In a previous blog post, we launched our series of posts on Secrets of the Visual Design Editor, exposing components that you may not be aware of and that can help you build a more powerful store.
In this edition, we look at elements that have a marketing tie – ways that you can merchandise effectively, build your mailing lists and promote your content on the site.
Product Slider
The product slider widget lets you display in an automated fashion certain products of your choice. You can decide how many products are in the slider, how many columns, and where they’re pulled from, among other settings, which make it easy to have a regularly updated product listing on your homepage or other promotional section.
The product slider widget can be found in the Products section of the Add Block window.
Newsletter Sign-up Banners
In the new Visual Design Editor are a set of newsletter sign-up banners that can be used to aesthetically enhance your designs while capturing critical information. Like other promotional banners they can be set to full width to break out of the standard page width.
The new Santi theme factors a full-width blue newsletter promotional banner that can be customized in fonts and colors to match your theme.
There are a number of newsletter blocks available, all of which are compatible with Zoey’s newsletter capture capabilities and can also get synced to MailChimp if you have properly activated and configured the MailChimp for Zoey app.
Collecting email addresses can be a critical element to building your business, and making sure your email callouts are prominent are a key aspect of building your lists.
Brand Slider
A brand slider is great for reputational building by showing logos of products you sell, or to offer a multi-image slide approach to displaying images that help better explain and represent what your business is providing online.
The brand slider is a different form of slider where you can show multiple images in a row, unlike the standard slideshow that shows one slide at a time. You can upload an image and make the image clickable to the page of your choice, whether another page on the site or a page outside the site. Similar to the main slideshows you can edit each slide individually, and add or remove slides on the fly.
Product Status Flags
For some time Zoey has had the capability to set start and end dates for when a product is new, as well as when a sale price should be active. Certain product grids were also able to use the new product data to be able to display dynamically based on the options selected.
With the latest Visual Design Editor update, we have leveraged that same data to also be able to show New and Sale Status Flags on the product grids in a dynamic form based on whether a product is flagged as new or on sale.
The Santi theme uses a Product List block on the homepage to show this in action. The Product List block is configured to show the newest products. The “Show Status Flags” setting, when checked, turns on the product flags to show if a product is new or on sale. In this case, since this is the New Products list, all of the products receive the “New” flag. The flags can be adjusted for design purposes just like other elements of the Product List block.
Status Flags can help draw attention to products, which will help increase the likelihood of purchase. New and Sale products tend to be among the higher priority targets for a store, so using Product Flags can assist in that process.
Status Flags are just one element of the Product List block that’s worth getting to know – click here to take a deeper dive around the Product List block in our support documents.
Recent Blog Posts block
With the launch of version 2.0 of Zoey and the upgraded Visual Design Editor, one of the pages we made more customizable regarding design was the blog. Making blocks out of the old blog pages allowed us to launch the Recent Blog Posts block for any page of your site.
On the blog page, you’ll see all of the various pieces that can power the blog, but on all the other pages you’ll be given a choice of recent blog post widgets that let you place your recent posts on whatever page you’re editing. There are a variety of presentation styles to fit different location types on your page, and you can decide basic display settings such as how many posts to show and standard design settings like fonts and colors.
Content marketing is incredibly popular as a way to drive in traffic from search engines and social media. Making sure your content is properly represented on the site will help with search engine crawling and customers who may discover you in other forms and wish to dive deeper into who you are as a business. If you are pursuing a content strategy be sure to judiciously use the blog callouts to bring some prominence to your efforts!
The Biggest Secret? There’s a Lot More Secrets
Our Visual Design Editor is packed with capabilities that make it easier to run your site on a day to day basis. If you’re not a Zoey customer already, request a walkthrough of the editor to see how you can make your company run more smoothly:
Stay tuned for more secrets in upcoming blog posts!
