In my last post, I offered some tips for improving the visitor experience at online retailing sites. To continue the discussion, below are some simple website enhancements that can help your customers find information they need more easily, and will likely lead to more valuable interactions.

• Prominently display the customer service phone number on the home page (and every page of the site) – and make other company contact information easy to find. You don’t want people to have to hunt down the info. Check out the home page for Allé Jewelry, which displays the company phone number right under the logo at the top of every page.
• Place the e-mail subscription box high up on the web page so it’s more readily seen – more subscribers can equal more sales. Agri Supply places its email signup box near the upper left corner of the page, which makes it hard to miss.
• Give visitors a good incentive to sign up for e-mails, such as: “Want to receive additional discounts, offers and hear more about our events? Sign up here.” Buggies Unlimited touts exclusive deals for people who subscribe to its e-mails.
• Test different placements for your search box. Most retailers place it somewhere in the upper right-hand section of the page. However, some of our customers – such as WEBS and LydiasUniforms.com – place the search box on the center of the page, and even experiment with different search box sizes. It’s worth testing placements and sizes to see what works best for your customers.
• Include a “Your Account” button in an easy-to-spot location on the home page, so return visitors can quickly check the status of recent orders, their purchasing history, etc.
• Include a “Locally in Retail Stores” link so people can easily find out what items are available in stores nearby, in case they prefer to purchase offline.

These are just a few things you can do to make your website perform better. If you have other ideas to share, feel free to post a comment below.

As head of SLI’s customer success management team, I’ve had lots of interactions with online retailers and have seen many instances of companies not doing all they can to turn online visits into sales. Simple things like not utilizing empty space on a web page or offering easily viewed company contact information can amount to lost opportunities – or basically, leaving money on the table.

Based on my own experience (and that of my colleagues), working closely with retailers to improve the usability of their sites, as well as industry research I’ve come across, I’ve put together some fairly simple tips for online merchants – no matter how big or how small the company – to improve the visitor experience and generate a higher ROI (Return on Interaction) online. Below is the first set of tips. In my next blog post, I’ll offer more suggestions for enhancing your site to give customers better access to information and drive stronger interactions.

Feature a new “Item of the Week”: This can catch customers’ interest and is also indexed by search engines as refreshed content each week, so it helps generate more visibility. You can feature it right on the home page – as a banner or in a special content box, or in another way that fits the look and feel of your site. BikeSomeWhere.com does this by showing “this week’s newest products” in a prominent box on the home page.

Make the most of empty space: Use empty white space on the right side of the webpage for a list of “bestselling items” – again, because this content refreshes on a frequent basis, it’s indexed by search engines. Also, research shows that most sites don’t utilize the right side of the page, so it’s valuable real estate that’s likely available, and can help clean up content that may be cluttering the left side of your site pages. On its site’s right-hand margin, Beauty Bridge lists “best sellers” to highlight product options for shoppers.

Show rotating “featured items” on front page: This is a good way to showcase different items you offer, perhaps popular sellers or items you want to promote more. You can do this in a rotating banner – perhaps midway down the page – where every few seconds a new item shows up. The feature can help keep customers engaged, reduce clutter on the home page, and increase site usability. Hansen’s Surf Shop does this on its home page with a rotating banner, allowing visitors to see a constantly changing selection of clothing, accessories, and even special offers like free shipping.

In my next blog post, I’ll tell you how to make your online retailing site more user-friendly.

One of our goals for 2011 is to significantly beef up our arsenal of useful, educational content. Along those lines, we’ve just made available a new Ecommerce Podcast interview with Tim Parry, senior writer for Multichannel Merchant. Tim talked with our CEO Shaun Ryan about how multichannel retailers are using e-commerce marketing tools to boost sales. For example, Tim explained that printed catalogs are still very much in favor and are great for driving customers to a website, and that shoppers with smartphones typically use them in physical stores to research products and compare prices, and possibly make a purchase. Tim shared lots of interesting thoughts on ecommerce trends in the year ahead, and the podcast is definitely worth a listen.

We’ve also released a new video tutorial in which Shaun offers tips for the best ways to create site search for mobile devices. Watch the video here, and you’ll see how site search results should look on a mobile screen, what information to highlight (like prices) and how to display things like refinements and customer ratings.

In the coming weeks we’ll also offer video tutorials on things like refinements, Rich Auto Complete, and social media in site search. Stay tuned.

Last week, Brian Burstein of MarketingSherpa shared some useful tips on the SherpaBlog for maximizing your site search (a few were provided by our CEO, Shaun Ryan) in his post “On-site Search: How to help your customers find what they want (to buy).” Interestingly, as Brian reports, “According to the MarketingSherpa Ecommerce Benchmark Report, customers who use the search box on ecommerce sites convert at nearly three times the rate of general browsers. Yet, 52% of marketers graded their internal search a ‘D’ or ‘F.’”

It’s staggering that so many marketers give their site search such a poor grade. Whatever the reason, Brian’s post includes a variety of solid tips that are fairly easy to implement. I recommend you check it out, and commend Brian for providing this advice to online marketers as site search is a critical yet often overlooked feature of any website. What grade do you give your own site search? If it’s anything lower than a B+ (or even if you give it an A), it’s probably time to give this feature some attention.