E-commerce packaging – 5 ways to boost your business
How can packaging add value in e-commerce? Here we share our 5 best tips on how to boost your business with e-commerce packaging.
Online shopping is rapidly growing and packaging for e-commerce becomes more important by the day. In 2020 the US e-commerce sales are estimated to have grown by 18 percent from the previous year.
But how can businesses utilize packaging in a favorable way? Let’s dig into our top 5 tips:
1. Choose the right size!
Packing products in oversized boxes results in higher expenses and a waste of material. This also reflects badly on the customer’s unboxing experience. Simply because the box is not appropriate for the product inside.
An oversized box is harder to handle and needs to be stuffed with excess packaging fillings. The final delivery of the product gets overshadowed by those fillers and the attention to the product is lost along the way.
From an environmental perspective it is also problematic to “ship air”. It is getting more important for businesses to be sustainable and a wasteful behavior is negatively looked upon by consumers.
2. Think of your mailer boxes as a marketing platform.
The first impression is crucial and the initial physical encounter with an e-commerce brand is often the packaging itself. That’s why your e-commerce packaging is a unique opportunity to create positive experiences and in the long run strengthen the brand identity.
Fact is that 74 percent of young consumers – 18 to 25 years old – say that they are likely to share a purchase on social media if the packaging design and product is unique and engaging.
A great design can easily result in lots of valuable and more importantly – completely free influencer-marketing. But it goes both ways. If you deliver low quality or damaged packaging, you risk creating a negative buzz about your brand.
3. Be consistent.
Let the customer know the package is from you. A strong brand identity comes from communicating the same logotype, colors, language and values consecutive times.
Make sure that your physical packaging works nicely with the aesthetics and feeling that you strive to achieve on your web shop. It is a fundamental brand strategy that all communication is coherent from top to bottom.
Always sing the same tune. For an example, if you don’t have the color red in your graphic profile – you should not package in red boxes.
4. Customer experience, customer experience and customer experience.
The quality of your packaging is related to your product. How the product is packaged says a lot about the amount of thought that is put into creating a good experience for the customer. It’s an indicator of the value of the product.
Using e-commerce packaging with your unique print shows the customer that you as a business care about providing all customers a better experience.
A white box for the best printed appearance of your brand’s colors, or a brown box in kraft for a more rustic feel – it’s all about knowing what emotions you want to communicate.
5. Don’t settle for the bare minimum
Don’t settle with just delivering the product. Walk the extra mile. An easy way to create a special unboxing experience is using custom mailer boxes with a creative design. And why not throw in a small “thank you”-card in order to let everyone know you care!
A common expression in the culinary world is that we often eat with our eyes. Beautiful food creates an extra demand with the person and in the same way great packaging enhances a product purchase.
To sum it up, if consumers are impressed, it is very likely that they tell others. Either through social media posts or the old-fashioned, but very efficient way, face to face.
All these steps are important aspects to consider when you are running an e-commerce business.
Sounds good! Show me the boxes.
