Select higher quality photographs

Peep Laja says that brands must think deeply about how they show what they’re selling. So it’s not only about the photo quality but also about which photos you’ll be selecting.

Personalise your home page

Personalization not only leads to more sales but also increases customer lifetime value. The customer is likely to return to your website if they feel that you understand their needs very well.

You can Autocommerce to recommend relevant products based on the visitor’s location, pages viewed, purchase history. Nordstrom has a great recommendation section.

Nordstrom - personalized shopping
Nordstrom – personalized shopping

Add product images to categories

Visitors want to see what kind of products you offer and your categories section presents an overview. To encourage them to explore further, adding images is very helpful. You can also use thumbnail images for each of your main categories.

Case-Mate does a great job of indicating what kind of product you will find when you click a link.

Case Mate
Case-Mate – categories with product images

Feature your best products

When you feature your best products throughout your homepage, you essentially give customers an idea of what to buy and help them make a purchase decision. You can strategically test which collection of products works best on your homepage in terms of sales. It could also be your best sellers, new products or seasonal products.

Physiq Apparel displays its “Featured Products”

Physiq Apparel
Physiq Apparel – featured products display

Have an intuitive navigation structure

If customers can’t get to pages easily, they might believe that you don’t stock the product they want, and abandon your website. So your homepage navigation, categories and sub-categories should be intuitive and easy to follow.

BooHoo’s navigation makes it very easy for visitors to understand how to discover products and where each link leads.

BooHoo
BooHoo – detailed and well designed navigation

Wrapping Up

An eCommerce home page performs many tasks, from helping visitors to find and buy products, to highlighting other key information such as shipping and return policy.

Your home page should bring visitors closer to a purchase. You don’t want them hanging around your home page. You want them to browse your product pages and buy.

Hopefully, you’ve found inspiration and will implement some of these guidelines on your own home page. Here is another great article that explains 5 essential elements of good website design.

You might also enjoy

UI DESIGN - 5 ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS FOR GOOD

UI Design: The 5 Essential Elements of Good Website Design

CONTINUE READING UI Design: The 5 Essential Elements of Good Website Design

Filed Under: E-Commerce, Web Design and Development Tagged With: ecommerce, growth, sales, UI design, Website design

What are Responsive Search Ads and how to make the most out of them in 2022

January 2, 2022 by nxtwvlgth

Since 18 February 2021, Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) are now the default ad type when looking to create ads for a Search campaign.

Advertisers can still create new Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) and edit existing ones but they’re being pushed aside nevertheless.

Introduced in 2016, ETA is an ad format that allows you to preview the complete ad. You not only have more control over the text and how it’s displayed – but you can also pick and choose which text assets to place in the headlines and descriptions. Moreover, the text assets don’t need to be combinable, which is the case with RSAs.

So what are RSAs and what does this mean for advertisers moving forward?

Traditionally, the advertiser would write a combination of headlines and body copy and multiple stand-alone versions of ads would be created.

Google’s algorithm would figure out which ad performs amongst them.

With RSAs, each piece of headline and description is considered an “asset” and Google dynamically combines these “assets” based on search intent.

In a single RSA, you can provide up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions.

The more you enter, the more Google’s machine learning algorithm will match your ads and serve the most relevant dynamic ads to your potential customers.

The hard part?

As each headline and description asset can be mixed and matched automatically by Google, they need to make sense on their own.

This requires a little more thinking when writing the copy.

The key elements of Expanded Text Ads when compared to Responsive Search Ads :

Key ElementsText AdsResponsive Search Ads
Number of headlines (in setup)Up to 3 (30 characters each)Up to 15 (30 characters each)
Number of descriptions (in setup)Up to 2 (90 characters each)Up to 4 (90 characters each)
Number of headlines shown3Up to 3
Number of descriptions shown2Up to 2
Maximum length of ad shown150 characters300 characters
Arrangement of assetsStatic (as written down)Automatic
Control over text asset combinationFullLittle

Google’s rationale behind Responsive Search Ads (RSAs)

As Google favors a shift towards machine learning and automation, many advertisers feel this will give them less control over their marketing campaigns. Google claims that machine learning can improve campaign performance in terms of relevancy, clicks and conversions.

Consumer needs and priorities are continuously changing, especially as the COVID-19 pandemic progresses. Google reasons that its push towards RSAs will allow advertisers a better way to adapt to changing customer demands and shifting market trends without creating individual static ads and testing them out manually.

Moreover, Google wants more advertisers to use RSAs (especially novice advertisers) so that it gives their machine learning algorithms more data to work with. This way Google can make more recommendations related to account performance.

How RSAs can help your business

You can tailor your headlines and description copy to your customers’ locations or locations of interest.

Multiple headlines and descriptions options allow your ads the opportunity to compete in more auctions and match more queries, thus reaching more potential customers.

You can increase ad group performance as you attract more clicks and conversions that your existing text ads aren’t capturing – this is because responsive search ads help you compete in more auctions.

Moda Furnishings, a British furniture designer and importer, wanted to increase sales from its e-commerce site. The brand reused content from its expanded text ads to create responsive search ads and added them across its ad groups.

The result?

Moda Furnishings has seen clickthrough rates increase 96% while sales have grown over 3,000%.

Jonathan Brierley, CEO of Moda Furnishings said, “We’ve seen significant improvement across all key metrics since adding responsive search ads. From site traffic to sales, responsive search ads have outperformed expanded text ads.”

How to make the most of this new development

Leverage RSAs to test out a diverse mix of messages regularly. This will not only help advertisers improve their ads, but it will also allow Google to better match a message to a particular search or user.

Continue creating and testing ETAs as they could outperform the machine learning-based RSAs. Ideally, like advertisers, you should supplement your ad groups with RSAs but continue to test two to three ETAs in each ad group. This will allow you to optimize your ad copy while also benefiting from Google’s machine learning-driven ad copy testing at the same time.

Use Google’s tools such as their Ad strength tool which takes relevance, quantity, and diversity of ad copy and provides a score (ranging from Poor to Excellent) for your RSAs. As per Google, “Advertisers who improve Ad strength for their Responsive Search Ads from ‘Poor’ to ‘Excellent’ see 9% more clicks and conversions on average”. Also, use location insertion to increase the relevancy of your ads. 

If you are interested in writing effective ad copy, check our article on – The Main Purpose of Your Ad Copy – To Get it Clicked

Conclusion

Responsive search ads can bring in more leads and improve your conversion rates. Although it comes at the price of lesser control, its machine learning mechanism can make it easy to quickly test your message and offers at a large scale.

You might also enjoy

eCommerce Home page

11 eCommerce home page guidelines to boost your sales

CONTINUE READING 11 eCommerce home page guidelines to boost your sales

15 Facebook Marketing Statistics 2021

15 Awesome Facebook Marketing Statistics You Need to Know in 2021

CONTINUE READING 15 Awesome Facebook Marketing Statistics You Need to Know in 2021

Shall I scale or stop my ppc campaign

5 most effective tips to manage your PPC Campaigns during COVID-19

CONTINUE READING 5 most effective tips to manage your PPC Campaigns during COVID-19

Advanced-Facebook-Ads-Banner

The Best Way To Effectively Scale Your Facebook Ads (6 Advanced Techniques)

CONTINUE READING The Best Way To Effectively Scale Your Facebook Ads (6 Advanced Techniques)

Secret of successful ad copy

The Main Purpose of Your Ad Copy – To Get it Clicked

CONTINUE READING The Main Purpose of Your Ad Copy – To Get it Clicked

Test your E-commerce Product Before Launching

The Super Simple Way To Test Your E-commerce Product Before Launching

CONTINUE READING The Super Simple Way To Test Your E-commerce Product Before Launching

Filed Under: Paid Media, E-Commerce

5 most effective tips to manage your PPC Campaigns during COVID-19

February 9, 2021 by nxtwvlgth

COVID-19 has affected customers and businesses in various ways. Customers are buying more of their essentials online while some businesses are scrambling to break even. Altered buyer behavior and current market situations have caused some businesses to end their online PPC campaigns while others are contemplating it. It might turn out to be the wrong move that will cause more harm than good.

Scale Down, But Don’t Kill Your PPC Campaigns

Buying habits and priorities have changed for now. If your conversion rates have dipped, take a look at other businesses in your industry. If they are in a similar predicament, reduce your ad spend but do not kill your campaigns completely especially if they were working well. The data will get messed up and you will have to start from scratch to rebuild your targeted audience. 

When you come across logistics issues such as stuck deliveries or trouble restocking the goods, don’t remove your ads entirely. You can pause them for a while and mark them as “currently out of stock”.

Pounce If You Have To

Most people are staying home in isolation and their use of the internet has increased significantly. There is a lot of traffic and huge amounts of wasted potential because businesses are scared to market their offerings.

PPC rates have been fluctuating but right now the cost of ads is low. While the conversion rates are different based on industries, it is still an amazing opportunity for proactive businesses to build their brand. The usual oversaturated market is facing less competition as many marketers and companies have retreated.

After figuring out how the market is evolving, businesses that dare to act now have a potential to grow that should not be squandered. 

Due to uncertain business conditions, there is a window of opportunity now where your competitors are not spending on particular keywords. You can increase rankings for the more competitive and high traffic keywords by spending less and increasing your conversion rate.

Connect With Your Audience

Use emails and go live on your social media accounts and build relations. Being open and wishing good for your consumers health and livelihoods would improve brand image and conversions. 

Pivot slightly and increase your offerings by factoring in certain activities that have been on the rise like homeschooling, working virtually at home offices, social distancing, reconnecting with old friends and family. Mention them when in your ad campaigns too.

Get inspirations from some of the top businesses in the world and how they are conducting themselves during this pandemic.

Change Your Messaging

We are still living in uncertainty. Be considerate of people’s feelings and critically examine the context and tone of your messaging. Mention your services accurately in your ads such as “free home delivery” or “same day delivery”. Avoid showing large gatherings of people. 

You should experiment and run campaigns on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and other social platforms. Find out how people are searching for terms and topics related to the Coronavirus and adapt your marketing to help them in any way you can.

Take Advantage Of Cash Grants

Last but not least, eligible small businesses should take advantage of grants offered by the likes of Facebook and Google in their efforts to support and empower Small Business owners. Besides 

Facebook is offering $100 million in cash credits to support SMBs in 30 countries. To be eligible, you must:

  • Have between 2 and 50 employees
  • Have been in business for over a year
  • Have experienced challenges from COVID-19
  • Be in or near a location where Facebook operates

Similarly, Google will provide ad credits to “Small and medium-sized businesses globally, who have spent with a Google Ads account in ten out of twelve months of 2019, and in January and/or February of this year. Eligible customers are those who advertised directly with us or through a partner, and adhere to our advertising policies.”

PPC Campaigns

Wrap Up

While there is a positive impact amongst local grocery retailers and education industries, some of the most negatively impacted verticals include travel, tourism, leisure, car rentals and alternative medicine. We would advise you to observe the landscape well, gain up to date knowledge before making any big decisions. It is easier to experiment with new pricing and messaging and scale upwards when your PPC campaigns go right – than to completely start from scratch hoping for a miracle.

You might also enjoy

Responsive search ads

What are Responsive Search Ads and how to make the most out of them in 2022

CONTINUE READING What are Responsive Search Ads and how to make the most out of them in 2022

15 Facebook Marketing Statistics 2021

15 Awesome Facebook Marketing Statistics You Need to Know in 2021

CONTINUE READING 15 Awesome Facebook Marketing Statistics You Need to Know in 2021

Advanced-Facebook-Ads-Banner

The Best Way To Effectively Scale Your Facebook Ads (6 Advanced Techniques)

CONTINUE READING The Best Way To Effectively Scale Your Facebook Ads (6 Advanced Techniques)

Secret of successful ad copy

The Main Purpose of Your Ad Copy – To Get it Clicked

CONTINUE READING The Main Purpose of Your Ad Copy – To Get it Clicked

Test your E-commerce Product Before Launching

The Super Simple Way To Test Your E-commerce Product Before Launching

CONTINUE READING The Super Simple Way To Test Your E-commerce Product Before Launching

Filed Under: Paid Media, Digital Marketing, E-Commerce

The Super Simple Way To Test Your E-commerce Product Before Launching

January 1, 2021 by nxtwvlgth

Do you test your E-commerce product before launch to make sure it will be profitable?

You may have dozens of ideas, done a lot of research, perhaps even launched a few stores – and seen poor results. Well, majority of E-commerce businesses end up like this.

They build massive funnels first, and then they try to figure out a way to sell their product just to find out that it doesn’t – after spending a ton of money.

The key to making sales is to offer a product that people are willing to buy!

Although, you do have to invest a little bit of time and money, it’s going to cost substantially lesser to test your E-commerce product first rather than taking the route most people take.

The following steps will help you find out whether there’s an actual demand for your product before you invest in it.

Build a landing page and write your sales copy

Assuming you already have your idea of what you’re going to sell, the first thing you need to do is to create a landing page. There are couple of options here, Leadpages is our favorite.

Then create a basic text-based sales copy for your landing page. If you don’t know how to write one, hire a copywriter to do it for you.

The right copywriter will craft sales copy which will help to increase your conversions (we will get to the conversion part in a bit.)

And if you end up deciding to go with a different E-commerce idea, the copywriter can help you edit the sales copy, so you won’t have to keep repay to create new copy all over again.

Create an opt-in form

From the landing page you will have an ‘Add to cart’ button which you can either link to a new page or a pop-up window. A pop-up is what I recommend unless you have a good reason to send them to another page.

Once you have this set up, the opt-in form copy will be something like “Please enter your name and email address.”

After filling out the form, re-directed the visitor to a page that says “Sorry we’re currently out of stock on this product, we’ll let you know once it becomes available.”

Opt-ins vs ad spend

So this way you’re not actually selling anything – you’re driving the traffic from the ads to the landing page and then measuring the opt-ins.

Basically, you’re considering every opt-in registration as sales in this scenario – hence the conversions. Let’s say your product was worth $100 and you spent $500 on your ads to get 20 opt-ins.

We know in a 2-step process not everyone is going to buy. Since there’s no way to figure out how many will drop-off, we need to assume every opt-in is a buyer.

If you did 20 sales for $100 a piece you essentially earned $2000 in sales with $4 return on your $1 ad spend ($2000/$500.)

This means you have a profit potential with your E-commerce idea, which is a strong indicator that it makes sense for you to build or invest in the product.

If you didn’t get enough opt-ins to cover your ad spend, then you will need to test a new idea.

Create an email list

If you decide that you’re going to build the product, setup your e-store properly and then send an email to your opt-in list saying, “We got the product back in stock, visit the store to order”.

Majority of this list will buy – so you didn’t completely waste the initial ad spend.

If you end up going with a different E-commerce idea, you can promote that new product out to the same email list too, driving them through the top end of your funnel.

If you did 20 sales for $100 a piece you essentially earned $2000 in sales with $4 return on your $1 ad spend.

Either way, you can leverage the email list that you build.

Wrap up

The bulk of your efforts would be in getting the sales copy and landing page right, and running the ads properly.

Click here to download the funnel model to test your E-commerce product.

You might also enjoy

Responsive search ads

What are Responsive Search Ads and how to make the most out of them in 2022

CONTINUE READING What are Responsive Search Ads and how to make the most out of them in 2022

15 Facebook Marketing Statistics 2021

15 Awesome Facebook Marketing Statistics You Need to Know in 2021

CONTINUE READING 15 Awesome Facebook Marketing Statistics You Need to Know in 2021

Filed Under: E-Commerce, Paid Media

Primary Sidebar

Categories

  • Analytics
  • Content Marketing
  • Digital Marketing
  • E-Commerce
  • Paid Media
  • SEO
  • Uncategorized
  • Web Design and Development

Email newsletter

Sign up to receive updates and to hear what's going on with our company!

Footer

Facebook

LinkedIn

Instagram

Sharjah Shams Business Center,
Sharjah Media City free Zone,
Al Messaned
Sharjah - UAE

+971 522 718034

[email protected]

Sydney Suite 703, Level 7
The Trust Building
155 King Street
Sydney NSW 2000
AUSTRALIA

+61 432 958 550

[email protected]

REQUEST A QUOTE

SERVICES

  • Analytics
  • Branding
  • Content Marketing
  • E-commerce
  • Marketing Automation
  • Performance Marketing
  • SEO
  • Social Media Marketing
  • Web Design & Development

Copyright © 2023 Next Wavelength. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy | Sitemap