Branding and UX as your Niche Ecommerce Sword and Shield

There are millions of online stores on the internet, and that’s why in many cases Branding and UX can make a niche ecommerce stand out in this competitive field. Think of these two as your loyal weapons, where you can trust in their relevance along your journey.

At the end of this post, you’ll see a plus content that unifies everything.

Branding is that important?

As the branding pioneer Walter Landor says, ‘Products are made in a factory but brands are created in the mind.’

What a powerful quote, right? Let’s dive into it.

A brand is not just a term for a ‘company’. It’s how customers perceive the company and its products. It’s also the foundation for effective marketing and sales strategies.

We see stores all over the place, but often we remember our good experiences on good brands.

Think about a couple that loves their lovely dog called Bilbo. Bilbo’s anniversary is near, so it’s up to the owners to buy a nice gift. For over 4 years, the couple has bought pet accessories along many places, but generally the physical and online stores are just good price products sellers, except for Pet Love.

Pet Love is a store that cares about pets, that’s the difference. Bilbo’s owners have a great shopping experience buying from Pet Love, because their brand’s mission offers much more than just a product. Their social media is full of fun content, the ecommerce website has all you need for your pet, there are benefits and discounts clubs for loyal clients. So all this branding work makes Bilbo’s gift an easy choice.

In a marketing campaign around 2021, Pet Love gets back this crazy old costume dog that is a popular Brazilian character from the 90’s, A.K.A. “Priscila”. Although this costume gave me goosebumps, it was a very fun way to impact pet owners.

For sure Pet Love understands their customer needs and preferences. So remember that it is very important to deeply understand that. Here comes an amazing article about marketing persona: learn about persona.

Besides making a great buying experience, branding work makes your company prosper, looking for a long term relation with customers.

That’s why many niche companies build their brand with true missions.

Branding is your sword.

How to branding?

Branding starts internally, in how the company works. That being said, each niche will have a mission and a vision for their brand, so branding work must start with authenticity.

As your mission and vision are defined, there are a lot of practices a company can make branding works.

Marketing campaigns
Unique visual identity
Identity product placement
Brand communication on customers ecosystem
Relevant content
Loyalty advantages
Great user experience

All this tied up can lead your brand to being recognized.

Remember great brands and what comes first to mind:

Red Bull: Adventure, hardcore sports, energy.
Apple: Minimalism, user experience, exclusive.
Disney: Magic, family entertainment, nostalgia.

Crazy people jumping a rooftop with a bike, a parachute and a bad*ss bull logo isn’t a random thing. These first impressions are builded along years through many branding actions. And no, you don’t need to sponsor a dude to jump over the space with your logo stamped to be remembered (although they did it and it was very cool).

Branding isn’t something created from one day to another, specifically for online companies, so results are long term too.

Now it’s your turn to work on your brand day by day and leave a lasting impression.

UX as your online Brand aly

What about having a great brand identity, great loyalty features, unique navigation system, but all of that being hidden?

Knowing how to showcase your best advantages is as essential as having them. No, this power quote isn’t copied, it’s mine (give me some credit).

Here comes a real example of UX helping branding uniqueness:

A brazilian niche ecommerce of semi truck parts: “Mundo do Caminhão” (Truck World).

Truck World has the mission to help truck drivers, introducing online shopping with transparency and helping them to achieve their goals, offering quality products at fair prices.

The challenges: There are many truck models, a lot of truck drivers are buying online for the first time, and they have to compete with big online retailers and physical stores.

Their advantages: They can ship all over the country, maintain a good margin on products to ensure fair prices, and the main one is their investment in an open-source site to create a unique user experience for truckers.

Truck World has a system called “my garage”, where the user can select his truck model. As the truck model is selected, all the navigation is personalized, leading the user to a unique truck landing page and displaying only compatible products for the selected model. There are more than 700 truck pages, with variations of Fabricant, Year and Model.

Besides the improvement on user experience, this feature prevents wrong product ordering, brings a special way of navigation, and is a great SEO machine! Imagine having all these landing pages with unique SEO content ranking ‘x truck part to x model x year and x manufacturer’, with enormous variants… Google’s SEO algorithm must be doing cartwheels!

This UX feature helps Truck World to solve the challenge with their customer for the first time buying online, giving them confidence and a great experience shopping in their ecommerce. Aside from the performance improvement on sales.

Use UX to spread your branding and showcase your advantages.

UX is your shield.

CRM E-mail marketing getting all together

Resuming shortly what is CRM (Customer Relationship Management) e-mail marketing:

Rob is a Lakers fan, he always watches the NBA and loves to buy jerseys of his loved team.

He started to search online for new shirts and jerseys, and landed in a sports ecommerce, where he bought one Lakers shirt. As he made the purchase, he ended up signing up to the newsletters of that ecommerce, to stay tuned on the next offers.

Now imagine Rob, being a big fan of Lakers, receiving generic offers on the e-mail from the sports store, including of his rival team Celtics. This could ruin his expectations and turn down his second chance to purchase on this ecommerce.

That’s where a CRM E-mail Marketing enters.

With a CRM system, this ecommerce company can ask Rob’s favorite team on his register and, with that rich information, run a marketing campaign especially for Lakers fans.

In the Truck World case, the CRM strategy can lead to marketing campaigns displaying truck parts, for specific truck owners. Precisely and personalized communications generates enormous differences on e-mails open rate, click rate and the most important, conversions.

If branding is your sword and UX is your shield, CRM strategy is that secret arrow that hits right on target.