eCommerce Branding: How to Make Your Online Store a Brand?

The key to a successful business is branding which may sound unclear and challenging. But, let you know that branding is one of those marketing concepts that you need to understand, being an online business owner. 

You should know what eCommerce branding is and how to apply good branding elements to your brand. 

Join us to know everything about eCommerce brands, why it’s important, how to brand for an eCommerce business, and much more. 

What Is eCommerce Branding?

A company’s or brand’s image associated with its products is branding. The companies hold the strength to build their unique label for their eCommerce brands that sets them apart from their competitors despite having similar products. This way, the customers become familiar with the eCommerce brands holding unique faces. 

Building a brand is a constant process that assists customers in understanding what the brand offers, what it stands for, and how it improves customers’ lives. 

Brand recognition crafts a relationship with customers through positive emotions to satisfy them with its products and the company itself. 

You can also craft positive emotions for your online brand by constantly helping and revealing care for your customers. 

Why Does Branding For eCommerce Matter?

Customers are increasingly purchasing products from eCommerce stores, which is good but for well-recognized brands only. That’s why crafting a recognizable eCommerce brand is essential for business growth. Having robust branding means customers usually choose you among the other competitors, offering you a competitive advantage. 

Once the customers recognize you and prefer your brand, they will likely become more loyal to your brand and stick with you for a long time. Even during tough times, people trust well-recognized eCommerce brands and support them. 

eCommerce Branding Matters for Various Other Aspects Also, Like:

1. Enhances Recognition

Branding can assist you in crafting a visual image of your business in your customers’ eyes. Simultaneously, it aids in building a strong association with your customers that will help increase sales. 

2. Increases Customer Loyalty

Through branding, you can attract old customers and keep your old customer-base strong. The repeat customers help measure the success of that eCommerce business. 

3. Conveys Clear Message

All your potential customers should get a clear message from your brand that appeals to a huge number and attract enhanced customers. 

4. Biggest Business Asset

Your business’s brand is the biggest asset for your business, whether it’s online or offline. That’s why eCommerce branding is important for every business’s success. 

5. Increases Customer Reach

Every business looks to grow and expand, and branding is the key to attaining that. It assists the eCommerce startup in reaching various customers at once, making a huge difference. Also, it helps reach the target audience quickly. 

6. Serve Your Customers Better

Besides brand building, it’s important to note that one should meet customers’ needs and resolve their issues. This way, a good image of your business will emerge, and you will automatically win customers’ trust. In any business, every action should target customer satisfaction and serve them as expected. 

7. Don’t Sell Products; Sell the Story 

It’s a critical eCommerce strategy for building an attractive brand name for your eCommerce business to increase sales. You should do so without focusing on selling your products; this way, you can make connections and trust with customers. Your brand should tell its story about the products it sells to customers who can relate and connect. 

8. Stick to Business Objectives

Customers should understand your eCommerce business’s goals and principles and what you want to convey to your customers. Once you put that and your potential customers will start understanding what your business promises that will help you attain your target of connecting with them and increase your sales. 

Integrate the Four V’s Into Your eCommerce Brand

A Company’s Branding Lies on Four Pillars

1. Vision

To make your brand attractive to customers, you must walk with a clear vision. 

Vision is the goal your brand needs to achieve; besides ROI, it’s not monetary; it’s impactful. 

So, how to discover a vision for your brand? 

You can try digging into the history of your business and surface a relevant story holding an inspiration that instills an idea that makes your root a company. Leave the transaction behind and go ahead with what you want people to think about or feel after using your product. 

2. Value

Values stay close to you and your audience, guide your company, and let you know what you do and how you attain that. 

To Know Your Business Values, Find Answers to Below Three Questions:

• What are your customers’ thoughts about you?

Check your customer reviews or survey to know what you are performing well. 

• What are your top three priorities?

This question makes you target what’s crucial to you. 

• What are your mostly-picked brands doing? 

Check what the brands you love doing as your mind always thinks about what they are doing. 

3. Voice

Like people have recognizable and different voices, your brand also has a voice. When you converse with your audience, the way your company comes across is brand voice. Relying on your goals and industry, you can be friendly, sophisticated, funny, supportive, helpful, authoritative, and playful. 

Your voice needs to be consistent and memorable, so you don’t need to confuse your target audience. Brand voice is essential to humanize it and make it recognizable. 

4. Visuals

The visible symbol linked with your organization is brand visuals. Below are three visual sections of a brand identity:

a) Logo

A unique image or mark of your brand is a logo design, which is the face of your company. 

There Are Seven Types of Logos:

• Monogram Logos or Lettermarks, like Coca Cola
• Wordmarks (or logotypes), like Google
• Pictorial marks (or logo symbols), like Apple
• Abstract logo marks, like Adidas
• Mascots, like KFC
• Combination Mark, like Lacoste
• The emblem, like Starbucks

b) Color

Colors exhibit multiple emotional responses from a brand. You can boost your brand recognition to 80% using colors effectively. Below are some standard branding colors with their meanings:

• Blue: It showcases dependability, wisdom, sophistication, loyalty, and security. 
• Pink: It is to reveal love, warmth, femininity, and romance. 
• Red: It exhibits energy, passion, comfort, romance, and love. 
• Green: Fertility, nature, tranquility, and wealth. 
• Black: Power, modernity, intelligence, glamor, and strength. 

11 Ways To Do Branding For eCommerce Business

1. Identify Your Target Audience

Before you build your eCommerce brand, the first step you should take is to identify whom you would target. You should know what type of people would be interested in dealing with your company. Well, this step would be challenging initially, but once you emerge with the right audience, things will become easy ahead. 

2. Tell About Your Mission

Every brand starts holding a mission, and you should let people know about it and what you would offer them. Sometimes people recognize your brand through your mission. 

3. Outline the USPs of Your Brand

It would prove to be a fantastic eCommerce branding strategy as various businesses target promoting their mission. So, prefer writing your brand mission on your site and marketing it to make people understand your company and its offering. 

4. Make Clear Brand Policies

Be sure you stand with your company policies, and make your refund, exchange, and return policies clear before your customers. This way, only the one who agrees with your policies will decide to walk with you. So, in the case of any mishap, you would not be accountable for justifying, as your policies will say it all. But, be sure you keep them simple, authentic, and transparent. 

5. Don’t Compromise with Customer Service

Most people consider customer service before doing business with a brand. You must leave customers satisfied with your want to survive in this competitive world. So, to please your customers, repeat their visits, and make them loyal to your company, provide them with expected services. 

6. Prepare a Content Strategy Documentation

A brand’s voice is content that should exhibit a convincing tone to save you from struggling at various marketing points. A robust content strategy will assist you in engaging, converting, retaining, and nurturing customers. 

As per the latest reports, about 90% of brands use content marketing. Above that, it costs about 62% less than traditional marketing and leads to 3x more lead generation. 

So, try creating original, memorable, and convincing content for your customers. 

7. Establish your Brand Persona

A brand persona holds the caliber to showcase you as more than just a logo. It appends a robust personality to your brand and assists you in effectively communicating. 

You can start with deep consumer research, know your audience, the languages they use, check how they talk in the reviews section, and more. Adopting the way customers talk will boost their responsiveness. 

8. Tell Your Brand’s Story

Every brand has a story; it’s just that they should share it with their customers. It creates an emotional link with your customers. Stories speak out about a brand’s success and failures with which they can relate. Users start empathizing with your brand after knowing the story of your brand. You can promote your online store legally by including this eCommerce branding strategy. 

9. Prefer Email Marketing

Most people say and think that email marketing is no longer in use. But, it’s not true. 

Worldwide, in 2019, there were about 3.9 billion email users, which will boost and reach 4.3 billion by 2023. This states most people still prefer using email marketing. 

We can include all the stages of the sales funnel. From engaging users to its retaining end, email marketing covers it all. It is an essential aspect for all-sized businesses. You need to perform deep analysis and craft personalized emails with your audience to send them to the users. 

10. Create an Engaging Logo & Name

Try making your brand logo attractive; that may strongly influence your customers. Today, most top brands are instantly recognized by their logos. 

You can choose any worldwide platform to create a captivating logo for your brand. With a good logo, you can present your brand as an authentic company that customers can trust. 

11. Create a Catchy Tagline

A tagline is essential, like a logo that should be crafted in one line and must include some catchy, memorable, and impactful words. Taglines are the best way to advertise your brand, and the chief target is to let people know about your brand through a single line. 

You can pick tagline creating tools online to create your brand’s tagline. 

12. Use Social Media to Improve Brand Presence 

Most brand owners have caught up with their business objectives using social media. Social media is one of the effective methods to boost your visibility. Social media helps in marketing, connecting with the audience, and driving traffic. It’s the best way to promote your brand before more than half of the globe’s population. 

Some latest reports say, by 2025, 4.4 billion people will prefer using social media to increase brand awareness, brand outreach, target audience, provide better user experience, and more. 

13. Know Your Buyer Persona 

Customers are the base of any successful branding strategy. You should know your customers, age, interests, gender, language, income, favorite websites, concerns, questions, and more. You can predict their requirements, craft personalized messages, and choose the right platform to reach them. 

Top Secrets Behind the Success of Market Leaders  

Some eCommerce brands are ruling the world for some reasons; let’s catch them up. 

1. People look for social proof before purchasing

As we know, people walk in a herd and perform what others are doing. You can reap the advantage of this fact. You can collaborate with authentic influencers to craft your brand and be sure the influencer is related to your audience. 

Also, you can use user-generated content to post on your social channels. Research reveals that user-generated content catches four times more click-through rates and around a 50% downfall in cost-per-click than average ads. 

2. Stay updated and stay ahead of the curve.

Giants in the eCommerce world always move with the latest trends. You should remember to post ephemeral content on your social channels. This type of content showcases rich media, including images and videos that the users can access just for a short period, maybe for 24 hours, and after that disappears. 

Ephemeral content attracts traffic who wants to see the content. You can use the latest Instagram stories as a fantastic tool for this purpose to share your brand’s message in an exciting way. 

3. Offer expected customers to boost sales.

You should instill positive feelings in your customers when they visit your brand until they depart as potential loyal customers. 

• You can surprise them with extras or unexpected gifts.
• Make an easily navigable website so they find it easy to shop from your store. 
• You can build a custom app to offer them the convenience of shopping anytime, anywhere. 
• Capture products’ pictures from all angles to make customers view products entirely. 

Examples of eCommerce Branding

Below are the names of top eCommerce brands that are expanding following the best eCommerce branding strategies. 

1. Blvck

In 2021, Blvck Paris cut the ribbons of ten stores worldwide and caught up with $1.2 million annually in revenue. 

A global lifestyle brand, Blvck Paris, sells ‘all black’ apparel, accessories, and digital goods. Founded in 2017, this brand made efforts to emerge as a new lifestyle type targeting the best designs and quality. 

Blvck is growing swiftly globally, holding various successful plans for the future. 

Lessons it Learned & Grabbed as Opportunity

• During the pandemic, the brand managed to do so when it was crucial to stay calm and positive about the unexpected challenges. 
• When people were not allowed to go out to shop, this brand grabbed this situation as an opportunity to sell digital offerings that surfaced as a big hit. 
• They released iOS icons to let users customize their home screens. 
• Besides, Blvck Paris rolled a project, Blvck Genesis NFT collection, that features 9,999 exceptional NFTs collection of avatars. The holders of these NFTs will access membership to the new and exclusive community of Blvck Paris collectors with the ever-growing offers and benefits. The brand’s target is to pair the unique NFTs with the same numbered physical product from its store to bring the physical and digital worlds together. 

All the above branding strategies are helping Blvck to stay ahead of the curve and shine brighter. 

2. Urban Monkey

Specialist in caps and accessories, a streetwear fashion brand, Urban Monkey, came in 2013 with various categories in lifestyle and streetwear. It gained popularity worldwide, and you can find it being adopted by an increased population. 

Today, Urban Monkey sells 50,000+ products annually and has a team of about 21. 

Steps it Walked to Gain Success

• In 2016, Urban Monkey collaborated with Dharavi United. This is where everything started after performing for two years, supporting and with young artists. 
• Urban Monkey finally got a break with its products being used heavily by Indian movies, like Gully Boy. 

3. boAt

The founders of boAt wished to root a lifestyle brand that may arrive with fashionable audio accessories and products to the millennials. The boAt is its brainchild. boAt, a consumer electronic startup, has been counted among India’s top audio accessories and wearables sellers. In FY21, this brand crossed Rs 1,500 crore in revenue. 

The boAt was declared the top brand in the earwear category, holding 27.3% market share. In FY21, boAt sold about Rs 1,120 Cr headphones and earphones. Founded in 2016, Boat was valued at about $299.59 million as of April 2021. 

Strategies & Steps

• boAt targets developing a customer-brand relationship considering the buyers as its brand family members. 
• Earlier, it decided to pick cricketers and celebrities for the brand endorsement as Indians are fond of Bollywood movies and cricket. 
• Despite being a consumer electronics brand, this brand marks itself as a lifestyle brand.
• The target customers of boAt are millennials and youth, and that’s why it’s catching up with swift growth.

4. Bewakoof

A lifestyle fashion brand founded in 2012, Bewakoof designs creative and best apparel for contemporary and trendy Indians. 

In April 2022, Bewakoof was valued at about $60.1 million. It’s getting around 2.2 million traffic from India. 

Milestones Bewakoof Achieved

• It has served 6+ million customers and sold 2+ million products so far. 
• It has 40.1+ lakh Facebook followers. 
• Bewakoof showcases 3000+ style trends.
• It has started selling women’s clothes also. 

Bewakoof is working hard to attain around Rs 2,000 Cr. in sales in the future. Recently, it has collaborated with top celebrities like Sanya Malhotra, Rajkummar Rao, and Farhan Akhtar. 

It’s walking on a pathway to increase its subscribers. 

5. Classmate

Classmate by ITC was rolled out in 2003 and, with time, released a line of other stationery products, like pencils, mechanical pencils, erasers, pens, and more. 

Its varied range and best quality pull it into the limelight. 

Strategies & Steps

• In 2018, the CEO of Classmate declared to spend about 5% of its turnover on marketing.
• Ahead, it organized various fundraising campaigns to help the underprivileged children of the nation.
• Through its engaging story and tagline, this brand always has magnetized students.
• Classmate once filmed an ad that turned out to be a huge success.
• National Spell Bee, Classmate’s content with its nine seasons, is known as India’s Biggest Spelling Competition. 

Classmate’s products are undoubtedly amazing and of the best quality, but the strategies it adopted proved to be the biggest support in its growth.

How Much Does It Cost to Create an Ecommerce Website?

Conclusion

eCommerce branding is more important than creating visual elements, like colors, logos, taglines, and products. But, people usually mistakenly compare a brand with a logo. 

An eCommerce branding strategy assists in controlling and guiding customers’ expectations while building a relationship with them. Many companies fail to know customers’ thoughts about their brand, but they don’t know that they can define how they want to be showcased and remembered.

So, consider branding your business, whether offline or online, as with good branding your brand, you can become well-recognized in the crowd. good branding is impactful on ROI and sales.