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Branding 6 min read
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Your website design can make or break your customers’ experience.
If you’re conducting 100% of your business online, your website serves as your office or shop. If you have a physical storefront, your website is your frontdesk. Anything that could turn off a visitor – from the design to the slow-loading webpages – can cost you a conversion.
You need more effort than simply maintaining an online presence. Know how to make a web design that will have an impact on your visitors. Your web design should be able to share this story, create a positive customer perception, and build trust among your visitors.
Your brand story is the story behind your brand (or business). This provides a narrative of how your company started, the inspiration behind it, and how the past events are still serving your purpose today.
This article will share helpful tips on how to narrate your brand story with your web design, and the best practices you may use as reference for your own website.
Your brand story is “the way your brand presents itself to the world and the way the public perceives you,” wrote Emma Bullen on Medium. As mentioned earlier, this story depicts the beginnings of your brand and how your vision and core values help you navigate present-day challenges.
If done right, brand storytelling can help you develop genuine and lasting connections with your customers. You customers could relate to your purpose and believe your products and services could address their pain points.
Identify and define your brand story by going back to your purpose: Why did you go to business? What are your core values? What are the challenges and problems you want to help solve?
Then, choose the most important elements or parts in your brand story to highlight in your web design.
Neil Patel shares the three-part model in telling a brand story. Your storytelling should have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Three-part Brand Storytelling Model | |
Beginning | Present the problems or pain points that you want to solve. |
Middle | Describe how your products and services solved these pain points. |
End | Share your successes and how you envision to move forward. |
In narrating your brand story, don’t forget to pack the emotional punch. “You can say the right thing about a product and nobody will listen. You’ve got to say it in such a way that people will feel it in their gut. Because if they don’t feel it, nothing will happen,” shared advertising legend William Bernbach.
Then, translate your message into your web design. Here are brands that effectively incorporate their brand story into their web design:
Human Heart Nature is a Philippine beauty brand established to produce high-quality, Philippine-made skincare products that would benefit grassroots communities.
Image 1. Human Nature’s Home Page displays some of its core values as a brand. Photo courtesy of Human Nature.
The website uses soft earth palettes with quality photos that depict its core values: “being pro-Philippines, pro-poor and pro-environment”.
According to color psychology, colors can evoke emotion and create an atmosphere for a website that appeals to visitors. Understanding how different colors interact with each other is essential to creating an effective design. Human Heart Nature has masterfully adopted this web design and marketing technique.
The North Face is a US outdoor recreation brand that goes with the tagline, “Never Stop Exploring”. It started in 1966 as a climbing equipment retail store in San Francisco and has since sold apparel across the globe.
Image 2. Outdoor apparel brand The North Face ensures that assets communicate its tagline ‘Never Stop Exploring’ clearly and consistently. Photo courtesy of The North Face.
From the color theme to the images, the North Face website resonates with its target customers – climbers, mountaineers, extreme skiers, snowboarders, endurance runners, explorers.
If designing your site with powerful storytelling overwhelms you, a seasoned web development agency can help you create your brand with consistent visualization and performance throughout any device or platform available
A web design that tells a brand story not only connects with the audience – it also ensures a good user experience (UX).
But to implement a UX design, you should have a strong grasp of the needs, preferences, motivations and pain points of your audience.
There are various techniques to research and understand your target audience:
After clearly identifying your audience, including their needs and preferences, your next task is to tailor your web design to appeal to them. You can do this by adopting a customer-centric web design.
Customer-centric web design is one developed around the needs, wants, and behavior of your customers. The goal is to provide the functionality and convenience that visitors expect from online businesses. Here are some important tips to remember in adopting this design:
Quality content is also key in boosting your search engine rankings, increasing traffic to your site.
So how do you proceed to mapping out a website that is UX-friendly, customer-centric and shares your brand story effectively? Know the design elements that should be incorporated into your webpages.
Various design elements can help tell your brand story.
For instance, Human Heart Nature used color palettes that symbolizes its “pro-environment” core value. It also displays badges and awards such as the certified cruelty logo and the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. Without a lengthy narrative, Human Heart Nature is able to share the quality of its products and services, and its business purpose.
Here are solid tips for incorporating design elements that are consistent with the brand’s story and values.
Aside from Human Heart Nature, UnionBank, a Philippine commercial bank, effectively uses web design elements such as its key leaders on its website.
Image 3. Local bank UnionBank signals trust to its customers by sharing the information of its leadership and key executives in the company. This is vital as well to the brand being a publicly listed company.
Similar to showing your brand’s key people, sharing information about brand ambassadors can aid in telling your brand story.
Japanese fashion retailer, Uniqlo, highlights its brand ambassadors whose values and achievements reflect the brand’ story.
More than aesthetics, you also need to consider the non-visual web design elements in preparing a web design workflow to ensure you create a UX-friendly and customer-centric website. You must consider making a clean backend code, optimizing website speed, enabling mobile view, and incorporating SEO-boosting features in your website.
Knowing how to code a website that functions faultlessly, loads swiftly, and can be navigated efficiently impacts how your audience perceives your brand.
All set with the planning phase of your web design? Check out this web design checklist to set you off to the next stage.
As mentioned earlier, your brand story presents your brand to your world by sharing a cohesive narrative of your beginnings, the inspiration behind your establishment, and how the past events and challenges are still serving your purpose today.
By introducing your brand in a meaningful way, you can build trust among your website visitors.
As Neil Patel wrote on his blog, “Stories produce trust. But not just any story will do. You must tell a story that has the right features — features that produce successful neural coupling, plus those which exhibit integrity-building features.”
Use design elements to establish credibility and trust with these tips:
Brands that effectively use design elements that establish credibility and trust include e-commerce platforms such as Barnes & Noble, Lazada and Shopee.
How do you know if the web design elements you incorporated into your website are effective in telling your brand story, promoting good UX experience and building trust for your brand? You test and measure your success.
Testing and measuring the effectiveness of web design lets you know which are working and which are not. These can help you make decisions about content marketing and ads placement. By analyzing your web performance, you can explore new opportunities such as the possible introduction of new technologies.
Here are tips for testing and measuring the success of your web design:
A web design can make or break your customer’s experience on your “online storefront”. You may either win or lose a potential conversion. So, it’s a must that you learn the elements of a solid web design.
If you have any other questions, send us a message via our Facebook, X, and LinkedIn accounts.
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