Retail Focused Brands and E-Commerce

Nearly all of Socialike’s clients have a large retail footprint and a secondary sales channel with Amazon.com. Despite a small percentage of clients’ sales coming from their own e-commerce site, we still consider this independent sales track critical for brand building.

Think about your most loyal consumers who tell everyone about your product: those consumers buy directly from a brand.  When customers buy straight from your website, you get to communicate with them directly and gain a better understanding of who they are. And the importance of understanding your customer can not be understated. What product innovations are they looking for? What are their buying habits? This information can only be gleaned if you own the consumer data.

This is similar to how we value email subscribers. Email subscribers are your biggest fans. Seeing your brand on an Instagram feed is one thing, but the consumers who subscribe, double opt in, and read your long-form content are special.

As brands, you can make your online consumers feel important and privileged by:

• Offering exclusive benefits only available from you. For example, Socialike is launching a new product for a brand we represent, and the product will not be offered anywhere for the first three months except on the e-commerce site. To die-hard customers, that is a big deal.
• Offering branded gear. Most brands would love to have their top consumers wear branded merchandise, and the biggest fans of your products want to wear it. The option for branded gear on your site is excellent.
• Offering limited edition products, like a special holiday scent or cool artist-collaboration bottle, for example. The audience for these types of kitchy products is smaller, but the impact it has on building brand loyalty is enormous.

Another advantage of a brand e-commerce site is using your direct buyers as a focus group. You can ask them how they use your products and what products they want next, accessing information you could never hope to get from Amazon. Of course, you can get this information by asking Instagram followers, but email has a much higher success rate.

An email from a brand that does not make the majority of sales from its websites stands out from other brand marketing emails. It is less about promoting a sale and more about building a community, which further positions the brand as a lifestyle.