Stale Blog – Stale Retail Site
One of the greatest challenges of hosting a blog is keeping it current and posting regularly. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run across blogs….followed them for a while….then suddenly they’ve gone stale. We can obviously expand this to online content on E-tailers.
If you view retail sites, especially their homepages, it becomes apparent that many view their online properties as little more than a monthly direct mail pamphlet. I understand that content:
- Needs a chance to allow the bulk of their viewers to view.
- There is also the consideration of branding implications and allowing the message to “soak”.
You Train Your Viewers/Customers
Yet, how often you change your content is training your users/customers on when to come back to your site. This reminds me of the old discount problem…..offer a 20% off sale and you train your customers to wait for the next sale.
Worst yet, is when retailers email their customers (let’s say weekly), yet bring them back to the same stale site. You have a problem if you say, “we’d change our content more often if we could.”
Retail Site Content
1. Look at your homepage (or your top 5 entrance points). Does your content here recognize social or timely events, such as Back to School, the weather, a holiday (Labor day). Google and Yahoo do a fantastic job of changing their logo’s based on random events of the day.
2. Does you content sell “newness”, “fresh”, “recently added”. Does your content sell the fact that it’s current and fits into “today’s” context? Are you promoting new product lines, recently received product, incorporating dynamically updating customer feedback, etc.
3. Does it talk to each of your customer segments?
4. Look at your content creation process? Can you operationalize to increase your turnaround time. Let’s say a day?
5. Does your content on the homepage re-enforce your main navigational categories? Or does your categories speak like your “buyer”.
6. Is your homepage just one big image doing nothing but branding? Current examples:
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