4 Ways to Make Your Retail Brand Voice Stand Out on Shopify Plus
Written by Debra Weinryb, Content Strategist at Diff Agency
Speed, control, and efficiency are expected features of today’s online retailers — and that’s exactly what Shopify provides. Shopify is the ideal platform choice for online retailers looking to grow because it empowers small companies to develop into $100 million dollar brands, like Pura Vida and Fashion Nova. Their platform has the bells and whistles merchants are looking for, along with an advanced app network that enables businesses to add additional functionality to their stores.
At Diff Agency, we help our clients integrate Justuno’s app with their Shopify Plus stores. Justuno empowers entire ecommerce teams to rapidly test, design, and deploy onsite lead capture and retargeting campaigns for a smoother and more personalized customer journey. Our team likes Justuno’s platform for its flexibility in terms of design, extensive integration options, and for its strength as a data and AI conversion suite.
In our first Justuno partner blog, we interviewed Director of Solutions, Rob Hammett, about what does being on brand really mean. We discussed how to stay true to your business’s mission and authentic with your customers through consistent brand messaging across channels. To continue our conversation, we asked Rob how to optimize the onsite experience for Shopify Plus customers to attract an engaged audience. Here are four ways Rob suggests to make your retail brand voice stand out from the crowd on Shopify Plus, and increase sales:
1. Identify with the lifestyle you are selling
Identifying with the lifestyle you are selling makes your brand real and authentic. It allows your customers to envision how your brand will connect with their interests, opinions, or behaviors. Therefore it’s important to ensure your product imagery, messaging, and overall aesthetic, matches with your brand lifestyle to be truly “on brand”. Nike, Patagonia, and Iron and Resin are a few great examples of companies that really live what they sell and market.
Nike produces innovative sportswear products that enhance performance, and also represent an active lifestyle that pushes limits everyday. Patagonia is a brand devoted to outdoor clothing and gear, and invites customers to align with their brand by connecting with nature and supporting environmental causes. Iron and Resin is a hands on collection of products that represent the founder’s “one-off” culture, where goods are handcrafted to demonstrate the pursuit of freedom to get on the road, off the grid, or even just up the coast. All of these brands leverage their aesthetic and messaging to cultivate a community around their brand, which is a major way for up and coming brands to utilize Shopify Plus to market a lifestyle.
To develop your brand’s lifestyle, we recommend starting with a mood board. A mood board is when you collect ideas for an aesthetic and you map them out onto a canvas. For example, if you are decorating a room, you might put together a mood board of colors or furniture fabrics you would like to use. After creating a mood board, test out your concepts until you find something that you are happy with, actually works, and which represents that lifestyle your brand lives and want customers to align with. You can use Justuno to A/B test aesthetic changes to your onsite messaging like CTA color, copy, messaging tone, or off type to see what appeals the most to your target audience.
A/B test aesthetic changes
2. Use promotional giveaways as an incentive
Promotional giveaways is an underused, yet highly effective tactic in promotional marketing that often results in increased submission rates. For example, a contest such as ‘Enter to win 2 tickets to San Diego for your winter vacation’ would cost a brand relatively little money when you consider the amount of emails the company could potentially collect and add to their marketing email list. Many people will enter their email just for a chance to win a significant prize, like a flight for example. If you offer a prize too small however, like 5% off your retail product price, chances are people won’t be as incentivized to sign up. Because let’s be real here — 5% barely even covers shipping today! Your offer needs to provide enough perceived value to consumers for them to sign up, what that is will depend on the audience you’re targeting.
Choosing a promotional giveaway also needs to mesh with your lifestyle component. If you’re an athletic company, for example, your prize could be tickets to an adventure retreat, or a store gift card. Giving away a $200 shopping spree on your website is a common and effective promotional incentive.
evo contest email capture
If shoppers are already browsing your website, they are in the awareness stage, otherwise known as the top of the funnel. If they already have invested interest in your brand, and you offer an incentive to win a $200 shopping spree at no cost, you’ll likely see an increase in sign ups. So instead of a 5% off product discount coupon, try offering a prize with tangible value so your customers will actually want to submit their emails.
3. Use free shipping banners
At the end of the day, retailers are looking at how they can take sales back to their website from competitive big box retailers like Amazon, or Target in the USA. While it’s important to maintain a working relationship with these marketplaces, many companies also want to drive traffic and sales on their own website.
The difference is that big box retailers offer shoppers fast and free two-day shipping. During the holiday season, Amazon has an impressive 40% of its annual online sales in December, with many people relying on the Amazon fulfillment network to buy gifts. It’s no surprise that shipping costs are one of the top cart abandonment reasons that shoppers name and big box retailers are a living example that flexible shipping options work.
free shipping banner
One way to move the needle for international sales is to let visitors know that you offer worldwide shipping, because most shoppers won’t assume that. If a shopper is in Australia and your store is based in America, you’ll want to make it clear from the start that shipping will be free despite the distance. A great way to let your customers know that you have fast or free worldwide (and local!) shipping worldwide is to use free shipping banners across your site.
4. Sync emails to your website post click
Use on-site messaging to reinforce your email content’s messaging when someone clicks through is another way to stay “on brand.” This is part of creating an omnichannel approach by maintaining consistent branding across channels — and email is arguably your most valuable channel for customer acquisition.
When you send out an email, people often click through to your website. For this reason, email is typically one of the highest converting channels, and you can garner more value out of this channel by reflecting the same messaging on your website. For example, if you send out a welcome series or a cart abandonment triggered email flow, you could offer a time-limited coupon code such as, “Save 20% in the next 20 minutes” to drive shoppers back to your site from the email flow.
Justuno can pull the coupon code from the email, using UTM and URL targeting, so that all the details a shopper saw in their email are showing when they get to your site. UTM codes attach a custom code to a URL so you can track where your searchers came from as well as what campaign directed them to your site.
Sync emails to your website post click
Completing that personalized marketing one-to-one loop will hopefully move the needle in the right direction by elevating the site experience, and optimizing a high value channel for even more conversions. This is why many retailers are calling email their cash register, because they know the return is high from sending an email out. Use this strategy to take this high performing channel to the next level.
Communication is key to conversions
As we’ve discussed, elevating the site experience is necessary to make your customers think less about the website they are clicking through and think more about the brand that they’re engaging with. The goal is for customers to align themselves with your brand as they move closer to buying. While marketers tend to think about conversions as data, in the end a consumer’s decision to make a purchase is personal. It includes research, and the decision to align themselves with your brand. This is why it’s so important to stay true and authentic to your brand lifestyle, clearly communicate promotional incentives and shipping offers, and promote seamless messaging across brand channels to optimize your customer acquisition strategy.
Want to learn more? Sign up to our newsletter to find out about our next Justuno partner blog on common mistakes brands make with promotional messaging on Shopify Plus!
Missed our first Justuno partner blog? Read what does being on brand really mean.
