You’re doing it right! You just don’t know it.
Recently, a colleague I hold dearly told me that for online retailing the USP method of distinguishing yourself from the opposition was over and now it was all down to promoting your emotional sales position to differentiate yourself from your competitors. Sorry, respected colleague. You’re completely wrong on this one.
The great thing about the internet is that everyone can have a go at being a retailer; a wholesaler, or a promoter. You don’t actually have to be any one of these things, just a person that knows how to put a site up and load content.
Armed with this knowledge you can easily look to see what the other website builders are doing and copy them, good practice or otherwise. There are some builders, usually former graphic designers, that add beautiful aesthetics to the rendering, feasting in the delusion that their art will grow sales.
In the main, although generally well intentioned, Web Designers and Builders are not Online Retail Specialists. This fact leads to loss of online sales potential.
I retailed at national level right through the latter stages of the last century. From around 1975. My sites were bricks and mortar, eventually 326 of them, in almost every High Street in Britain. In some cases they started out as just a piece of land. My Business Development Department, using demography, would choose the site, and the architects and the surveyors would combine with the builders to build the shop. At that point we would send the builder’s home.
We would not ask them to design the retail space inside, fit it out, or merchandise it. For that we needed specialists with retail knowledge, handed down over the centuries, of trading on the high streets of the world from market stalls to department stores. These highly trained skilled retailers would use their expert knowledge to optimise the retail space in 3 ways; consistency, easy to buy, and the WOW! factor of the displays, offers, and promotions. In doing so they would use age old proven retail methods such as well promoted features advantages and benefits grabbing attention, creating inteŕest, stimulating desire, and calling for action.
What my valued colleague has failed to register is that the company he helped found does all this and this is its unique selling position. His team treat the businesses they look after as though they were their own. They strive to personally develop themselves in all aspects of online retail so that they can apply best retail practice to the clients websites they partner in growing online business.
This is the culture that my colleague created in his team. The emotional selling point?
They care.
