How the Right Subpages Can Make Your eCommerce Brand Irresistible

Designing and Building Subpages to Share Your eCommerce Brand Story Can Inspire Sales, Loyalty, and Customer Shares

A huge, untapped marketing opportunity for your eCommerce website may be sitting right in front of you…and that’s auxiliary subpages. As online shopping continues to increase, so does the number of eCommerce stores cropping up, and more than ever, you need to find ways to stand out amid the noise. Going beyond standard product pages by designing and building a series of supplemental subpages centered on your brand can give you space to build trust, offer useful information, and keep potential and current customers engaged. All of this, in turn, can help you turn one-time browsers into loyal repeat customers.

When designing and building a new eCommerce website (or revamping your current one), here are a few subpages you should consider including in your build that go beyond the product pages.

About Pages: Share Your Passion

Every business has a story, and sharing your story can help set you apart from your competitors. The retail world is already saturated with products, so many consumers are seeking out stories and purpose when making decisions about their purchases.

This is where your About subpages come in: Having custom pages geared toward establishing a narrative and telling your customers exactly why you created your business and what makes your products so special can help visitors feel like they’re not “going in blind” when making a purchase. Do you have a customer promise or guarantee? Do you have special sourcing or manufacturing processes that make make your products better than those of your competitors? Shout it loud and proud in your About pages.

Better yet, by sharing your awesome brand story, you encourage inspired customers to reshare this info about your company through their own social networks, in turn, boosting your visibility even further.

One company that’s done a great job of sharing their story through via About pages is our client, KINONA. KINONA—designers and retailers of attractive women’s golf apparel—has a great story behind the label: The two founders are avid golfers who were unimpressed with the boring, unflattering apparel they were forced to wear to the links. They decided to do something about it. Now, not only do they offer cute and functional golf clothing that women will want to purchase for both on-the-green and off-the-green activities, they also support networks of entrepreneurial-minded, golf-loving women across the USA through their business model. KINONA uses their About pages in a variety of ways to share these stories (they even link to an introductory video in the masthead area).

KINONA also regularly gives back to the community—and they use their About pages to point to these efforts. And this is no small thing: According to a recent Forbes study, “75% [of respondents] said that it's either fairly or very important that a company gives back to society instead of just making a profit.” If you support philanthropic causes, make sure you highlight this fact on your website wherever you can.

Team Pages: Introduce the People Behind the Business

Audiences care about who they’re purchasing products from. According to the Forbes study linked above, “43% of millennials rank authenticity over content” when it comes to media consumption and “only 1%...said that a compelling advertisement would make them trust a brand more.”

So, what does this mean for your website?

In essence, even if you have a great product, more and more, customers are wanting to know about you. Showing your customers faces of founders and employees—and maybe introducing each with a short blurb and favorite quote—can help them feel more connected with your brand and its people. Is your CMO a dog lover? Does one of your product developers love to go rock climbing on the weekends? Share that!

Bonus: Photos and quotes tend to do particularly well on social media, so don’t forget to update your social channels when updating your website. All these tiny connection points can make eCommerce shopping feel a bit more like in-store shopping—and keep your customers coming back for more.

Blog Pages: Show Yourself Off as Thought Leader By Sharing Interesting Articles

A well-maintained blog could be one of your most useful assets for gaining brand exposure and turning browsers into buyers. You can use your blog for all sorts of purposes, like mentioning good press, highlighting a positive write-up from an influential figure in your industry, sharing helpful information and tips with users (which can propel you as an industry thought leader in your own right), and more.

Regular blog updates not only increases the perceived “freshness” of your website (which search engines also love—hello, better rankings!), they also increase the likelihood that followers will share your content and increase your reach. Additionally, regular posts help keep your brand at the top of customer’s minds, increasing the likelihood they’ll remember to come back and repurchase your products.

Don’t believe us? Check out the stats! According to Hubspot, “Marketers who have prioritized blogging are 13x more likely to enjoy positive ROI,” and “Companies who blog receive 97% more links to their website.”

Looking for an example of a blog done well? Check out Beeswrap, which manufactures and sells sustainable food storage options. They use their blog—affectionately known as The Hive—to share featured recipes from chefs, tips about now to use their products, and information about the deleterious environmental effects of over-reliance on plastic products (which is a great way for their team to reiterate their mission and highlight one of their key differentiators).

Reviews, Press, and Social Pages: Highlight All the Cool Stuff People Are Saying About You

Social cognitive biases are real...and playing to them can be super helpful for your brand. Recognizing that users tend to look to each other to establish assumptions about companies, you can leverage your website to benefit from “the bandwagon effect.”

For instance, by using a dedicated Press, Reviews, or Social area on your website to show consumers what your product looks like in action (especially when being used by “real customers”) or shots of influencers engaging with your brand, you can better help potential customers imagine themselves using the product.

Try setting up social media campaigns to encourage customers to take shots of your products “in the wild,” then repurpose this user-generated content on your own website—this could go a long way toward removing question marks from your customers’ decision-making processes. Our client, See Kai Run, does an excellent job of sharing their social content on their website.

Featuring a Reviews section on your website is also a great—almost crucial—way to provide important, accurate information to potential customers. Reviews can be featured on product pages or on a separate Testimonials page. Just remember—when managing product reviews, it’s not always a bad idea to show some negative entries (this is true on your social media accounts and Yelp page, too, if you have reviews enabled in those spaces); just make sure you take the time to sincerely respond to any negative reviews. This will show your customers that you care, are accountable, and are dedicated to providing awesome service (by contrast, showing nothing but positive reviews may cause them to think it’s all inauthentically curated content).

FAQ Page: Provide a One-Stop Shop for Answers to all the Inevitable Questions

From how returns are processed to what your products are made of, as an eCommerce business, your team will inevitably receive a ton of questions from customers about what makes you tick as a company. By having a curated list of FAQs that you can easily update and refer visitors to at any given time, you will both lighten the administrative load faced by your customer service team and help protect against losing customers that would rather give up on your product than reach out to someone to get the info they’re looking for. As you receive questions via contact forms, social media, call-ins, and emails, make sure to update your FAQs list.

We Can Help You Connect to Potential Customers Via Your eCommerce Website—Just Ask Us How!

At efelle creative, we’ve been designing and developing eCommerce websites for well over a decade. We believe in going beyond the standard, templated online store design to provide your team with all the space you need to make your brand sing to potential customers. If you feel like your website is being overlooked and under utilized, we can help. Give us a shout at 206.384.4909 or reach out via our online contact form.