Why People can not seem to get enough of Our House (Arhaus)
Just a quick background before we jump into the main topic of discussion. I and my teammates were tasked to do a comprehensive Digital marketing campaign for a company in a particular industry and we picked Restoration Hardware — an upscale American home-furnishings company.
For ease of getting through the project we were directed by our professor to do an in-depth analysis of Restoration Hardware competitors online presence, I decided to do mine on Arhaus an American retail chain that designs and sells home furnishings online and through its retail stores and catalogs.
There are many things that come together to make a website of a retail store appealing and make visitors spend longer time on the website and possibly convert which is paramount for a business. The User Experience and User Inter-phase have to be impeccable along side other functions as these have direct influence on the conversion rate and overall revenue generated.
A few things I noticed were done reasonably well that would definitely keep people on the website longer than 10 secs. There were certain baits and CTA that will keep consumers clicking and exploring the site. I will be sharing my favorite below.
1: promotion CTA message and button: On opening up the website the first thing that catches your attention asides the high resolution picture of Dining Table which seems to be what they are promoting at this moment, Is the Message and CTA of 50% of Dining furniture.
2: Header and Navigation: I would not normally put this two piece component together but for Arhaus the website designers put these together to avoid clumsiness and to keep the platform as minimal as possible. The header contains just the Brand Name and logo which also functions as a home button when clicked. To the right of the logo they also have three simple navigation buttons which lead to other pages of the website which they are named after; Furniture, Decor and About us pages. To the top left corner there is the store locator, Sign In icon, search icon(allows users to instantly access any part of the website. This is an important feature from the user experience (UX) perspective),and the cart/shopping bag.
3: Breadcrumb navigation. This can be closely assumed to be the GPS of the website it does the job of keeping your visitors aware of their location on the website. Plus, it forges a path for site’s visitors so Arhaus’ marketers know how they got there, hence helping them iterate their marketing and overall user experience.
4: Captivating content: The way the images of the products are placed on the website are decent and not clustered making them legible hence, visually appealing. They have the little or no text on the images on when necessary for example most of the images just have have a call to action while some just have the promotional sales message on them. This approach is good because customers are not distracted by the plethora of words and they get to click to see more of the images.
Part of the captivating content on this site had nothing to do with products being sold just more about informing visitors on the good work they are doing in giving back to the society through their CSR. “Spreading Hope, Empowering Women”.
5: Chat-bots: They incorporated live chat on their website to enable visitors to contact center agents or customer service reps to deal with customers’ queries and to alleviate any concerns they may have. Giving the nature of their business they named their chat-bots ‘Talk to a Designers’
6: Footer: Their footer served as an information hub which has like important links, sitemap, contact info, important news about their social responsibility, terms an conditions and also their privacy policy.and social media icons linked to their social media accounts embedded within the footer. Also a button that appears as you scroll to the bottom of the page that links straight to the top which is also perceived part of a great user experience.
Last but not the least thing I noticed was the pop up notification that prompted me to allow them to keep me informed about new products and promotions. I think this was brilliant for them to be able to keep in touch with visitors and make them come back to their website.
The pop up came as I was about to close the website after surfing. Giving the level/stage I am in life, I am sure you all can predict my answer to the prompt. As I sign out of this weeks post, I would like you to tell me what you thought my answer was in the comment section.
Thank you see you next week!
