Visual merchandising is the strategic display of items to appeal, engage, and persuade customers to make a purchase. It is widely used in retail marketing. Although it is most typically associated with traditional brick-and-mortar stores, it also includes the production of stunning product displays for websites. In this article, we will discuss the important visual merchandising strategies to boost the sales of your e-commerce business.
Invest in Eye-Catching Visuals
The visual elements of your products are at the heart of the online shopping experience. Intriguing visuals may help you make your products more appealing to buyers and differentiate your brand identity from that of your competitors.
To capture the attention of customers, use high-quality visual commerce graphics techniques like 3D, 360-degree, and interactive photographs. These photos enable consumers to review your products from a variety of perspectives, test them against live backgrounds, and read callout captions for further information. It is easy to add 3D material to your website using the VNTANA 3D Web Viewer so that customers may see it on any device.
Use Your Homepage to Tell a Story
The homepage of your website performs the same role as a window display in a real store. To attract more customers, it must provide a positive picture of the company and the products it offers. To achieve this goal, use the photographs on your website to tell a story.
You should consider the themes that connect with the goals of your company to help guide the visuals and style of your site. These themes should be readily obvious to a consumer when they visit your website.
Recognize the Importance of Social Proof
Marketers use the term “social proof” to convince prospective customers to behave in a specific manner by pointing out the activities of other customers who have previously followed that course of action. Customers who are on the fence about buying your products will often research the experiences of others before determining whether to proceed with the purchase. Doesn’t it make a convincing case when there are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of favorable comments and reviews made online about a product you’re thinking about buying?
Online retailers have a significant tool at their disposal in the form of social proof, which helps to create consumer loyalty and establish confidence in your business.
Personalize the Experience
Gather information about your consumers’ interests, browsing histories, purchase behaviors, and demographics. Install algorithms capable of evaluating customer data and producing product recommendations that are unique to each person. These may be identified using a user’s browsing history, buying tendencies, and items associated with past purchases. Send personalized marketing messages, product suggestions, and promotional offers to different customer groups based on their attributes.
Add Machine Learning to Category Management
If you want your online visual merchandising to be effective, you should concentrate on much more than the visual appearance of your category pages and sections. You should review the ordering, sorting, and optimization of your items.
Category management and the grouping of specific items are the foundations of product exposure. You must establish a balance between inventory data and consumer purchase intent and preferences to optimize sales and profitability.
Machine learning is the most efficient way to do this job. You can accomplish all of this in real-time by incorporating the power of machine learning, AI, and automation into category page management, as well as utilizing Fast Simon’s merchandising feature. This enables you to adapt to changing retail KPIs to increase revenues.
Improve “No Results” Pages
When a customer does a search on your website and finds no results, you must present them with other options to keep their interest in your site. If not, it may cause disappointment, resulting in the client leaving the store and the business losing sales.
Consider Cross-Merchandising
Visual merchandising tactics, such as cross-merchandising, are excellent ways to highlight new items as well as slow-moving stocks. When you arrange products together to entice customers, their attention will be stimulated. Consider providing products as upsells, building a themed bundle, and rewarding consumers for future purchases.
Automate Data Processing
Analyzing your website analytics, product systems, and the transaction system of your e-commerce platform will provide you with a great amount of data that can be used to expedite your merchandising decisions once you have obtained a thorough understanding of your customers. These data sets, which have access to personalized information on online shoppers, may be used to tailor your customers’ searches to show specific items based on a range of useful data categories such as gender, age, and geographic location.