Customers trust you with their branding needs, so ensure yours is also on point from the moment the customer locks eyes at your building, enters your showroom and so on. Catching a customer’s attention visually is key, whether this is in-store with visuals, point of sales materials and Marketing collateral or outside branded with visuals, decorated windows or sandwich boards with your last offers, promotions and latest range of products.

Along with this consider things like promotional giveaways and merchandise giveaways branded with your info and details, branded samples and swatches. Anything that enhances your businesses brand that may also come useful for your customer.

You can also extend your offers to be store only. Offer showroom specific offers, discounts and incentives which can only be used by visiting your store, give people a reason to visit you.

Combining all these factors makes for an enticing store which hopefully both existing and prospective customers will visit. Offer a professional appearance, service and give customers a reason to go one step further than picking up the phone or searching for you on Google.

It allows them to visit you, see the quality product and proposition you offer, chat to you, get a feel for your business and brand. Despite the steady year on year growth of personalised clothing being sold online, there is still no replacement for seeing the quality of both a product and a service.

Do not just our word for it.

First and foremost - what is it we offer?

What are the other 'options'?

What about us?

Again do not just take our word for it...

To get your business thriving online in the post-COVID era we have put together some advice to help you achieve success with an ecommerce website.

Ensure the website layout is mobile & tablet friendly: An almost essential for a website which is still overlooked by many. Your website needs to look great on both a desktop PC/laptop and a mobile & tablet. Customers shopping from home are looking for a crisp, easy user experience to buy their goods online.

Mirror how you work in-store online: Make sure users know all about your knowledge & expertise. Customers previously would have potentially visited your store to find out about your products, service, and branding methods. With this being limited ensure this can be found online to put their minds at ease and help with any queries.

Communicate with your customers through the website: A simple point inexplicably overlooked, provide clear call to actions (CTAs) for customers. Make it easy for them to reach out to you, this can also be through the use of chat bots and live chat facilities.

Set up designated areas for your customers: There will be exiting customers – schools, clubs, businesses who will want to re-order. Provide them their very own shop facility to make their repeat orders simple.

Keep products & prices up to date: This is a mammoth task, but one that needs to be considered. Products are continuously dis-continued and added from suppliers with prices often changing. There are website solutions from wholesalers that manage this aspect but are extremely limited and tie you in to using their products offering no choices or flexibility. Create a website selling the products you want at the prices you want.

Keep your website safe & secure: Customer information needs to be safe & secure and since the introduction of GDPR this is under more scrutiny than ever before. Your website needs an SSL certificate to appear safe in your customers browsers. If it does not have one it will display an error and give your customers a poor user experience or cast doubt in their mind.

Taking payments online: Something not many consider when looking for an ecommerce website, you need a secure payment processor and checkout plus in most cases a merchant account. There is often a monthly cost to these services from banks & payment providers.

Lastly, consider the costs of building an ecommerce website. The garment decoration industry is unique and to build a solution from scratch with products and branding options is complex and expensive. An ecommerce solution may not tick every box a bespoke website does, but it will save you £1000s in development and increase your businesses sales post COVID.

For more information or to book an online demo to see how we could help your print & embroidery business with its website email info@etraderwebsites.co.uk or call 029 2074 1663

Similar with other Online Marketing tools, look at things like Sponsored Ads on Social Media, Google Adwords and identify if there is opportunity for your business. Plan a strategy, budget and build all the key words ready to go live to your audience once business is fully operational.

You might think all this sounds a bit costly. Where will the budget come from with cashflow being tight, it is a great opportunity for a bit of Marketing DIY. Grow your knowledge, skills and carry out the review and analysis. Plus there is also a chance to broaden your skillset and carry out these ideas yourself learning on the go, familiarising yourself with Social Media channels, or testing our different pieces of software for CRM, Email Campaigns, Social Media scheduling and so on.

It is an unprecedented time that presents many challenges but the optimistic business owner the freed up time is a great opportunity to look at your business, think of where it was, where it is now and think of where you want it to be in a year’s time. Use the time to develop your skills and your business, time wasted is time lost.

There are a few things to consider when using an automated approach:

• Define your goals & outcomes: What is your campaigns end goal? What data is relevant to be collected and collated? Knowing your aims & goals allows you to decipher what data is the most relevant and appropriate to use.
• Complete a data audit: Your business probably has an abundance of data readily available. Data from Analytics, Webmasters & Ads plus any CRM data or transactional data from previous orders and enquiries. Assess this data and work out what is relevant, what can be used and what would provide value to your business and its online efforts.
• Consider external data sources: Alongside having data about existing customers, creating an online profile for a new potential customer is essential. Use public data sources such as Google Trends, UK Data Service and other readily available datasets to identify any existing online retail trends.

Undertaking Machine Learning & utilising AI in Marketing is in its infancy for businesses with only large multi-nationals having the facilities and resources to build bespoke software to fully utilise it. But there are a growing number of software available for small businesses to utilise with the pick of the bunch being Phraseee, Optimove, Rapidminer and Automat.

Similar with other Online Marketing tools, look at things like Sponsored Ads on Social Media, Google Adwords and identify if there is opportunity for your business. Plan a strategy, budget and build all the key words ready to go live to your audience once business is fully operational.

You might think all this sounds a bit costly. Where will the budget come from with cashflow being tight, it is a great opportunity for a bit of Marketing DIY. Grow your knowledge, skills and carry out the review and analysis. Plus there is also a chance to broaden your skillset and carry out these ideas yourself learning on the go, familiarising yourself with Social Media channels, or testing our different pieces of software for CRM, Email Campaigns, Social Media scheduling and so on.

It is an unprecedented time that presents many challenges but the optimistic business owner the freed up time is a great opportunity to look at your business, think of where it was, where it is now and think of where you want it to be in a year’s time. Use the time to develop your skills and your business, time wasted is time lost.

Test your businesses website loading speed using Page Insights on Google. If your loading speed needs improving work alongside a quality reputable web design designer. They will be able to help improve your sites speed with some of the below suggestions:

• Enabling compression: Use a programme (Gzip) to compress the size of your CSS, HTML & Javascript files on-site. For images compress the sizes using Photoshop or other design software.
• Reduce page re-directs: Every time a page directs to another page, the wait to find a search and page result increases. Ensure minimal re-directs as these slow down your loading time.
• Leverage browser caching: Browsers store information every time a user visits your website. Set your ‘expires’ header for a year, this reduces the loading speed over time as it loads saved information and doesn’t have to load the entire page.
• Improve server response time: Server response time is affected by the number of traffic your site generates, the amount of information it has to load plus the software and hosting package you use. Ensure the server you use has adequate space, the most up-to date software and deals with issues like slow queries and performance.
• Optimize images: A simple but effective tip for improving your businesses website. Ensure images are a relatively small file size and correct format for loading up in an adequate time.

Make sure it looks professional, promotes trust and reflects the brand and values of your business, and of course sells something. Your homepage especially needs to do this, but equally important, it must be flexible enough for you to easily update with your latest offers, promotions, best-selling products, content, social media campaigns and so on.

Try looking objectively at your homepage, if you're not happy with it then it's unlikely your potential customers will be. If you want an idea of just how critical this stuff is online, I found this article 'a real eye opener': http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/223150

Focus on marketing, your businesses biggest potential income generator. 

When all that hard work and effort you have put in to promoting your new or existing website starts to pay off and the orders, customers emails and phone-calls are coming in, whatever you do, don't send them back to the place they just came from (your website) to try again, 'cause they'll go somewhere else!

Making sure your website gives the best customer experience possible, and when you get to that dream position of how to handle all the orders then look at the rest of the stuff.

When is a Website Not a Website?

If you want a website that books the job in, does the proofing for you, creates the delivery note, sends the invoice, collects the payments and even makes the tea. That's not a 'website'! 

There's plenty of software out there that'll handle all that (maybe not the tea) and will serve you well. You can get it built specifically or integrate it with your website. We meet lots of people in our industry who tell us about how much time they spend on this kind of stuff, trying to do it themselves, trying to figure out how these systems work, attempting to upload a zillion products, worrying about whether they need to add more widgets or features to make it better for them. 

What about the customer? 

Excercise caution if you find something that promises to do it all in one, that's a tall order to be all things to all 'platforms'. 

What if you want to change your website? 

You shouldn't have to change your order processing system. What if you want to update your brand and improve your marketing or get a swanky new responsive website, you shouldn't have to change your proofing system or accounts package.

Don't get me wrong, it's not that this stuff isn't important, it is! But they are not the same and none of it will win you any business...

One last thought... 

Try setting up a new site from a website design company online, fully branded for your business to sell your embroidered or printed clothing. It will cost £10k+ and take months of planning and consideration.

For a sensible solution that helps businesses actually generates income get in touch on info@etraderwebsites.co.uk or call 029 2074 1663. 

We will happily chat to you and see if we can possibly help grow your business and its online presence.

With that in mind, here are five tips to help declutter your businesses website:

• Streamline Your Home/Navigation Bar: This is the spine of your site and holds it all together in terms of accessibility. Make the bar a simple to use, informative tool and do not overload it with options and information. Organise it and make it concise for your customer.
• Less is More: Content is a main fundamental element of SEO, but sometimes less is more. Customers are after quality not quantity, do not bombard them huge chunks of content and information. Be clear, keep the readers attention and focus on what information is crucial to them when purchasing or enquiring through your website.
• Continuously Remove Out of Date Items: Often one that is overlooked. Simply take a few moments to remove any out of date seasonal content and campaigns. Keep on top of your website and ensure that your site looks like it is both managed & professional.
• Manage Loading Times: Customers are an impatient bunch and often happy to shop around over the littlest error. Ensure your website does not take forever to load, work with your developer or provider to make sure customers can navigate your website quickly.
• Clear Call to Acton (CTA)/Contact Details: Ensure all action buttons and contact details are visually easy for customers to find. Even if they are struggling a tiny bit to navigate your website or are stuck for choice on what to order these will improve your chances of winning the order and not frustrating a potential customer.

To find out more view the rest of our website or alternatively book an online demo by getting in touch on 029 2074 1663 or email info@etraderwebsites.co.uk.

To get the most from these promotions here are a few simple pointers to get you started:

Start planning now: Plan your promotions in advance, build up suspense with your customer base and let them know of any upcoming offers and savings in advance whether its in-store, on Social Media or via an Email Campaign.

Create specific page copy: Plan the products or services you are going to offer savings on. Ensure your website is optimised with product pages for these specific items. Point customers in the right direction and ensure your user experience is customer focused, they are not afraid to shop around when it comes to huge savings!

Create eye catching content: Whether it is for your businesses website, Social Media or to be distributed to your list of customer contacts creating eye catching content significantly increases click through rates.

Plan for an upsurge: Ensure your website can deal with increased volumes of traffic, too many page requests can slow the site down or crash the site itself. Test your website using tools like Loadimpact.com to ensure the server that your hosts your businesses website can take the strain.

Test, test, test: Before any of your promotions, artwork and copy goes live test your processes and ensure your site is fully prepared, functioning and operating as you would expect with the new pages, copy etc. Get another set of eyes from a team member and gain feedback.

Some businesses go as far as offering loyal customers a first glance ‘Exclusive’ access to a flash sale. This is used to gain customer feedback, fine tune and tweak their offering to make sure everything runs as smoothly as possible in time for the main event.

Whether you love it or hate it, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are here to stay for the foreseeable future. The chances are if you are not taking part, your competitors are. If you think it would be something that would add value to your business dip your toes in, start planning and prepare a campaign using these few simple pointers.