It's easy to lose your mojo when everything looks the same
I just got back from vacation in Paris. It was beautiful. It was delicious. It was different. Do Parisians see it with the same wonder that I did? Truth is, It doesn’t matter where you are, familiarity breeds contempt. The same goes true for our online world. Everything gets old. What once thrilled you is now a bore. What was so very IN is now tragically out, Out OUT!
When I was an Art Director for L.L. Bean I had a delightfully huge photo budget. The ADs could basically do whatever they wanted as long as they didn’t go crazy and hire a supermodel or rent a cruise ship. It’s hard keeping things fresh on any budget, but tighter budgets require some added creativity. The magic isn’t really the money spent, it’s the ideas that make the magic.
Does Your Site Do This?
It can with Stylaquin! Stylaquin is the easy to add Shopify app that transforms your website. Stylaquin makes shopping faster, more engaging, and more fun. Stylaquin shoppers stay longer, view over 85% more products, come back more often, and buy more when they do. Find us in the Shopify App Store.
Creativity is a muscle that needs to be used
There’s a myth that creative people are born and not forged. The truth is that the people who say they aren’t creative just don’t like the process of being creative. I don’t like the process of accounting, but thankfully there are those who do. If you don’t enjoy being creative you won’t spend a lot of time honing your skills. Ten thousand hours to mastery is also true of creativity. One of the biggest killers of great creative is not giving it enough time. How often have you heard a nature show say “Play is nature’s training ground for the hunt.”? Play is creative’s training ground for the killer idea that sells. Giving yourself, or your creative team, time to come up with multiple ideas is the fastest way to get fresh ideas.
So how do you keep your website fresh?
Embrace change. You need to change things. There are things you can change easily: Images, colors, copy, and apps. There are things that are harder to change: Branding, themes, and target audience. Start with the easy stuff.
New images
Just changing images can help. If you are on a Shopify site, change the order in the carousel. Be sure to keep an eye on how different images perform. Some images just sell better than others. If you can figure out what about the image made it better you can really dial in how you show products. A good example of this is when we figured out that showing a hand on rolling luggage increased sales by about 11%. Just the hand.
New images are getting easier to make all the time. With AI you can take an image with a model or product in one location, and with a few awkward sentences, probably move them to a new location, hopefully with all their parts intact. Even without AI, it’s pretty easy to swap out backgrounds or create new ones.
Add a Styling Board and a Wishlist!
The Stylaquin Idea Board keeps customers engaged in two ways: it’s an interactive styling board where shoppers can collect and curate all the things that interest them; and it also acts as a wishlist that shoppers can return to. Find us in the Shopify App Store.
New colors
Change site colors with the season. It’s an easy way to show that your site is evolving and vibrant. If you just stick with your brand colors, that’s fine, but it’s harder to keep fresh. When we were designing the Stylaquin App we made it easy to change the colors of the bar so folks could play with color.
New Copy
It’s really easy to set it and forget it online, but revisiting copy can be an easy way to keep things fresh. No one reads copy until they are considering buying, then everyone reads copy. The tee shirt that sells all year round will still sell better if the copy changes with the seasons. Basic items may be used differently in summer than they are in winter. Refreshing product copy from time to time keeps products relevant.
New Apps
One of the great things about online shopping platforms like Shopify is that you can add new things easily. While adding too many apps can slow down a site, letting apps transform your website is easy and affordable. The Stylaquin App adds a new way to shop that transforms any website without changing much. Sounds impossible, but it’s almost magic. Stylaquin is easy to add and has a 14-day free trial.
How much change is enough?
There’s a cognitive bias called the Status Quo Bias where we prefer to keep things kind of the same. If you color outside the lines, the group think will be that you are doing something wrong. But if nothing changes then, well, you’re back in the same boring rut you started out in. So we need to keep things fresh, while not changing much, in order to get anything changed at all. Oh, the joys of being creative! Seriously though, evolution versus revolution is easier to manage and, if you make it part of the normal product cycle, it’s not as daunting as a total overhaul done in a panic.
