Content Marketing Today

6 Essential Lessons Your Website Should Learn from a Shopping Mall

Even though the growth of online shopping is outpacing brick-and-mortar shopping, we can still learn a lot from in person retail environments. Mall owners and retail store operators are very good at what they do–which is to get lots and lots of people to come to the mall and to buy a lot of stuff. They have perfected an environment which prompts visitors to spend a lot of time walking around window shopping and then spending time in individual stores whose products match their interests,whose display captures their attention,and who make buying an easy and pleasurable experience.
Whether we are selling to other businesses or to consumers, here are the 6 most important things we can learn from best and worst retail practices.

1. Time is of the essence. You have very little time to capture the attention of virtual passersby. when I research this article, I was surprised to see that a talented website window designer said interestingly,”You have only five seconds to capture the attention of prospective customers walking by.”That sounds pretty darn familiar to Web marketers because you have certainly that you have less than 10 seconds to capture your Web visitors’ attention. Of course, in a mall you’re only competing with several hundred other merchants in an ideal environment that is all about shopping.
   
   
   On the Web,you’re competing with millions of other merchants. Therefore it’s all that much more important to get your visitors attention from the get go. Everyone is busy. Everyone is on the lookout for items that will improve their personal or professional life. If you have a store in the mall, at some point visitors will probably return.This Muvico theater is a perfect example of what not to do. You have no idea what movies are showing. In fact, if you did not know that Muvico was a movie theater, there is nothing except its design to suggest what the heck it is. Unless it’s show time and you walk up to the ticket window, you cannot even determine what movies are playing at the theater. Worse, you have to search the newspaper paper or the Web to figure out what movies are showing. Muvico gets away with it because only two movie complexes exist in our town.

   You won’t be so lucky on the web. If it’s not obvious that your website contains exactly what your visitors need to solve their problems, they will almost certainly not return. They will not take time to guess what it is you have to offer. Be certain that your visitor knows how you can help them within 10 seconds of their arrival on your site.

2. Window and store design are all important in a retail environment. Design is equally important on the web. You must first capture the attention of potential visitors to your store, you must make it clear that what you sell matches up with what window shoppers would like to buy, and once inside, you need to display your merchandise in such a way that they are encouraged to browse, to sample,to try things on or try things out.Store windows are highly visual. The best store windows also provide a sense of drama enhanced by clever design and dramatic lighting.When the store windows do their job,you will linger and ultimately be lured into the store where the odds become a lot better that you will become a customer.Be sure to include strong visual elements as an integral part of your sites content. They will make it much easier to keep visitors on your site long enough to take some positive action.
3. Make it obvious who your target customers are. We’ve all spent time in malls, however reluctantly for some of us. What’s obvious, as I’m dragged along, is that certain stores would appeal to me as a baby boomer and a gadget geek. Except for the geek crossover,the younger generation wouldn’t be got caught dead stopping in most of the stores I would frequent.Fortunately, none of us are likely to wander into the wrong kind of store, because great merchants understand exactly who their target customer is. Retailers create just the right look and feel for their storefront, for their store interior, and in the selection and design of the products they sell.Here’s a great retail store front at the Coconut Point Mall in Estero Florida. It actually reaches out onto the street to attract their target demographic–generation Y– more easily . They don’t even bother to put a name on the front of the store because it’s obvious to young people that this is a place where they can find the kind of stuff they really love.
   
   Understanding your target customer is equally important on the web. Unless you are Amazon.com or eBay, you cannot possibly appeal to or sell to everyone.Therefore, you must be certain to be very clear in the way that you design your site so that those arriving know that it’s appropriate for them to be there.This involves creating an appropriate design and using language that matches the way that your target customers think and the way they express themselves.
4. You must understand that your presence on the web is just like your presence in a shopping mall. You’re not there to have people look briefly in your window and then walk past.You want them to take action.They may just browse and plan to come back later because they found a lot of stuff that interested them–or they may ask you buy something the very first time they visit. But your primary goal to get your visitors to take some kind of action, even if it’s only to bookmark your site .The picture on the right is from a Brookstone retail store. This display is clearly visible to folks who are walking past Brookstone, this brightly colored three-dimensional presentation makes it clear that there is a lot of interesting and inexpensive stuff that you can buy there.Your website must show right up front that you have a number of products and services that are designed and priced to appeal to your visitors. Don’t hide them away below various layers that are multiple clicks away from your home page. Even if you have an extensive inventory and a wide variety of products available show some sampling of what’s on offer. And, again, make it is visual as possible.
5. Content and design are inextricably intertwined. That applies both to retail and on the web. Apple is living proof. Steve Jobs’ baby is justifiably famous for the elegance of its design across an entire product line: desktop computers, laptops, the iPod, the iPhone and, of course, the elegant Apple stores. The superb design of its products blend both functionality and a certain cachet. For example, the iPod was late to the game in terms of MP3 players. But its wonderfully simple interface and sleek white exterior quickly made it the one MP3 player most of us had to buy.Apple’s retail stores expand on its design ethos to create an ideal shopping environment. Even though they display fewer products per square foot than a typical electronics store, they generate many times the revenue per square foot. Why? Because shopping in an Apple store is a lot of fun. And they actually have salespeople and “geniuses” who really love their jobs and want to help you find just the right thing.Not surprisingly, Apple’s website is equally elegant and functional. It combines gorgeous graphical elements which showcase its products with all the helpful tools you need to figure out exactly what product will best match your needs.

   Very few of us can come anywhere near matching Apple’s marketing budget. That doesn’t mean we can’t learn some important lessons about design. Make sure that your design integrates both elegance and functionality so that your visitors will find it intuitively obvious what they can do on your site and how they can do it. If you have visuals, make sure they are relevant to what you’re trying to communicate.

6. Give something away for free. It sure works for food and drinks, but it also works if you can tie in a free add-on promotion that accompanies a purchase. When do retailers use this? Perhaps they are brand-new and must persuade people to try them out. Perhaps the food or drink they are offering is unfamiliar to prospects. So they need to entice them to taste it. Perhaps they’ve just introduced something brand-new that they want people to try. So they offer a sample. Maybe business is slow so they have to offer something free to get people off the dime.Retailers in the mall do this all the time even though they have the advantage of being in an environment with relatively few competitors. In addition, the mere fact that a major mall developer has accepted them gives them instant credibility.You don’t have that advantage on the web. You have thousands and thousands of competitors. Most people who come to your site will have no experience by which to judge the quality of your products and services. This is where free content comes in.

   On the web it’s easy to offer free content that is relevant to your target audience. This applies whether you are selling products or services–and whether you are selling to businesses or to consumers. At the Coconut point Mall, a new specialty tea retailer is offering free samples of special blends. You can just as easily offer a free white paper, a free e-book, a free one-hour consulting session or a free add-on product with the first purchase. In each case, you begin to establish a trusted relationship with your Web visitors that will make it easier to turn them into regular customers.

Those of us who’ve been around the web for a long time may think we’re pretty savvy about what works in that unique environment. In many ways, we are just digital storefronts in an impossibly large virtual mall called the Internet.

As we enter the holiday season, maybe we should apply some lessons that have been honed over thousands of years. Technology has given us a lot more tools, but human nature is pretty much the same.