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Customer Case Study: Touche Shoes
Background
Touche Shoes is a women’s shoe store in Tucson, Arizona which caters to providing fashionable, and yet also comfortable shoes. When they initially contacted JDOG Media their website was not doing what they wanted it to do. It was an old flash based website, with static content. There was no customer interaction, or mechanism to either generate new sales leads, or to keep existing customers updated with promotions and events.
Unfortunately many businesses are all too quickly impressed by flash based websites, which are often merely modified from stock website templates. Flash websites are ineffective for several reasons. Primarily, we recommend against them because their content is virtually invisible to search engines. This means that organically increasing search engine visibility is near impossible.
Poor visibility means little, or no traffic from search engines, leaving paid advertising, offline word of mouth, and mainstream marketing tactics. A combination of these is best, with a strong focus on Organic Search Engine Optimization, and Search Engine Marketing.
If you think of Google for instance as being a new, and free yellow pages for small and local businesses, then generally by having a completely flash based website you are missing out on bringing people to your business.
The 2nd big turn off for flash is that, while it may look pretty, it lacks effective customer interaction functionality. In the new era of Social Media, and Social Networking to ensure that you build a monetizable audience it is imperative that your audience (your customers) are able to take part and interact with the website experience of your business. Simply implemented this may be allowing visitors to comment on articles, thereby joining in the conversation. Another example might be to feed those comments out to Twitter, and then embed a widget into the sidebar of the page, which displays tweets of your most recent articles, and viewer comments.
On a final note Flash sites are complicated, and therefore expensive when it comes to changing and updating the content. It is not realistic to believe that most small businesses employ IT professionals to manage this on a daily basis. Therefore, we ensure that it our customers are able to easily maintain their own websites, and be able to add new articles, and other content at their leisure.
Specification
Website Design – Design a fresh website that reflects the colors of the bricks and mortar store, with the ability of displaying dynamically changing content. It should be simple for employees to create and publish new content themselves, whether that be written articles, audio, or video information.
Visibility & SEO – The site must be optimized for Search Engine visibility, with Search Engine Friendly URLS. Ideally the site will appear in related search results for terms such as; “Women’s shoes in Tucson, Arizona,” “Tucson Shoes,” and “Tucson Women’s Shoes.”
Customer Contact – There must be a way of generating sales leads, to encourage visitors to walk in to the physical store. This process should also enable a large customer newsletter list to be built up over time, and also allow the existing customers who have already provided their email addresses to be imported to this newsletter list. Additionally, when someone provides email information in-store there needs to be a simple process for adding them to the newsletter list, for online marketing email campaigns.
The newsletter club will keep customers updated with store promotions, offers, and events, with the goal of generating more in-store revenue.
Solution
JDOG Media provided a turn-key solution for Touche Shoes, covering; website design, strategy planning, SEO, easy content publishing, newsletter list management, and hosting on our servers.
Clean & Fresh Design – To keep with the look and feel of the bricks and mortar store, the same color scheme has been implemented on the website.
Key Information – Store hours, location, and contact information is easy to find on the website. This includes a map that is linked to Google Maps, allowing customers to get quick directions to the store, no matter where they are coming from.
Customer Contact – Customers may submit requests via a contact form, which captures important information about the customer. This is then sent instantly to several people within the company, so that they can act on it quickly in order to maintain a good customer relationship.
Newsletter Club – Upon visiting the site people are presented with an instant offer incentive, where they receive an in-store discount coupon if they choose to join the newsletter club. This has proven effective to generate new sales leads, and provide the store with extra walk in traffic on a weekly basis.
- Newsletter template design
- In-store signups can be easily added
- Email broadcasts, and newsletter have been created
- Statistics such as number of emails opened, click trough rates, and percentages can all be accessed
Search Engine Visibility – Within 2 weeks of the site being launched it was listed on page 1 for google search results for each of the customer’s desired search terms, reaching positions between number 1 and number 6.
- Website optimized for search engine visibility with search engine friendly URLs.
- The website focuses on delivering content which is easily indexed by search engines.
- Initial website article content created specifically with Content Relevance in mind to achieve search engine placement.
- Customer educated on Content Relevance, and utilizing keyword placement.
Business Listing – A google business listing was created to further increase visibility, and conversion rates from google searches. Time was taken to ensure that their listing stands out from others, by adding pictures, store information, and coupons.
Easy To Maintain – Customer has access to a simple administration pane, where they can create and publish new content directly to their website.
Ongoing Support – Touche Shoes has chosen to retain the services of JDOG Media, for several ongoing support services, including; hosting, relevant content creation, internet marketing, and newsletter email marketing campaigns.
