How To Improve Your Online Hamper Sales
Chances are you're not the only retailer in your industry selling gift hampers online. How do you make your hamper gifts stand out? What about your brand, experience and offering might compel someone to buy your hampers?
Selling online takes more than creating a simple product listing. It tough to persuade customers to buy your products. Here's what you need to do to make your hampers stand out and give you the best chance of online success.
1. Great photography
Product photography should be your top priority. While there are benefits to hiring a professional photographer, it's not essential in a lot of cases. There's no reason why you shouldn't be generating strong sales before making that investment. Let's talk about how to take great product photos with your camera.
Think about how a customer would naturally pick up and interact with your products instore. Your photos should replicate this experience as closely as possible. Aim to include at least 3 or 4 different images showing different aspects of your hampers and gift boxes for customers to scroll through to mimic the action of handling the product.
Make sure your photos reflect how your gift hampers look in real life. You could be doing your products an injustice if your photos are too dark, out of focus or taken at a bad angle. On the other hand, if you touch up or manipulate your photos to make your products look more appealing your gift hampers may fall short of customer expectations.
A plain white background is best for most gift hamper shots as it provides the perfect backdrop for showing off the colours and details of your products. You can also include contextual shots of your gifts. For luxury food hampers you could shoot in a beautiful kitchen or put Christmas hampers under a Christmas tree!
It's important to get your lighting right. Natural light won't cost you a penny and can be much easier to work with than studio lighting. You'll want to position your white background near to the window and make sure your gift hampers are lit as evenly as possible, with minimal shadows.
2. Write compelling product descriptions
Once you've grabbed attention with a great photo you must make it clear what goodies are in your hamper and who it's intended for. Customers will want to know as much as they can about your products before committing to a purchase.
The first step to copywriting is to establish your target audience. Hopefully you've already created your hamper with this in mind so should have a good idea of who this is. This will determine the tone, language and style of your description. Merely describing the product isn't enough to turn prospective browsers into customers. For example, if you are writing copy for a luxury food hamper it's as much about selling the lifestyle as it is the features and benefits. Likewise, if you're selling retro sweet hampers you'll want your copy to be fun and creative to evoke fond memories and trigger an emotional connection with your customers.
Being mindful of product and consumer trends can help you broaden your appeal. There are lots of powerful words you can use to describe your wicker hamper baskets such as 'sustainable', 'eco-friendly' and 'reusable' that will appeal to eco-conscious customers.
Another great tip is to start with the important stuff, it's critical that you don't lose customer interest in the first few sentences. Dive in highlighting the benefits and follow with the details. Most buyers aren't interested in boring specs and features, they're looking for a connection with a brand or product.
3. Choose high quality gift packaging
You could fork out lots of money on a professional photographer to enhance the quality of your product packaging with great lighting and a spot of retouching, but you won't be able to disguise poor quality packaging once it's been received by the customer.
The hampers and gift packaging you choose are much more than a way to send products to your online customers in the post, your gift packaging says a lot about your brand. The quality, style, size and even sustainability of your packaging is creating an impression with shoppers. Great packaging such as gift boxes and wicker hamper baskets can actually enhance the products within and make them appear more aspirational to customers.
Fast-forward to when the customer unboxes their order, how do you want them to feel? For many customers, it will be the first time of seeing and touching your products so it's important to exceed expectations. Of course, there's nothing wrong with a plain flat-pack box, it does the job and is cheap, but the lack-lustre packaging is unlikely to ignite much of a response. Paying extra attention to detail where you can will make a customer feel more valued will encourage repeat sales.
You can also increase the value of your gifts by opting for gift packaging that can be reused instead of single use packaging that gets thrown in the bin. Customers love to repurpose wicker hamper baskets, wooden crates and preassembled gift boxes around their home, so consider adding these to your gifting collection.
4. Take care with presentation
To sell your gift hampers online you'll need to present them well. Tossing the products inside your hampers isn't going to look good on camera, let alone convince customers to buy it. This means you have to really think about arranging the contents of your gift hampers creatively to show off your products clearly and stylishly.
- Think outside the box! We love how Fortnum & Mason arrange their delightful products around the outside of their signature wicker hamper baskets, displaying some products in their beautiful packaging, leaving some unwrapped to really appeal to the customers' taste buds.
- Use additional paper shred to prop up the contents of you hamper
so they can be seen easily by the customer and to make your hampers
appear fuller. There are plenty of colours to choose from so go for a
colour that will complement your products and make them pop.
- Refer to the popular pyramid principle - the tried and tested
merchandising method of arranging larger items in the middle and smaller
items around them.
- If you've opted for window gift boxes or a gift tray with a clear lid, then you want to make sure that too much light isn't reflecting off the acetate. A little is ok though to show a little shine and texture reference.
