Your choice of packaging can have a huge impact on your consumer. Packaging has ample potential to act a form of communication between you and your customers and therefore improve customer retention. Packaging’s marketing opportunities are often overlooked but it’s a great chance, particularly for ecommerce businesses, to market their products. From unboxing experiences, to personalised notes, how can you add that personal touch to your packaging that builds customer loyalty?
When thinking about you can make your packaging personalised, it is important to think about all the possible solutions and elements you could include for your own brand.
Know you brand
First of all, keep your brand in mind at all times. There is no point in creating personalised packaging for your product if it’s completely off brand. What are your brand values? How do you want to reflect this in your packaging? Is there anything that has worked really well in the past? These are all questions you should be asking yourself at the start of your packaging journey.
Know your customer
You also, importantly, need to know your customer. Improving your packaging by adding a personal touch is for the sole purpose of improving your customer relations and hopefully repeat custom. If you don’t know what your customers want, then you’ve got a problem… What has been popular previously with your customers? Do you know what they like about your competitors? Always do your research.
Practical implications
Whilst knowing your brand and your customer is all very well and good, you also need to know what your practical limitations are. If your product is fragile, this should be your number one priority for your packaging for example. Don’t sacrifice anything else for the sake of improving the marketing on your packaging. Also, if you are using a 3PL, what can they offer you in terms of material and design? Have this discussion before you go any further.
Consider your budget
Always think about your budget first. Don’t overspend just to make your packaging personalised. Make sure that you figure out costs and budgets before you start adding personalised notes and stickers to all your packaging.
Find some inspiration
As with all aspects of your product and marketing, it’s good to look around for a bit of inspiration every now and again. What are your competitors doing and what can you learn from it? Also, check out other industries and see if there’s any ideas you can get inspired from. It’s always good to get creative with your packaging.
To help you with that inspiration, we’ve put together some ideas about how you can easily personalise your packaging to give you a head start.
Create an unboxing experience
Creating a memorable experience for your customers when opening your product helps to create a lasting impression on your consumers and make them feel more valued. If you put time and effort into their experience, this can only be beneficial to your customer satisfaction. There is a big ‘unboxing’ culture on social media and brands that want to appeal to this target audience ought to think about their packaging in this way. Part of making this experience memorable involves making it personal. Get creative with it – how can you turn your packaging into an experience?
Add a personalised note
A personalised note can make a huge difference to your customer. Importantly, this is hard to scale up. However for high value items or limited edition items it can be the perfect way to add a personal touch to your product and make your customer feel more valued. This also, does not need to affect the rest of your packaging and can therefore be added whenever the retailer pleases, making it an adaptable option.
Include other handmade details
Anything with a handmade touch can give the impression that the brand has taken lots of time and care into making the product. Obviously, this is impossible to scale up entirely, but it’s worth experimenting with.
Include personalised samples or discounts
Mass marketing is a thing of the past, personalised targeted ads are what’s hot right now. Like your personalised suggestions on Netflix, your packaging can include this too. If you have the capacity to do so, it might be worth including free samples of products you think your customers might like, or a discount for their next purchase. Your packaging a be a great opportunity to market your products and it’s important to try not to miss out on this.
Benefits to personalised packaging
There are many benefits to personalising your packaging. Notably, the marketing benefits are undeniable. Not only can you push other products through free samples and discounts but you can also encourage social media shares. In the world of YouTube unboxing videos and Instagram stories, people are sharing their packages all the time, especially if they’re personalised. This basically means your packaging could give you free advertising and exposure.
Personalised packaging can also increase customer satisfaction which can, in turn, increase repeat custom. Did you know that 80% of your profit can come from 20% of your existing customers? Worth thinking about isn’t it.
If you’re thinking about changing up your packaging to positively impact your business but you’re not sure where to start, get in touch with us at Complete Packaging today. We offer a full range of packaging and fulfilment services.
