Humanize your ecommerce presence

Brand personality, human-to-human marketing, brand persona, etc. This trend to humanize brands is becoming more and more important in the current discourse. It even seems to be a “paying” – read unavoidable – avenue for brands in 2017. We propose here a reflection on this trend and its foundations.

Human > ecommerce

With its relentless growth, ecommerce is dramatically changing the face of retail. Despite this, a majority of shoppers still consider the in-person shopping experience to be essential to the development of a trusting relationship with the brand. The development of this loyalty would be easier to do in person, because of the human contact.

People relate to people, and if your brand feels like “people,” they’ll relate to you too.

Laura Busche, Lean Branding

From a multi-channel perspective, the success of a digital commerce strategy depends on the ability to create a human attachment to the brand. Here is an additional challenge for companies working in online commerce: how to humanize its digital presence and thus facilitate the organic development of consumer loyalty to its brand?

Focus on emotion

The idea of having a simple online store is no longer appropriate. “Selling” online is no longer enough. The shopping experience must be more than utilitarian, it must be emotional. To create positive emotions in the user towards your brand, you must first understand his needs, desires, values:

• Collect tangible data on your audience (social media, Google Analytics, surveys, reviews, etc.)
• Analyzing the results of your data collection is an opportunity to target needs, values and recurring behaviors based on facts.
• Optimize your actions based on these learnings. In short, the basis of any empirical method.

Create a bond

Humans are tribal by nature; they want to identify with a group. So we tend to develop relationships with people – and brands – who share our values, references, language, etc. We also want to know about inspiring stories and recognize our own values in those stories. Take Jalie as an example, it’s the story of a mother and daughter who set out to create and sell patterns for everyone. The company does not hesitate to put forward its “family” and human character in its online store, even before its products.

Simon Sinek’s “Why” is still relevant today. Users, especially millennials, are interested in the “why”, the “little story” of your brand and its inspirational side. This quest for meaning forces marketers to deepen and refine their discourse and put forward this “core value” that sets them apart.

Develop your brand personality

Don’t bullshit. The differentiation factor must be consistent with your brand’s DNA. People know the difference between real and fake.

Start with a simple exercise: if your brand were a person, what would qualify them? Is he or she a serious person or a braggart? Is their humor sophisticated or snarky? What do they hate? What do they like? How does he talk? While this exercise doesn’t have to be that exhaustive, Mailchimp’s Content Style Guide can certainly give you some inspiration!

Loyalty is less expensive than acquisition

When you know that it is 6 times more expensive to acquire a customer than to keep him, it makes you want to put the necessary efforts to humanize your online approach and measure the effects. Moreover, if you are curious to know how much it costs to acquire a new customer, the BDC details here some clever calculations to determine the Customer Lifetime Value and its Acquisition Cost.