The Ultimate Website Audit for BFCM

You’d be surprised to hear that we don’t solely think about SMS marketing. We think about all the pieces that make the ecom puzzle come together—including your website. Without an optimized experience there, visitors are less likely to be acquired or even make it to checkout. 

Postscript Plus strategists spend a lot of time shopping online, looking at what’s trending in the space. And once in awhile, we come across a cool brand with a site that isn’t optimized for the visitor or potential customer. That’s when we move on.

Here’s a few tried-and-true tweaks to make to your ecommerce store before the most profitable time of the year.

Three clicks or less.

When someone visits your site for the first time, make sure they can find what they’re looking for in less than three clicks.

Your brand is fighting hard in an online market of alternative options so site merchandising for easy navigation is critical. If you can’t take a neutral look at your own store, have friends or family follow some prompts to see how easy it is to navigate without your help.

Good product detail pages sell a product, but great ones sell a story. Uniforming your PDP images across your site, adding in lifestyle imagery (or on-model shots), updating product specs based on FAQs, quality product descriptions and visible ingredients when applicable, keep your shopper entertained and keep them in your store. Though these best practices can vary based on your industry, keeping this information clean, coherent and readily available on product pages is so, so critical.

And don’t forget that sorting and filtering functionality is essential during a time when visitors are looking for gifts at a wide range of prices. Consider making this your highest priority or at the very least having an “Under $$” product landing page collections easily accessible. Plus, those are great pages to send that text to!

Even if your site traffic is still mostly desktop, you can’t avoid the fact that mobile shoppers continue to increase YOY and you don’t want to lose any. 

It’s easy when making drastic changes to the website design or UX and not prioritize the differences between a user shopping on a desktop vs mobile friendly ecommerce site. 

Consider making mobile checkout easier by removing fields not required for processing or eliminate any conversion roadblocks (ahem, always let them have a guest checkout option).

And don’t forget to test everything on mobile. For example, a new landing page might look great on desktop, but are those CTAs clear enough on mobile? Do you need to remove copy from mobile product pages to make scrolling more seamless? Now’s the time to test.

It’s easy to forget to have an FAQ page on your site when you work so hard to make sure questions are answered on all key pages, like your ‘About’ or within product pages. 

However, this one is easy to understand when you consider how busy your customer service teams get during the holidays. Proper FAQ pages that are updated consistently with product and customer feedback are great to use for automated responses during these windows where your CX reps are behind in tickets.

So if you don’t have one, now’s the time. We always suggest making sure those holiday shipping deadlines are right at the top and prominent when you get closer to BFCM.

No time to build out a lengthy FAQ? Rely on your customer reviews instead and make sure those are turned on. Consumers don’t always trust a new brand, but they do their due diligence to trust another verified shopper. 

This will go a long way to building brand loyalty and sometimes even answers questions consumers have that don’t show up on the FAQ page.

Best of luck this BFCM and, as always, happy texting.