Building a great storefront and offering high-quality products in a crowded online ecosystem isn’t enough to make you stand out. You need to leverage the things that make your brand stand out from the crowd. And, if your online store doesn’t offer something that no one else does or that consumers crave, it’s time to do some market research and position yourself for success.
Here are five things you can leverage to give a market advantage to your online store.
1. Identify and highlight your unique value
Focus your marketing and messaging on the features and benefits that set your brand apart from your competitors. Your unique value proposition might be:
- Below-market pricing
- A broader product range than your competitors
- An emphasis on the quality of your materials or construction
- Exceptional customer service
- Unusual or hard-to-find goods
- Oversized or bulky products that aren’t easily purchased online
Whatever makes your online store stand out, make shoppers aware of it, and don’t let them forget it. For example, if your unique value is product quality, that should be a theme in every product description and highlighted on each landing page. Use your blog (if you have one) and social channels (which you must have) to spotlight features that showcase the benefits of choosing a top-quality product such as yours. Include customer testimonials that speak to your unique value proposition on your website to back up your claims.
2. Focus on what matters to your customers
In addition to your unique value proposition, you must speak to consumers about what matters most to them. For example, suppose your prices are slightly higher than the market average for products like yours (but your higher quality makes up for that). Don’t shy away from talking about price; just center the discussion on the outstanding value you deliver for the price, such as more years of use or replacement guarantees.
There are several tools to develop a clear picture of your customers’ priorities. Investing in these research tools to help you create messaging that speaks to your target market is worth the investment of time and money.
- Customer surveys: Send follow-up emails asking customers for feedback on their shopping experience. Include opportunities for product reviews and give them a chance to tell you how to improve your business.
- Monitor your social feeds closely: Take customer feedback on social media platforms seriously — it’s probably telling you something you need to hear. Compile data on social posts about your brand, identify trends, and use that information to drive your engagement. And, of course, respond promptly to customer service requests, complaints, and compliments.
- Monitor reviews and ratings: Keep track of your customer reviews and ratings on third-party sites, such as Yelp and Google, and use that feedback to improve the shopping experience on your site.
- Personalization: All marketing is personal in our Big Data age. Offer targeted recommendations and discounts to increase conversions.
By gathering feedback and using data analysis, you can identify and prioritize the aspects of your products or service that matter most to your customers and emphasize those in your marketing and messaging.
3. Refine your sales funnel
Your sales funnel is the invisible hand that guides visitors to your online store from browsing to adding items to a cart to checking out. If the journey is confusing or clunky, you could lose sales from even highly motivated shoppers. Conversely, a well-constructed funnel provides a winning customer experience that can turn undecided shoppers into happy buyers.
These tips will help you streamline your sales funnel:
- Leverage website data: Use analytics tools to track customer behavior on your eCommerce site. By creating reports on which pages shoppers visit, what products they view, bounce rate, and shopping cart abandonment, you can begin to develop a picture of what’s working and where your funnel needs improvement.
- Get expert UX help: User experience is a science and an art. Hiring a UX consultant to help refine your customer journey is an excellent investment in your business. And remember that online navigation styles change over time, so do a UX inventory regularly to ensure that you don’t get left behind with outdated navigation or site design.
- Optimize your product pages: Include high-quality images, detailed product descriptions, and customer reviews to help your customers feel confident about their purchases.
- Streamline checkout: Your checkout process should be simple, secure, and fast.
- Diversify payment options: Provide multiple payment options to make the checkout process as smooth as possible. Add a financing option such as Klarna, particularly if your items have higher price points.
- Offer multiple shipping options: Shipping is one of the top factors influencing online buying decisions. If you can offer free shipping, it’s an excellent way to boost sales. But online shoppers want more than a free or cheap delivery option: Include a minimum of two expedited shipping options to let customers choose the speed of delivery.
- Don’t let shoppers leave without saying goodbye: Implement retargeting campaigns to send follow-up emails to customers who added items to their cart but didn’t complete the purchase. Use retargeting software to reach out to shoppers who bounced from a product page.
Your sales funnel isn’t static. Analyze data from your site and make continuous adjustments to keep your conversion rate high.
4. Offer fast, reliable, and order delivery
Customer experience with order delivery is an often-overlooked driver of market advantage and online retail growth. It may seem counterintuitive because a customer has already made a purchase by the time they interact with your fulfillment operations, but fulfillment is the closest your eCommerce business comes to personal interaction with most consumers.
Poor quality fulfillment can lead to negative reviews that drive away more than the buyer who had the bad experience. And retaining customers is more cost-effective than customer acquisition, so providing an outstanding unboxing experience is a terrific way to boost your profits.
Whether you ship in-house or use a fulfillment company, these operational standards are guaranteed to increase customer satisfaction:
- Zero shrinkage: Shrinkage or warehouse product loss not only hurts your bottom line; it can also impact your customers by impacting the reliability of your inventory, leading to stockouts and backorders.
- Same-day fulfillment: Days that orders spend in a fulfillment queue waiting to be picked and packed are days they aren’t on their way to your customers. Fast turnaround in your fulfillment warehouse is an excellent way to reduce delivery times.
- Warehouse locations: Another way to shorten delivery times is by shipping your orders from warehouses in central locations. Find the minimum warehouse locations to reach 90% or more of your customers in two days or less. That lets you offer two-day shipping without expedited delivery charges while keeping your inventory management simple.
- Order accuracy: When your customer gets the wrong product or quantity, it’s an expensive problem for you to deal with returns, and also a hassle for the customer. Work with a 3PL with near-perfect levels of order accuracy and watch your sales soar.
Don’t overlook fulfillment as a tool to leverage market advantage. For many eCommerce brands, top-notch fulfillment is the secret weapon that keeps them a step ahead of their competitors
5. Outshine your competition
All the tips in this article are intended to help you outshine your competition, but here are a few more ways to make your online store stand out in a crowded marketplace:
- Provide unique content: Create content via a blog and social media that educates, entertains, and informs your target audience to establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry. If you sell food items, offer recipes. For a seller of camping gear, a blog offering stories of bucket list wilderness trips could blaze a trail for the brand. Start with what excites you about your product niche, include what you know about what motivates your customers, and you have ready-made topics for posts and social content.
- Start a loyalty program: Reward repeat customers with discounts, rewards, sneak peeks, and special offers. Give your loyal customers a first chance to buy new items or let them shop a sale before you open it to the public. Stay in touch with your program members through regular emails.
- Use technology to stand out: Invest in new technologies, such as virtual or augmented reality, to provide customers with a unique and engaging experience. VR and AR can allow online shoppers to see what a piece of furniture would look like in their home or virtually “try on” a clothing item.
Use your creativity to differentiate your online store, and then use your marketing savvy to tell the world.
Conclusion
Selling online is a bit like swimming in a choppy sea. You have to paddle continuously to keep your head above the waves — if you simply float, you’ll be swamped by your competitors. Fortunately, eCommerce automation software makes it easy to collect and analyze data. Leverage those tools to build and maintain your market advantage.
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