Most web retailers realize the conditions for selling online change continually and their web sites must adapt to shoppers’ habits and expectations. Less clear is the scope of changes to include in a redesign and how much they will cost. Determining how much to spend should be balanced by the return the e-retailer seeks, says Betsy Emery, CEO of web design and marketing consulting firm Tellus. She will speak at the Internet Retailer Web Design & Usability Conference 2011 in a pre-conference workshop session titled “Costing out a web site redesign” on Feb. 14 from 8:45 to 9:30 a.m.
“Web retailers need to right-size the expenditure of a redesign in relation to the magnitude of return on investment expected,” Emery says. “They need to diagnose their individual needs: Do they want better traffic? Better average order value? It’s about looking at making the right decision for your business and then, within that, using a financial analysis to set you up for making correct decisions regarding technology, vendor partners and how to measure results.”
Emery will be joined by Timothy Peterson, vice president of marketing at NutraOrigin.
Emery will discuss strategies for determining what makes sense for a retailer to spend on a web site redesign and the elements that go into making that decision. She will share advice on how to estimate the costs and calculate the return for retail web site updates, both large and small, using examples of different types of redesign efforts and different return on investment.
Internet Retailer’s editors asked Emery to speak because of her extensive experience in crafting successful e-commerce sites. Emery is CEO of Tellus, which she formed in 2003 to create and execute effective web strategy, design, development and marketing strategies. She oversees the company’s key partnerships, web strategy consulting, and continued service offering development. Before founding Tellus, Emery worked with name-brand and niche-leading business-to-consumer web sites as chief of client services for Fry Inc. Before that, she led consulting teams at MicroStrategy in large-scale Internet, data warehousing and eCRM projects. Prior to that Emery managed Dun and Bradstreet’s Silicon Valley account operations, focusing on Internet services, database marketing and decision-support solutions.