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"We've seen the figures. This [pandemic] roller coaster ride … will naturally balance itself out. That doesn't mean ecommerce and the digital shelf have gone away. [They] absolutely [have] not. But it's thinking about, as an organization, how they can prioritize those areas, how they can react, and how they can be agile." — Lynsey Sweales, CEO, SocialB
Succeeding in ecommerce isn’t a destination, it’s a journey.
Brands that optimize every step of this journey build a competitive advantage and grow their business.
Lynsey Sweales, CEO of SocialB, an international digital marketing agency, understands this all too well. Sweales works with national, global, and blue-chip brands to execute strategies that help them grow their market share on digital channels.
Sweales joined a recent episode of the "Unpacking the Digital Shelf" podcast, "The Fundamentals of Digital Shelf Excellence," to share four best practices brands need to master to achieve ecommerce success. Here they are:
Over the last two and half years, ecommerce growth has accelerated for many brands. But growth is beginning to normalize back to pre-pandemic levels.
Inflation, ongoing supply chain issues, and the death of the cookie are among the headwinds companies now face.
To succeed in ecommerce, brands can no longer rely on the acceleration brought about by the pandemic. They must have a holistic digital shelf strategy.
Sweales says this starts with building a brand personality.
Big brands have benefited from their longevity and the trust they’ve built with consumers, Sweales says, but they can no longer rest on this as digitally native brands chip away at their market share.
"They have no personality. It's a brand — it's a trusted brand. They've used that in terms of their buying power and people recognize that brand, but it's getting a bit dull," she says. "So, brand personality, and having a personality, having a tone of voice, and having a reason to buy is something that is really important from the consumer perspective."
How can brands build a personality?
They need to know their customer and understand their wants and needs.
First-party data is invaluable in this regard. Brands that sell directly to consumers can tap this valuable resource to better understand their audience.
But even companies that don’t sell direct-to-consumer (DTC) can find ways to generate this data. Maybelline, for example, uses QR codes on its products to gather first-party data.
Brands need to know their competitors, too. Sweales says it’s critical for legacy brands to understand that other big brands in their category aren’t their only competition.
Now, digitally native brands are also their competitors — even if they don’t have eight, nine, or 10 figures in revenue.
"There are actually brands that are taking some of the market share that didn't even exist back in the mid-2000s," she says. "They've popped up from people's kitchens, from people's garages, and are taking market share and are really disrupting that space, so the competitors are different."
Part of the challenge for established brands is that they’re still overly focused on the traditional retail environment. That’s rightfully so, considering brick-and-mortar still makes up the majority of retail sales, as highlighted by Digital Commerce 360.
However, Sweales says just as brands do physical walkthroughs in stores to look at their products, they need to do digital walkthroughs to understand who sits next to them on the digital shelf.
Doing so will give them a better idea of who their competitors are and how their products stack up online.
With fierce competition on digital channels, brands need to make their products more accessible to consumers.
Sweales says during some of her digital walkthroughs with clients, even big brands have discovered their products aren’t widely available.
To address this issue, brands need to think like a consumer when they design their product content experience, and work with retail platforms and other online marketplaces to increase the visibility of their products.
"It's opening up their eyes and saying, ‘Look, have a look,’" Sweales says. “Then, it's [saying], ‘Okay, how can we make a difference there? How can you be there organically rather than paid, as an example?’" Sweales adds that leadership teams need to then prioritize how to help their implementation team (or their ecommerce team) because they'll often know what to do.
From here, Sweales says a brand’s ecommerce team can gather insights on things like product availability and the product page experience — and share these insights with key stakeholders to identify which ecommerce opportunities the company may be missing or need to capitalize on to grow its market share.
Along with product availability, brands need to focus on product content.
"Just because you sell your product in-store doesn't mean it's going to be available online. And if they’ve put you online, have they just cut and pasted what's on your product jar or on your packaging and put that online? Well, how useful is that in PDP listings? Not very helpful at all," Sweales says.
To optimize PDPs and position themselves for ecommerce success, brands must focus on SEO. Consumers shop online with intent. They input specific keywords to find certain products, and then they might look at product images and scour reviews to help with their buying decision.
Sweales says brands must transfer the product and buying experience consumers have in a physical store to a virtual one, and ensure their PDP is fully optimized and content-rich to accelerate consumers’ path to purchase.
"The images, the text, the video, the reviews — they're all tangible things that as a consumer, we can use that information to find [a product], or we can look at that image to go, ‘Yep. That's what I'm looking for.’ It's all of those things that make up an amazing product description page." — Lynsey Sweales, CEO, SocialB
Sweales provides this example of content optimization: During a digital walkthrough for one of her clients, a skincare brand, Sweales, discovered that consumers frequently used the keywords "acne-prone" and "combination skin" in their reviews for the brand’s sunscreen product.
However, the brand didn’t have these specific keywords on its PDP. She shared this insight with the brand’s ecommerce and research and development (R&D) teams.
This led the company to do an R&D test for this specific product application and then relist the product to indicate it also worked well for acne-prone skin.
This is just one example of how brands can optimize their product content and unearth new ecommerce opportunities that unlock success on the digital shelf.
Brands arguably have access to more digital insights today than they ever have before. They can use this data — and first-party data, in particular — to better understand their competitors and customers, improve their product detail pages, and deliver an engaging, omnichannel shopping experience.
Brands may have gained momentum during the pandemic as ecommerce sales accelerated, but it’s now up to them to capitalize on this momentum and make the right investments to grow their ecommerce business.
"We've seen the figures. This [pandemic] roller coaster ride … will naturally balance itself out," Sweales says. "That doesn't mean ecommerce and the digital shelf have gone away. [They] absolutely [have] not. But it's thinking about, as an organization, how they can prioritize those areas, how they can react, and how they can be agile."
To hear more of Sweales' insights on what’s driving ecommerce success today, check out the full episode of "Unpacking the Digital Shelf."
