Business > Merchant Voice

Avoid ‘saving money’ content if you want higher-end clients

How do you position your ecommerce products and services? Are your items, on average, more expensive than your competitors? Do you offer high-end, custom products that shoppers can’t find elsewhere?

Or do you offer discounts, packages, or bulk purchases? They create an entirely different positioning for your ecommerce site as a place to get a bargain.

And what if you have a mixture of both — expensive and cheap?

Last week I ran through the sales figures for my bridal and corporate event orders, and rental and purchase orders.

While the average bridal rental spend has risen — likely due to my $200 minimum rental threshold introduced a year ago — the average bridal purchase spend had fallen from the year prior. Fewer couples than the year prior spent more than $200 on items bought (not rented) to reach the free shipping threshold.

Why was this, I wondered?

In addition, the items totaling more than $200 (and thus qualifying for free shipping) were heavy and mostly sent outside Melbourne, Australia, completely chewing through my profit.

So I deleted the free shipping offer.

And then I had a phone call this week from a wedding planner. She had found my website via my blog post, “Save $$$: Book Your Mid-Week Wedding At These Melbourne Venues.”

This blog post, written March 1, 2016 and updated with new pricing in 2017, remains my most popular as it lists a number of popular Melbourne venues and their minimum spends for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday weddings, as well as for weddings booked Monday to Thursday.

As I talked with the wedding planner, she revealed she was a little confused as my website offered both bespoke (custom) products, as well as items that were a “complete steal.”

“So I thought based on your blog post, all of your stuff would be affordable — and some of it is — but you also have really unusual, quite expensive decorations,” she said.

We finished the conversation with her compiling a list of décor her client wanted, as well as a few special items she didn’t expect to find.

I realized that if I wanted to position My Wedding Décor as a website with upscale, hard-to-get products, I need to reassess some of the cheaper products, and revamp not only my product descriptions, but also my blog posts and, possibly, my social media posts.

I currently have 18 out of 94 blog posts that address “saving money.” Thus nearly 20 percent of my blog content is the type that might attract budget-sensitive couples.

Other words that may currently draw lower-spending shoppers include “budget” (14 blog posts), “package” and “cheap” (12 blog posts each), “discount” (seven blog posts), and “DIY” (five).

Of the 18 “saving money” blog posts, eight were written in 2015, six in 2016, and four were created this year.

While I concentrate less on price-driven posts now, the age of the previous posts may cause them to receive Google ranking priority, And their popularity continues to attract potential customers who think I offer cut-price products. I plan on rewriting those posts.

Elizabeth Hollingsworth
Elizabeth Hollingsworth
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