Even if your store sells the highest quality products, you have the most impressive website design, and your social media pages are always active, you won’t achieve a high ROI if customers can’t identify and engage with your brand. This shouldn't come as a surprise.
Today’s customers increasingly seek emotional connections with brands. In fact, a trend report by Iterable shows that 83% of shoppers will buy from a brand they have an emotional connection with.
One way to achieve this is through brand consistency. Customers need to experience your brand the same way at every touchpoint, and that’s where an eCommerce style guide comes in.
In this article, we discuss the importance of having an eCommerce style guide along with tips for successfully implementing it to reinforce your branding.
What is an eCommerce style guide?
An eCommerce style guide is a physical or digital document that helps your team create consistent content across every touchpoint of your business. This comprehensive document is meant to define how your brand is perceived.
To ensure that all aspects of your eCommerce channels adhere to a consistent style and tone, the style guide should include guidelines for content, tone of voice, imagery and graphics, social media and marketing, and user-centered design. It should also cover eCommerce niches targeted by your business so you can tailor your content according to your audience.
These brand guidelines require a great deal of research and an understanding of your business. However, the benefits are manifold and include professionalism, consistent branding, better user experience, streamlined workflow, and improved SEO.
For instance, if you want to position your company as a luxury brand, your style guide must ensure every piece of content you create, from product descriptions to social media posts, is aligned with that brand positioning. The components of an eCommerce style guide include:
- Brand identity: This section defines the brand’s logo, color palette, typography, and other critical visuals. It ensures all design elements on the site and other marketing assets align with the brand’s identity.
- Imagery and graphics: Guidelines for using images, icons, and other visual elements should be clearly outlined. This includes specifications for image sizes, formats, styles, and guidelines for maintaining visual consistency across channels.
- Copy and tone of voice: This part of the guide outlines the written content’s style, tone, and voice. It may contain grammar and punctuation rules, recommendations for word usage, sentence structure, and language to reflect the brand’s personality.
- User-centered design (UCD): User-centered design focuses on making products and services simple, effective, and enjoyable for the end-user. It considers the UI (user interface), UX (user experience), and usability.
- Social media and marketing guidelines: This component can offer guidance on maintaining a consistent brand presence across social media channels, email marketing campaigns, and other promotional materials. In this way, you ensure all marketing efforts align with the overall style and tone of your eCommerce business.
Why is a style guide important for your eCommerce business?
The most significant benefit of having a style guide for your online business is that it leads to a higher ROI due to brand loyalty. Let’s look at a few other benefits.
Consistent brand identity
A well-crafted style guide can help you maintain a polished and professional appearance across every channel of your eCommerce business. This can increase customer trust and confidence in your brand, which leads to higher conversion rates and customer loyalty.
A prime example is Nike. The sportswear giant has retained its identity for years. Known for its "Just Do It" slogan and iconic logo, Nike is a brand fans can identify with when it comes to pushing the limits and pursuing their dreams.
This is also evident in their other marketing efforts that showcase famous athletes and inspiring stories of everyday people. The brand also maintains this energy across social channels by engaging its audience and promoting its values.
The lesson is that your brand’s voice should be consistent across all platforms. The easiest way to coordinate it across multiple teams and agencies you might be working with is to share with them a comprehensive style guide and stick to its rules. Not much else emphasizes professionalism like consistently presenting your brand’s voice.
Consistent branding
To buttress the previous point, a style guide ensures all aspects of your eCommerce channels, from visual elements to written content, adhere to a consistent style and tone. This creates a cohesive brand identity that makes it easier for customers to instantly recognize, and remember, your brand.
Let’s assume you’re collaborating with another brand and they need to add images of your products on their website. When reviewing their pictures, you notice they don’t align with your brand. With a style guide, you can annotate pictures to guide your partners in representing your brand.
Better user experience
By providing clear guidelines for your website’s layout and design, you can ensure a seamless and intuitive shopping experience. This includes everything from placing buttons and navigation menus to using images and product descriptions.
A well-designed eCommerce style guide can also reduce customer confusion and frustration. This improves the customer experience and ultimately increases sales and customer loyalty. For help with this, customer intelligence systems can help you better understand your customers’ behavior and preferences so that you can tailor your eCommerce experience accordingly.
Streamlined workflow
Transparent guidelines allow your team to work more efficiently and effectively. This reduces the time and resources needed to create new content and marketing materials, which leads to increased productivity.
Larger eCommerce businesses with multiple departments and teams working on different aspects of the website and marketing campaigns can particularly benefit from this. An eCommerce style guide enables all efforts to move in the same direction by providing a shared framework. This can lead to faster turnaround times, fewer errors, and a more cohesive strategy.
Improved SEO
A style guide is a crucial factor in your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. You can create a more visually appealing and user-friendly website by establishing consistent design elements, such as font choices, color schemes, and image styles.
In addition, the document should contain guidelines for technical elements like domain names, URL structures, and metadata. For instance, if your target customers are in Hong Kong, an .hk domain extension would be more appropriate because it would allow them to find you easily.
All of these factors can improve the user experience, lead to longer page visits, and lower bounce rates. With improvements in those areas, you’ll likely see a bump in your website’s search engine ranking.
Tips for creating a successful eCommerce style guide
- Understand your brand: Defining your brand’s identity, values, and target audience is crucial before creating a style guide. This will help you create a guide that conveys your brand’s unique personality and appeals to your target audience.
- Start with the basics: Outline your logo, color palette, and typography. You can then build your eCommerce style guide around these core elements.
- Be specific and detailed: Provide guidelines for design elements, written content, and other aspects across all channels. It will minimize revisions and corrections across your website.
- Incorporate visual examples: This can help your team understand and adhere to your style guide and clarify your expectations. Illustrate your points with screenshots, mockups, or images.
- Train your team: After you’ve created your eCommerce style guide, it’s essential to help your team members understand and adhere to it. As a result, there’s consistency in communication and customers receive the same experience.
Consistent branding builds connection and brand loyalty
In today’s competitive digital landscape, eCommerce businesses must prioritize branding efforts to stand out. One way to achieve this is by creating an eCommerce style guide.
This guide is a blueprint for your brand’s visual and written identity to ensure consistency across all channels. Consistent branding builds connections and brand loyalty, which eventually leads to increased sales and customer loyalty.
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Grace Lau is the Director of Growth Content at Dialpad, a secure video conferencing and AI-powered cloud communication platform for better and easier team collaboration. She has over 10 years of experience in content writing and strategy. Currently, she is responsible for leading branded and editorial content strategies, partnering with SEO and Ops teams to build and nurture content. Here is her LinkedIn. |
Published June 29, 2023
