Offline marketing for e-commerce as a strategy isn’t that popular, but that may largely be the result of limited vision and a native preference for all things digital. E-commerce approaches to marketing tend to focus on familiar online activities: content marketing, SEO, digital ads, social media, etc. But these days there’s a ton of clutter from competing sellers. This includes competition with online marketplaces, online auction sites, membership sites, and much more. For a buyer to sift through all that online clutter and discover the superior qualities of your brand and products, it helps to build awareness in more analog ways too.
Building community and authenticity for your brand via real-world encounters
Offline marketing for e-commerce can be successfully applied to every aspect of an online retail business. Having actual, physical encounters with bus or subway ads, billboards, catalogs, or pop-up displays inspires a sense of authenticity, even community. Those around you in a public place are seeing those same things at the same time as you. Or you’re standing together discovering products at a trade show or pop-up store, and sharing your reactions. All of these IRL experiences confer an identity for your brand and its products that consumers can connect with–and search for to purchase the next time they log on.
Many online sellers are actually opening brick-and-mortar shops. Amazon now has bookstores in malls. Even ultimate digital product company Google is opening its first brick-and-mortar store, in New York City.
Other benefits of offline marketing:
- It helps attract a wider and more diverse audience
- You can collect invaluable customer data
- It increases brand awareness.
- You build trust with customers when they’re exposed to your brand in diverse, IRL settings
Statistics show that offline marketing for e-commerce is effective.
- A survey by Visua.ly found that 40% of customers purchase online after seeing an offline ad.
- An InfoTrends survey indicated that 56% of consumers who responded to direct mail either went to the brand’s website or visited their offline store.
- Another survey showed that 54% of customers prefer to get printed catalogs in the mail, over scrolling through a digital catalog.
Three proven offline marketing strategies to consider
Catalogs
E-commerce businesses tend to focus on email newsletters or social media to promote special offers. But direct-mailed catalogs are greatly effective in a lot of ways. Your investment in printing and mailing indicates to consumers that you’re a serious business. It says you’re not a here-today, gone-tomorrow drop shipper with no office, no warehouse, and no stocked inventory.
Many customers trust print over online promotions for subtle reasons of their own. Some, like this author, simply prefer the experience of paging through a paper catalog instead of scrolling and clicking on a laptop or worse, pinching and zooming on a mobile screen. After selecting from the print catalog, they’ll place the order online. It’s been shown that print catalogs can achieve an average 4.4% response rate, compared to a 0.12% email response rate.
In 2019, Amazon began publishing a print toy catalog and target mailing it to customers who’d previously purchased children’s products on Amazon. Different editions of the catalog aimed at different aged children, based on the age-related items in their purchase histories. The catalog features products displayed in staged settings with beautiful photography, with some clever innovations. Rather than cluttering pages with prices and product numbers, it has QR and other codes that link directly to the product’s page on Amazon.
Promotional Giveaway Items
Another proven method for boosting brand awareness and customer loyalty is promotional items. Small giveaway items (pens, magnets and other bling) help users remember brands when they’re used or seen every day. The same principle applies whether that brand is sold in brick and mortar stores, online, or both. Increasing brand awareness and recall with a small gift will prompt higher web traffic and conversions.
Pop-up Shops and Trade Shows
For certain kinds of e-commerce brands, especially designers and creators, pop-up shops bridge the gap between online and offline merchandising and marketing. They’re also a great way to test the reaction to new products, engage with new customers, and build brand loyalty. Face-to-face meetups with your biggest fans can turn them into brand ambassadors, spreading the word about your brand. Associating a real human face with your business makes it all the more memorable. Pop-ups and trade shows are good places to hand out postcards, business cards, and promotional items like the ones described above. Point-of-sale signs and flyers at these events can tell your brand’s story. They also keep customers in your display area while reading about, seeing, and touching the products you sell.
Billboards
As with pop-ups and trade shows, billboards are best suited to large metropolitan areas where there’s plenty of foot traffic and drive-by traffic. Their primary value is building brand awareness, and creating intrigue about your products. The Apple iPhone campaigns in recent years have been a head-turning success by showcasing one very cool thing about iPhones in a single large photo image, with a minimal caption.
Sometimes to succeed and innovate, we must reach back and find the tried and true methods. One e-commerce merchant told the Wall Street Journal that designing, publishing, and mailing a catalog to his customer list cost less than the cumulative costs of digital marketing for his niche products, and helped him stand out where before he was getting lost in search results. Lest we get too arrogant and dismiss as “old school” some of these analog marketing strategies, remember that stepping back can also be a good way to get ahead.
