Grocery Stores have marketing down to a science! They study buyer behavior and purchase patterns to fine tune everything they do from what goes where to what’s offered when. You’ve probably noticed the amount of time and effort your local grocery stores puts into merchandising products, and there’s good reason for that! With the slim profit margins that most grocery chains have, they need to be able to squeeze the most profit out of every customer experience. With all of the research and testing that goes into everything they do, we can learn a lot about improving ecommerce sales from them!
Here are the top 3 ecommerce tips that you can learn from the grocery store down the street:
Here are the top 3 ecommerce tips that you can learn from the grocery store down the street:
Put Content Above the Fold
Walk into any grocery store and you’ll notice the end cap displays. These let you get the best of each aisle (or at least what the store wants you to buy from that aisle) without actually requiring that you go down them. This means that everyone from the casual shopper who stopped in for a few items without a list to the disciplined shopper with a detailed long list of the week’s ingredients gets a view of select items that the store wants to push. The result? Impulse buying! Putting these items where everyone will see them generates demand for them that wouldn’t exist if they weren’t so visually accessible.
You can do the same thing on your ecommerce store by making sure that the most important content appears above the fold. Whether it’s a toll-free phone number or product details, the most important elements to shoppers should appear where they will instantly be seen without requiring that a visitor do any work at all to find them.
Pair Items for Cross-Selling
Grocery stores pair items all the time! Sometimes this is simply functional (like having 6 bazillion varieties of crackers all together), and other times it’s meant to encourage cross-selling and increase average transaction sizes (like in the case of grouping marshmallows, chocolate bars, and graham crackers to entice you to want to make s’mores).
Any good ecommerce platform will give you the ability to pair items to encourage up-selling as well. You can display related products on product pages, suggest related items during checkout, or incorporate complementary items into emails. Using one or all of these strategies is a great way to both increase your average order value (AOV) and also encourage return purchasing.
Sell the Experience
Don’t be fooled; grocery stores don’t just sell groceries! They also sell experiences. This is why during the summer you’ll often see things like grill accessories, cases of beer, and patio torches all in a display together. They’re not really trying to sell you new grilling utensils. They’re trying to sell you on the experience of hanging out with friends this summer – building camaraderie, making memories, and having fun.
Your store can easily do this as well with some basic modifications to the elements that already exist on your ecommerce site. By changing homepage images and product photos to showcase people using your products instead of just the products themselves, you can sell people on the experience. You can also write engaging product descriptions to accompany the hard specs and manufacturer information that you need to provide. Sell people on what they can have if they buy your products rather than the products themselves and you may very well see overall sales increase too!
Kate Pierce is the owner of LionShark Digital Marketing LLC, a West Michigan internet marketing company. Her areas of expertise include Paid Search, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Web Consulting for small businesses, Copywriting and Local Online Marketing. She lives in the Grand Rapids area with her husband and enjoys cooking, watching sports and spending time outdoors. Like a true digital marketing expert (i.e. geek), she loves talking about marketing theory and SEM trends… so don’t say you weren’t warned!
Walk into any grocery store and you’ll notice the end cap displays. These let you get the best of each aisle (or at least what the store wants you to buy from that aisle) without actually requiring that you go down them. This means that everyone from the casual shopper who stopped in for a few items without a list to the disciplined shopper with a detailed long list of the week’s ingredients gets a view of select items that the store wants to push. The result? Impulse buying! Putting these items where everyone will see them generates demand for them that wouldn’t exist if they weren’t so visually accessible.
You can do the same thing on your ecommerce store by making sure that the most important content appears above the fold. Whether it’s a toll-free phone number or product details, the most important elements to shoppers should appear where they will instantly be seen without requiring that a visitor do any work at all to find them.
Pair Items for Cross-Selling
Grocery stores pair items all the time! Sometimes this is simply functional (like having 6 bazillion varieties of crackers all together), and other times it’s meant to encourage cross-selling and increase average transaction sizes (like in the case of grouping marshmallows, chocolate bars, and graham crackers to entice you to want to make s’mores).
Any good ecommerce platform will give you the ability to pair items to encourage up-selling as well. You can display related products on product pages, suggest related items during checkout, or incorporate complementary items into emails. Using one or all of these strategies is a great way to both increase your average order value (AOV) and also encourage return purchasing.
Sell the Experience
Don’t be fooled; grocery stores don’t just sell groceries! They also sell experiences. This is why during the summer you’ll often see things like grill accessories, cases of beer, and patio torches all in a display together. They’re not really trying to sell you new grilling utensils. They’re trying to sell you on the experience of hanging out with friends this summer – building camaraderie, making memories, and having fun.
Your store can easily do this as well with some basic modifications to the elements that already exist on your ecommerce site. By changing homepage images and product photos to showcase people using your products instead of just the products themselves, you can sell people on the experience. You can also write engaging product descriptions to accompany the hard specs and manufacturer information that you need to provide. Sell people on what they can have if they buy your products rather than the products themselves and you may very well see overall sales increase too!
Kate Pierce is the owner of LionShark Digital Marketing LLC, a West Michigan internet marketing company. Her areas of expertise include Paid Search, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Web Consulting for small businesses, Copywriting and Local Online Marketing. She lives in the Grand Rapids area with her husband and enjoys cooking, watching sports and spending time outdoors. Like a true digital marketing expert (i.e. geek), she loves talking about marketing theory and SEM trends… so don’t say you weren’t warned!
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