At first glance, high-end jewellery and ecommerce might seem incompatible. After all, luxury markets aren’t just about selling a product. For luxury retailers, the promotion of an experience or a lifestyle is just as valuable as highlighting product specifications. The latter is easy enough to do on an ecommerce website, but the former requires a bit of strategic branding and marketing.
It might surprise you to learn, however, that many high-end jewellery brands actually are reaching their customers online, and with great success. If you’d like to sell upmarket jewellery on the internet, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’ll outline some key strategies for high-end jewellery ecommerce ventures and how you can apply them to your own digital atelier.
Prepare Plenty of Buyer Resources
It goes without saying that anybody who’s looking to buy high-end jewellery online is doing so with a lot of trust in your brand and product range. This trust is grown by providing your consumers with plenty of information, imagery, and other resources to reassure them that what they’re buying both aligns with their expectations and is suitable for their needs.
For instance, if you sell an array of gold vermeil and solid gold jewellery, make sure these differences are clearly labelled and explained. Similarly, luxury jewellers provide more information about the cut, clarity, and sizing of gemstones and semi-precious stones used in their creations.
And then there’s sizing guides. For people buying everyday rings or even engagement and wedding rings online, you’ll naturally want to make sure your provided size guides are easily legible and thus helpful. For husbands-to-be, having a size guide provided on a printable PDF is going to make the process of sneakily getting their girlfriend’s ring finger measurements. Thankfully, there are digital tools that allow you to convert images to PDF, ensuring your ring size guides are provided in a high resolution and with scale accuracy.
Finally, and as we mentioned, luxury ecommerce retailers must also ensure all their product imagery is high-quality. If you’re not an expert photographer or lack the necessary equipment, consider investing in a professional product photoshoot. While this obviously costs more than doing it yourself, it’s still worth doing, as having high-quality images on your site is absolutely essential if you want to sell your luxury wares online.
Make the Buying Process an Experience
Luxury is all about creating an experience. Traditionally and in brick-and-mortar stores, this equated to providing tailored customer service and perhaps even bespoke packaging or other unique touches. For Tiffany & Co., for instance, part of the excitement of shopping is being able to take one of their signature “1837 Blue” boxes home – a colour that was developed expressly for the brand by Pantone.
So what’s your buyer’s experience like? As an ecommerce brand, making online shopping an experience naturally takes a bit of creativity. A good place to start, however, is by making sure your website is well-optimised and easy to navigate. Here, make sure your pages are responsive, that your sitemap is intuitive, and that your site/brand colours work well together (i.e. your site is easy on the eyes!).
You should also make customer service a priority. Customers should easily be able to speak with a human customer service representative in case they have any questions about your jewellery.
And again, keep it mind when preparing a luxury digital marketing strategy that you’re selling more than a product. Your customers are also paying top dollar for their buyer’s experience, so make sure the entire process of shopping with you is pleasant and intuitive.
Work With Influencers
High-end jewellery brands have always worked with celebrities to market their goods. Let’s use Tiffany & Co. as an example again. The luxury jewellery brand has been using its association with Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s for years with great success. Working with personalities or figureheads who your target audience looks up to is a great way to boost demand for your products and build your brand.
This strategy is still effective in 2024. However, luxury companies have an even wider range of options when it comes to choosing their ambassadors. In fact, many futuristic brands are turning to social media influencers to help them reach a younger audience. As a high-end jewellery company, getting in touch with influencers on platforms like Instagram, YouTube and TikTok can generate plenty of awareness of your brand online.
When working with influencers, it’s essential to make sure the people you get to represent your company align with your values. As a luxury company, your brand is among your biggest assets, and you want to be incredibly selective about who you associate with.
Advertise Without Selling Directly
Among the most important of the ‘anti-laws’ of luxury marketing is that the purpose of advertising is not to sell. As a high-end jewellery company, you should never look like you’re trying too hard to convince people to buy your products. This cheapens your brand.
Rather, the point of advertising should be to build your brand. Craft a cohesive narrative around this brand and give customers reasons to want to own one of your high-end pieces of jewellery without selling directly. People should want to buy from you not just because of the quality of your jewellery, but also because of who you are as a brand.
This also means that, in the vast majority of cases, you shouldn’t resort to discounts to sell your goods. Instead of lowering your price, look for ways to make your products desirable enough for people to pay your current prices.
Focus on Quality
Lastly, you should never compromise on the quality of your jewellery. If you’re a reseller, make it a point to only source top-notch products from renowned manufacturers. You should also create a process for inspecting the quality of the individual pieces you receive.
If your company creates its own jewellery, ensure that the raw ingredients you source are of the best quality. You should never cut corners during the manufacturing process for the sake of reducing your costs: modern customers are more discerning than ever and will likely notice any drop of quality in your jewellery.
When it comes to luxury, quality is paramount. Ensure that each piece of jewellery that you sell in your online store is up to scratch, because a single low-quality product can do plenty of damage to your brand.
Starting a high-end jewellery ecommerce venture can be difficult due to the inherent challenges of running a luxury business online, but it can be done. In this article, we’ve gone through some key strategies you can use to run an online jewellery company.
Apply these tips to your own brand today to boost your chances of success and thrive as an ecommerce jewellery business.
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