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Like any website, your e-commerce page designed around marketing and selling your product should put the audience at the forefront of its focus. Perhaps even more so than other pages, e-commerce sites need to accommodate the target audience, their preferences, their likes, and dislikes.
Making sales means paying attention, and through segmenting your target audience, experimenting, and coming to understand them, you can build an e-commerce site that grabs users and maximizes sales.
Here’s what you should know about designing your e-commerce website for your target audience.
Segment your audience for better targeting
The first thing you should understand about targeting your audience is that not all audiences are alike. Generation, location, gender, and many other factors play into how an audience will receive a message, and you should take all of these into consideration. That’s where segmentation is useful.
Marketing segmentation for an online audience means dividing your leads and site traffic into manageable groups for targeted messaging. This messaging can be personalized to customer desires and needs, furthering the potential of customer engagement.
In fact, 72% of consumers report they only engage with personalized messaging. This makes segmented marketing a necessity for any online retailer looking to drive customer engagement.
When it comes to designing your website for segmentation, you need a clear picture of your intended audience so you can ensure messaging across the site hits on specific needs.
Here are some categories you can use to target your web design to your e-commerce audience:
- Purchasing behavior, such as time intervals between purchases.
- Demographics, such as age, gender, ethnicity, and more.
- Geography, by country, city, or even neighborhood.
- Customer needs, such as specific problems addressed in emails or polling info.
Segmenting your audience for website design is immensely important for e-commerce success, but you may be asking, where do I get the data to truly understand my audience?
Study and learn your audience
Designing the perfect e-commerce website to reach your target audience means fully understanding who that audience is. This is possible through study, experimentation, and narrowing of your focus as you receive more information.
Studying
Studying your audience comes down to a thorough analysis of site analytics and surveying. Who is using your site? What are their needs? What are their challenges? You can examine your existing data to answer some of these questions, but you will also want to make use of social media and email polls and surveys to gain better insight into customer worldview.
With the right data — and the more of it you can accumulate — you can build an e-commerce site that touches on everything your customers need to know. Social media platforms like Twitter have easy-to-use polling tools that are perfect for this kind of study. Email surveys are also useful in understanding target preferences.
Experimenting
Experimentation is another key element in e-commerce success. Experimenting allows any business to move and grow faster, as they learn from failure and expand through success. Without constant trial and error, you can’t expect to better understand what kind of messaging and site design works best. As you develop an understanding of your customer, play with site design and features and get feedback from your users. You must be open to their opinions on what works well and what doesn’t if you hope to attract enough attention to grow your sales.
Putting users first
Best practices for e-commerce put the user at the forefront of the experience and site design. By finding out working solutions for your intended audience, you can build a website that keeps user needs in focus. Narrowing that focus is a necessary part of the design process and should be adjusted the more you know about your audience.
For example, if you are selling orthopedic insoles and you know your target base tends to be a certain age group, use messaging and imagery that centers on them. A simple, user-friendly site design with broad, readable font and a clear purchasing path will be a necessity.
Acknowledge audience preferences in your web design
Different users expect a different experience from a website. Your research into the demographics and preferences of your target audience will help you craft the best website design for your users.
Certain design elements of a site are universal: you need a user-friendly site that enables customers to easily find what they are looking for. In fact, Hubspot found that 76 percent of users rank this as the most important function of an e-commerce website. On the aesthetic and feature end, your efforts should be more specifically targeted.
For example, millennial users expect a platform they can personalize with user-generated content. They want to be able to seamlessly share and integrate their experience on social media, so making these features a priority is essential in targeting a millennial audience where it might not be for reaching a baby boomer audience, for example. Knowing your audience helps you customize features specifically to meet their needs and challenges, ensuring customer success and the success of your digital store.
Audit your site design as you build it for e-commerce best practices in relation to your target audience. You need a mobile-friendly site where customers can find their preferences like social media integration and easy-to-leave reviews integrated clearly and simply. If you are getting negative customer feedback, analyze for what you can do better.
Customize for audience needs
A successful e-commerce site design carefully targets a market and follows user-friendly guidelines in personalized ways. You can incorporate user-friendly best practices into your digital store and still target specific niches around design and implementation.
Here are some areas you can focus your targeted design:
- Mobile-friendliness and functionality
- Search bars and navigation
- Check-out process
- User profiles
- Email contact sign-up and messaging
By designing your e-commerce website around your target audience, you ensure engagement and interactivity. The key here is listening, responding, and re-evaluating, keeping up on customer opinions in order to better the user experience. With targeted marketing, consumers will feel cared for and seen and will keep coming back to your well-designed site.
