Each week, we publish a mishmash of ecommerce related, insight infused articles for you to smash through. Just as we collect business information across all of a merchant’s channels in a single place, we’re doing the same for ecommerce related content from a variety of top-tier content creators. If you find the material filling your appetite for knowledge, feel free to share this post, as well as any article you see here.
All eyes are on ecommerce. It’s been on the rise for years and it’s clearly challenging traditional, in-store retail. But as more and more businesses flock to the worldwide web to make some cash, that means more competition for you. Plus, with enormous marketplaces like Amazon, consumers don’t even need to visit your site.
There’s one aspect completely unique to your business that distinguishes you from everyone else: your brand. In this week’s mishmash, we’ve got five charts illustrating how your brand contacts, communicates, and relates to the customer, as well as how you ultimately compare to the competition.
The Key to Any Good Relationship
One of the key parts of your brand is communication. Whether visually via logos or tonally through words, brands speak to customers. But what’s the best way to start a dialogue with them? Social media? Test? Adestra surveyed more than a thousand consumers in an effort to find their most preferred medium of communication, and, not surprisingly, email is indubitably the best way to reach out to them, making your email marketing a major catalyst for your branding.
Factor in Satisfaction
Brands must always strive for customer satisfaction, but where that satisfaction comes from is incredibly important. Some customers demand quality products, others prefer lower prices, some want a smooth, quick and easy process to checkout. Thanks to customer satisfaction research by Accenture, here’s a list of the top satisfaction drivers for consumers. Customer service, product, and price points were the reigning champs, but there are a few other surprise contenders that customers take into account.
Amplify Your Voice with Others’ Voices
And part of that customer satisfaction comes from creating an experience that gets the customer talking and buying. Whether you’re infusing your brand on social media, on your webpages, or your packaging, the hope is that your customers’ branded experience is strong enough to get them talking about you. Why? Because word-of-mouth recommendations are an incredibly powerful way to reach and persuade the friends and family of your customers to check you out. For more, look at these purchase decision influencers provided by Deloitte.
Getting on the Radar
Need further proof that word-of-mouth is a big deal? When Ebates asked a variety of consumers — teens and adults alike — how they hear about new brands,it ranked pretty high amongst the competition, like TV and online ads. For all the spending on advertisements, wowing the customer, capturing their attention, and impressing them via your brand is just as, if not more, effective. It’s one thing to turn a site visitor into a customer, and another to turn them into a voicebox that spreads the word and praises your brand.
A Conversion Experience
At the end of the day, it’s always about results. All your branded efforts are meaningless unless customers are actually engaging and buying from you. Converting, like the case for most business actions, is the end-goal of brand building, but are your rates above or below average compared to the competition? Courtesy of Monetate’s conversion rate research, here’s a look at benchmarks across the industry by device. See how you compare.
