In today’s e-commerce landscape, setting your products apart from the competition is vital to creating brand awareness and loyalty. Using a platform that your e-commerce merchandising team can leverage to spread product awareness will ultimately increase your sales and bottom line.
E-commerce merchandising today is about more than simply showcasing specific items. It should incorporate a broad social media campaign to access larger pools of prospective buyers. Additionally, it requires having the right tools to turn prospective buyers into customers, and customers into loyal, repeat shoppers.
This article will examine how merchandising has evolved and give you the information you need to effectively merchandise your products in the digital age.
Leverage Social Media to Create Awareness and Drive Traffic
The social selling of goods and services continues to be a growing trend that you need to capitalize on. Using social media to showcase your products is becoming one of the dominant methods through which your products can be marketed to potential customers.
The vast reach of social media allows you to showcase your products to more customers than ever before. Savvy e-commerce companies use social media to generate buzz around their products drive traffic to their sites. Social media allows you to generate brand awareness and reach untapped markets and cross-generational divides with your products.
Through effective social selling, your merchandising team can turn that awareness into increased traffic, higher sales, and greater brand loyalty. Ensure your merchandising team has the tools they need to create a strong social media presence. Doing so will lay the groundwork for continued growth in social selling, and allow you to adapt to changes in how social media is used by future generations.
Curate Your Products and Your Brand
E-commerce merchandising today is more far-reaching than simply placing popular items above-the-fold on your homepage or emails. Merchandising today must provide context for those products through intelligent curation.
Today’s best curating decisions are based on your unique site visitors’ behavior. But most merchandising teams don’t have the bandwidth to consistently pull customer data and manually curate item by item. That’s where automated merchandising solutions are changing the playing field. AI-powered product discovery solutions learn from customer behavior to automatically order search and navigation results based on popularity and even seasonality. Yet they won’t remove the power of the merchandiser, who can still easily curate, promote and move products with drag-and-drop merchandising controls and SEO-friendly URLs.
Curation is about more than showcasing a specific product. It is also an avenue through which you can, over time, define and sell the uniqueness of your brand. Cultivating brand loyalty will ensure a greater success rate in converting one-time purchasers to repeat customers. Think about what makes your company unique, and leverage those ideas as the framework through which you curate your specific products.
Harness the Power of User-Generated Content
User-generated content, such as ratings, reviews and customer images or videos increase sales by increasing engagement and shopper confidence.
Beyond merchandising onsite, user-generated content can also deliver powerful SEO benefits to increase your traffic from search engines. As users provide unique content for your product detail pages, their unique terms boost your rankings and provide social proof for other shoppers, making them more likely to convert.
Market to the Individual
Customers today expect a customized online shopping experience. E-commerce merchandising is an often overlooked, yet crucial, aspect of creating a personalized shopping experience for your customers. Use intelligent product recommendations to drive sales by relying on information about specific customers and their preferences.
Individualized merchandising requires a platform that can filter through shopping patterns, search history, and past purchases in real-time to generate product recommendations. In the past, your merchandising team had to do this by hand. Now, with a machine-driven e-commerce solutions, customizing your customer’s experience can be accomplished quickly and accurately.
Meeting your customer’s desire for a personalized shopping experience will ultimately result in higher AOV and a notable increase to your bottom line.
Incorporate Merchandising into your Site Design
Every aspect of your site design should be designed to maximize your merchandising. This ensures the products that you want to sell, and that customers want to buy, are always easy to find. Use a platform that allows your merchandising team to create bespoke landing pages to drive sales to promoted products.
Banners that incorporate customers’ past search queries or product views can also be used by your marketing team to further customize an individual’s shopping experience. Remember that merchandising is as much about the customer as it is about the products you are promoting. Customers today expect to have a personalized, aesthetically pleasing user experience. Meeting these expectations is critical to your success.
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