The demand for cosmetic products has been growing steadily in the past few months as more and more brands become available in online stores all over the globe. In this article, we created an ecommerce checklist for your beauty ecommerce website so you can reimagine how to market your products.
Like other industries, the cosmetic industry is also going through a digital transformation, which is changing the way we think, react, and interact with cosmetic brands.
Everything is changing, including consumer habits, product quality, and overall shopping experience. The rising online competition leads to new marketing methods, as consumer behavior changes over the years.
As a cosmetics retailer, you have to create a memorable ecommerce experience to stay on top of your competitors. The checklist we've put together will help you get going in the right direction.
The essential ecommerce checklist
We'll cover some of the essential trends shaping the beauty industry in 2022. The following checklist covers all essentials you should consider when creating the best shopping experience possible on your beauty ecommerce website.
1. Create a flexible omnichannel marketing strategy
An omnichannel strategy is a fancy way of saying that you have to diversify your efforts across multiple sales channels, including both digital and brick and mortar. This approach is by far the most effective way of increasing sales, improving customer relationships, and building a vigorous brand presence.
The key here is to create a working, well-designed system that integrates all online and offline channels into one easily manageable platform. For example, you can use your social media channels to promote upcoming real-world events where customers can come, meet your company, and try your products.
Some brands provide users with an app that tells customers everything they need to know about the brand itself, as well as new product promotions. Customers can simply open the app and see the locations of the nearest shops, check product availability, win free items for various activities, etc.
On your website, you can create affiliate programs, hold online contests, and use similar methods to motivate users to give your products a try. The possibilities are endless.
💡Blanka tip: Read more on how you can start a creative brand awareness campaign💡
Use the same branding and design choices on all documents and marketing materials to make it easier for anyone to recognize your brand. Start with doing extensive product research, website traffic analysis, conversion analysis and more, to create a strategy for omnichannel marketing. Although you might find that the initial research is time-consuming, you will end up with a strategy to create a better customer experience while staying true to your brand identity.
There are lots of options, so you have to understand what your customers want before you start adding new elements and features to your website or app. Here are some automation options to make managing your omnichannel strategy a little easier.
Chatbots
Chatbots are growing in popularity because they bring customer support to a new level providing levels of automation. In most cases, you’ll find that chatbots are more affordable than live agents since they can initiate leads on your website automatically. In addition, you can personalize and adjust chatbot responses so your online visitors feel engaged personally!
The best part-Chatbots work 24/7, allowing you to generate more sales on your beauty ecommerce website and increase overall customer satisfaction. Lastly, most chatbots are available in multiple languages, allowing you to provide support to customers worldwide.
Pros
- Chatbots are online 24/7 to keep online visitors engaged
- Automatically capture sales leads
- Inexpensive compared to hiring a live agent
- Multilingual assistance for your customers
- Improve customer experience with quick, smart responses and helpful articles
💡 Did you know? Chatbots have proven to cut operational costs by up to 30%. 💡
Cons
- In the beginning, chatbots will require some heavy lifting to populate the right answers to properly engage with your online visitors
- Some chatbots may be more costly than others, do your research!
Include easy signup options
When you’re logging into your Facebook or Instagram account, do you login with your Google account? Using social media accounts to login is easier and faster, reducing valuable time to signup or login for your customers.
This type of social network integration is an excellent way for customers to login or register a new account with you, reducing any friction for your customers to shop with you. In other words, you reduce the number of steps your customers have to take to do what you expect them to do.
When customers to sign up for an account on your website, you can provide them with extra value such as offering wishlist options, saving products in their carts, reviewing their order history and more. Give your customers the extra value by automating seamless registration options!
How is this an automation option for you? It’s a way to keep track of your registered customers to start revealing buying patterns of your customers. There are apps on Shopify that easily allow your customers to register on your ecommerce website!
Pros
- Very easy for customers to signup or login using existing social accounts
- Incentivize customers to keep coming back to your ecommerce website by making it easy for your customers to register or login!
- Offer more personalized features such as wishlists, saved items in their carts when customers are shopping on your site.
Cons
- Update your security to allow secure social logins! Mini Orange explains how you can upgrade your security for your Shopify store.
2. Adopt a variety of digital tools
The digital space is ever-changing so you'll need the best tools to stay on top of trends and the best digital tools for your business. For example, managing a large inventory for your growing business can be optimized with new tools. Blanka’s warehouse management combined with Shopify is a tool that you can use to have a peace of mind for your beauty business!
Cosmetic buyers are picky when choosing products, which means that you'll have to put extra effort into providing them with reliable information on use, ingredients, manufacturing process, and other details to help them make their decision.
Did you know that Blanka offers vegan and cruelty-free products to private label with your logo? With transparent labeling, your customers will appreciate the transparency!
Companies like Shopify have made digital tools like bulk editing and inventory management much easier for merchants like you to grow your business. Here are the key areas you should consider to adopt tools:
Try integrating apps to upgrade your user experience
Your ecommerce website should have features that make it easy for both you and the shopper. Many ecommerce website platforms such as Wix and Shopify provide a list of apps you can integrate with your store!
For example, there are apps that can automatically change currencies for your customers who are browsing your ecommerce store from anywhere in the World, apps that can send customized tracking emails to your customers, or apps that can text your customers on Whatsapp asking for reviews! The possibilities are endless and ever changing to help provide you with more digital tools for your business.
Digital tools provided by ecommerce platforms are there to make you and your customers' lives easier. Give them a try!
Design matters
Website design directly affects the way your website looks and functions, playing a big part in how something like your product collections pages convert into sales.. For example, if your products help with aging skin, a good approach is to use medical colors such as white, blue, and green, and images of doctors and lab equipment to build more trust with your customers that your products actually work. Using color to represent your brand and image can have an emotional effect on your customers and how they perceive your products and company.
On the other hand, if your store offers products made by multiple brands, the best approach is to use promotional photos with the latest collections and place them strategically on your pages. As an example, you can compile all of your lipsticks into one collection called “Lips” to create a seamless way for your customers to search!
Another example can be allowing your customers to find the right lipsticks by each color collection.
The navigation has to be easy and clear, and you'll also need a search system with plenty of available filters. Making it easy for your customers to find products using the least amount of clicks reduces friction and ultimately leads to higher conversions. According to research from the Baymard Institute, 70% of online shoppers abandon their carts before checkout. This can mean that the shopper hit a minor inconvenience when it came time to checkout and decided to abandon their potential purchases entirely!
3. Choose beauty and cosmetics products aligned with your values
As you already know, cosmetics come in all shapes and sizes. The concept of "clean cosmetics" is always appealing to the customer, but sometimes the meaning can be unclear. It is usually used to describe cosmetic products that don't use any toxic or harmful elements in production.
The rising question about environmental impacts has changed how customers think about cosmetics. Consumers today prefer clean products, ideally sustainably-produced, and those that were not tested on animals. Plus, those that use recyclable packaging materials get even more points with potential customers.
💡 Did you know? Blanka offers cruelty-free cosmetics with the option to also add branding on recyclable packaging materials! 💡
4. Convenient use of carts
The cart page is a great place to collect customer information, upsell and incentivize other offers, and get customers to the final point of placing the order – if done properly! Create a frictionless checkout process with the least amount of clicks possible to avoid your customers feeling frustrated and abandoning their cart!
Adding more options such as the ability to reserve products, promotions, automatic email notifications about abandoned products left in a customer's cart, and other similar features can help you reduce cart abandonment and increase sales.
Previously mentioned above, there are apps you can integrate into your ecommerce site to decrease cart abandonment, upsell more products, and more!
If you're having a hard time creating an seamless checkout process, you can always reach out to ecommerce website development experts to ensure you do things correctly the first time. Nowadays, ecommerce platforms have created better frictionless checkouts in their most basic form! All you need to do is customize the cart page to enhance your customer experience with apps, plugins or custom development.
5. Surprise and delight
Attracting new customers can be challenging in a saturated cosmetics market, so try some surprise and delight marketing methods to build a stronger relationship with your customers. For example, you have probably seen beauty and cosmetics companies give away free testers in customer orders so customers can try a new scent or product.
💡Did you know? Giving free samples is an effective and low-cost “surprise and delight” marketing method that helps improve customer satisfaction! 💡
It's already a well-established practice that can help you reach a wider audience and attract more customers. However, you can't just give things away without creating a strategy around promotions and freebies!
Here are some factors to think about:
- Develop a referral system for attracting new customers. If you manage to get things right, your customers will become your sales representatives, spreading the word about your offer and store to friends and family. Word of mouth advertising is, by far, the most effective advertising as it creates trust.
- How will you develop a digital marketing campaign around this? You can consider accompanying reels and posts and incentivize online sharing through contests! All the while gaining new followers on social media.
6. Partnerships
The cosmetics market has changed a lot over the past few decades. According to GlobalData since COVID hit in 2020, consumers shifted to value-based purchasing such as buying from local, sustainable, or smaller brands.
Partnering up with other brands that match your audience and values will give you access to a new pool of potential customers, which can do wonders for sales and brand awareness. You’ll also create new business opportunities by collaborating on new projects, sharing previous experiences with other industry experts, and getting your brand’s name out there.
For example, your cosmetics brand can partner with a brand that sells lashes to increase brand awareness with a complimentary business’s customer base
By increasing exposure, you'll get more business opportunities, and you'll also get access to better marketing solutions and strategies.
7. Hyper-personalization
Hyper-personalization is a trend relying on new automation technologies, and beauty brands are already experimenting with technologies such as implementing a “virtual try-on” feature. Tarte cosmetics is doing just that and has seen a 30% increase in customers adding products to cart. It’s the next step in running a modern business!
To get started, there are other easier ways to get started with personalization like email segmentation and on-site personalization with recommended products.
Today, customers look for unique experiences and messages that make them feel like the brand truly cares about them. . For example, Blanka offers merchants the ability to add custom insert cards to their customer orders, making each order more personalized with your brand.
Not only will personalization help you build your brand, your brand also builds relationships with your customers to keep them coming back with unique experiences and connections!
Conclusion
Ongoing digital transformation will define many industries in 2022, and the cosmetic industry is by no means excluded from this. As consumer habits change and new, improved products based on customer feedback reach the markets, the only way to stay competitive is to adopt new techniques and further digitize your operation, continuing to innovate and evolve as fast or faster than your competition.
It doesn't matter if you're a manufacturer or a cosmetics retailer. Stay up to speed with and try to exceed current trends if you want to keep your existing customer base and grow it in the future. This ecommerce checklist is a good place to start if you want to kickstart your private label cosmetics brand.
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Author bio
Rick Seidl is a digital marketing specialist with a bachelor’s degree in Digital Media and Communications, based in Portland, Oregon. He carries a burning passion for digital marketing, social media, small business development, and establishing its presence in a digital world, and is currently quenching his thirst through writing about digital marketing and business strategies for Find Digital Agency.
