A regularly overlooked way to enhance your brand image is to consider how packaging falls into your marketing plan. By using recycled and recyclable, branded product and fulfilment materials, your packaging can help reinforce your brand values and can become an extension of your brand’s personality.
Improve customer perceptions with packaging
When your customers receive their package from you, they first and foremost want it to be protected. Delivering your orders in strong, undamaged boxes is an essential starting point.
Packaging – both product and fulfilment – can become a key marketing tool. Use it to –
- Create a great first impression
- Improve customer lifetime value
- Increase brand awareness
- Start a key marketing campaign
- Encourage gift ordering for friends/family
The packaging your products arrive in matters. Use your product and fulfilment packaging as an opportunity to raise brand awareness and improve customer perception.
Using high-quality packaging not only helps to protect your products, but it also gives your customers a better experience. Packaging does however need to be in tune with the product(s) being fulfilled: utility products don’t need anything fancy, but prestige products can really benefit from the added luxury that premium packaging provides. Imagine opening a box that’s filled with rough, plain brown parcel paper. Now imagine opening a box that contains colourful, soft tissue paper, printed with your brand’s logo. Which one do you think will be more likely to increase brand loyalty?
Packaging can enhance the customer experience and make others want to share their beautiful new package by telling their friends and posting online. When customers receive these parcels for themselves, they’re much more likely to order your products for family/friends’ gifts, as they know the quality is good and will give that all-important experience
Product packaging for ecommerce brands
For ecommerce stores, product packaging isn’t an obvious driver of sales, but its importance shouldn’t be overlooked. As an ecommerce seller, you still have a great opportunity to increase customer excitement and improve perceptions using packaging. In a study, 61% of people asked say they are more likely to make a repeat purchase if it came in premium packaging.
Many ecommerce brands encourage customers to share images of their new deliveries on social media. This helps to spread the word of your brand and makes customers excited to receive their order. A reported 35% of consumers state they watch unboxing videos online.
A great example of this is the beauty brand Beauty Pie. The boxes and packaging materials are fully branded in their colours and logo, both inside and out. They include a small flyer in each order that tells users to share images on social media, using their hashtag #postyourpie. By doing this, the hashtag has over 17,000 posts on Instagram – a great marketing campaign to build brand awareness.
Another example of using high-quality packaging is Apple, as theirs is often praised for creating a luxury, sensory experience. Apple’s packaging reflects their brand values, being simple, clean, and good quality. As with many brands, the moment of opening your new product should be exciting and give you a taste of what’s to come – Apple does that exceedingly well whether you order online or buy in store.
By including personalised and branded materials in your ecommerce order fulfilments, you’ll be communicating your brand and creating more loyal customers.
Amazon trials changes to fulfilment packaging
Recently, Amazon have announced the launch of an unbranded packaging pilot for their multi-channel fulfilment (MCF). It’s a new test that will be rolled out for certain package types.
That means that any orders from the independent sellers fulfilled by Amazon can come in plain packaging, rather than branded with the Amazon logo. Sometimes, customers are unaware that their orders will be coming from Amazon, so the unbranded packaging pilot gives independent sellers an opportunity to step away from the large corporation’s image. We look forward to seeing whether it’s a positive or negative response from the trial.
Using recyclable, branded product and fulfilment packaging can make you stand out from your competitors. Get people excited about receiving their products from you and don’t miss the added marketing opportunity.
EC Group can help your product fulfilment to increase your brand awareness. Get in touch with our team of fulfilment and logistics experts for more information on how we can help you.
Get in touch today to talk to a member of our skilled team about handling your Fulfilment needs!
