Modern buyers find shopping online far more convenient than having to trek through long aisles in physical stores. Following the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, online retail has skyrocketed, with consumers spending $870.78 billion online in the United States alone in 2021, up 50.5% from the 2019 total. Because of this, the eCommerce space is becoming competitive.
As an online entrepreneur in 2022, you must create a foolproof digital merchandising strategy that elevates your business over competitors. Doing this will lead to more sales and revenue for growing your business.
We’ll go over 8 digital merchandising tactics that will boost your revenue in this post. But first, a brief overview of what digital merchandising entails.
What is Digital Merchandising
Digital merchandising is also known as online or eCommerce merchandising. It covers all the activities that are involved in the positioning and sale of products online. As much as you need to model your online stores with certain basic characteristics of physical stores, you also need to innovate by employing certain digital merchandising strategies. These are specific to online stores and will bring in more customers while improving their shopping experience.
Online stores make use of some key strategies like
- Ensuring the site has a quick search
- Displaying clear product descriptions
- Making sure that the branding is consistent from the shopping experience to the delivery
- Ensuring the website has a great user interface design and experience
8 Digital Merchandising Strategies for More Sales
1. Make Shopping Easy with a Great Search Tool
When your website has a powerful site search, your customers enjoy a better shopping experience. Because they can find items quickly, it converts into higher revenue, as customers who find what they are searching for faster are more likely to make a purchase. This digital merchandising strategy also opens up additional doors because it reduces the number of failed leads caused by the inability to find the right products. There are many search plugins and tools that you can use for your site, but it’s best to choose one that offers the following vital features:
- Ease-of-use: you don’t want to need a software engineer to install your site search or to manage it each time the minutest thing goes wrong
- Search filters: These are advanced search options that make it easy for buyers to finetune their search
- Voice search: this is becoming more popular by the minute, and many of your customers are switching to using voice commands rather than having to type searches every time.
- Multilingual: you’ll want a site search that has support for multiple languages as the world morphs more and more into a true global village.
Expertrec has all of the key features of an eCommerce search bar and more.
2. Create Personalized Recommendations for Buyers
Do you know how it feels when you make a search and Google recommends the perfect handbag? Heavenly! That’s the power of personalized recommendations! Personalized recommendations make use of Artificial Intelligence to study customer purchasing patterns and habits. They predict what shoppers may want to get in the future.
It keeps track of their preferences, the seasons in which they buy certain items, and much more. You can then utilize this information to provide highly tailored, one-of-a-kind recommendations for each consumer. It will feel like you know them so well and would drive up their experience with your brand. Expertrec, for example, has recommendation engines integrated into its search that allow you to keep track of what your consumers are looking for the most.
3. Use Powerful Storytelling
87% of customers desire more meaningful connections with the brands they patronize, and storytelling is one of the most powerful ways to build such connections. From your homepage to your product descriptions, your website should tell a story that communicates your brand’s values.
It should offer help when it’s needed and gradually steer visitors from curious window shoppers to buyers.
There are a few key points to tell a great story.
- Focus on the emotional benefits of your products
- Make it easy for customers to share your story
- Make your brand “human”
4. Display Product Reviews and Social Proof
Leverage social proof by displaying your product reviews in conspicuous locations on your site. Most customers want to be assured that they are getting quality products, and great reviews help tell them that.
It goes without saying that you should build mechanisms that make it easy for your customers to provide feedback on your products once they’ve purchased them.
5. Use High-Quality Images and Graphics
Invest in terrific photography. A high-quality photograph of your product naturally suggests that it’s top-tier merchandise, irrespective of its price tag. Clear images also strengthen the first impression that a customer has of your brand and even enhance the shopping experience.
Your eCommerce site should also have a fantastic visual interface, as this will improve your customers’ experience and make them recommend your store to their friends.
6. Create Upselling Sequences
Since the goal of any digital merchandising strategy is to generate more sales, you should aim to turn leads into recurring customers via upselling tactics. Upselling entails persuading customers who can afford it to spend more money by offering upgrades to the core product they’re interested in. The goal of upselling is to get more money from your clients and maximize their lifetime value (LTV). Some key tactics to upsell include:
- Categorize and group your products into tiers
- Employ simple personalization
- Use persuasive copywriting and imagery to tell them of the problem they didn’t know they had
7. Check Your Weekly Analytics Report
Keep track of your users’ analytics by noting their preferred search sortings, the churn rates for the various pages, page depth reports, and conversion rates. All of these serve as a digital stethoscope to know the health of your business. They let you create reference points and show you where your business needs improvement.
Don’t wait until the end of the month to check your reports, but do so as often as you can (preferably weekly). If you don’t want to get too technical, the most vital metrics to track are:
- Sales conversion rate
- Page depth reports
- Shopping cart abandonment rates
8. Leverage Content Marketing to Showcase Products
Content is one of the most effective ways to ensure that your customers find your product; it’s also a powerful tool that can be used in conjunction with social media marketing to interact with customers and increase sales. Content marketing will:
- Help educate your customers
- Increase customer loyalty
- Help your website in achieving a higher search engine ranking
Drive More Sales to Your eCommerce store
We’ve examined some of the best tactics for ensuring that your eCommerce sales surge in 2022; from obtaining a great search tool to utilizing content marketing, there are many options available. You now have all the knowledge you need to create a killer digital merchandising strategy. Don’t forget to incorporate them into your online store as soon as possible.
