E-commerce branding is all about creating a powerful and memorable image of your company in the customers’ minds. It’s neither a name nor a logo. Though it’s invisible, it exists, and it can be felt.
Creating a brand image in this competitive digital world is not easy. It involves a lot of precision in deciding the brand values, the brand’s voice, the logo colour, the brand tagline, the advertising strategy of products, etc.
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Examples of Some Brands:
- The delight in using Apple products
- The excitement to use Nike for any sportswear selections
- The thrill to drink Coca-Cola
- The enjoyment to shop from Zara
- The love for McDonald’s Burger
The list is unlimited. Though branding defines the customer’s viewpoint on your company, it also defines the actions taken by you to cultivate and grow your brand.
What is Branding?
Branding is all about the 3 “E”: Emotion, Engagement, and Expectation.
When people are emotionally connected with the brand, they tend to engage with the brand and expect their desires to be fulfilled. Therefore, a strong branding strategy has a combination of all the three factors mentioned above. This will help you in enticing customers to your brand in this competitive market, thus boosting sales.
That’s just the beginning of your e-commerce branding process. Here are some of the best e-commerce branding strategies to enhance your brand identity, which you need to implement for creating a strong brand image.
Expert Tips for Building your Online Brand:
#1. Know your Target Audience
Your target audience is the foundation of your brand-building process, and hence it’s vital to know your audience.
- Who is your audience?
- Where are they?
- What do they want?
Once your audience is clearly defined, focus on them to know their precise needs, expectations, and demands. Then, step in their shoes to know their thoughts and speak their language to reinforce your branding process.
If you are unaware of your target customers, all your branding efforts are bound to fail. So, keep accessing your customers by analyzing your audience.
Tips:
- Send survey forms
- Conduct interviews
- Assess their lifestyles
- Create specific customer profiles
Once you have narrowed your audience, focus on them to gain a competitive advantage and ensure precise communication to fulfil their needs.
#2. Incorporate the Four Vs of Branding
You can say that the four Vs, i.e. Vision, Voice, Values, and Variation, are the foundation factors of your e-commerce business that dominate your branding decisions and lead to success.
- Vision:
The ideas why your brand exists can be defined as a brand vision. A clear and impressive vision, which inspires you to create your brand, apart from the monetary goal, can help in attracting customers to your brand, making sales an easy process.
- Voice:
Your brand’s communication style defines your brand’s voice. Personalization and emotional quotient involved in brand communication matter to create an impacting image on the customers.
Eliminate the dramatic part and let your brand voice be effective and authentic enough in the entire journey of shopping and social media postings.
- Values:
Your brand values define your brand beliefs and your brand’s existence. They should be catchy and attract the targeted customers to your brand. Share your values with your customers (improves brand loyalty by 89%) to make them feel connected to your brand for a gradual increase in customers and sales.
- Visuals:
Visible signs of a brand like a brand logo, style, and fonts in which the brand name is written, and the brand colour, which portrays varied emotions, are all a part of your brand image. Statistics indicate that colour impacts brand recognition by 80%.
#3. Be Consistent and Loyal
Imagine yourself being a customer and think about your favourite brand. Have you ever thought of switching over to some other competitive brand and dupe your favourite one?
No, Why? The main reason is the consistency of the brand, and that makes you loyal to them. In addition, their efficiency to maintain product quality and service efficiencies help in ensuring customer loyalty.
Also Read : 9 Quickest Ways to Increase eCommerce Sales
Amazon is an ideal example of a consistent and customer-friendly brand with a huge loyal customer base, thus reaping immense sales.
Consistency across all the channels helps increase revenue by 23%. Ensure that you maintain brand consistency by setting clear brand guidelines, adhering to defined brand values, and fulfilling brand promises.
#4. Implement the Four Vs in your Store Design
Once the 4 Vs are defined, its implementation time. First, ensure that your store visuals rotate around them and portray them.
Example:
If your e-commerce store is offering beachwear, your target audience will be the female crowd. So your brand voice will be all about play and fun. The colours of your store should match the voice and product because if they are dull and boring, it will create a negative impact on your audience.
Not only will they switch to competitors, but you may also find it difficult to gain customers.
#5. Speak Your Customer’s Language
Emotional connection is only possible when the owner and the customer speak the same language. This makes them understand each other’s needs since communication becomes simple.
When you focus on customer language, the responsiveness to your brand, products, marketing strategies all increase, thus benefiting your e-commerce store. Not everyone is born with that talent, and hence many brands fail to impress customers since they fall out of matching customer language.
Tips:
- Peep in product reviews to check out customer’s tone and expressions
- Conduct customer research to study their language
- Check out your competitor’s language and try to be unique to stand out
- Employ simple language and avoid using jargon.
#6. Prioritize Customer Service
It’s good to focus on sales, but never forget after-sales services, since that too is a part of the customer journey. You will be surprised to know that 73% of the customers love a brand due to its excellent customer service.
Customer experiences of using a particular brand affect the sales figures. Negative customer experiences during sale or post-sales can make you lose out on customers and create negative publicity for your brand. No customers, no business.
Hence, serve your customers in the best possible way by:
- Instant query resolution
- Valuing repeat customers
- Greeting customers politely and enthusiastically
A good branding strategy is to create the “Wow” factor by investing in an expert team to take care of your customers.
#7. Install SSL Security for Gaining Brand Trust
The digital market is full of cyber threats and hackers, making customers cautious about using your brand. Give a secured and authentic e-commerce website to your customers for increasing brand trust.
To secure your website from cyber threats, install SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate security for domain and subdomain security.
This digital certificate uses encryption techniques to secure browser-server communications and makes plain text non-readable for hackers. Only the intended recipient with a special key can decrypt the communication.
Example:
Out of varied SSL certificates, the wildcard SSL certificate is very budget-friendly and helps secure the primary domain and unlimited first-level sub-domains with a single certificate.
Apart from PCI compliance, trust indicators like HTTPS (hyper-text transfer protocol secure) and padlock in URL and address bar respectively assure customers of their transaction safety.
Secured site seals on web pages increase trust, and the more trust in the brand, the better the brand reputation and conversion rates.
#8. Guarantee Authenticity
Guarantee your customers with high-quality and genuine products for creating an authentic relationship with them. Be honest and transparent in portraying your products because 94% of the customers stay loyal due to brand transparency.
Honest labels, be it ingredients or the type of fabric or any other product specifications, always helps in enhancing the brand marketing process. The genuineness of a brand has a powerful impact on customers and also boosts the emotional quotient.
Tips:
- Be real and consistent
- Don’t tell but show
- Show a good reputation
- Never over-promise
- Share your story
- Never purchase reviews or likes
An authentic brand always stands ahead in the competition and helps increase the loyal fan base.
#9. Review, Reflect and Refine Constantly
Once your brand is established and popular, don’t forget to constantly review for better productivity. Then, keep on reflecting your brand values with your actions to motivate customers to return to your store.
Refine their journey with trust so that they are compelled to enter and stay in your digital home.
Ensure that your brand values are constantly communicated to your target audience. Also, ensure that customer feedback is taken, industry trends are focused, competitors are researched, and promises are delivered as communicated.
Few More Tips:
- Invest in Brand Logo and Tagline
- Research your competitors
- Use Unique and Diversified Content
- Highlight your Offers
- Shine your Brand Personality
- Share your Brand Story
- Integrate social media
Final Thoughts
Though branding is a long-term process, build a strong and memorable identity by providing the best user experience to your customers.
Secure your in-transit web communications with an SSL certificate purchased from a reliable SSL service provider. You can get cheap wildcard SSL certificates or multi-domain SSL certificates at extremely reasonable rates from the Cheap SSL Coupon Code. In addition, they offer discount coupons on web securities for securing your digital infrastructure.
It takes a lot of effort to build a successful brand, but ultimately, the customers who support the same matter. So, hear your customers and fulfil their needs to make your brand popular and prosperous.
