How To Make Your Product More Accessible To Your Customers

This guide will give you all of the information that you need, be it a little or a lot, depending on where you are starting from today, to get started with making your product more accessible to your customers. Here are tips and tricks. 

A Mobile App 

This tip is for all of the entrepreneurs who have a product that consumers buy. For example, maybe your product is groceries or clothing or books or gadgets or toys. Maybe even your company ships products to the customer, but it isn't exactly efficient enough. If you are one of these companies, go ahead and make a Mobile ordering app so that customers can order your product directly from their mobile device. This saves them time because now they don't have to drive out to physical store locations anymore. They can just log in to the mobile app anywhere at any time and order right away! And this also helps you as well because no more phone tags between customers and customer service reps, which slows down delivery times.

Make Your Staff More Accessible

If you own or manage a company, look for ways to make your staff more accessible so that customers can get in touch with them directly if need be. Do you have an office? If so, then put the phone number of your office on your website and business card. You can also consider installing video chat systems or just email if nothing else is available. This way, your customers should feel at ease when asking questions because they know that they will hear back right away since you are just across town rather than out of the country somewhere.

Update Your Website

Go ahead and update your website to make it more accessible. There are a few things that you could consider such as:

1. For starters, try updating the navigation menu of your website so that it makes it easy for users to go from one page to the next without much hassle. You can do this by having submenus or by using breadcrumbs. If you don't use breadcrumbs (little pieces of trail like "Home > Holiday Gifts > Stocking Stuffers"), then Google will not be able to help visitors find what they need on your site because Google cannot find pages which it cannot see. So if someone searches for "gift ideas for men'' then you have just lost out on that customer because Google will not be able to tell your customer that you have a page about "gift ideas for men" and instead, they will go to one of your competitor's sites and buy their product and never return back.
2. Use headings such as H1, H2, etc. so that search engines can understand the hierarchical structure of your pages. Search engine spiders crawl through HTML tags such as H1, H2, etc. Tag usage makes it easier for online readers to scan and digest information on a webpage so use them!
3. Link out to other websites when relevant so that visitors can gain access to more information if they need it. 
4. If you have videos on your site, make sure to use captions so that individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing can fully understand what is being said.

Make It SEO Friendly

Make sure that your site is search engine friendly because first and foremost: it's the right thing to do for the good of your company. Having a strong website presence on Google, Yahoo and Bing (just to name a few) means more traffic on your site which means more people will be able to find out about what you have to offer. Search engine optimization is just as important as customer satisfaction so ask yourself. Here is how you can make your product SEO friendly:

1. When writing product descriptions use keywords when possible so that when someone types in "office supplies" or "buy blue widgets" then your site will come up on the search engine results page. But don't just stuff a bunch of keywords in your product descriptions because that doesn't work anymore, is considered spam and it may get you banned from Google altogether which means bye-bye to free traffic.
2. Make sure that your site is optimized for mobile devices as well. If not, then customers won't be able to order right away (or ever). Let's say someone orders an item using their tablet but your company didn't make it compatible with tablets. Well, this customer will wait until they get home and log onto their computer before they can finalize their order. Or maybe they will just go to your competitor and order from them instead because they have a better website that is compatible with tablets.
3. Hire a professional copywriter or a consultant who specializes in optimization for search engines.

Make Sure Your Product's Packaging Is Accessible

If you are an entrepreneur whose product is sent directly to the consumer such as clothing or books or toys then chances are that your products come with packaging. If this is the case, make sure that any boxes or labels are labelled using simple words and clear images so that customers can more easily understand what each item is. 

Here's an example, if your product's packaging says "Monkey Socks" then you should include a picture of a monkey wearing socks on the box. If there is no such image, then this means that if someone who has low vision tries to pick up the box, they won't be able to distinguish the written text from the rest of the packaging which makes it difficult for them to know whether they have picked up the correct box or not.

Make sure that your product comes with instructions so that if someone does have low vision or another type of disability, then all they have to do is follow your instructions in order to enjoy your product.

Use Social Media

So your product's website is complete and you have optimized it for mobile devices, great! Now it's time to get the word out to the public. Social media sites can be a valuable marketing tool so use them to their full potential. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are just some examples of social media sites that you should consider creating a page on since they allow users from all over the world access to your content which means more exposure and publicity for your business.

Give Back To The Community

This final tip may come as a surprise but if you want to increase sales then give back in every way possible because charity work will make people see your company in an even better light than when you first started. 

It's true, making a product more accessible for your customers can be challenging but in the end, it will pay off tenfold. Use these tips and remember that it isn't just about making sure that your website is user-friendly, it's also about doing the right thing which means making sure that people with disabilities are able to use your products just like everyone else can.