PlantAmerica
Well, you’ve built your web site—your online garden center. Now what?
Like any business, a web site doesn’t just achieve all your goals—increase revenue, build customer loyalty, and improve your brand and name recognition in your area.
No, your site, like any other part of your business, requires strategies to ensure your site brings you the benefits you want.
use your brick-and-mortar location to drive traffic to your online garden center
When you first create your online garden center, one of your first priorities is to tell your current customers about it.
To drive traffic to your online garden center:
- include the web address on all your collateral, receipts, bags
- display the address on all your in-store promotions, direct mailing, and flyers
- have your staff tell your customers about your site as standard part of customer interactions
use your online garden center to market your brick-and-mortar location
As you use your brick-and-mortar customers to your online garden center, you should also market reciprocally—use your online garden center to drive traffic to your brick-and-mortar location. This is especially important because your online garden center may be your first interaction with prospective customers who have used the web to find a garden center near them.
To drive traffic to your brick-and-mortar location:
- include basic contact information, address information, and, ideally, an online map so prospective customers who find you on the web can easily call or visit you from the information provided on your site.
- provide incentives for web visitors to visit your location, including online coupons, promotions, or special offers
think of content as a knowledgeable sales person
Everyone in business knows the value of a knowledgeable sales person—a customer asks a question, the sales person establishes themselves as a knowledgeable, trusted provider of information, and the customer then moves from the information to rely on the sales person to help them make the right purchase.
In your online garden center, you may not have a traditional sales person—but you do have online sales person—content. Like your knowledgeable sales person, the content you provide in your site helps you establish yourself as a trusted, valued source of not only products, but also valuable information that is essential for building lasting, loyal relationships with your customers.
To turn content into a knowledgeable salesperson:
- develop feature articles for a range of topics and establish a consistent rotation of features so you’re customers keep returning to your online garden center.
- provide content that guides your customers to specific services, products, or features you provide. For example, a feature about design ideas offers an excellent opportunity to drive customers to your landscape design services.
Keep your content fresh—rotate content regularly and communicate with your customers how often the content is rotated so they know when to return to your online garden center - develop a online newsletter, complete with features, tips, and design ideas—use this newsletter to highlight the products and services you provide.
be sure to have tools to see site traffic
In your brick-and-mortar location, you make a range of choices about how and where you display your products based on your understanding of how your customers move about your store.
For your online garden center, you must have the same ability to evaluate how your online customers move through your site. Beyond your home page, which is the prime location for all your highest priorities, be sure your site is supported by reporting tools that enable you to see how and where visitors are going in your site so you can reorganize or redesign as needed.
The basis for evaluating your site traffic is page views. A page view is simply an instance where a visitor views a page in your site. Ideally, you will be able to see how many people viewed each of your pages—either by day or by month. This is a useful way to evaluate the success of promotions or incentives you’re using to bring customers to a particular part of your site or for your site in general.