E-Commerce, Web Development

Description

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This package focuses on Brand Loyalty

By nurturing a consistent relationship with customers and users, a brand begins to build influence, which, in turn, becomes brand loyalty. Brand loyalty and trust occur when your consumer is loyal to your brand, not simply the products. Many variables impact this influence, and increasingly, the presence of digital marketing is facilitating these connections via a digital ecosystem. Brand influence is an integral part of building a brand — especially marketing to millennials and Gen Z. These generations are looking for brands they can relate to and feel good about being associated with.

If your customers are converted into advocates, this will help immensely with launching new products, keeping retention up and impacting the overall bottom line, particularly through online community engagement.Understanding that an increasing number of consumers will engage with brands online before making a purchase, it’s clear that an integrated website marketing strategy is essential to reach and convert leads both on and offline.With a solid digital foundation in place, anchored by a well-strategized website, a company can effectively leverage positive brand image to increase sales, build PR, generate a robust social media presence and create a top-down marketing campaign across all media.

  • Landing Page Design, Focus is why landing pages are so effective for marketing. As opposed to homepages, which are designed for exploration, landing pages are customized to a specific campaign or offer and guide visitors towards a single call to action. In short, landing pages are designed for conversion. Think of a web page as a bucket and the traffic you’re sending to it as water. A landing page bucket has one hole drilled into the bottom, so the stream of water naturally flows through that specific hole (call to action) and can be directed to a spot you’ve chosen. A homepage bucket has multiple holes in the bottom and around the sides. You can choose which tap that water is sourced from—Instagram, email, a Google Ad—but once it enters the bucket, you can’t choose which hole it’ll flow through or where it will land. Those extra holes are conversion “leaks.” Landing pages zero in on one chosen conversion goal, giving you more control over where traffic flows, and ultimately, where your marketing efforts and ad dollars go.
  • Style Guide, You’ll receive a style guide for yourself and in the event you have to pass along your branding to a new employee, another designer or marketing firm. This way there will be no question as to how your brand should be communicated.
  • Mobile optimization, The process of adjusting your website content to ensure that visitors that access the site from mobile devices have an experience customized to their device. Optimized content understands the mobile user. It easily adjusts to fit on smaller screens.      

This package focuses on Marketing Advances

When strategizing an integrated marketing plan for your brand, the right web design is essential. The standard for web design is no longer just function or visibility; it’s all in the details that lead to how a user will engage with your brand. From layout to color, these critical elements work together to build a digital tool that, when strategically used, can improve online marketing campaigns significantly. A well-crafted website can benefit a business in many tangible ways, including increased sales and leads. Effectively, a great website is its own campaign, constantly working to support the brand. What’s more is that in comparison to other marketing initiatives, a website is easily trackable, allowing brands to better understand consumer behavior and providing insight into what is and isn’t working.

"But how can a company get there?"

Our digital agency is asked this question on an almost daily basis. Below, we’ll explore some of our implementations, best practices and ways in which website design can impact the marketing aspect of a brand.

  • Differentiation

It is important to differentiate from competitors. And when a website is outdated and clunky, that website will more than likely experience high bounce-back rates. It may seem tempting to build a website within a template and plug your business information in and be done, but it isn’t that simple. In our experience, a custom website with a storytelling perspective and aligning visuals makes an impact with both the market and the consumer that won’t soon be forgotten.

  • User Experience

A well-designed website will create a journey for the user to engage, explore and interact with the brand. Building meaningful first impressions — from brand to consumer — impacts the bottom line and overall objectives for a brand. User experience has become an essential investment for a brand, with users expecting an authentic and intuitive website that reflects the brand’s vision, perspective and service level. Ensure the ideal user experience through strategic plans such as user testing and A/B testing, which are critical to determining the success of a website.

  • Conversion

Monitoring conversion rates when analyzing metrics of how a website is performing is critical to offering the ideal customer experience (CX). Because a conversion rate is correlated directly to how a user engages with the website, it is a hugely important factor for a company to leverage in making marketing decisions.Web design, when properly strategized for conversion, directly impacts conversion rates. While the idea of a website template solution seems simple and low cost, this can cause a huge negative impact on the user experience of a website and overall conversion rate. If a user is exploring a website and is not able to locate the information they are looking for as a result of a poorly placed call-to-action button or unclear navigation, it’s likely they will quickly leave and go on to another website — maybe even a competitor’s website. 

This package puts you amongst the elites by implementing the listed advances...

Innovation

To many business owners, innovation can be an intimidating word with a lot of expectations. If you listen to the shareholders of a certain fruit-flavored technology company, innovation means inventing a new product or service that changes the way humans engage with the world every half-decade or so.

But to brands such as yours, this word doesn’t have to be so complicated. In its simplest form, innovation just means to “never settle.”

Looking back on your brand’s history, your company may have already done some amazing things. It may have already built a fantastic product for its customers or introduced a new ideology that changes the way your industry operates, and while this in itself is a great achievement, your brand cannot continue to grow by being satisfied with its past. You have to keep looking toward the future for inspiration: What else can your brand do to make its products/services better? Or what new products/services can you create to move society forward?

Like your favorite smartphone app, your brand should always be making improvements — iterating. Even if these changes are miniscule, the greatest threat to any brand is to stop building upon its future.

The world will inevitably continue to change. Your brand must change with it, or it will be left behind.

Humanity

You may be asking yourself: What does humanity have to do with business?  Everything, actually.

If you read over the last section on innovation again, you’ll notice several odes to humanity spread throughout it:

“Innovation means inventing a new product or service that changes the way humans engage with the world.”

“What new products/services can you create to move society forward?”

At Media Maven Marketing Agency, we often talk about serving the people behind the businesses that we work with. Sure, a brand’s measureable income and success are important, but when scanning through spreadsheets upon spreadsheets of data each week, it can be easy to forget about the human beings who run these companies.

The same goes for your customers. These people aren’t just dollar bills on an earnings sheet. They are living beings with real wants, needs, concerns, emotions and more. They go to work to support themselves or their families, they pay bills to keep the lights on, and they face challenges, some of which may be even greater than those you’ve ever experienced.

As a company, it is your job to remember that your customers are human. What product or service can you, with all of your knowledge and industry expertise, provide so that your customers’ lives are truly better with your brand than they are without it?

 Marketing

This third key to success isn’t just here because we’re a marketing consultancy and agency. Marketing is really important.

The old adage states: “If you build it, they will come.”

If the proprietor of this saying lived in a small town where everyone knew his/her name, this may have been true. But today, as millions of businesses compete to sell their products and services in real life, as well as across the web, this saying no longer suffices. Street corners and online spaces are chalked full of companies trying to sell their products to turn a profit.

What makes your company unique?

In addition to innovating and keeping humanity at the forefront of your business strategy, good marketing is how you break through the noise. Without it, search engines, like Google and Bing, cannot find your brand and show it to the people who are looking for the products/services you sell. Your business is less likely to appear in Google Maps, thus preventing consumers from visiting your business.

Without marketing, your brand and all the hard work associated with it is invisible. If you’re invisible, you perceptually don’t exist. And if you don’t exist, consumers cannot find you, see what you sell and invest in your business.

Q: HOW DOES DROP SHIPPING WORK?

A: An e-commerce business decides to offer a new product to customers. Instead of buying mass quantities of that product and storing it and shipping it out themselves, the company researches until they find a manufacturer interested in working with a retailer to distribute their products. The retailer contacts the manufacturer and reaches an agreement: the retailer will host the product listing on their website and make the sale, and the manufacturer will ship it out. The manufacturer is the entity that both produces, stores, and ships the product. 

 The retailer may agree to pay the manufacturer $25 for a product, so they might choose to list the product for $100 on their website, leaving them with a profit of $75.

Q: WHY DO COMPANIES CHOOSE DROP SHIPPING?

A: Many online stores will use drop shipping to expand their product offering to customers. It’s a low-risk way to test potential merchandise without having to pay for inventory up front. A home goods retailer, for example, might be considering offering a line of outdoor supplies. Instead of purchasing the inventory, finding a place to store it, and risking taking a loss if products don’t sell, they can work directly with a drop-ship supplier of outdoor goods. They can promote the items on their own site to gauge the interest level of the consumer base without spending money on the inventory in advance.

It’s also a helpful option for new startups, as these companies don’t usually have a ton of cash on hand. The manufacturer takes care of the storage and shipping, so there’s a low barrier to entry on the part of the retailer.

Q: ARE DROP SHIPPING BUSINESSES LEGAL?

A: The concept of drop shipping is 100 percent legal. It's not necessarily a business strategy — it’s a fulfillment method. A manufacturer has 1,000 units of product, but it’s generic, so drop-ship suppliers provide the product to these retailers to apply their own brand to it. And each supplier agreement has different terms, which is where the legal aspect comes in. There's always an agreement between the retailer and the drop-ship supplier that have specific terms that will be legally binding.

Q: WHO IS LIABLE IN THE CASE OF A PRODUCT DEFECT?

A: The liability will be laid out in the agreement between the retailer and supplier. It often depends on who has more leverage — a drop-ship supplier for a large corporation will likely have the upper hand when it comes to determining which side takes responsibility. 

Q: SHOULD COMPANIES EVENTUALLY BRING DROP-SHIP INVENTORY IN HOUSE?

A: It depends on the strategic goals of the company. Profit margins tend to be low with drop shipping. The drop-ship supplier is the one who has all the fulfillment costs, but usually the retailer has all the costs of acquiring the customer, running the advertising and promotions, and driving demand. Retailers often aren’t able to generate a lot of new cash. 

The choice to bring drop shipping in house depends on how well the drop ship inventory is moving and if retailers prefer to use drop shipping for a few products or as a way to retain customers, rather than expand the customer base.

Q: DOES DROP SHIPPING BENEFIT CUSTOMERS?

A: Many of the benefits of drop shipping are on the merchant side — low overhead, low risk — but customers do benefit as well. The flexibility that drop shipping provides to merchants as a way to quickly begin offering new products to customers makes it easier for a retailer to start providing a wider variety of products to their customers and to consider what product their customers might need. If a customer is a fan of a product or brand, and they want the retailer to offer more options, instead of spending months designing and developing a new product, the retailer can turn to a drop-shipping supplier and start offering the product the next week.

Q: IS THERE A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ADVERTISING IN-HOUSE INVENTORY AND DROP SHIPPING PRODUCTS?

A: To a customer it should be relatively incognito because the retailer has branded the drop-shipped products as their own product. But there are differences. Since drop-shipped products have lower margins, and a retailer might make more of a profit on a product they produce and store in house, they have to be careful when evaluating how to spend their marketing budget.

Q: HOW DO STORE-WIDE PROMOTIONS AFFECT DROP-SHIPPED PRODUCTS?

A: Every discount or promotion includes fine print and exclusions. There are rules the retailer can apply to certain SKUs so the coupon doesn’t work for a drop-ship item, because the low profit margins mean a discount might cause the company to lose money.

However, in certain cases a retailer might include the drop-shipped products in a promotion. They may lose money on that specific sale, but it could lead to customer retention or customer acquisition, which will be more profitable in the long run.

Feel free to check out our portfolio for visual references! 

          

This package focuses on Brand Loyalty

By nurturing a consistent relationship with customers and users, a brand begins to build influence, which, in turn, becomes brand loyalty. Brand loyalty and trust occur when your consumer is loyal to your brand, not simply the products. Many variables impact this influence, and increasingly, the presence of digital marketing is facilitating these connections via a digital ecosystem. Brand influence is an integral part of building a brand — especially marketing to millennials and Gen Z. These generations are looking for brands they can relate to and feel good about being associated with.

If your customers are converted into advocates, this will help immensely with launching new products, keeping retention up and impacting the overall bottom line, particularly through online community engagement.Understanding that an increasing number of consumers will engage with brands online before making a purchase, it’s clear that an integrated website marketing strategy is essential to reach and convert leads both on and offline.With a solid digital foundation in place, anchored by a well-strategized website, a company can effectively leverage positive brand image to increase sales, build PR, generate a robust social media presence and create a top-down marketing campaign across all media.

  • Landing Page Design, Focus is why landing pages are so effective for marketing. As opposed to homepages, which are designed for exploration, landing pages are customized to a specific campaign or offer and guide visitors towards a single call to action. In short, landing pages are designed for conversion. Think of a web page as a bucket and the traffic you’re sending to it as water. A landing page bucket has one hole drilled into the bottom, so the stream of water naturally flows through that specific hole (call to action) and can be directed to a spot you’ve chosen. A homepage bucket has multiple holes in the bottom and around the sides. You can choose which tap that water is sourced from—Instagram, email, a Google Ad—but once it enters the bucket, you can’t choose which hole it’ll flow through or where it will land. Those extra holes are conversion “leaks.” Landing pages zero in on one chosen conversion goal, giving you more control over where traffic flows, and ultimately, where your marketing efforts and ad dollars go.
  • Style Guide, You’ll receive a style guide for yourself and in the event you have to pass along your branding to a new employee, another designer or marketing firm. This way there will be no question as to how your brand should be communicated.
  • Mobile optimization, The process of adjusting your website content to ensure that visitors that access the site from mobile devices have an experience customized to their device. Optimized content understands the mobile user. It easily adjusts to fit on smaller screens.      

This package focuses on Marketing Advances

When strategizing an integrated marketing plan for your brand, the right web design is essential. The standard for web design is no longer just function or visibility; it’s all in the details that lead to how a user will engage with your brand. From layout to color, these critical elements work together to build a digital tool that, when strategically used, can improve online marketing campaigns significantly. A well-crafted website can benefit a business in many tangible ways, including increased sales and leads. Effectively, a great website is its own campaign, constantly working to support the brand. What’s more is that in comparison to other marketing initiatives, a website is easily trackable, allowing brands to better understand consumer behavior and providing insight into what is and isn’t working.

"But how can a company get there?"

Our digital agency is asked this question on an almost daily basis. Below, we’ll explore some of our implementations, best practices and ways in which website design can impact the marketing aspect of a brand.

  • Differentiation

It is important to differentiate from competitors. And when a website is outdated and clunky, that website will more than likely experience high bounce-back rates. It may seem tempting to build a website within a template and plug your business information in and be done, but it isn’t that simple. In our experience, a custom website with a storytelling perspective and aligning visuals makes an impact with both the market and the consumer that won’t soon be forgotten.

  • User Experience

A well-designed website will create a journey for the user to engage, explore and interact with the brand. Building meaningful first impressions — from brand to consumer — impacts the bottom line and overall objectives for a brand. User experience has become an essential investment for a brand, with users expecting an authentic and intuitive website that reflects the brand’s vision, perspective and service level. Ensure the ideal user experience through strategic plans such as user testing and A/B testing, which are critical to determining the success of a website.

  • Conversion

Monitoring conversion rates when analyzing metrics of how a website is performing is critical to offering the ideal customer experience (CX). Because a conversion rate is correlated directly to how a user engages with the website, it is a hugely important factor for a company to leverage in making marketing decisions.Web design, when properly strategized for conversion, directly impacts conversion rates. While the idea of a website template solution seems simple and low cost, this can cause a huge negative impact on the user experience of a website and overall conversion rate. If a user is exploring a website and is not able to locate the information they are looking for as a result of a poorly placed call-to-action button or unclear navigation, it’s likely they will quickly leave and go on to another website — maybe even a competitor’s website. 

This package puts you amongst the elites by implementing the listed advances...

Innovation

To many business owners, innovation can be an intimidating word with a lot of expectations. If you listen to the shareholders of a certain fruit-flavored technology company, innovation means inventing a new product or service that changes the way humans engage with the world every half-decade or so.

But to brands such as yours, this word doesn’t have to be so complicated. In its simplest form, innovation just means to “never settle.”

Looking back on your brand’s history, your company may have already done some amazing things. It may have already built a fantastic product for its customers or introduced a new ideology that changes the way your industry operates, and while this in itself is a great achievement, your brand cannot continue to grow by being satisfied with its past. You have to keep looking toward the future for inspiration: What else can your brand do to make its products/services better? Or what new products/services can you create to move society forward?

Like your favorite smartphone app, your brand should always be making improvements — iterating. Even if these changes are miniscule, the greatest threat to any brand is to stop building upon its future.

The world will inevitably continue to change. Your brand must change with it, or it will be left behind.

Humanity

You may be asking yourself: What does humanity have to do with business?  Everything, actually.

If you read over the last section on innovation again, you’ll notice several odes to humanity spread throughout it:

“Innovation means inventing a new product or service that changes the way humans engage with the world.”

“What new products/services can you create to move society forward?”

At Media Maven Marketing Agency, we often talk about serving the people behind the businesses that we work with. Sure, a brand’s measureable income and success are important, but when scanning through spreadsheets upon spreadsheets of data each week, it can be easy to forget about the human beings who run these companies.

The same goes for your customers. These people aren’t just dollar bills on an earnings sheet. They are living beings with real wants, needs, concerns, emotions and more. They go to work to support themselves or their families, they pay bills to keep the lights on, and they face challenges, some of which may be even greater than those you’ve ever experienced.

As a company, it is your job to remember that your customers are human. What product or service can you, with all of your knowledge and industry expertise, provide so that your customers’ lives are truly better with your brand than they are without it?

 Marketing

This third key to success isn’t just here because we’re a marketing consultancy and agency. Marketing is really important.

The old adage states: “If you build it, they will come.”

If the proprietor of this saying lived in a small town where everyone knew his/her name, this may have been true. But today, as millions of businesses compete to sell their products and services in real life, as well as across the web, this saying no longer suffices. Street corners and online spaces are chalked full of companies trying to sell their products to turn a profit.

What makes your company unique?

In addition to innovating and keeping humanity at the forefront of your business strategy, good marketing is how you break through the noise. Without it, search engines, like Google and Bing, cannot find your brand and show it to the people who are looking for the products/services you sell. Your business is less likely to appear in Google Maps, thus preventing consumers from visiting your business.

Without marketing, your brand and all the hard work associated with it is invisible. If you’re invisible, you perceptually don’t exist. And if you don’t exist, consumers cannot find you, see what you sell and invest in your business.

Q: HOW DOES DROP SHIPPING WORK?

A: An e-commerce business decides to offer a new product to customers. Instead of buying mass quantities of that product and storing it and shipping it out themselves, the company researches until they find a manufacturer interested in working with a retailer to distribute their products. The retailer contacts the manufacturer and reaches an agreement: the retailer will host the product listing on their website and make the sale, and the manufacturer will ship it out. The manufacturer is the entity that both produces, stores, and ships the product. 

 The retailer may agree to pay the manufacturer $25 for a product, so they might choose to list the product for $100 on their website, leaving them with a profit of $75.

Q: WHY DO COMPANIES CHOOSE DROP SHIPPING?

A: Many online stores will use drop shipping to expand their product offering to customers. It’s a low-risk way to test potential merchandise without having to pay for inventory up front. A home goods retailer, for example, might be considering offering a line of outdoor supplies. Instead of purchasing the inventory, finding a place to store it, and risking taking a loss if products don’t sell, they can work directly with a drop-ship supplier of outdoor goods. They can promote the items on their own site to gauge the interest level of the consumer base without spending money on the inventory in advance.

It’s also a helpful option for new startups, as these companies don’t usually have a ton of cash on hand. The manufacturer takes care of the storage and shipping, so there’s a low barrier to entry on the part of the retailer.

Q: ARE DROP SHIPPING BUSINESSES LEGAL?

A: The concept of drop shipping is 100 percent legal. It's not necessarily a business strategy — it’s a fulfillment method. A manufacturer has 1,000 units of product, but it’s generic, so drop-ship suppliers provide the product to these retailers to apply their own brand to it. And each supplier agreement has different terms, which is where the legal aspect comes in. There's always an agreement between the retailer and the drop-ship supplier that have specific terms that will be legally binding.

Q: WHO IS LIABLE IN THE CASE OF A PRODUCT DEFECT?

A: The liability will be laid out in the agreement between the retailer and supplier. It often depends on who has more leverage — a drop-ship supplier for a large corporation will likely have the upper hand when it comes to determining which side takes responsibility. 

Q: SHOULD COMPANIES EVENTUALLY BRING DROP-SHIP INVENTORY IN HOUSE?

A: It depends on the strategic goals of the company. Profit margins tend to be low with drop shipping. The drop-ship supplier is the one who has all the fulfillment costs, but usually the retailer has all the costs of acquiring the customer, running the advertising and promotions, and driving demand. Retailers often aren’t able to generate a lot of new cash. 

The choice to bring drop shipping in house depends on how well the drop ship inventory is moving and if retailers prefer to use drop shipping for a few products or as a way to retain customers, rather than expand the customer base.

Q: DOES DROP SHIPPING BENEFIT CUSTOMERS?

A: Many of the benefits of drop shipping are on the merchant side — low overhead, low risk — but customers do benefit as well. The flexibility that drop shipping provides to merchants as a way to quickly begin offering new products to customers makes it easier for a retailer to start providing a wider variety of products to their customers and to consider what product their customers might need. If a customer is a fan of a product or brand, and they want the retailer to offer more options, instead of spending months designing and developing a new product, the retailer can turn to a drop-shipping supplier and start offering the product the next week.

Q: IS THERE A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ADVERTISING IN-HOUSE INVENTORY AND DROP SHIPPING PRODUCTS?

A: To a customer it should be relatively incognito because the retailer has branded the drop-shipped products as their own product. But there are differences. Since drop-shipped products have lower margins, and a retailer might make more of a profit on a product they produce and store in house, they have to be careful when evaluating how to spend their marketing budget.

Q: HOW DO STORE-WIDE PROMOTIONS AFFECT DROP-SHIPPED PRODUCTS?

A: Every discount or promotion includes fine print and exclusions. There are rules the retailer can apply to certain SKUs so the coupon doesn’t work for a drop-ship item, because the low profit margins mean a discount might cause the company to lose money.

However, in certain cases a retailer might include the drop-shipped products in a promotion. They may lose money on that specific sale, but it could lead to customer retention or customer acquisition, which will be more profitable in the long run.

Feel free to check out our portfolio for visual references!