How To Improve Your Shopify Branding for a Superior Customer Experience

Your branding is one of the most important assets your business owns. Whether you're a jewelry brand, a music business, a clothing store, or any of the thousands of other retailers that host their products with Shopify, if you want to offer a top-quality customer experience, your branding must be exceptional.

Before you brush off the importance of branding your online store, just remember: Customers buy from brands they connect with! For established brick-and-mortar stores, building an emotional connection is simple. From the moment you walk in the door, you're greeted by a friendly salesperson. You can easily browse all the merchandise by walking around, and the physical experience of the sights, sounds, and smells of the store quickly connects with your senses.

But when it comes to selling online, building the kind of emotional connection that translates to true customer loyalty is much more complicated. Now, it's up to your website to instantly help your customers connect with your business virtually— before they get distracted by busy backgrounds or click away to another site.

The right Shopify brand strategy can take your store from humble beginnings to household name. In this article, we'll show you how!

Our best Shopify brand tips for creating a memorable customer experience

There are nearly 4,000,000 Shopify stores online. If you want to stand out from the online crowd and get noticed by your target audience, you have to combine a memorable branding strategy with a first-rate customer website experience.

Here are the key elements of a Shopify brand experience that work together to create a positive online store visit:

• Clear and compelling product descriptions. When your customers are shopping at your online store, they don't get to experience your product packaging like they do in a physical store. Strong, on-brand product descriptions that introduce the uses and benefits of each product help fill this gap.
• Adequate clear space. Website pages with busy backgrounds, lots of text, or too many pictures tend to confuse and overwhelm shoppers. But pages with lots of clear space, easy-to-read fonts, a simple logo, and one dominant image per section keep the focus on your key products. Rather than including a lot of text all over every web page, use embedded hyperlinks to share additional information, if your customers want to learn more.
• A simple user experience. The more user-friendly your Shopify store site is, the more your target audience will use it! This is especially true for brands that sell to buyers in an older age bracket— who may not be as comfortable shopping at an online store. For example, you can set up your Shopify store to open certain pages in a new window, like additional product information or your sizing chart, instead of taking the browser to a whole new page. That makes your Shopify store experience even easier for your customers, increasing the chances they'll be back!
• A streamlined buying process. The fewer steps buyers have to take to complete their purchase, the more items your Shopify business will sell! In fact, research shows that even if you offer the best products, if your buying process is overly complicated or too lengthy, your prospective customers will choose to shop with your competitors. People value easy, simple, streamlined shopping experiences— from the moment they click "add to cart" to the moment the box arrives at their door.

While these Shopify brand elements are essential to a successful online store, we can't understate the importance of building these elements on top of your brand story. Your brand story— including your messaging, positioning, target market research, and visual identity— is foundational to your company. Even the best Shopify websites fall flat without a strategic brand story behind the web pages.

The best Shopify Store apps for your online business

Today, creating an exceptional customer experience isn't just up to you and your marketing team. The right innovative tech toolscan streamline your entire brand and marketing strategy— allowing your business to focus on the tasks and processes you enjoy most.

Luckily, there's a host of handy apps that plug right into your Shopify store, elevating the browsing experience and automating your customer service. Let's take a look at a few examples:

This collection of Shopify apps can help you create a loyalty-building brand experience

Shopify app #1: Re:Amaze

One of our favorite Shopify apps to help online stores improve their customer experience is Reamaze. Reamaze works with Shopify to help you enhance your customer experience by offering a built-in helpdesk, customer support, and lots of team collaboration tools to help you maintain the best level of service.

Adding Reamaze to your Shopify store allows you to serve more customer needs in a shorter amount of time, while speeding up your response rate and decreasing your order tracking time. Check out the best features of Reamaze:

• An automated live chat with a variety of built-in tasks, like the ability to change, modify, or cancel orders without the customer needing to contact one of your service representatives. You can even customize the automated responses to fit your brand and shop theme.
• A CRM-style tool that organizes your live chat messages, emails, social media interactions, and texts by person, allowing for seamless conversations with customers
• A built-in knowledge desk where you can point your customers to commonly asked questions and product tips
• The app integrates deeply with your Shopify website, allowing for a whole host of business optimizations and brand customizations that streamline your most common (and time-consuming) activities

For retailers (or any businesses that sell products or services!), an integrated live-chat app like Reamaze, is essential to creating a Shopify site that converts!

Shopify app #2: Aftership

Looking for an easy and professional way to share relevant shipping information with customers, automatically? When you connect your Shopify shopping cart to AfterShip, the simple app automatically keeps your customers up-to-date on their order status, shipping time, and location— without requiring them to subscribe. You can even use the app to send customized and on-brand text updates so they always know exactly where their package is.

Here are the top AfterShip features that can benefit your Shopify store website:

• Customizable alert templates with multiple themes, allowing you to showcase your own brand and store name while keeping your customers informed
• On-demand delivery and location tracking
• Users can update their alert preferences to receive updates via text, email, or website alerts
• A free, basic version to save costs while still offering the most popular shipment tracking services

Shopify store customers want to do business with brands they trust. And offering clear, easy-to-access order tracking is just another way to show your shoppers you care about their experience and value their business.

Shopify app #3: The Planet App

The third Shopify app worth considering is Planet. Planet helps Shopify stores reduce the carbon emissions they create when shipping orders around the world. Once you install Planet on your website, every time you sell a product that needs to be shipped, that package is automatically tracked by the app. At the end of each month, Planet will automatically charge you a small amount, generally between 3.5 and 15 cents (USD) per shipped order, and that money will be put towards carbon-eliminating processes and research initiatives around the world.

For companies interested in climate-change initiatives and world-saving business practices, the Planet app is a must. It's free to install on your site, and once you do, your brand can start advertising its carbon-neutral shipping practices right away by adding the Planet app logo right into your site.

Here are the best features of the Planet app:

• Free to launch on your website
• Automatically tracks every customer purchase and shipping distance, making it easy to offset your carbon footprint
• Gain an edge over your competitors and improve your brand image by advertising Planet's logo, and your carbon-neutral shipping practices
• Track your efforts on Planet's at-a-glance data dashboard

The Planet app has created the simplest, most user-friendly way to use your Shopify store for good— to help maintain a healthy planet for today, and for the future.

Want more branding tools to level up your growing business? Check out the 5 online branding tools every startup should consider.

Want to run a successful Shopify online store? Put customer experience first

The best Shopify brands, the ones that really stand out from the competition, put customer experience first. It's not enough to have a catchy store name, pretty packaging, and a cool logo. Online shoppers do their research before they buy! And the brands that dominate their market and beat the competition again and again are the ones that prioritize top-quality service, a streamlined buying experience, simple images and fonts, and responsive web pages. Those companies are the ones that achieve real, lasting success in the crowded e-commerce industry.

Got a clothing business, a candle shop, a pet accessories store, or something in between? ZeBrand can help!

We understand how overwhelming branding can be! That's why here at ZeBrandwe offer a full suite of branding tools designed to help businesses nail their marketing, reach more customers, and grow. Try our Brand DNA Builder tool or meet one-on-one with a Brand Coachtoday to take your company to the next level.

Looking for more brand and marketing support for your Shopify site? Partner with ZeBrand. Start Nowor Contact Us