Once you fully understand who your customers are, you can tailor your offering to them. But don’t just think that your site should be a one-way selling machine.
Long-term sales growth is driven by genuine engagement with consumers, rather than just throwing offers at them. This spans the design, social media and content aspects of your website.
“Most Australian sites still focus on a narrow functionality, in a very debranded way,” says Hosking.
“You need to get a designer in early, along with your business brain, to think through the brand and how you’ll be speaking to people.”
“The design needs to convey who you are and who you’re talking to. You have to deliver on your brand promise, whatever that is. It shouldn’t really be lowest price – you need to offer more than that. Target can offer kids’ T-shirts for $4 – that’s not us, and it shouldn’t be most start-ups.”
Offer something of value to users beyond your product or service. Consider embedding competitions, games or calculators into your site.
Encourage them to interact with you via social media and try to grasp what interests and excites them. Even if it doesn’t directly lead to a sale, tapping into this will do wonders for your long-term image.
Also, think about your packaging – RedBubble’s redesign allows it to easily get ‘RB’ onto its packaging, an important branding exercise for online-only brands that don’t have the same amount of customer touch points as physical retailers.
The main advantage of launching a web-only business is the cost – stripped of the overheads of premises, fixtures and fittings and equipment, online start-ups can run a very efficient model.
However, as selling via the internet becomes ingrained within businesses and rises in popularity among consumers, the costs are beginning to rise.
In order to stand out from an increasingly cluttered field, you will need a striking design, easy user experience and a secure payment platform that doesn’t fall over or get hacked into on a regular basis.
All of these things cost money. If you baulk at the cost, you should ask yourself how important the web is to your business and whether you’d invest a large amount in another area of your operations that’s of equal value.
Hosking says that in addition to the 18 months taken to overhaul RedBubble, he also spent $200,000 on market research and design, which doesn’t include development costs.
“It’s a big outlay for a small company like ours,” he admits. “But that’s what we had to pay to really show what the brand meant to customers and how customers use us. I can’t put a figure on what the return will be, you can’t easily quantify that.”
“But we want to be a global brand for those that aspire to creative individualism. In Australia, brands such as Billabong and Quiksilver have done that in the past and we want to be in that category. And that takes investment.”
The best way to find out what works and what doesn’t is, of course, to take a wander through the internet yourself.
What you should find is that cutting edge design and great useability isn’t confined to a niche of cool consumer-facing brands – online excellence is filtering down to businesses of all shapes and sizes, across a range of sectors.
Asked for standout sites for start-ups to reference, Franklin picks out US marketing software firm HubSpot, saying: “The homepage is very clear, they have lots of information online but in a big, clear font. It’s clear what they are and they do a good job of building trust by offering a free trial of their software.”
Franklin’s other choice is Sydney accountant Kelly & Partners: “It delivers something you maybe wouldn’t expect from an accountancy firm. It has a blog which allows you to get to know the company and it has a range of free tools available via the homepage. It also makes it clear how you can interact with the brand.”
Hosking picks out design site Fab.com and fashion hub Gilt as eCommerce sites that have got it right.
“Both are clean, clear and have a clear segment of the audience they can talk to,” he says. “They are brave about their content by offering a richer visual experience. They are making a conscious effort to be more beautiful.”
