With 2017 quickly coming to a close, it’s important to take inventory on current website trends and what we will see more of in 2018. This is part II, so if you haven’t already, check out Part I!
6. Shopping Cart Marketing- Cross sales, up sales, and bundle offers should help increase your online revenue. For instance, on a product detail page you can leverage additional products to get more in the customer’s cart. Examples of this would be product listed areas titled, “you may also like,” “customers also bought” and “frequently bought together.” These make for great distractions that help the customer find other products they are interested and potentially increase the sale. This is one of the factors that makes Amazon successful. In the retail industry, when consumers are out shopping and waiting in the checkout line there are additional goods they can buy within arms distance at the register. Having additional products on the product detail page or as close to the checkout process as possible on an ecommerce site is the same idea. Other ways to increase consumer purchasing is to create bundle offers and sales. People love free merchandise!
7. Videos, specifically persuader videos- A testimonial video is an example of a persuader video because it’s a review of something positive to create influence. Bestop uses this marketing technique with a video testimonial located toward the bottom of their homepage. They do more than a couple of things right in this video. One, they use real people from their team representing their corporate office. Two, they talk to actual customers about their first/prior experience with the product. Three, they show visuals of the customers using the product. These methods create trust for a site visitor questioning the brand and learning about their products. Having real, genuine people in persuader videos helps to give it an authentic and trustworthy touch to potential or repeat consumers.
8. Value-based exit overlays (dun-dun-dun-dunnn) – Value-based exit overlays are when you’re scrolling through a site and a popup prompts you to take action and, in order to close, you need to locate the X to get back to the previous page of content you were reviewing. The bummer is we hate these, BUT they do increase conversions making them HIGHLY valuable. If you want to utilize an exit overlay without annoying your visitors offer something without requiring another action from the user. An example of making an offer the visitor will like are: free shipping, site wide deals and coupons, a limited 10% discount code, etc. It’s important to not ask for their email address because the less they have to fill out and click, the more likely they’ll stay on your site. If it’s a returning user that already has items in their cart, this system works particularly well. Think of it as an act of altruism, giving customers something without asking for anything in return and ultimately they will value your brand for it.
9. GO HOME HOMEPAGE- Landing pages are becoming increasingly more beneficial than homepages. Landing pages filter major topics of your site. Think of your site like a family tree - at the top is the home page and the branches below are the main topics of the site - landing pages, which contain more branches of information. Landing pages are helpful to visitors seeking specific information. These pages are often found through search engines, thus staging a homepage-like presence for that landing page. To reiterate, with landing pages growing in popularity it’s important that they look as good as the homepage to leverage the site visitor.
10. Large Screen Design- With Retina & 4k becoming the new standard, we now are seeing some 8k screens with imagery that can scale from small screens to large screen displays. The use of vector imagery as well as designing with multiple screen sizes in mind is a good idea.
11. Brutalism – What is brutalism in webdesign? It’s BOLD in your face design! Have you noticed Apple changed their branding to using bolder type? As usual, they are ahead of the trend. Many sites this year have exercised applying bolder type for hero spaces, page titles, and content titles. This styling helps not only your content to be legible to the visitor, but is on course with a trend that will continue through 2018. Type is not the only constituent in brutalism, the use of bright pictures, big color contrasts or black and white follow suit. Some Americaneagle.com examples sites are: Whirlyball, Pro Football Hall of Fame, Packers Everywhere, Xtremeswim, Portillo’s, and Erewhon.
Embrace these current key site trends and keep your eyes open for new trends in 2018 as tech progresses and Americaneagle.com does along with it!
Back to part 1!