Those who want to achieve some short-term successes and boosts to their popularity, traffic and sales, usually think about a marketing campaign. On the other hand, those who are in this industry for the long run, prefer to focus on the issue of branding as a whole. By creating a brand, you are turning your business into an entity capable of relating to your customers on a personal, rather than rational level. In other words, it creates the sensation that makes your customers buy from you rather than from your competitors even in a situation where they have a slightly better offer. Needless to say, in the world of eCommerce, your success at branding can make or break your business.

1.    Start building your brand on trust and honesty

No matter how cheesy, even cliché, this statement might sound, it is a genuine piece of advice. You see, the lack of transparency when it comes to the price is one of the main reasons for high shopping cart abandonment, seeing as how most of your customers had similar negative experiences in the past. Some online retailers deliberately exclude taxes and the cost of delivery from the price they display on their e-store. In turn, this ends up in one of two ways. They either A) lose a customer or B) trick a customer into buying, yet lose all hope of ever turning them into a regular.

This last part is also quite serious, seeing as how it damages both your branding and your sales. When it comes to branding, about 27 percent of all satisfied customers are bound to return, while after two purchases, this number rises up to about 45 percent. As for your sales, just 8 percent of your return customers are capable of generating 40 percent of your entire profit. For this reason alone, it is worth your while to think past making your first sale and think about building your brand on trust and honesty.

2.    Come up with a great name

Another thing you need to keep in mind is that the name of your company will become the essential part of your brand. It will be the word or phrase that associates people with your products, your staff and your brand in general, which is why it deserves your full and undivided attention. For starters, you need to make sure that it sounds good and that it is easy to memorize. For those who hope to turn it into their domain name, there are several things to consider, as well. For instance, using hyphens and numerals makes it much harder to memorize. Furthermore, seeing as how there are no gaps between words in a domain name, there is always a risk present that it will come out as unintentionally inappropriate.

3.    Focus on your website’s layout

When it comes to the actual retail, people would make their impression of your business based on your headquarters, your staff and the quality of your product package. Of course, before they strike their first deal with you. When it comes to these online transactions, they will mostly focus their attention on two things – your digital footprint and your website. Your footprint are all the posts, comments and reviews you leave online and all the brand mentions even remotely related to your e-commerce business.

As for your website, this is where you have much more control. The layout, the design, the colors used, as well as the position of your CTA (call-to-action) button, all have a direct impact on your conversion rates. This is why, bottom 75 percent of the internet have the average conversion rate of 2.35 percent, while top 10 percent brag with an average of 11.45 percent or higher. This is also why investing in e-commerce website development might be more than worth your while.

4.    Utilize the power of Instagram

One of the advantages that the traditional retail still has over the e-commerce is the fact that they have easier time displaying their products and connecting them to the potential buyers. Needless to say, this massive discrepancy in efficiency could easily be breached with the cunning optimization of your Instagram e-commerce activities. For this, you need to do what Instagram does the best. By this, we mean getting visual and displaying high-quality images of products, writing better descriptions and finding hashtags that are going to bring the right audience to your e-store.

5.    Turn to storytelling

Finally, in order to enable your audience to get a better sense of immersion in your marketing campaign, you might want to attempt trying out a bit of storytelling. This comes in two stages. First, you need to explain who you are, why you do what you do and what are your goals. Next, you need to try telling a story in which you describe exactly what you do by painting a reader as the protagonist. Here, your protagonist has a problem, that you can help resolve. As always in life, people are always more interested in what you can do for them than what they can do for you.

We mentioned how branding can help you against competitors that have, objectively, slightly better offer, however, if your prices are twice what they charge, no amount of branding will be able to help you. The same thing goes in a situation where your customer service is not up to the task. Making a brand is just one side of the coin and you need to make sure that your business is logistically capable of withstanding a media pressure that your image creates. Those who manage to find a balance between the two are bound to overcome any obstacle of the business world with ease.