Berk Akman, Author at Segmentify

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Want your customers and prospects to feel like you are talking to them personally? Then you must adopt personalised email marketing! Let’s discover how you can start email personalisation.

Key Takeaways

3 Steps of Email Personalisation

There are multiple steps to take when personalising the emails you send your clients. While you might not see the results in a day, it goes without saying that building a relationship with your customer base will reap the rewards that you are looking for in the long run.

1. Use the recipient’s name.

Make sure to use your recipient’s name, both in the subject line and in the content of your email.

By doing this, you are indicating to the recipient that you know who they are. You are invested in ensuring they are not receiving generic emails that other companies are sending and making your customers feel like they are important to you.

A simple Hey or Dear <First Name> in the subject line can boost your open rates by around 40%.

2. Use dynamic content.

Everyone has been in a situation where you have three different emails from 3 companies that use the same ESP (Email Service Provider) with the same content. And then they proceed to move them all into spam—no surprises here.

It is nice to have a clear and concise receipt email that is always the same. However, if you are trying to capture my attention, having different emails with different content every time goes a long way.

This is the case with most, if not all, of your customers, who expect different and accurate content every time.

Manually achieving this is possible if you have three customers signed up to your mailing list, where you can curate the content you are sending. However, this is virtually impossible if you have a customer base of thousands.

Personalised banners, products, and content in your emails… Many tools ensure that people who receive your emails get a personalised and customised email every single time, which we will go into more detail about as we advance.

3. Use triggered emails.

A solid email flow is a must to keep your customers up-to-date and be constantly in touch with them. Triggered emails are a big part of this.

Sending an email after purchase with the order id is standard practice. However, adding alternative products to what they have ordered to that email goes a long way. This will capture your customer’s attention and might even sell more products that your customers might still need to purchase.

For example, sending batteries to customers who bought RC Cars from your store will not only make them feel like you are looking out for what is best for them by removing the inconvenience of finding batteries for their product, but get you a repeat customer who will prefer your store over the others.

What’s Next?

Don’t forget to come back for more information on email marketing and personalised emails. Next week, we are looking into some mind-blowing email marketing statistics you absolutely need to know about.

It is essential to know that emails, while widespread and accessible for everyone, do not necessarily appeal to your email list. To ensure that your emails hit the right spot, you need email personalisation. Scroll down to learn more!

Key Takeaways

What are the Benefits of Email Personalisation?

The short version is that by adopting email personalisation, you are accomplishing the following:

1. Cost-Effectiveness

First and foremost, you do not need to spend a single cent on starting a email marketing campaign. All you need is a list of email addresses and a free email account.

To increase your reach, investing in this field will help you reach more people, such as email services that will help you build your email list for a fee. With this investment, it is important to keep your ROI in mind as there are better strategies than investing in this heavily to start with. However, in the long run, having a targeted email list will go a long way in converting contacts to sales.

2. Increased Open Rates

Many people who receive brand marketing emails in their inboxes say they delete them without opening them. Even more, people say they treat the “Promotions” folder in their GMAIL as spam and will not open any email stored under it.

So, what can you do to improve your open rates? Is it as simple as putting “Dear [First Name]” in the subject lines? While this strategy can boost your open rates by around 40%, more steps should be taken to increase the open rates with further personalisation.

In addition to personalising the subject line, it is essential to make the subject line give information about what is in the email. For example, touching base on your customer’s activity on your website is important. So a subject line that says “Dear <X>, you might be interested in leopard print handbags.” will ensure that you are addressing the right person and their interests regarding their shopping behaviour.

By personalising your email’s subject line, you are taking the right steps to a better open rate. Make sure to address the right person and their interests in your product catalogue.

3. Improved Click-Through Rates

A benchmark by Bluecore on emails reports a 139% increase in click-through rate (CTR) for personalised emails. In addition, repeat customers are more likely to continue shopping, while converting first-time buyers is more complicated.

This benchmark shows us that personalisation regarding email content is a must if you want to increase your CTR. This increase in CTR can only be achieved by accurate content and product recommendations in the email’s content. This can be achieved with tools such as Segmentify, where AI engines directly process the users’ website activity to display the products that are more likely to be clicked on and purchased by your customers.

An example of the case is the most prominent in price-drop products. When customers go through your catalogue, they most likely see the prices, note the products they are interested in, and wait for the price to be more affordable for their budget.

An email that includes these products both in the content and the subject line of the email means that these customers that you have not converted before will open the email, see the products that they saved and click on them as they are on discount. This will help massively with the CTR and ensure that the visitor is converted into a customer.

4. Increased Conversion Rates

Building a personalised network of emails means that your customers will start to create a bond with your brand as they will notice that everything you are sending over is personalised to their liking. This means that your emails will stand out from the crowd when it comes to being personal to one customer, accurate to their preferences, and showing them what they might be interested in.

As mentioned before, having the right personalisation tool that will do all of this for you without any effort means that you will be converting more people into customers who might not even have bought a single product from you before, as well as keep customers coming back for more in the long run.

A person who sees a cookie-cutter email that the X brand sends might need to click on the products in the email. However, a person that is sent an email that shows them what they were or are still interested in will capture their attention. This attention-grabbing email, in turn, will bring the customer back to the store and get them a step closer to a purchase.

In an email, try to show a person interested in baggy clothing, skinny jeans. You will not only ensure they will not get back on the website, but they will also ignore future emails, which show the importance of accurate customer profiling and targeted advertisement in capturing and keeping customers.

5. Better Return On Investment (ROI)

As previously mentioned, while free, improvements can cost you money. This is the investment in the email that is important to do. However, ensuring that you are getting more than what you’re paying for a 3rd party tool to manage your emails and their content is an oversight you should not be a part of.

As email marketing is expected to reach a revenue of $11 billion by the end of 2023, the piece of the pie you will have can either be small or large depending on your choosing the strategy, the amount of investment into email marketing as well as the 3rd party tools.

With the right strategy, you ensure you get a more significant piece of the pie and build a better relationship with your customer. This strategy should focus on how much you’re investing in the tools regarding money and time and how much revenue they bring to your company. With the right strategy, tools, and tests, your ROI can be as high as 28%.

Personalise Your Emails, Folks.

With the benefits and definitions out of the way, it is clear from the data that having cookie-cutter emails do not work in 2022, where everyone and their grandmothers are sending marketing emails.

Personalising your emails for every customer is hard work, but it does not have to be. Finding the right tool is significant when maximising your revenue from this venture that you are investing your time and money into.

What’s Next?

So far we’ve covered what email marketing is and how email personalisation benefits a business. Next stop: How to Personalise Your Emails!

Everyone has a folder in their mail providers page dedicated to filtering and separating marketing campaigns we receive through email; however, we still click on a particular brand’s emails. What’s so special about that specific brand’s email?

Key Takeaways

What is Email Marketing?

That brand that keeps you in the loop with emails that are engaging and fun to read achieves this in a landscape overpopulated with meaningless spam emails because of its personalised content. But before we look into how to personalise your email and what benefits this will bring, we first need to understand what email marketing is.

Email marketing is the most cost-effective way to keep in touch with your customers. You can communicate with your customers directly and send educational information, special offers, coupons, promotions, and everything in between.

While this sounds simple as sending out an email, it can be used to get different results, such as:

Remember to decide what goal you want to achieve before starting your campaign. Setting your goals and expectations beforehand means controlling your customer’s actions and leading them to exhibit these behaviours to help you achieve your KPIs.

After you decide what you want to achieve, creating email campaigns to serve this goal will assist you in getting there.

Why is Email Marketing So Effective?

The simple fact is everyone has an email address, and they use these email addresses to sign up for your website, essentially giving you the green light to engage with them. This being the case, using this channel effectively, as well as keeping the trust that your customers give you when they sign up for your mailing list, is essential to email marketing.

Segment Your Email List for Better Performance

Segmenting your audience, i.e. your email list, is vital to improving your campaigns’ effectiveness. Email campaigns are vastly customisable, and adding segmentation into the mix means that people interested in the topics you offer will be easier to reach and convert.

Segmenting your audience is critical to keep your emails from becoming another voice in the crowd. Let’s say that you have an eCommerce shoe company. You are selling boots, flats, heels, sandals, sneakers, and everything in between.

Each of these different types of shoes will attract a different audience. Usually, your customers purchasing high-heels will not be interested in flip-flops and vice versa.

This being the case, creating two different segments, such as high-fashion and casual, and sending promotional material based on these groups will achieve higher open rates and increased engagement with your material. Therefore, making segmentation is crucial to achieving your campaign goals and being very easy to create and manage.

What’s Next?

Now you know what email marketing is; however, this is only the beginning. Join us in this journey, and let’s explore the benefits of personalised email marketing together.

One-to-one marketing is perhaps the most popular marketing strategy for eCommerce websites at the moment. One-to-one marketing is the name we use to define the practice of creating a unique and optimal experience for your customers using data from their activities online.

To put the online one-to-one marketing strategies into perspective: You can think about them as your favourite coffee shop starting your regular order as soon as you walk in. Write your name on the cup correctly and deliver your usual order as soon as you get to the register. Shortening the time you are waiting for your order creates a unique experience. This Personalisation and Customised Experience is the expected outcome of one-to-one marketing.

Why Should You, as an eCommerce Website, Care About One-to-One Marketing?

With the COVID-19 pandemic, the competition in the eCommerce space has risen to very close margins, making customisation and personalisation more critical than ever to find that connection between your store and how connected your customer base feels to it.

While you might not be selling to-go coffee to your customers on your website, you can still make the experience as unique and quick as your favourite coffee shop. As much as online shopping is seen as a way to not interact with other people, the inherent need for interaction and connection stays the same, and one-to-one marketing achieves this by interacting with a website’s customer base in a more personalised way.

Each day, the competition and new brands emerge in the eCommerce space, making anything to get ahead of the competition essential to stand out from the pack. To stand out from the competition, the last thing you should do is show your customers a cookie-cutter website with no personalisation to every single customer. Therefore, creating an eCommerce website with one-to-one marketing is essential to standing out from the crowd.

So, What Steps Can You Take to Utilise One-to-One Marketing on Your eCommerce Website?

1. Customisation

In a world where everyone and everything is sending out a notification to your mobile phone, it is essential to understand how your customer would like to hear from you. Giving them a choice to show that you understand their needs and avoiding the methods they do not prefer makes it so that they are not annoyed by different notifications by your website.

While it can be necessary to notify your customers about new promotions, new products, and updates, doing so on your customers’ terms creates a relationship that shows that you respect their communication choices.

2. Segmentation

The process of segmenting a target market into groups of potential customers with similar requirements and behaviours involves dividing the market into segments. It is used to create different groups of customers interested in other products throughout your website.

These groups, such as customers who have purchased “2 summer dresses in the past 20 days.” can be a valuable tool to take one-to-One marketing to the next level.

These clusters can be used in different ways, such as through emails, push notifications, a carousel with their favourite dresses that haven’t been purchased yet, and a unique code for those interested in buying new “summer dresses”.

The sky becomes the limit when you start to use segmentation, and it changes how you approach the customer groups of your website.

3. Personalisation

Personalisation is that your website will be able to cater to and care for each customer that visits and browses your website in real-time, evolving as they spend more time in your store.

It is much more than putting your customers’ names on their account page; it is about changing your website to suit your customers’ needs individually.

How Do You Create a One-to-One Marketing Strategy for Your eCommerce Website?

1. Create Personalised Carousels Throughout Your Website

Understanding your visitors and making personalised product recommendations will create a unique shopping experience that will impress potential customers. And tools such as Segmentify can analyse each visitor’s interests and help you offer the most relevant products that your visitors will love.

With personalised carousels, you can show your customers what they will be interested in the most; for example, on the homepage of your website, you can add a carousel that offers a selection of products that a customer has shown interest in previously.

This is next to impossible without some serious effort and a copious amount of time on your hands to look into each customer’s data and recommend them a product. However, to make this easy, you can use Segmentify’s AI Technology to recommend personalised products to your visitors.

Take one of our fantastic algorithms as an example: Smart Offers, which recommends products based on the best-matching categories and the current visitor’s behaviour during their last visit. The first-time visitors, on the other hand, are recommended the most popular products.

2. Create a Search Experience

It is essential to show your visitors the correct products when searching for a specific product and show them alternatives to the said product.

To achieve this, you can either just look at the search query, match it to the existing products, or show that product to your customers. Or an improved and unique search experience that offers your visitors the products they have searched for and different products you want to promote as soon as they click your search bar.

With Segmentify, this is possible with our before and after search functionalities that show accurate products based on the search query, helping you not miss out on a sell and promote products your customer has looked into on their last visit, as well as other sorting options such as:

3. Build More Personalised and Tailor-Made Shopping Journeys with Precise Audience Segmentation.

Create and manage different groups of visitors interested in many products and target them with specific promotions and accurate recommendations, as well as showing that you understand their interests.

With Segmentify Rule-Based Segmentation, you can create them efficiently and use them throughout your website’s one-to-one marketing strategies. You can create as many segments as you want based on the purchase data with the Rule-Based Segmentation.

Create a segment for fans of a particular brand and inform them about special deals or products before anyone else, or give them special discounts. Create segments for people shopping in specific price ranges (luxury items), send push notifications for new arrivals, and recommend products accordingly. Or just combine the two segments!

4. Show Your Visitors That You Care

Nobody likes to eat at an empty restaurant. It is the same story with eCommerce websites. People are more likely to make purchases if they are reminded that they are not alone in their experience and show them that you remember their interests and interactions with products.

With tools such as Segmentify’s Social Proofing, you can show them that they are not alone and that you remember your customer has looked into a product or has added it to their basket previously and offer them your discounts.

Messages like these will show your customers that you are with them throughout their experience, just like a shopping assistant in a physical store, catering to their needs. Plus, social proof marketing is a great way to nudge your customers in the right direction and convince them to make that purchase!

5. Keep in Contact with Your Customers Even When They are Not in Your Store

Reminding your customers about yourself is essential with so many things happening in our lives, and it helps to give them quick reminders about what is happening in their favourite store. While keeping in mind preferences that we’ve looked into about communication and incorporating segmentation to the mix, not annoying your customers with too many emails or push notifications to become more accessible.

Using Segmentify in emails ensures that you will be sending out the most appropriate products in an email that your customer has shown interest in before, as well as keeping them in the loop about Top Sellers, Back-in-Stocks, Discounts, Abandoned Carts, in addition to Nice to Meet You and Birthday eMails without even lifting a finger.

The same scenario also applies to push notifications, which are personalised for each of your customers with campaigns such as “Happy Birthday,” which can give out a unique code for your visitors just created for them.

Wrapping Up

By understanding your customers’ needs, you can cater to them using the aforementioned one-to-one marketing strategies. When done effectively, this will distinguish between your store and many other cookie-cutter eCommerce websites that people forget about after they close their browser tab.

It is not an easy task to understand and cater to everyone. However, with tools such as Segmentify, this process becomes pain-free, and this experience can be implemented on your website to help you with your one-to-one marketing needs. You can book a free trial, try Segmentify’s outstanding one-to-one marketing solutions, and boost your customer satisfaction.

As the famous philosopher Jagger once said, “You can’t always get what you want.” However, “But if you try sometimes, you’ll find you get what you need.“

eCommerce, at times, is much similar to what Mick Jagger says in his hit song “You Can’t Always Get What You Want“. But certain tactics have been tried and perfected over the years in retail stores. While not confined to mortar and brick, these tactics can be adapted and used in your eCommerce business.

What is Visual Merchandising?

Before looking into the tactics you can use, it is essential to understand and define what Visual Merchandising is.

Visual merchandising is a valuable marketing tool used to engage your customers from the minute they walk into your store, or in this case, they click your website’s link, to the moment they leave. Retailers throughout the world have been employing these tactics to captivate as many customers and their attention as possible to an experience that is both beneficial to the customer and the business by leaving a lasting impression with the help of your brand’s voice.

This helps to strengthen brand identity, creates loyalty, brings more revenue, and generates repeat purchases.

6 eCommerce Visual Merchandising Strategies to Boost Conversion

While beneficial in brick-and-mortar stores, Visual Merchandising is also incredibly effective online. eCommerce can use Visual Merchandising to improve online metrics such as engagement, conversion rate (CR), time on site, and average order value (AOV), thus cementing Visual Merchandising as an essential element of your website.

Due to the volatility of the online experience, it is vital to create an environment that is relevant, personalised, and is easy-to-use. This is meant to guide the customer through the purchasing process as quick and hassle-free as possible. Presenting shoppers with relevant information, products, and offers is a must to convert potential customers into loyal and repeat customers before they jump into the next website or task.

While this may seem tricky, eCommerce comes with some perks that physical stores do not have access to, such as Segmentify. Segmentify is a personalised eCommerce platform that creates end-to-end, highly personalised shopping experiences for your customers from the moment they click on your website to the moment of purchase.

Online retailers do not have to optimise their stores for the average customer and their particular niche. An online store can alter and quickly adapt to its customer’s needs. They can change the locations of their displays as promptly as one click, adjust their website to the demographic data they collect and offer products based on the customer on the website by looking into their shopping activity—all in order to help with a quicker and better experience.

Keeping these in mind, let’s look into how we can use tried and tested brick-and-mortar tactics in the volatile world of online shopping.

Website Layout as the Store Layout

In-store visual merchandising looks into how to maximise the space usage and its effects on sales. Retail stores use techniques to determine which parts of the store are used the most, optimising the experience to showcase special promotions, new products, or best sellers in such areas. The goal is to display interesting products or promos to as many people as possible.

These tactics can also be used for your eCommerce store by analysing the data through services like Trendify by Segmentify or Google Analytics. You can determine which products or pages are driving the most traffic and focus your energy on promoting them further.

At the same time, via personalising these promos and products, you can specifically cater your products to each customer’s needs. For example, Category pages usually drive high traffic in eCommerce websites as visitors like to browse through your catalogue, similar to strolling the aisles of your favourite grocery store.

Placing personalised widgets with a high click-through rate or popular with your general audience at the top of these category pages will get your visitors’ attention. Plus, collecting and utilising behavioural data will help you personalise category pages, which will save your visitors from scrolling through thousands of products.

Like a shopkeep that knows you personally and can lead you to what you are looking for, widgets allow you to show the relevant products to your customers. This shortens the time that they spend pointlessly scrolling through your catalogue, which can cause them to leave your store without buying anything.

Website Homepage as the Window Display

The first thing a customer sees in the physical world is the window display. The window display is a place that is meticulously prepared to draw in a lot of potential customers into the store. Therefore, it becomes a great place to show new products, bestsellers, and on-sale products.

While as widespread as they are, window displays are vastly impactful and can make a lasting impression on your potential customer’s mind. Therefore building your website’s “homepage” is incredibly important since you need it to create interest, tell a story, and inspire customers to continue their journey through your website.

You can use this space to intrigue potential and returning customers to take a look at specific promotions, products, and services you may be offering. You can use strategies such as Personalised Dynamic Hero Banners and track their performance using Bannerify by Segmentify or Personalised Brand logos to lead customers to brand pages and create an inviting and reassuring landing page.

Website Navigation as In-store Signs

While physical retail stores use signs to lead customers to their destination, such as grocery stores’ overhead signs on the aisles indicating the contents of the shelves, eCommerce stores have navbars (navigation bars), menus, and search bars.

Menus and Navigation

Suppose you have a lot of products on your website. In that case, to optimise the customer experience, your menus and navigation throughout your website should follow a natural flow so that your customers do not get lost in the aisles of your website.

There are a lot of different styles of menus to choose from. However, you should choose to go with the one that will give your customers the best experience for navigating your website and its aisles.

Search Bar and Search Box

A considerable number of customers visit websites with a product in mind. To reach this particular product, they use your website’s search box. The importance of a search box on a website does not only shine when someone has a specific product in mind but also if they want to browse your store.

Search areas help visitors find the product they have in mind—just like an in-store shopping assistant. Therefore, an intelligent search box is a must for eCommerce. You can utilise the search area for recommending products throughout the search journey, starting from the moment they click the search bar.

In addition, you can use different search banners and buttons and features such as “auto-complete” or “my last searches” to help your customers reach the products they are searching for, making the experience of shopping on your website more seamless.

Online Social Proof as In-store Store Events

While overlooked in many online and physical stores, Online Social Proofing or Events are a great strategy to attract customers and pique their interest.

As no one wants to eat at a completely empty restaurant, online shopping can be the same. In the online world, most of the websites we shop from might feel empty or that no one is purchasing anything from them, even if this is not the case.

To counter this, you can use social proofing to show your customers the number of likes, current views, baskets, and purchases and how many people purchased the product right on the product page. With this display of information, you can create the “Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)” mindset. The stock information can also be displayed on the page and show your customers how popular a product is to nudge them in the correct direction to make a purchase.

Social proofing is essential in eCommerce because you cannot physically see how many people are in the store buying products alongside you, which helps your customers immensely with finalising their decisions.

Product Recommendations as Bundles

Bundling is a technique that Fashion Retailers have used to promote products that “go together” to push certain products as a whole instead of just single items. And this tactic can be easily adapted to and used in eCommerce.

Although there are many ways to achieve this, one way of accomplishing this on your eCommerce website is to create widgets on your product description page to show different products together in a set.

Complete the Look

The customers who see such recommendations will be more inclined to take a look at the other products even if they don’t purchase them straight away as a set.

In addition to showing products together, making it easier to purchase them as a whole by adding add to cart buttons or deals on whole outfits can also help convert those who are just browsing to repeat customers.

Again, this has been a tried and tested strategy for many brick-and-mortar stores, and its effects on eCommerce have been undeniably potent. Using this technique not only sells more products as it inspires your customers to consider what products go together but also takes them on a journey through your website.

Frequently Bought Together

In addition to whole outfits, you can employ a tactic that Amazon is currently using to sell complementary products.

For example, when looking for a TV on Amazon, you will usually get recommendations like HDMI cables and TV Screen Cleaners. With these recommendations, you essentially show people what they might need and might have forgotten.

Online Checkout Optimisation as the Checkout Line

The checkout or the basket page might look like the last stop on a shopping experience; however, this is not always the case. The basket page is the prime spot for increasing your AOV by recommending low cost/high margin products that appeal to your customers.

For decades, this upsell strategy has been seen in grocery stores, with products close to checkout appealing to us. Whether it is a piece of gum or a can of soda, we tend to have a second look and have the tendency to purchase the said products.

In eCommerce, the story stays the same. When the customer is ready to end their shopping journey at the checkout, you will be able to recommend impulse buy products to your customers to increase your AOV and upsell a product.

As the last stop to make an impact, the checkout step is the space for you to show your customers how many points for your in-store loyalty program they have or, if they are not a member of the said loyalty program, how they can sign up for it.

While it is important not to disrupt the flow of the checkout and to make it as painless as possible for your customers, you can use popups, widgets, and anything in between to make sure that your customers have another look at one or more of your products to increase your AOV.

Checking Out

Visual merchandising is not just for brick-and-mortar stores anymore! Thanks to Segmentify, you will be able to recommend visually pleasing and relevant products to your customers to help them through their journey through your website.

By employing some of the strategies above, you will be able to increase your engagement, conversion rate (CR), time on site and average order value (AOV), helping you grow your business and retain more customers.

We all have heard, “Don’t you take that tone with me!” at some point when we were out of line when talking with our parents, which has given us an idea of the right tone when talking with someone and started the foundations of language usage in different situations. With this in mind, building the same skill when talking with customers is a must when it comes to being a successful communicator in your professional life.

What Is a Tone of Voice?

In in-person communication, we take clues from the other person via verbal, sonic, and visual clues to determine the feelings that are being conveyed. While some of these clues can be missing in written communication, we use our ability to interpret and understand to detect the underlying layer of emotions in words.

This interpretation and deeper understanding of both oral and written communication are what we deem as “Tone” and sets the attitude of conversations. For example, while “you” and “customer” could mean the same person, they differ in tone. Looking at how an audience perceives these two words, using “you” creates a warm and friendly engagement tone. On the other hand, “customer” puts distance between the brand and its audience, making the setting more formal. This explanation of “tone” can be applied to many aspects of a business and how customers perceive it, affecting both the customer and the brand itself.

Therefore, it is an integral and essential part of businesses to create an environment that consistently reflects their brand image. If done correctly, the brand image that aligns with the company’s vision will yield better results in engagement and understanding than an inconsistent “tone” of voice.

Why Is “Tone” Important in Written Communication and Building a Brand Image?

The tone is essential both in in-person and written communication as it adds another layer of meaning to the message that needs to be conveyed. Although it is used to determine the emotions that need to be conveyed through both oral and written communication, this article will focus on the non-verbal communication aspect of “Tone” since non-verbal communication is the type of communication that can be easily misinterpreted.

When engaging with a customer, it is vital to consider the tone of the conversation, as taking a different tone than the one that the customer expects can undermine both the relationship with the customer and cost you future business.

On the other hand, using a tone that is clear to understand and is in line with your brand image when it comes to customer expectations will build a long-lasting relationship with the customer that will keep both parties engaged and content.

What Is the Right Tone of Voice for Your Brand Image?

The right tone of voice varies from business to business, and it mainly depends on the target audience that the brand wants to reach. However, there are specific steps to take towards understanding the tone your customer expects:

Engaging With Your Target Audience/Customers

This can be achieved by many different methods; however, one of the most effective ways is to interact with your customers on a level playing field. One way to achieve the level playing field is by interacting with your customers through social media channels such as Twitter.

A way that certain brands like Ebuyer, one of the largest independent online retailers of computer and electrical goods in the United Kingdom, likes to post questions, observe their answers and interact with them.

We can observe that Ebuyer, while not directly related to the brand, is asking questions to their customers that lets them express themselves. By doing this, Ebuyer gains a deeper understanding of its target audience.

Social media is essential here as it is a level playing field when it comes to expression, and the brands can pick up on clues such as the tone of their customers to match their brand’s voice to suit their audiences better. This approach allows them to understand the tone their customer expects better.

Defining the Core Values of Your Business and Improving Your Tone of Voice in Alignment With Them

Transparency and communication are of utmost importance when it comes to building trust with your customers. The significance of this becomes apparent when you consider that 65% of customers will develop emotional connections to brands that align with their values and are genuinely interested in their customers.

Asking these questions will help you create your brand image and establish a brand voice. With these questions in mind, you will be able to proceed towards a brand identity that is concise and aligned with your audience.

While the questions mentioned above are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to finding your brand’s voice, they will help you get an idea of what tone of voice your audience expects of you.

What Are the Different Types of “Tone of Voice” Based on Your Target Audience? (Examples from Brands)

While there is no “one size fits all” answer to this questions, here are some examples of brands, their target audience, and their tone of voice:

Zalando

As a fashion and lifestyle e-commerce company based in Berlin, Germany, Zalando is all about being free and expressive. In 2019, they rebranded their brand’s voice as “express a powerful truth about fashion: when we’re free to be who we want and wear what we want, nothing can hold us back.”. This shows us that the Zalando customers are expecting more than a shopping experience; they are expecting “a richer experience; to align with the company’s values beyond the product or service alone. Our most loyal and engaged customers have a much deeper relationship with us.”.

With this attitude in mind, Zalando takes a much more relaxed approach when it comes to their brand’s voice. As a result, we can see this expressive and informal tone in their online presence.

As a company with a target audience in a younger demographic, Zalando’s tone is in line with both the expectations of their customers and their brand’s core values, therefore, standing out from the rest of fashion e-commerce websites.

McKinsey & Company

On the other side of the spectrum, McKinsey & Company, a management and consulting firm, takes a more helpful, authoritative, and uplifting approach with their brand’s voice, separating them from a brand that uses a non-serious and informal tone. This serious tone is more in line with the expectations of their industry and audience.

With sentences such as “How can we help you?”, they approach their customers with the intent to help them and elevate their businesses by offering their services.

Since their target audience is companies interested in management and consulting, they use a tone of voice that aligns with their target audience’s expectations of a helpful and uplifting consulting firm.

Different Types of Brand Voice

Looking at the examples above, we can see that different companies require different approaches to tone. It is vital to the brand that this tone is consistent with the image that the brand wants to convey to its customers and that this tone stays consistent with its core values. Failing to achieve a tone that aligns with your company and is consistent will alienate your customers and cost you potential business.

Keeping this in mind, while there isn’t one right way to follow your brands’ voice, here are some examples to guide you to your brand new voice:

1. Informative Tone

When someone first comes to your site, what are they after? The answer is simple: They want to know what exactly your company does and how you can help them with the problem they’re currently contending with.

In that case, you should take on an informative and helpful tone. The visitor should feel as though a very interested customer service representative just greeted them and is curious about how they can help.

While using an informative tone, you should avoid using your passive voice. For example, when giving information to your customers about how they can contact your brand, don’t use a passive voice. By avoiding the passive voice, you will be able to talk directly to your customer and show that you are there to meet their needs.

As you are writing with our customers in mind, you should talk to them directly. For example,

This approach will communicate to your customers that you are there for them to talk to and get guidance about their problems. When done correctly and in line with your brand image, this is generally not a bad tone to keep throughout your site.

2. Authoritative Tone

Maybe you’re using your website to pitch yourself as a speaker or consultant. While you still want to be informative, it’s even more critical that you’re authoritative. You need to convince people that they could benefit from your superior knowledge base. The tone you use should help to impress them.

We can observe this tone in consultancy firms such as McKinsey & Company. As a consulting firm, they benefit from showing their authority when it comes to their years of consulting work and their spot in the consulting industry. As a result, this tone lets potential clients know their experience and know-how in their industry and helps them decide if they would like to work with them.

3. Witty and Funny Tone

Trying to be witty and funny as your brand’s voice can be very, very difficult. As we mentioned earlier, it is very easy to be misunderstood and come off as condescending instead. You can also alienate your customer if this tone does not fit your brand well, which is never desirable, either.

Nonetheless, if you’re able to pull it off, a humorous tone can reap massive rewards. And entrepreneur James Altucher has mastered this tone. Despite being featured in Forbes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and countless other impressive publications, it’s the only one he uses.

Altucher’s demographic tends to have already read other self-help books and blog posts, so they value someone who recognises that and can play with their expectations a bit. As a result, his choice of tone of voice works perfectly for him and his audience.

So, How Do You Pick the Right Tone for Your Brand?

As a brand, it is important to establish this early on to learn your core values and market them to your customers in a light that does not alienate them. By examining your brand identity, in turn, you are allowing yourself to choose the right tone of voice when it comes to interacting with your customers, improving the connection between your brand and your customers.

This connection with your customers does not only lead to one-time sales. Instead, it creates loyal customers who feel right at home when it comes to your brand—building a community of loyal customers who use your services and give you vital feedback to elevate your brand further.

When it comes to eCommerce, as the marketplace becomes more and more competitive, the prices for logistics and production are skyrocketing to places that are hard for many to cover. However, when a brand can create a community by using its brand voice that is attractive to its target audience, it can receive valuable feedback that helps the brand foresee its expenses for logistics and production.

Foreseeing which products will be worth the hassle of production and transportation can be achieved with the help of the feedback you are receiving from your customers. While you can examine the sales data for your products, you won’t be able to get as much information and feedback. The feedback you get through a level-playing field such as Twitter or other social media will be more in touch with reality and customers’ experiences, thus more valuable.

The customers giving feedback to companies are there to lead the brand into decisions that they would be happy to go along with. Their feedback can give you foresight into decisions that otherwise would cost your brand financially and alienate the customer base you are trying to reach.

As mentioned above, skyrocketing prices of production and logistics are one of the many elements affecting eCommerce websites. While it is not the only factor that will eliminate this problem, brand marketing will help with this problem and help your brand cut costs that otherwise would affect your brand’s profits.

While there is no right or wrong answer to this question, the best way to pick the right tone of voice for your brand is to talk with your customers and take their feedback into consideration since they are the cornerstone of your brand when it comes to further progress. In addition, the way you decide to market your brand will determine the success and the relationship you will have with your customers and whether or not they will be loyal to your brand. This is why choosing the right tone of voice is essential for brand marketing.