Customizing your storefront theme can be a lot of fun. Here are some quick tips for new store owners on how to customize different parts of your storefront.
Editing the Home page
Your Home page is important part of the shopping experience. In many cases, a visitor to your store will view the Home page even if they entered your storefront from another area (e.g., they first arrived to a product page from a Google search). Customizing this page with a short welcome message will add value to their shopping experience. You should tell your web visitors what your store is all about.
Read the Customizing the Home Page tutorial for more information.
Editing the Contact Us page
When you first start your store, the Contact Us page will have a placeholder address in the Contact Us page. You’ll want to make sure you edit this before you start doing business. Make sure you provide a way for customers to reach you for questions regarding orders, shipping and purchasing. The Contact Us page is broken down into two sections. The sidebar on the Contact US page contains your contact information. This could be a mailing address, email address or sales phone number if you have one. The main content section of the Contact Us page is blank and you can use this space to write a little bit about what a customer should expect when they contact you. How long does it take for you to respond to inquiries? Make sure you let them know.
You can also use the main content area to explain little bit about yourself if you don’t plan on adding a separate About Us page (see our post on the About Us topic).
Read the Customizing the Contact Us Page tutorial to learn more about how to edit this page.
Once you’ve edited your Home page and updated your Contact Us page, you’ve got your basic storefront theme ready to go. You can add more WebPages to your theme if you’d like or add more links in the header or footer. These edits take a little bit more experience with HTML code. You can read more about making these customizations with the Add a Link to the Footer and Add a Webpage tutorials.
Store Tips
Store Launch, Store Themes
Many of you who are long-time store owners probably have an address book full of customers you’ve done business with in the past. But, are you aggressively collecting email addresses of store visitors who are simply browsing your store? Capturing this audience will get you one step closer to converting visitors to paying customers. This is a top priority for both new store owners and those who’ve been doing business for quite some time.
We’ll show you a simple and effective way to start capturing email addresses of web visitors so that you can create a dialog with these potentially profitable visitors. In our example exercise, we’ll use a store launch event as the hypothetical situation. So, if you’re new to Auctiva Commerce this will be right up your alley. More experienced store owners can customize this lesson to fit their specific needs. We’ll be giving you suggestions on how to do that as we go along.
The Power of Email Lists
Email lists are a terrific selling tool. It allows you to frequently keep in touch with your customers and drive high-quality traffic to your store. There are a variety of ways to do email lists, including a guerilla-style technique where you send emails to your email list through your standard email client (e.g., Microsoft Outlook or some other email application). This is one of the least expensive ways to operate an email list, however, it can become difficult to manage and design your email campaigns. This method also does not automate opt-in or opt-out functions or provide analytical data.
A good email list managing tool will automate the most essential email managing tasks and provide insights into the success of your email campaigns. This means that when you send an email to the recipients in your email list, you’ll be able view how many of those people open the email and how many of those click on a link within the email (i.e., the click through rate). This additional information can help you decide the value of the emails you send as well as assess which types of emails drive the most valuable traffic back to your store. Let’s say you want to feature a new product on your store next month. What kind of marketing copy would compel your email recipients to buy this product? You could write a hard sale, such as “Just Added to Our Inventory-Get 10% off Now.” Or, would you do better with something softer by writing a paragraph about the product itself and why you are excited to offer it on your store? These are difficult questions to answer, but a good email list tool should be able to offer us some insights. We encourage you to take a closer look at these tools and see if they’re right for you.
Email List Setup Summary
Here’s what we’re going to do:
- Plan our Email Signup Workflow
- Create a MailChimp account. We’ll tell you more about these monkeys later.
- Create a new email list.
- Create a Sign-Up form.
- Create a new WebPage in Auctiva Commerce.
- Create a link to the New WebPage from the Home Page.
We won’t discuss how to do an email campaign in this exercise. We’ll talk about email campaigns at a later date. This exercise is simply for creating the “net” that will capture web visitors so that we can sell to them, later. Let’s dig in.
Read more…
Store Tips
Customer Communication, Email, Store Launch
