Imagine opening your YouTube account, seeing your feed filled with French videos that you don’t know. Not very interesting, right? Fortunately, their algorithm has customized your feed according to the preferences that are tailored to your interests.
This clearly states that not all of your customers want or like the same thing or use your product the same way.
Here, product customization plays an important role in providing great experiences to your customers. When you sell customized products, you not only serve each segment of users but also drive customer loyalty and increase customer satisfaction. Hence, here is all you need to know how you can start selling custom products on your online store.
A quick the road map of this guide:
- Choose your Products Wisely
- How Would you Offer Custom Products Online
- Choose the Right Supplier Partners
- Automate the Workflow of Print Job
- Some Tips for Marketing Your Customized Products
Keep the Purpose Alive
If you want to sell custom decorated products, it is important to first analyze the market, research which products are in-trend that you can sell. Targeting a general market, here are a few custom products customers are demanding these days are:
(i) T-shirts and hoodies
(ii) Mugs
(iii) Visiting cards
(iv) Caps
(v) Photo calendars
(vi) Pillows etc.
Even if the above products do not fit into your business niche, there are tons of other ways to provide customization to your products. For example, if you deal with Kitchen appliances, how about offering custom woodcutters? Hence research what’s trending in your niche and make your choices accordingly.
How Would you Offer Custom Products Online
Here, there are two ways you can go for: Either sell ready-made customized products or allow real-time customization where your customers can customize the products. Sounds interesting?
Let’s understand it with a small example.
No matter how wide a range of designs and colors you offer in your products, you still can’t surpass the imaginations of the creative minds of your customers. It simply implies that it is always possible that a customer may be looking for something of their imagination that you may not be selling.
Let’s say a customer wants to have a t-shirt with a printed quote by some famous poet. Now there are chances that they might not find precisely that in your pre-customized product catalog. As a result, they might not make any purchase at all. Even if you offer personalization services by letting customers convey their customization requirements all at once via a call or an email first, there are chances of errors in understanding and implementing those customizations, which can hamper customer’s experience.
And you surely wouldn’t want that to happen, would you?
Then here’s the solution, what if you could retain that customer by letting them write that quote on the t-shirt of their choice by themselves. Yes, it is possible to offer them the freedom of personalization by integrating an online product design software into your store.
For Parth’s reference – Hi Sulabh, once completed, change the status to “In Editing.”
By turning your e-store into a customization studio, you would be able to let your customers apply the customizations as per their preferences. Once you integrate an online product design software, a customer gets to see a ‘Customize’ or ‘Design’ button on the product page that redirects customers to the design page on clicking.
After landing on the design page, customers can avail of many customization options, including templates, clipart images, advanced image or text effects, filters, and more that can fully suffice customers’ personalization needs. Customers can also preview the final design to get an idea of how it would look before checking out to order the custom decorated product. Here’s a quick glance at how this flow would work on your website through this free demo.
Choose the Right Supplier Partners
To sell customized products on your store, you need to procure blank products of all the types you offer customization for. So, it is important to find out the best supplier partners in your vicinity or online that you can collaborate with to get the supply of all the products you sell without any hassle. While choosing the supplier partner for any blank item like mugs, t-shirts, etc., making sure they are popular and reliable.
For instance, if you want to get blank t-shirts, there are several wholesale t-shirt suppliers in the USA that you can buy blank t-shirts from in bulk.
Automate the Workflow of Print Job
Once an order is taken, you should be able to handle that order efficiently. Therefore, automation of print jobs is in high demand these days. If you integrate a good-quality print job manager that can help manage print jobs from various channels, it can make your work easier and faster.
You can easily receive orders, define workflows and jobs, generate order tickets, schedule jobs, manage and track them, and get them completed for final deliveries through an automated print job management system.
This way, through an automated print workflow, you won’t only achieve high customer satisfaction levels but a wider loyal customer base.
Some Tips for Marketing Your Customized Products
You have got to show what you are selling – and, more importantly – your USP. If you deal with custom products and offer personalization services, you must promote them across all marketing channels – including your site.
Your site is the very first interface, and you must take every step to make it engaging and user-friendly. Also, see to it that you optimize its content for the right keywords to achieve high ranks in search engine result pages (SERPs). Further, you should also run a check for your site’s loading speed to ensure that it wouldn’t ruin the visitor’s experience.
Besides your site come various other marketing channels – social media platforms, forum panels, other sites, and more. So, be equipped with everything you need to make the best use of them all.
-> Create official pages on various social media channels, and keep sharing content, blogs, news, and updates to keep customers engaged.
-> Make sure the SEO is to the point of your site. It will help you gain organic traffic from search engines, help you target relevant customers. Also, participate in forum & community discussions for more and more people and even brands to notice your brand.
-> Collaborate with popular e-stores like Amazon, Etsy, etc. in order to display some of your products over there and bring people to notice your brand and increase your brand awareness.
-> If your budget allows, go for a properly paid marketing campaign and display advertising campaigns too to bring good results in a shorter time. Once you have gained enough traction, you can rethink your overall strategies.
-> While online marketing and promotional strategies are indispensable for an online store, you can also tap into offline advertising. You can get a news ad printed in the newspaper about your online venture and encourage people to buy through some offers or discounts. The best example is the latest Big Shopping Sale that Amazon had organized that lasted five days. Amazon has got it published in various popular newspapers for better visibility.
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