We explore the connection between creativity and e-Commerce. Learn when and how a creative e-Commerce approach helps improve your online selling experience. Read this to get more creative with e-Commerce.
Creativity can be hit-and-miss in e-Commerce. As it’s still a relatively new way to sell things, it feels like there should be lots of opportunities to get creative.
However, operational processes drive much of the thinking in e-Commerce. These focus on driving efficiency. This doesn’t sit well with being creative.
For example, it can be hard to get creative with your order to delivery system or your profit and loss. Such operations are usually the domain of logical thinking functions like supply chain, finance, and IT.
However, you need creativity to create an effective online selling experience for customers. And to do this, you also need to factor in more instinctive and emotional appeal. That’s where you find the creative opportunity in e-Commerce. It’s about how you use the creative process to more deeply engage customers.
How much creativity you can apply in e-Commerce depends on how much you control the selling experience. The more you control, the greater your scope for creativity.
For example, your creative choices are limited when you sell via low-control channels like marketplaces and print on demand. You can only really apply creativity to your product pages in those channels. e.g. your product images, selling messages, choice of colours, and so on.
But everything else in those channels is usually pre-set by the platform. There’s little scope for you to get creative with your e-Commerce.
Online retailers usually give you a few more creative options. For example, you can work with them to :-
However, these types of creative opportunities are often costly and time-consuming. Plus, the retailer will restrict your creativity by controlling how much time and space you have to interact with their customers. They may even place restrictions on what you can say.
The biggest creative e-Commerce opportunity is when you control the whole selling experience. You set up your own store and sell direct-to-consumer (D2C). To fully explore what creative e-Commerce can do, let’s assume for the rest of this guide that you’re selling D2C.
Your goal when you launch your own D2C store is simple.
You want to convert customers from not having heard of your store to having them as loyal, happy customers.
You do this by managing the 5 key parts of the D2C experience, each with its own opportunities to get creative :-
To get customers to visit your store, you have to make them aware it exists and get them interested in what it offers. You usually drive such traffic by using digital media and focus on one or more of the following :-
Display advertising is when you pay to place your adverts on other people’s sites. Usually, these are short videos or animations which show your products, land a key selling message and encourage customers to click to visit your store.
There’s lots of opportunity to get creative with e-Commerce advertising. In fact, given it’s such a hard job to stand out with display advertising, creativity is a must.
So, you create vivid visuals, memorable messages and barnstorming brand stories. For example, you think about whether to just show your product on its own or to show someone using / enjoying it. You think about how to bring the benefits of your store to life with copy that sparks interest and creates enough desire to make customers want to visit your store.
Creatively, you also have to choose whether to focus on long-term brand building (make customers think and feel better about your brand) or short-term sales driving (e.g. running sales promotions and price discounting offers to create a sense of urgency).
Another creative e-Commerce opportunity is how you maximise your impact on social media.
This channel allows you to share content, connect with customers and bring your store’s brand to life in a way that’s less obviously sales-driven than advertising.
However, you need strong creative thinking to well, create all of this. To create your social media content. To plan how often you’ll post it and how you’ll respond to comments and feedback. You have to think creatively about whether your brand will only post on its own social spaces or if it’ll go out and interact with posts from customers and other brands.
Creatively, you usually need strong design, writing and storytelling skills to build a strong social presence for your e-Commerce store.
There are a lot of functional and technical skills involved in helping your store rank on search.
However, creativity also comes into play when you look at areas like how you write your headlines and meta descriptions. The more your words grab attention and stand out, the more clickthroughs you get and the higher up the search rankings you go.
If you only post very functional and uncreative titles and descriptions, you won’t stand out. Lots of stores do that. You have to look at your competitive position and tone of voice and use creativity to find search titles and descriptions that will capture your customers’ attention and interest.
Once potential customers start visiting your store website, there’s still a creative job to do to give them a relevant experience that helps and encourages them to buy. Conversion rates of visitors to buyers are usually very low. (see our how D2C freaks out accountants article for more on this).
The creative challenge here is that the store has to be flexible enough to work for different customer journeys.
Most new customers will want to browse the site to see what’s on offer. So your range needs to be appealing and well-organised.
However, others might be looking for a specific product or responding to a specific offer. So, the search and purchase functions need to be slick and speedy. Regular, loyal customers may well want fast access to adjusting their account details and checking on their order status. Your store needs to handle all these different customer expectations. Let’s look at some key areas where you might do that :-
The first key creative opportunity in this area of e-Commerce is navigation. You want to make it easy for customers to get to the part of the site where they can do what they’ve come to do.
So. you want clear navigation names on the header, on the home page and an easy-to-use search function. (See examples of these in our online fashion shopping article).
Next, there’s the visuals. The images, videos, animations and icons you use to make the site aesthetically appealing.
You use distinctive and relevant colours from your brand’s colour palette and choose a design style that reflects your brand identity. (See examples of this in our online alcohol shopping article) The easier your site is on the eye, the easier it will be for the customer to decide to buy.
Finally, there are the words you use to “talk” to customers. Your tone of voice and sales copy.
Choose your words carefully on your store website. It’s about creatively matching the need to make your products sound attractive while also satisfying the customer’s informational and emotional needs. You want to say just enough to be interesting but without waffling on so much that customers lose interest.
When you set up your own online store, you also get the benefit of being able to test creative work and get instant access to all the digital data these tests generate. That way, you can efficiently and effectively identify which creative approaches work for your customers and which don’t.
You build a knowledge base of creative e-Commerce activation that you can then even use in other channels, e.g. to refine your call to action in your advertising or when running sales promotions in other channels.
Having your own D2C store is like having your own creative e-Commerce laboratory in which to experiment.
You might assume that once the customer decides to buy, your order to delivery process takes over, and you don’t have much more scope to be creative. But that’s not true.
In fact, you’d be overlooking some creative opportunities to build even deeper connections with the customer if you assumed that.
For example, most sites only offer payment by credit card. But creative e-Commerce stores offer multiple payment options. Paypal. Afterpay. Subscription deals.
Then, there’s how you show the price.
There are a whole bunch of psychological pricing choices you can use if you’re a creative e-Commerce thinker. These usually involve trying to reduce the “pain” of payment. For example, making the price’s font size smaller or removing the currency symbol seems to make it less “painful” to pay. (a psychological trick used by many top-end restaurants).
There’s also a real creative challenge for your sales copy and tone of voice. The point of payment is the customer’s crucial decision point. When they decide to buy or not. So, you want to creatively reinforce the benefits and value they get by buying from your store. Your copy has to remove all doubt and reassure them that ordering from you will solve their problem and make their life better.
As per our order to delivery guide, a key part of the D2C experience is communicating with customers about their order’s progress. They’ve paid for it but don’t yet have it. So, this can be an anxious time for the customer, especially if it’s a high-ticket item.
So there’s another creative e-Commerce opportunity in how you update customers between their paying and the order being delivered. You should confirm you’ve received the order and then update them at key points. e.g. :-
You shouldn’t overcomplicate these messages, but you can see them as creative opportunities to reinforce your brand’s personality and tone of voice. Your copywriting here should get customers excited about the delivery of their order.
You can also use creativity in the packaging that surrounds your product as it goes through the order to delivery process. Plain brown boxes are very functional but not much fun for customers. Creative e-Commerce brands (e.g. Who Gives a Crap) use their packaging to add some personality to the delivery experience.
Lastly, you can also get creative in the logistics of the delivery. For example, can you deliver at specific times of day? Or deliver in the evening or at weekends when people are more likely to be in? Can you offer express delivery options for those who just can’t wait? (Again, see our online fashion shopping article for more examples of these). All of these experiences have to be created.
The final stage of the D2C experience is about making sure the customer is happy with their product. You normally send them a thank you email and / or a satisfaction survey. Again, you should see this as another creative opportunity to reinforce your brand tone of voice and enhance the customer’s experience.
This becomes doubly important when something goes wrong. Order issues frustrate customers, so you have to make sure your customer service processes and systems are slick, stress-free and effective at fixing issues.
So, you create clear, helpful FAQ pages to answer common customer questions, for example.
You build creativity into how you train and empower your customer service teams to handle enquiries. They should have the authority to do whatever is needed to keep the customer happy and solve queries quickly. That means giving them some creative flexibility.
Stories of great customer service are rarely about customer service following strict processes. They’re much more often about customer service teams given creative license to do whatever it takes to keep customers happy.
Many people struggle connect the idea of being creative with success in e-Commerce. However, that’s a missed creative opportunity.
You shouldn’t get distracted by the pressure to deliver operational efficiency when managing an online store. Creative e-Commerce thinking is also needed to improve the customer’s experience at each step of their journey.
Creative digital media helps drive traffic to your store. How customers find what they want on your site and the visuals and words that persuade them to buy – all driven by creative thinking.
Even your back-end systems benefit from creativity.
Better payment and delivery options. Creativity in how you communicate with customers about their orders. And creativity in how you run your customer service system.
Check out our e-Commerce branding and e-Commerce challenger thinking articles for more on this. Or get in touch if your store needs a creative e-Commerce nudge in a new direction.
The Three-Brains team know a lot about creative skills. We can help you use creative thinking to come up with clever, brand-building ideas. We then help turn those ideas into action with creative advice and support in areas like writing, graphic design and brand storytelling.
Check out our coaching and consulting services to learn how we can help you. Or get in touch if you need help with a specific creative thinking challenge.
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