Being a retailer In the „Age of Customer“, how do you manage to stick out of the mass and outshine even the big players in e-commerce? The key to success for your online shop is no longer just a matter of excellent usability, but primarily customer centricity: you can truly enthuse your customer by putting him in the spotlight consequently. This also includes individual, situational approach through customization as well as playing highly relevant (emotionalizing) content. Supported by inspiring content marketing as well as excellent customer service you can create the ultimative shopping experience (customer experience, CX). Yet, even though this winning formula is well known theoretically among many online-retailers, its practical implementation is all too often inadequate. This way any provider squanders not only valuable potential but also a promising opportunity for their online shop to obtain an exclusive market position
In our four part series we show you valuable practical tips on how to avoid precisely that and how to impress in the above mentioned online areas. Here you can read Part 3: Emotionalization: Achieve Greater Customer Loyalty for Your Shop.
Emotionalization: Achieve Greater Customer Loyalty for Your Shop
In part 1 and part 2 of this blog series, we showed you how you can encourage your shop users to stay and make purchases by employing a feel-good atmosphere and absolute customer-centricity. But that is far from the end of the matter, and this can even still mean an inadequate customer experience: Online shoppers are hungry for experiences! Your job as a retailer is therefore to spark excitement in each individual user from the moment they land on the site. The key for such an ultimate shopping experience lies in inspiring and emotionalizing your shop users and your customers.
In the blog-like “Fashion & Beauty Updates”, ASOS presents celebrity styles, shopping tips, outfit ideas and how-to’s and links the content masterfully with their own products.
Product Presentation: Make Your Products Something That Can Be Experienced!
The first step in emotionalization lies in product presentation that creates excitement and awakens a strong desire in your users to purchase the product:
Unique Product Descriptions:
It is of course essential for your product descriptions to provide complete information, complemented by a personal touch where you, for example, tell users why you would personally recommend the product and which specific added value it offers the current prospective customer. Do not design these texts to be factual and businesslike with a scattergun approach; instead make them into unique stories! Such personalized storytelling helps your shop users to instantly form an emotional bond with the product and indirectly with your shop.
Visual Aids:
For clear product presentation, you need high-quality product images from various angles. By also showing the objects during use, you will stimulate your users’ imaginations and add to the storytelling. Be creative and cater to each user individually here too by personalizing the selection and combination of the images, because which key stimuli will convince users to buy is heavily dependent on who they are and how they want to use the product. Product videos are also highly promising conversion drivers, making it possible for users to experience your products without actually holding them in their hands. Since producing videos can be associated with significant work and expense, we recommend that you first test video content for your ten top-selling products.
At the Thomann Musikhaus the instruments with their sound, features and saome instructions are presented in videos by musicians.
User-Generated Content:
A neat trick to save work while at the same time increasing the engagement and trust of your users is to encourage user-generated content: Enable your customers to upload photos and videos of what they have bought and write reviews, or set up a question and answer system.
Mass Customization: Have Your Products Tailor-Made!
Customers love to customize and put together products themselves. Mass customization introduces a playful element, provides the greatest possible individuality and ensures a strong sense of ownership: If users spend half an hour putting together their perfect laptop, they are ultimately much more likely to make a purchase and are even prepared to pay a higher price for what is, after all, “their” laptop! Even if you cannot implement this for your entire range, you should make use of this powerful effect and allow your users to customize at least one product that is suitable for mass production themselves.
Content marketing: Tell stories that relate to what you offer!
“Content is king”: Content marketing plays an important role for brand awareness, customer loyalty and long-term success. This is about storytelling — not about the product, but “around” the product: If you offer your customers useful, exciting or entertaining content, they will retain good memories of your online shop. You will also improve your awareness and reach — and Google will love you for it! The name of the game for a successful e-commerce content marketer is getting to know your customers through intelligent data analysis in real time and automated individualization of the content on this basis. Your choice from the varied options for presenting your content should be based on the individual interests and taste, the context and the specific needs of your current user, since only personalization 2.0 and tailored content will enable you to do justice to the user’s individuality and find the right arguments to fill users with enthusiasm. You can find some great examples of content management grounded in strategy here — be it Saturn’s specialist magazine for tech fans, Zalando’s fashion blog, springlane’s recipe collection or Made’s Social Showroom. These creative projects are definitely not suitable for the same customer type, but are tailor-made for a very particular target group of the brands. Establishing and maintaining relationships with relevant influencers is invaluable in ensuring that your content is better publicized.
Ingenious: In the social showroom made by made.com, past buyers can upload and present their achievements. Content marketing and user-generated content with one stroke!
