Lazada organised a free 2-days training for its sellers, conducted by a Taobao University trainer. Our trainer, Mr Li Bo, is a very successful seller based in China and is currently selling cross border – doing particularly well in the Thailand market. He started about 10 years ago, with RMB 4,000 capital and 4 staffs. Today he has come with a bagful of experience selling in various categories, different markets and creative ways to beat our competition. More than these he has definitely arrived in Singapore with a deep pocket as he revealed his biggest buy at Orchard Rd the day before – a Chanel bag worth more than SGD6,000 for his wife!
Here’s sharing what we learnt. I won’t be sharing all the slides on this blog. You may read this as the essence of our learning during the training. I have processed the learning, reflected, and put it in a post, in a more readable format. Therefore, none of what is written here will be verbatim from the trainer himself.
If you are a Lazada seller yourself, I would definitely encourage you to sign up for one of these free training sessions by the Taobao trainers. The sharing in this blog does not do that 2 days of training enough justice. The training is rich and interactive, with free yummy lunch too!
So here goes…
Day 1
Key points:
1. Consider brand effect before mega campaign
2. Good marketing can encourage better interactions and promotion
3. Allowing customers to understand your business through Unique Selling Point and Advertisements
4. Design a shopping experience
5. 3 steps to market for mega campaign
6 common goals when participating in 11.11 BIG SALE
Should we strive to fulfil all 6 goals or focus on one? It largely depends on your resources. Regardless, at least be extremely clear about what your goal is, and communicate it clearly with your team.
1. Consider brand effect before campaign
When we think of the word “Brand”, we tend to relate it to big enterprises with established brands, like Gucci, Levi, Dior, etc. We may also not be inclined to relate our own shops with being “branded”. However, we ought to change our perspective and learn how to build our shop as a brand itself.
What makes a brand? Definitely NOT the size of a business.
A brand is a personality, represents a culture, can bring consumers a sense of consumption beyond functional use, and is the true realization of the value of the purchase.
When a consumer buys from a shop with a strong brand, the consumer gets more value out of just what she has just purchased. It could be the purchase experience the consumer enjoys, it could be a sense of belonging to a circle of like-minded people, it could be a status-affirmation. When a person buys from a shop with a strong brand, the person does not just look at the attributes of the product anymore. The value of the purchase is higher than the product value.
Therefore, to differentiate yourself from your competitors, it is important to start building a brand around your shop. Investments in brand effect will definitely reap you alot more.
2. Good marketing can encourage better interactions and promotion
In a highly competitive market, effective marketing strategies should be consumer-led.
While traditional marketing tend to focus on the 4Ps – Product, Place, Price and Promotion, we may have neglected the 4Cs that are increasingly important as part of the marketing strategy – Consumers’ Needs, Consumers’ Cost ( the cost of purchase, eg. Travelling cost, time etc), Convenience and Communication.
We should scrutinise the purchasing journey of our customers on Lazada and think deeper about their needs, how to lower their cost of purchase, how to make purchasing and using our products more convenient for them and how to improve our communications every step of the way.
One case study our trainer shared was a Taobao seller who empathised with the inconvenience of looking for a sharp object to slice his parcel open. Therefore he included a little device in every of his parcel, with his brand name engraved on it, that his customers may use to open their parcels.
There is also another case study of a seller selling vacuum packed braised meat. This seller included a packet of wet tissue, a handphone pouch (so that the consumer may use his handphone while eating the braised meat with his hands), and also an interesting amulet that assures the consumer that he won’t grow fat eating the braised meat! These are indeed fine examples of sellers who have gone the extra mile to delight their customers.
On the topic of Communications – Mr Li Bo is one strong advocate of using Lazada’s chat function. His KPI for his own chat personnel is 6 seconds reply. Reply within more than 6 seconds more than twice and the chat personnel gets fired. Speed of reply is crucial.
On top of speed, the ability of the chat personnel to engage consumers and chat with them like friends would be another bonus. There is one such seller who chatted with her consumers every step of the way in very flowery language – from pre purchase to post purchase, even after the parcel has reached her consumers.
Chat is a great way to gain trust with your consumers, and bridge the relationship between buyer and seller.
We look at the TOP 10 characteristics that retail promotions often revolve around. The following slides speak for themselves.
3. Allowing customers to understand your business through Unique Selling Point and Advertisements
There are a few ways to differentiate yourself from your competition:
– Value advantage
– Price advantage
– Personnel and quality advantage
– Raw materials, equipment advantages,
– Logistics and service advantages
– After-sales advantage
– Business advantage
– Brand advantage
Many sellers understand the above differentiation factors, but have not adequately communicated these strong attributes to their consumers to increase sales. For example, one may include after-sales advantages in the products images themselves if these are very strong differentiating factors for that product.
Sellers need to scrutinise their products presentation and work on communicating differentiating factors more.
It is also important to communicate some of these advantages in a way that can influence consumers better. For example, if a certain skincare product is made from a special patented ingredient that is not present in other competitors’ products, it is not enough to just communicate to consumers about this patented product. Consumers do not care about information that do not affect them. The seller needs to think of a way to communicate the information in a way that consumers care. For example: “This product makes your acne disappear within 24 hours with this special patented ingredient!”
4. Design a shopping experience
We observe how escalators and lifts are designed in some major shopping centres. Some escalators are designed in such a way that consumers need to walk one whole round before getting to the next escalator to move up or down the shopping centre. This is to increase the traffic flow for stores in the shopping centre.
Likewise, it is important that we design a shopping experience for our consumers that not only increase traffic for our store but also conversions and retention.
5. 3 steps to market for mega campaign
Step 1: Non-campaign days marketing
Step 2: Near-campaign days marketing
Step 3: Campaign day marketing
Step 1: Non-campaign days marketing
During non-campaign days, we want to communicate the following messages to our consumers:
1. My shop is the best
2. My products are the best
3. We are best friends.
We can communicate the above messages through the following ways:
– Share the brand story in various ways
– Send out samples
– Engagement strategies to engage new users and revive old accounts
Step 2: Near-campaign days marketing
Once Lazada has started its marketing promotions in public, we can communicate the following to consumers:
– What they can buy
– Where can they buy them
– The cheapest way to buy
– The most assuring way to buy
We can communicate the above through the following ways:
– Customer service (informing through chat)
– Send out promotional material about which products are taking part in campaigns, and encourage early add to cart.
– Get people interested in our shops through feeds.
Step 3: Campaign day marketing
Crucial hours:
12am to 1am – Mad grab period
1am to 6pm: Rational purchase period
6pm – 12am: Sweeping period
Sellers are encouraged to prepare “Sold out” banners for popular products, and be ready to upload these banners to the storefront every time such products are sold out.
Day 2
Recap on the objectives of taking part in major campaigns on Lazada:
2. Optimizing data is the only way to achieve goals
Traffic source (On marketplace)
– Sellers picks
– Search
– Feed
– Voucher
– Platform activities
– Live
Traffic source (off marketplace)
– Parcel
– Messaging (WhatsApp)
– Social media (Facebook)
– Traditional media
– Physical stores
What consumers look at when doing a product search:
– Product title
– Product reviews
– Product price
– Product image
Word selection method for product title
How to phrase product titles:
Think of potential search phrases that consumers will use and include them in product titles.
Say your product has a great image, reasonable price, relevant title and many reviews, consumers will have a high tendency to click on to your product page once they spot the product in a search page.
The next goal would be to convert these consumers.
The Lazada backend shows us our traffic numbers and conversion numbers, so we are aware of whether we can effectively convert our traffic.
To increase conversion rates, you need to first understand your consumers.
3. Understanding your customers is the only way to formulate a good strategy
We need to ask ourselves:
– Who are our consumers
– Where can they be found
– Do they have any special attributes
4. Develop Reasonable Plans according to Data (Obtaining platform traffic from Lazada)
We can obtain Lazada’s platform traffic using the following:
– Sellers’ Picks
– Customer service
– Campaign Participation
– Search
– Vouchers
The better we perform on Lazada, the more Sellers’ Picks we can have. Sellers’ Picks are basically free sponsored places for our products. So, we should make full use of our Sellers Picks and reactivate them whenever they expire.
If we have not really spent enough effort on Customer Service, it’s time to relook this aspect of our business. Chat response is extremely crucial, and how we talk to our customers do make a difference to our sales outcome.
We end off with a strong reminder to decorate our store fronts. For any e-commerce business, our “digital packaging” gives the first impression. In the context of Lazada, this will mean our product image, product description page and store design. Work on these 3, and make our products searchable, and we will definitely stand out among competitors who only compete on price but neglect these crucial work to be done.
Lastly, we are also reminded time and again to work on our chat response. It is not easy at all to achieve a 6 seconds response time, but it is definitely something we can work towards.
I must thank our trainer, Mr Li Bo, for delivering such a content rich learning experience for us, and Lazada Singapore for making this free for us! Let us all work harder towards becoming better sellers in Singapore.
