6 ways to make your retail brand more relevant
Finding the sweet spot between what a customer wants and what your company offers.
From branding to product selection to customer experience, what can companies do to genuinely connect with customers? That’s the question retailers asked — and answered — at Shop.org’s annual summit.
Trust and authority
Great branding actually helps customers develop their own sense of identity. “Brands that we respond to are the ones that give more than they ask in return,” said Tonic Design’s Chris Bye. Those brands inspire loyalty and long-term relationships where customers choose to align with the company’s core values.
Philadelphia-based motorcycle gear retailer RevZilla has experienced rapid growth in recent years, but its mission is to advance the experience of the motorcycle enthusiast, not to be the biggest company in the space. Early on, customers were impressed with employees’ knowledge, and the company launched a series of online videos to scale that knowledge-sharing. The result? More than 160,000 YouTube subscribers and over 50 million video views. Co-founder and CEO Anthony Bucci said advertising-supported content isn’t honest enough, but because RevZilla employees share their honest opinions, people trust the company’s videos.
“Authority is content and commerce as one experience,” said Bucci, and it’s the only way for a retailer like RevZilla to stand a chance against Amazon.
Authentic reviews, whether they come from in-house personalities or real-life customers, go a long way toward inspiring trust. Instagram users upload 80 million photos and “like” another 1.6 billion images each day. Considering that 65 percent of consumers seek out user-generated content before making a purchase, Giggle finds value in adding customer images to product pages. But many of the photos depict the company’s customers — families with babies — and not everyone is comfortable giving the retailer permission to share the images more broadly. Giggle’s Shawna Hausman said less than half of the photos make it past rights management, but these “visual endorsements” are worth the effort.
The content challenge
Content is the secret to growth, said GoPro’s Meghan Litchfield, and personalized content drives brand relevance. The company noticed that hockey content on its website was resulting in high bounce rates, so now the website content is tailored to visitors based on referral data: If a customer comes to GoPro’s website from a surfing publication, she’ll see surfing videos. Inspiring content, built around customer activities and interests, helps shoppers immediately see how they can use products in their own lives.
Lowe’s has also seen a major lift from adding lifestyle-inspired content to product pages. An image of a grill that showed the number of burgers that fit on the cooking area drove a whopping 9 percent increase in conversions, said Senior Content Development Manager Richard Chapman. These successes have inspired the home improvement retailer to enhance more than 20,000 online products with better videos, 360-degree photos and other visual content.
Mobile-first content
“Creating an engaging retail brand experience starts on the small screen,” said KWOLIA’s Anne Marie Stephen. More and more consumers are turning to mobile devices for product information and shopping inspiration, which is why developing content that works on smartphones is mission critical. The key to small-screen success, said ChalkDust Consulting’s Debbie Kiederer, is simplifying design and prioritizing content.
Social media
A few years ago, social was the tail on a pig, said Abercrombie and Fitch’s Billy May. It didn’t add much but didn’t feel right without it. Now customers start discovery and interaction with brands on social. “The shopping experience today is not a transactional experience, it’s a social experience,” said Singularity University’s Salim Ismail. Much of this shift is generational — many Millennials don’t shop in stores like their parents do.
Many of Warby Parker’s customers are getting opinions from friends and learning about the eyeglasses brand on social media. Head of Product Management Chris Maliwat said the brand has formed an integration partnership with Stripe payments to enable shopping on Twitter, making it easier for consumers to shop directly from their Twitter stream.
Driving engagement is critical on social media, even if there’s not a direct link to sales. Lilly Pulitzer was one of the first retail brands to embrace Snapchat’s “geofilters” in an effort to “capture the attention of the ever-influential Millennial.” Vice President of Creative Communications Jane Paradis said the company finds the most success when it stays true to the purest expression of its brand:
“The more we dance to the beat of our own drum, the more it opens the market for us.”
Meaningful personalization
“Relevancy is the new currency,” said Sailthru founder Neil Capel. Using a customer’s name in an email subject line isn’t personalization, it’s field replacement. Capel suggests using more meaningful factors to personalize campaigns and messages:
- Buying signals — If a customer isn’t sending a buying signal, they should receive lifestyle content emails with a more editorial tone. When they shift to buying mode, they should receive emails promoting products.
- Cadence — Every customer is unique and goes through different engagement cycles. Ramp up emails when customers are engaged instead of acting desperate when they’re not showing interest
- Time of day — If your customer only shops on Thursday afternoons, that’s when they should receive emails from you.
- Channel — If a customer is engaging in a mobile app, they don’t necessarily need to receive emails, especially when those messages are duplicating push notifications.
Sailthru has helped outdoor gear retailer The Clymb track dynamic user profiles. E-commerce strategy consultant Craig Schinn recommends placing the most personalized information — about a customer’s rewards points or credits and favorite products — at the top of email messages.
At The Container Store, the “Perfectly Organized Perks” program helps the company “surprise and delight” top customers with sample products and other benefits. The engagement program launched a year ago and already has nearly 3 million members, said Vice President of Creative and Online Melissa Collins. By focusing on building profiles centered on each customer’s needs, the retailer can offer a relevant experience that drives incremental sales.
To find better answers, ask better questions
“If you are always focused on the outcome — that thing you are trying to make — then you are limited by your initial vision,” said Justin Ferrell, fellowships director at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. Creative problem finding is different than creative problem solving: If you can identify a creative problem, the obvious solution is often a disruptive idea.
This story was originally published as part of the Summit 2015 Playbook. Download playbooks and other free resources from the NRF Retail Library and make plans to attend Retail’s Digital Summit in Dallas this September.
