Designing a website that is effective, has a good ‘look and feel’ and is functional for your customers is an important step for the promotion and marketing of your business on the Internet. However, in order for your business to be successful, there are several other marketing techniques that you need to apply.

A well-architected website is designed to enable effective promotion and marketing of your internet business. Designing your website with the following characteristics is important for your Website’s Internet Promotion and Marketing. Some of the design elements that we discussed in our ‘How to design a website’ article are being derived from the strategies to promote a website effectively on the internet.

• Design your website to meet the objectives of your organization
• Identify your target audience so that you can design for them
• Architect your website information for easy and intuitive retrieval
• Develop a website that has rich content related to your business
• Design a website that will come up on internet searches. We will elaborate on this topic later in this article

Promotion and marketing of your Internet business and website involve: analyzing user behavior, reviewing of storyboard patterns, developing buyer tunnels, incorporating changes to adapt to user behavior, etc

As businesses invent better productivity tools and innovative marketing strategies, competing in today’s marketplace require continual improvement of your marketing and promotion strategies. This is especially true for ecommerce businesses. Ability of a business to adapt strategies to changing business and economic factors is essential for survival in today’s marketplace

An important note about implementing internet website promotion and marketing strategies: The strategies we outline here must be thoroughly evaluated and effectively implemented for it to be effective. Also, if your business is established through conventional retail channels, you must do comprehensive planning before adopting these strategies or entering eCommerce retails channel so that you can fulfill customers’ orders and needs matching with your other established channels and brand expectations

• If your website has rich and useful information that is general in nature, enable your users to forward them to their peers, family and friends. You must state clearly on your website that you will neither sell nor store the email of your users. This is an important assurance to many users who are apprehensive about receiving bulk mails. However, you may want to track the usage of this function, to measure its success.
• Provide free tools on your website that can add value to the business processes of your customers. Our website design company shares the internally developed project tools, such as Website Design Project Goals Questionnaire, Website Design Critique Form, etc. with our visitors free of charge. We have often been asked why we share our process tools with our possible competitors, but it is an effective viral strategy for our organization.
• Submit your websites to Internet companies that review and refer your services. Many such companies use their content for viral marketing themselves and thus, your website reviews and referral services can replicate.
• Provide referral coupons if you are in the Internet retail business. When friends or peers refer your business, it builds instantaneous credibility and thus you gain more business. This can be effectively used for Push Marketing Strategies.
• Create a discussion group section on your website. Using blog sites has become an effective strategy to spread the word to interested people.

The methods used for gaining visibility for your website on the web is a well-debated topic on the Internet because of the definite advantage a business can obtain by being in the top few places on major internet search company web pages. Following are some of the most important steps you could follow:

• You must develop rich and useful content that is related to your business for your customers. This is an important strategy for small businesses to gain visibility on the Internet. When people look for information specific to your business, your website will show up on searches. If you have a wealth of information resources related your business, your site will gain popularity. In online discussions, interested people will refer to your website as good resource.
• Your information resources must be structured so that each page has something unique to offer. Also you must define appropriate titles and headings for your pages so that searches for related words may point to your website.
• Choose an appropriate and easy to remember URL (Uniform Record Locator) that contains words pertaining to your line of business.
• Create meaningful link resources to and from your web pages. This will also help people find your website in searches on the Internet.

Storyboard and buying pattern analysis is an important part to devise your marketing strategy for an eCommerce business. With careful adaptation, you can develop your sales conversion on the Internet. Following are some of the specific strategies you may adapt based on user behavior analysis:

• Develop conversion channels or tunnels.
• Increase up-sell volume based on the most effective suggestions
• Let visitors store items in their cart even before they sign in.
• Allow both identified and unidentified visitors to come back at a later time and still see previously selected items in their shopping cart.

By reviewing the buying patterns on your eCommerce website, you can find out the unsuccessful point of conversions and make changes to enhance such drop­off points. You can read more about the detailed design considerations for developing an eCommerce website on our eCommerce website design page.

If your business or website is fairly new, advertising them is a good strategy during its initial stages. There is an array of advertising media that you can run your ads on. Pay-per-click advertising is an effective strategy with minimal upfront cost. These programs are structured such that you only pay when a visitor clicks on the link to your website from your advertiser’s web page. An intelligently and judiciously designed website will generate an interest in your visitor to probe further into your website. Another major advantage of pay-per-click advertising is your ability to adjust your expenses based on the analysis of sales conversion. Some of these advertising companies provide highly advanced user analytic tools that will also enable you to measure and fine tune the performance of your website.

Internet Search companies use personalization to improve the experience of the user by displaying contextual and targeted web page. There are several eCommerce websites that effectively use personalization to improve customer experience and thus make product recommendations to promote their company’s products. Personalization can be of two types:

• Rule based promotion: When you buy certain product, the website will provide a recommendation for you to buy related products. There are a number of eCommerce websites that use this effectively. For instance, if you bought a book by the name: ‘What to expect when you are expecting’, from an effectively run eCommerce website, a few months later you will find a promotional offer to buy a related book, ‘What to expect in the first year of your child’
• Group filtering: This is based on behavior of a group of people: If you bought a certain product, say A, the eCommerce website will make recommendation for you to buy more products, which were bought by other persons who also bought product A.

This is significant if your company is not a nationally well-known brand. Stating and adhering to this policy can build confidence in your visitors. Also your contact information must be either clearly visible from a page or be accessed by clicking on a noticeable link.

Internet shoppers tend to enquire about their orders, payment-processing information, shipping status, etc. Enable your users to receive these details by providing an effective and easy to use customer self-service functionality to pay for their purchases, track orders and get notifications about shipments. Implementing customer self-service functions can generate substantial savings for your organization by effectively reducing the customer support activities.

Adhering to the guidelines on Website Promotion and Internet Marketing will make the promotion of your website easy. However, an effective website design is a prerequisite to efficiently implement the marketing strategies to promote your website. More guidelines on designing an effective website is outlined in our ‘How to design a website’ page.