What is Responsive Design?

Simply, when a website is responsive the website is adaptable across various platforms– based on the size of the screen viewing the website. A responsive website automatically changes to fit the device you’re viewing it on. Mobile Responsive Websites are aimed at all manner of sized displays – varying from small screen handheld devices to large widescreen monitors covering every other size in between.

Why Have Responsive Websites?

The need for garment decorators to deliver online is at an all-time high, the marketplace is intense and the competition is tough.

So garment decorators need to use any tool necessary to stay ahead of the fierce competition!

You want your customers to keep coming back; you want them to have the best experience possible through any means necessary. And this now includes your businesses website! Previously, businesses just create websites and the online platform will look after itself. However the continuous rise and development of tablet and mobile technology has meant viewing websites has become an ‘on the go’ experience – customers are not afraid to purchase using their phones and tablets anymore. The chances are your nearest competitor is not making use of responsive design, so why not make the most of this new development and stay ahead of the competition?!

What Does This Mean For Your Business?                             

We all understand Google & SEO are crucial for your businesses online performance. Google fully values responsive websites and the customer’s online experience. Google has recently not so subtly stated the desire for all websites to eventually go this way. It is much easier and much more efficient using responsive design from Google's SEO perspective - Google's bots find crawling websites, indexing and ranking pages much simpler using responsive design as it simple requires just one URL!

 The value for your decorating business is incredible – 24% of Google searches are now being performed on tablet and mobile devices and 26% of e-mails received are viewed on mobiles, with a further 11% on tablets. The development of handheld and compact technology has led to the fast tracking of mobile responsive design– it’s a new concept to web designers but customers from all sectors are already demanding it.

With the development of a responsive website, the sky is the limit! Decorators alike can rejoice – your business can now provide customers with quality online service wherever they are, whatever they’re doing 24/7, 365 days of the year.  The use of responsive sites can also generate greater leads; the multi-platform nature of the website furthers your reach to customers outside of your traditional audience!

Here are some of our favourite examples we have found from garment decorators around the UK. Try them out on different devices & see how they ‘Respond’ - giving you the best user experience possible!

Kustom Kits 

Kustom-Clothing

Axent Embroidery

 It’s a simple, but highly innovative concept. Mobile Responsive Design provides an all-round solution to your online services covering all your customers viewing devices. It’s beneficial for both your print business and your customers. Your customer gets the optimum online experience using your website and you simply provide them this using just one platform.

Using just one platform also allows you to reach wider audiences at a relatively low cost, but the greater benefits are in term of SEO – your campaign becomes much easier to manage.  Instead of managing each platform’s SEO, using responsive sites make managing a much simpler process – only one SEO campaign has to be managed instead of potentially having to manage several. Saving your business both valuable time & money!

 The customer experience is vital for any business but more so in the print & decorating business - retention is critical (See last week’s blog for more on that). Mobile Responsive Design on your site is a simple but effective way of providing your key customers what they want, when they want and wherever they want!

Online shopping is a pretty simple mundane task, a simple transaction process - nothing more, and nothing less. The transaction process is repeated online approximately 200,000 times per day for UK garment decorators. The worry for businesses is customers can afford to pick and choose who they deal with. The key for garment decorators is to set your online experience apart from your competitors, make your business stand out and offer your customers more.

Here at eTrader, we have come up with something to address the problem!

Your business will rarely meet the majority of your customers, so the key to success is offering customers more online – a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) to make your business stand out from your competitors and the rest of the crowd. Offer your customer the personal touch, the ‘experience’ and build up a connection through your website.

This is seen as essential online practice when dealing with larger customers. Whether your customer is a school, sports clubs, groups/organisations, regular contracts or repeat customers, you’ll want to do everything you can to make it as simple as possible for them to place orders and give them something your competitors can’t compete with!

Just Simply Remember - It may be your website but it’s their experience!

eTrader addresses the need of tailored online experiences by offering fully customisable shops that can be easily set up to meet each of your customer’s needs. For other businesses implementing this, the cost of using web developers to develop their existing or a new site is highly expensive and time consuming process. But with eTrader it could not be simpler, with easy to follow instructions letting you fully customise shops to meet each customer’s personal preference.

Creating shops streamlines business between you and your customers a much simpler process - cutting out the lengthy negotiations back and forth, the administration, processing etc. Setting up an online personal shop is the most effective way of personalising your larger customers shopping experience.

Customising your business is not difficult or time consuming but it is a key tool in ensuring you retain key customers and perform financially.

eTrader Tip: 

• Customise content within personalised shops to meet your major customer’s specific needs; retention is vital for garment decorators in the current economy!
• Provide your customer an online experience mirroring your in-store experience and service, this will ensure your customers will keep coming back!

The garment decorating industry is a complex one (as you’re all probably more than aware of!) there are many challenges ahead for garment decorators alike, however big or small your business is. The industry has seasonal peaks and troughs which most garment decorators simply accept - calling it the nature of the industry.

BUT the quiet period isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There are ways to make the most of the downturn and prepare your garment business for what your customers and the industry throw at you next. The key to doing this successfully involves developing skills and smart practices that will allow your business to remain profitable during off-seasons and periodic slowdowns.

Here are some of our key hints & tips to help you and your business during these times:

Gain an understanding of the cycles in the garment decorating industry: The industry has a natural yearly cycle which is pretty universal meaning seasonality is inevitable. The challenge for decorators alike is to understand each season, what it means for you, your business, your online performance and how to best utilise each season to maximise profit.

Work on your planning/management skills: A key tool in making the most of the downturn is foresight. As an owner of a garment decorating business, the focus is on profit not planning. However, much research shows planning is key in making this profit. Plan rigorously, leaving no stone unturned – consider all situations and scenarios for your embroidery or printing business and how to best prepare for these. Manage your resources and people as effectively as possible to fit into this plan and your overall strategy.

Generate new ideas and fill the service gap: The printing & embroidery industry is a highly adaptable sector; you can transform simple garments into anything you like; with flexible e-commerce systems (such as our eTrader websites) offering opportunities to branch into other areas/markets. You don’t have to build up expensive new businesses branching off your core business. Simply, test your products in new markets, tailor your new printed/embroidered products for certain industries and play about with ideas (In a cost effective manner of course).

Stay in touch with your customers: Become pragmatic, find your customers. Don’t wait for them to come back to you. A proactive approach to business in the quiet periods is much more likely to yield results than that of sitting around accepting the situation. The key is constant communication with your customers, simply send out soft email campaigns, engaging in social media campaigns or simply just make a courtesy call. Your prerogative will always be sales, but just simply let them know you and your business are still there to meet their needs.

In conclusion, these simple hints & tips show your printing and embroidery business does not have to come to an abrupt halt. There are many areas within your garment decoration business that can be used to increase sales and defeat the downturn.

The logic is simple: Build up your solid foundations for your core garment decorating business - but when the going gets tough, be smart,innovative and pragmatic in your approach to managing your business effectively.

Don’t just settle for following the normal industry cycles, set your own!          

It’s that time of year where garment decorators alike start to pull their hair out, the volume of sales has decreased - the school uniforms have been fulfilled, sports teams simply don’t order once their seasons underway and businesses are simply being constrained by tight budgets. The key for garment decorators is to somehow not just survive but thrive.

The answers simple! – Develop your online presence; reaching new levels with your business. Here are a few simple pieces of advice to help you improve your business online and enhance your customer’s online experience & increase sales:

Homepage

1. Arouse interest and create demand: Exciting and emotional images and texts with call to action can whet your customer’s appetite.

2. Sales appeal: Position your top selling products in highly visible areas along with featured products. Make products highly desirable and eye catching using the tools at your disposal.

3. Consistency: Be clear and consistent throughout your homepage, using clear concise eye- catching content sticking to your brand guidelines and aimed at your target audience and key customers.

Product Pages

1. Present your product appealingly: Make it eye catching, something to remember! Display big images and offer the possibility to zoom in.

2. Information about product features: Clearly show the most important product details. Many don’t do this on sites but by showing the customer your attention to detail, you’ll reap the rewards.

Purchasing

1. Stick to the basic ordering/invoicing: Remove all website elements which are not necessary to display to keep the focus on the actual products.

2. Create safety and trust: Keep on displaying important trust elements such as customer reviews.

3. Communicate effectively: Offer the customer the latest updates regarding their order as soon as possible (Generating that previously mentioned trust).

4. Quick and customer-friendly process: Stick to the user friendly experience, offer customers what they want, customers often require a speedy easy to order process (like the eTrader way). Stick to this and you can’t go wrong!

 Final thought, it’s important to see things from the customers’ perspective. From main page to check out, always be self-critical and ask yourself what you can do to improve your customer’s experience. 

If your company has separate departments or suppliers for marketing and web design, the responsibility for turning website visits into conversions (sales and enquiries) can tend to fall between two camps. This can be bad news for any business hoping to turn their online investments into real profitability.

So who is responsible for ensuring the website leads to a conversion? And how do you make sure the right people, in the right departments, take the right steps to make your website convert? In this article I look at the problem and offer some tips to help you turn your website views into conversions.

You may assume that the optimisation of conversions is part of the web designer’s role (they’re the technical experts after all). However, as marketing managers delve deeper into the world of online marketing, conversion optimisation becomes much more of a collaborative effort between the two teams.

Marketers have a unique understanding of the needs and wants of their customers, this gives them valuable insight into what will convert visitors into clients or customers, and what won’t. These sorts of Insights may not be available to many web designers. Meanwhile, many marketers may not realise how important their customer knowledge is to conversion optimisation and how crucial their understanding is to successful web marketing.

I will now suggest some key points that when applied can improve website conversions, the points are summarised on a format that both marketers and web designers can use:

Delivery Relevance

Clear headlines and suitable images reassure potential customers they are on the right page to find the information they need, this ensures they continue their ‘journey’ on your site and are much more likely to convert in the long run.

Integration

As a marketer you work hard to entice customers to visit the website. Keeping your message consistent from offline to online will improve conversions by keeping visitors on site for the same reasons they visited in the first place (the messages in your offline material).

Details

Whilst short sharp points will attract attention, visitors are also likely to be looking for informative text which helps them to make buying decisions. Give them all the facts they need to make the decision to buy/ enquire.

User Journey

This is where the web design department becomes a part of the optimisation process. Every page should be designed to take users on a journey, whilst minimising the number of clicks to reach their destination.

Page Length

Part of conversion optimisation is about thesting out which approach is most effective. Longer pages with lots of information or shorter, more impactful pages. Try both and test which is the most effective at converting

Graphics

Through experience with offline brochures and advertisements, marketers will have gained useful insight into the images that illicit the strongest response from the target market. These should be incorporated into your web design to improve conversions.

Menu Options

Reducing the number of menu options on a page also reduces the number of possible clicks, often resulting in improved conversions

Call to Action

Marketers should be adept at writing persuasive copy, and strategically placed calls to action could be the difference between a conversion and a lost customer

Whilst the web department will have an expert understanding of what looks the most appealing, website design should be guided by the expertise of marketers. By working together and analysing the data, conversion optimisation becomes a lot easier.

There is no single solution to website conversion optimisation. Only testing and in house knowledge and expertise can help to provide your customers with the ultimate online experience.