As eCommerce developers, we work with a lot of online retailers. During the development process we constantly ask ourselves what we can do to help our clients increase their customer engagement, sales, and become the top in their industry.
We put a lot of energy into helping our clients find success, and we’ve found that it’s often helpful to observe those who are already top retailers in the EU. They all have familiar names for those who live there: Aldi, IKEA, Nike, Tesco…while these retailers are in different industries and have differing retail strategies, what they all share are a strong web presence and similar strategies for driving customer engagement and conversions.
We’ve split this blog series into three parts, with each focusing on different component of the online retail puzzle. Today, we’ll talk about what the EU’s top retailers do to drive customer engagement:
1. Top EU Retailers are Masters of Their Brand
The top EU retailers operate in multiple countries and retail environments simultaneously. Being a Brand Master is more involved than having the same logo and colors displayed in your physical store, on your e-commerce website, and in your social media platforms. We’re looking at the strategies of the EU’s largest retailers, but in reality proper branding applies to retailers of any size – from multinational corporations down to the smallest internet retailer.
Being a Brand Master means building a single identity around your company, and most importantly: enforcing consistency. Your physical stores, website, customer service, events, and products must all have a single unified identity and present customers with a consistent experience. When you’re developing something new, you must ask – how does this fit into my company’s identity? As your company grows, take the time to consider how your company’s image lives in the minds of your customers and what can be done to improve it.
Effective brand development presents challenges to retailers of every size and industry. We can work with you to develop a customized web presence that matches your company’s identity and personality to ensure the most consistent customer experience possible.
2. Top EU Retailers Have Meaningful Engagements With Their Customers
The top retailers have the uncanny ability to identify their customers’ needs and effectively address them without losing sales. The key word here is “meaningful.” As a consumer-oriented business, you engage with your customers constantly. What you need is for those engagements to be positive and memorable. This requires that you spend just as much energy on understanding your customer as you do on engaging with them.
Every time your customer interacts with your company is an opportunity for you to provide them with a meaningful engagement. For example, before opening a new store, IKEA performs in-depth market research into the local market’s housing styles, income levels, and spending habits. When a customer walks into an IKEA store, they’re walking into a customized experience tailored to the specific city that they live in.
Here at Foridev, we specialize in developing the best customer experiences possible. All you have to do is provide us with information about your target customer and market. We can take care of the rest, and build you an e-commerce presence that will meet your customer’s needs – and more.
3. Top EU Retailers Identify and Develop Brand Advocates
The top companies have a plan for developing close relationships with brand advocates. These advocates will make themselves known on your social media and through your contact channels. Some even start out as extremely vocal dissatisfied customers, and once made happy will turn that vocal energy into free marketing for your company! As an online retailer, it is your job to identify and develop relationships with them – properly developed customer relationships will turn brand advocates into extensions of your marketing department.
Developing a relationship with a brand advocate customer can be as simple as recognizing them and knowing their history with your company. Depending on what kind of retailer you are, brand advocates can be incorporated into your marketing plan by sending them free samples or test products. Good advocates will share their thoughts with you openly, and will give you better marketing than any outbound channel can.
At Foridev, we can help you develop customized eCommerce tools that maximize your engagement with brand advocates. We’re here for you – whether you need a specialist to customize your forms to increase submissions, or you need us to develop special software that helps you track customer engagements over time.
In our next article, we’ll discuss how the Top EU Retailers offer features to their customers that increase engagement, develop trust, and drive sales.