Digital champagne: How luxury brands keep customers during economic uncertainty

By Amandine Servain, VP Marketing, Wunderkind

By many accounts, we may be entering challenging economic times in the coming months, which usually spells trouble and challenges for retailers as consumers rein in spending.

Yet according to a recent survey we conducted with consumers in both the US and the UK, 89% expect to maintain or increase “luxury-specific” purchases in the year ahead.

So why do consumers stay loyal to high-cost, luxury brands during uncertain economic climates? It’s not just about money (although 70% of those responding reported confidence in their personal economic outlook for the year). It’s about the unique customer experience that luxury brands provide across all touchpoints — both physical and digital.

Ever walk into a luxury boutique? It’s a decidedly different experience than your typical store. Visitors are treated as special guests. They feel seen, heard, and cared for. The moment you walk in, you’re greeted warmly, often by name, and sometimes even offered a glass of champagne.

In fact, luxury brands were comparatively late to the e-commerce trend because of their hyper-focus on in-store brand experiences. These bespoke experiences, premium quality products, and strong brand, is what inspired customer fidelity.

Of course, many luxury brands are now well-represented in e-commerce circles. But they’ve taken care to bring that same personalized attention to their customers online. They are mindful of maintaining their brand voice and purpose. They’ve kept their digital “glass of champagne on a silver tray” handy, so to speak.

According to the survey, 89% of consumers say that individualized, consistent digital engagement from a new brand is “somewhat” or “very” influential in their decision to make a purchase. Consumers care that luxury brands know who they are, what they like, and provide an online experience tailored to their interests, similar to the experience they would receive in-store.

But you don’t need to be a luxury brand to provide a luxury digital experience. It’s simply a matter of paying attention to your customers and creating an online experience that meets their needs. Your eCommerce site should act like that highly personal salesperson luxury brands staff in their brick-and-mortar stores.

Examples of this include:

• Recognizing return visitors and greeting them as familar patrons.
• Knowing their style, size, budget, and preferences, and presenting them with an individualized experience.
• If they’re new visitors, making them feel like they’ve been customers all along with extra special treatment, showing how much you value their business.
• Following up after their site visit with authentic communications offering only the products and features relevant to their interests.

There is no shortage of ways to manually stitch together solutions and services to create a unified efficient experience. On the contrary, we recommend investing in performance marketing solutions that optimize owned channels and serve one-to-one communications to both new and existing customers.

Brands that focus on these experiences shouldn’t spend their valuable time or resources building their own marketing tech. Rather, they should invest in the appropriate tools and use them to create an experience that treats their customers like real, valued people.

That’s not to say brand marketing isn’t equally important. It very much is. Luxury brands are just as mindful about how they advertise in external publications as they are on their owned channels.

In the physical world, this takes the form of slick, well-produced ads you’d only find in high-end, glossy magazines. In the digital world, the same principle applies. Luxury brands don’t spam out cheap, interruptive ads that turn off readers. They want to make their promotional experience as elevated and sophisticated as they do their products. Think of it as “luxury ads.”

Of course, all of this comes down to quality. A quality user experience, quality ads, and quality products. According to our survey, quality was ranked as the top consideration when purchasing luxury products.

Extending that quality to marketing practices is only natural. With the right marketing and advertising solution to drive performance, luxury brands can focus on what they do best — building their brand.

And when times get tough, they enjoy the returns on that investment.

To learn more, download the free report Luxury Retail Pulse: How Shoppers Are Spending On Luxury Brands.