Merchandising a website takes many forms and is often
considered separate to conversion management, but they are in fact
deeply integrated.
If you're selling a physical product which requires delivery then
merchandising activities could evolve around the category, product,
range, accessories and indeed delivery itself.
If you're merchandising a less-tangible product like a service or
piece of software, you could merchandise a need, benefits, the service,
related products as well as payment options.
Having been asked a few months back to create a presentation on basic
merchandising tips I felt compelled to share them with fellow
marketers.
Price, Place, Promotion, Product.
The tried and tested 'marketing mix' plays an
important role in online merchandising. However, knowing what to do with
this and how to translate this into an effective trade plan will
differentiate your offering from your competitors.
Knowing how to complement this will help you stand out, and conversion management will provide the edge you need.
Before I start out, this isn’t intended to be a nitty gritty in-depth
guide to online trading, but instead a view of merchandising and
conversion management basics I’ve found useful over the years.
1. Perceptive propositioning
Between your product and marketing is the proposition. Selling ice to
Eskimos is all well and good to prove you're a great salesperson, but
in reality it'll not generate brand trust or when reality hits and they
discover the product’s not right for them.
Getting the proposition right isn't as easy as it sounds. The first
touch point is usually through marketing; online, in-store, TV, direct
mail to name but a few channels.
Understanding that your online merchandising journey doesn’t
necessarily start online, let alone start on your website, is a
significant first step to getting the proposition right.
The message must carry itself consistently and clearly across the
customer journey. And even then there are multiple messages being
carried by your marketing yet one website to deliver this, not 10 sales
assistants in your store.
Consider the selling of a hotel stay. Are you selling a place to
sleep or an experience? Is it functional or aspirational? How does your
website make the customer feel? How do they want to feel? Does this
carry across your marketing message through to the website?
A low-cost budget hotel sells on price and functionality. The hotel
room the customer buys into is the end goal. Conversely the high-end
hotel is selling an experience. Sleeping in the room is only part of the
experience.
The proposition in both cases is what you’re ultimately selling, not the product.
It’s rarely as clear-cut as this though. Brands serve many types of
customer and so getting the proposition right in the way you merchandise
your products or services requires a deep understanding of your
customer and product affinities.
Getting into the mindset of your customer will also help you get into the forefront of your customer’s mind.
2. Pricing and promoting effectively
Cornered a niche? Playing in a competitive field? High-end? Budget brand? No matter where you are,
getting the price and promotion mix right is critical.
Consider a subscription site. If you overcharge, you may lose
business to a competitor. Undercharge and you may have reduced your
revenue potential, yet possibly claim more market share. Are you growing
a long-term business or short-term profit?
This is as much about your business and trading objectives as much as
the products and target consumers. If you’re a high margin retailer,
then you may have more bandwidth with price and subsequently offer more
price based promotions.
This certainly has its drawbacks, especially when you discount so
often that customers refuse to pay full price knowing that if they hold
out they’ll grab a bargain. If not, a competitor will jump in. Do you
act first? Or wait for a competitor to gain the early advantage.
For a low margin product or business, reducing price becomes the last
resort and promotions pivot around added extras. Loyalty schemes often
drive repeat business through additional rewards for ongoing loyalty,
deferring the hit on margin. Or perhaps you focus on high profile loss
leaders, creating a perception of price competitiveness.
If you’re in a competitive niche, with a limited set of suppliers
you’ll need a unique selling point to stand out or strong brand advocacy
to attract and retain customers.
Another point of differentiation is effectively packaging your price.
From experience in travel, this has certainly come out as a key concern
for customers over the years in not knowing or understanding the full
price of a product until they pull out their credit card.
Pricing effectively takes on many forms yet one of the most common,
overlooked aspects for e-retailers is the final price. I won’t attempt
to try and explore the nuances and annoyances of pricing and
checkout abandonment - there's already much written about this.
The key finding I’d share from over the years is that no matter how
good or bad your user experience, in a price sensitive economy,
customers will more often than not persevere.
This is certainly not a good excuse to skip over a good online
experience but optimising your site without getting these two P’s right
may well leave you spinning your wheels. Get the other two P’s right in
Product and Placement and you’re well on your way.
My tip would be to ensure you remain competitive within your market as much as decreasing attrition.
3. Context is king
Here’s
the end goal of online trading: to sell the right product to the right
customer at the right time at maximum profitability.
Merchandising within the right context is as much about the position
within the conversion funnel. Taking a potential customer from prospect
to customer to advocate is a key fundamental of conversion management.
Merchandising is concerned with getting the right message or product
to the customer, presenting the product in the right way and at the
right time.
Merchandising should pivot around the customer's needs, but can also be based on what the customer doesn’t
think they
need. They don’t need the latest touch screen gadget but they may like
one, or may not even know they'd be interested until you show it to
them.
Merchandising doesn’t directly concern itself with the user
experience, yet this is the foundation of good merchandising. Matching a
customer’s needs, whether apparent or not, to your product.
As digital marketers we realise consumers shop in many different
ways. Some dive straight into a product, others will take a more general
browse.
Merchandising context can take into account many aspects of the user journey. Here are a few examples:
- First visit? Second?
- Prospect? Existing customer?
- Time of day – important if you’re targeting at-home mums during the day.
- Demographics – this could include affluence or life-stage.
- Geographic location – think of local targeting.
- Source of visit - such as search engine, email, direct, landing page.
I’ve known businesses that employ a role to simply merchandise
the company’s various homepages and nothing else, such is the importance
placed on the 'shop window', or teams which literally update offers and
prices throughout the day based on demand and availability.
Consumers are savvy creatures. I certainly am. I should be, after
all, I know the tricks of the trade right? Yet I'm still duped into
buying things online that I don’t need or didn’t intend to buy because
it was surfaced at just the right time.
That’s clever contextual merchandising. And I love it.
4. Lubricate your path to purchase with a good user experience
A good user experience lubricates your purchase funnel, merchandising
provides momentum and direction. This is where the lines of traditional
merchandising and conversion rate optimisation can blend into an
awesome user experience.
You could argue that Amazon doesn’t offer a great user experience yet
it somehow drives phenomenal sales. I’d disagree. The experience is
efficient. The one-click add-to-basket is addictively good as a
consumer.
It’s actually far easier to purchase on Amazon than many of the
leading e-commerce sites. Yes, there’s a lot of clutter and as a
usability practitioner it goes against many recommendations, yet the
impressive sales figures suggest otherwise.
Have you visited
Jacob Nielsen’s web usability website?
I’ve been an avid follower for over a decade yet the design has barely
changed. His principles have endured. However, I'd argue Jacob is not
trading his website.
If the user experience reduces friction, strong merchandising guides
them through your site, motivating and inspiring customers. Many
websites suffer from fragmentation when it comes to merchandising.
It is extremely difficult to fully merchandise and tailor a website
for each consumer. But you can get pretty close. Which leads me onto the
next point…
5. Choose the right tools, but moreover, the right people
The range of tools available for your website right now is quite
mind-blowing thinking back a decade. Just take a look at this small, but
useful list:
-
Automated merchandising. Let a mixture of automated
rules and commercial input decide on which piece of content or product
to surface based on various aspects of the user and their experience
within your site.
-
Click to chat. Perhaps the next best thing to a sales
assistance if used in the right way. It can provide the edge your
website needs to improve your customer experience especially when your
operators are trained to aid and close sales and not just field general
queries.
-
Multivariate testing. I’m a huge advocate of testing.
It’s so easy to test your site as long as you've got the right team
creating those tests. I’ve been asked a number of times what happens
when there’s nothing left to test. I’ve yet to encounter that scenario.
-
Online customer surveys. Not only will it provide
candid insight into what your customers truly think of your site, you’ll
learn so much more about how to improve your offering.
-
Real-time user tracking. Again another underused tool,
is replaying user sessions. Find out what customers didn’t do, which is
just as insightful as what they did.
-
Search and faceted navigation. A good search experience
goes beyond the tool you’ve chosen, it’s also about the active
management of your search experience. Customers expect to find what they
want with your search box and narrow down their options. If not, you
may well be losing 20% of your revenue.A small merchandising tip:
look out for your search keywords that return zero results; you may well
find new product ranges which customers think you stock that you don’t…
perhaps you should?
-
Targeting and segmentation. The ability to split your
traffic into pre-defined blocks of attributes and behaviour and target
content to them comes close to offering a tailored web experience.
Segmentation by definition groups clusters of customers and is not one
to one but does provide an edge over spray and pray approaches to
merchandising. For example, a simple male/female segment split based on
logged-in users gives an instant merchandising opportunity to
effectively double the merchandising space on your homepage.
-
User reviews and testimonials. Let your advocates sell
your product for you. User reviews do a great job in surfacing low
quality products that are not fit for purpose. If average reviews are
constantly low, will you persist in selling it? Or feed back to your
buying team to enhance it? Or push back on your supplier?
-
Videos, 360s and visual merchandising. With broadband
speeds increasing over time, video and other bandwidth intensive media
are becoming less of an issue for consumers and can add an extra
dimension to your toolset. In-depth apparel zooms and detailed swatches
have certainly provided consumers with a more realistic view of what
they’re buying, coming closer than ever to physically having the product
in front of you.
-
Web analytics. This still remains the central source of
information for many businesses yet some of the examples above
demonstrate that data sources are far more abundant. Is data the new
oil? I certainly think it will last longer…
With so much access to data and insights, websites continue to
struggle with conversion. Whilst you can debate the exact split, for me
it falls back to the 80:20 rule of resourcing, your emphasis should
certainly be on
hiring the right number and expertise of people to operate those tools.
I’ve lost count of the number of conversations I’ve had about
companies struggling to create insight due to a lack of resource. It can
be difficult to justify costs but if you’re trading a medium to large
website you’ll soon hit barriers in keeping the user experience
together; you can’t put a price on experience and knowledge to turn
insights into revenue.
Finally I’ll end with what has been the theme for the past few years.
The days of silos are in the past. Online and offline marketing is
continuing to diverge.
If you run a bricks to clicks business, glean insights from your
stores. If you run a sales call centre alongside your website, listen to
calls, understand why they’re calling. Complement the experience across
your channels and indeed devices.
http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/7978-10-basic-merchandising-tips-to-increase-sales
One of the things I have learned from being practical is
the ‘alternative’. There are many problems can be solved, many needs be
addressed and many dollars can be save by using ‘alternatives’.
Aminul
Islam, a Bangladeshi labor rights activist and former apparel worker
was tortured and murdered last week in Dhaka. His body was dumped
outside of the capital city and was found by local police last Thursday.
According to the police report, Aminul Islam's body bore signs of
brutal torture. It is most likely that Aminul was murdered because of
his labour rights work.