How To Build Your Jewelry Store’s Web Presence

Running a jewelry store can be a tricky business. Sure the margins are quite high for jewelry, with most stores having inventory that runs into the thousands of dollars, but chasing the sale can be an expensive prospect. So, when you decide to start an online boutique, it will be a good idea to have a great e-commerce marketing strategy in hands.

Whilst having a jewelry store can help bring users into and convert quite well (jewelry buying is a tactile, visionary business so having the piece of expensive jewelry in a customer’s hands can really close the deal), you shouldn’t look past the value that your website can have in the buying process.

Having a website can help your users find your business and begin the conversion process. But how should you begin? In this article, I discuss a number of ways in which a jewelry store owner can begin to look at their web presence.

Expensive Products Don’t Need an Expensive Solution

So as a jewelry shop, you may be thinking a high end website for a high end product. In reality, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Expensive solutions are often just expensive for the sake of expensive, and at the very least for most simple jewelry stores you probably will be better served using an open source solution. The software is free, and at the very least you can acquire a cheap domain and hosting for your site.

For a solution therefore, you may want to look at WordPress to power your site. WordPress is the best CMS solution for smaller sites, it powers over 30% of the internet, and can be used to create powerful solutions for both large eCommerce stores, to shops like your own.

You Probably Don’t Want An eCommerce Solution

As said before, jewelry purchasing is generally a tactile business. You are far more likely to say “yes” to a piece if you hold it in your hands and model it in front of a mirror. Doing such a process isn’t really possible if your main offering is eCommerce as eCommerce generally focusses on more goods you can get elsewhere for cheaper.

For jewelry part of the beauty is the art and you cannot try the piece on online without the faff of returning. As a result, you as a jewelry store owner could have serious cash flow and stock maintenance issues if you’re sending out pieces for users to try on, and then refunding them when they don’t like them. So I would recommend for a jewelry store owner, unless you have mass produced hugely common pieces, I’d avoid an eCommerce solution.

Whilst I don’t recommend you take payment, I can see a value of having an online inventory on your site of the pieces currently in stock. You can provide fairly common details on the pieces (such as size, carat and price) on your site, so even though you won’t probably be using the ordering processing of the system, using an inventory tracker such as WooCommerce could be useful for showcasing your stock and also ranking for the stock. But I would steer clear of using WooCommerce’s checkout and cash acquisition facilities.

Pick a Theme To Compliment Your Offering

So now you have a basic form of a site, what should you look for? Well, now we need to concentrate on the look of the store. Having a store that highlights the quality products you offer is a must, and a conversion for you is somebody seeing a piece they like and enquiring about it. As a result – pictures are an absolute must for your site.

You need to therefore pick a WordPress theme that compliments these images. A clean, bright theme such as the Adamas Jeweler Theme would be perfect, as the muted, subtle colors enhance the imagery that you will put on the site.

Of course, you don’t have to go for a dedicated Jeweler Theme, there could be more generic WordPress themes or WordPress eCommerce themes that could also work for you. You can check out these eCommerce themes there were listed some time ago.

Local SEO Is the Way To Go

Being a jewelery store the first thing you should make sure you achieve is making sure your local SEO is on point. Ideally, you want to be the first port of call to those looking for a piece or just making general inquiries. You can do this by making sure your site shows up for relevant searches for people in the area. For example, Google will show relevant results based on your IP location, and you need to tell Google where your bricks and mortar shop is located.

At the very least, you should spend a bit of time verifying your Google My Business listing. This takes a small amount of time, but can get you listed within your immediate area.

If you are not in a wealthy neighborhood, and want to be, a good way is to list that neighborhood with a city target page. This will be a page you create on your site with the keyword such as “Jewelery Store [Location]” and will feature local points such as landmarks or restaurants in the description. Don’t know how to craft this? Provide driving instructions for your visitors to go from a known waypoint to your store. That way you can target key phrases for your local listings quickly and easily.

Don’t Forget Social

As the goods of your items are more often than not visual, I’d strongly recommend being active on social to bring in people. At the very least, a Facebook Page can give you another social signal, particularly within a local market – a market you can later exploit. Facebook will automatically give you a listing page so by claiming it you can control the message coming from your business.
Secondly, as you are a jeweler, it’s important to look at more picture based services to sell your wares. Social Commerce could be an interesting channel, and if you have an Instagram account, as well as making it easy for users to share jewelry on something like Pinterest, you can have a huge amount of success. It may take a longer process for a conversion to happen, but it could be a worthwhile avenue, particularly if you then rely on social sharing to keep people sharing their jewelry.

People stories work best for Social. Ask your customers if they can share photos of their jewelry on your social channels. Better yet, get them to post on their social channels, and making sure they tag you in it. Want is a powerful emotion, and by getting friends of your customers to want what your customers have, this can lead to more business for you.

You can also read a few more tips on this great article on social media marketing.

Keep Things Warm With An Email List

You need to look at conversions for your site – after all, what point is there having a site if you don’t convert from it? As jewelry is quite a large purchase you cannot really justify one conversion and the only conversion as a lead from the site, you can begin to look at other conversions.

Why not build an email list?

A subscription to a newsletter, whilst not being a major conversion, can lead to further conversions down the line. So how do you go about it? Well, before you start doing anything, make sure you actually have something you capture. First of all, install a WordPress email marketing plugin like WP Email Capture which you can use to begin capturing email addresses, but that – really – should be the first port of call of many.

First off, it can be a good idea to make sure that you give some incentive to users to subscribe. You can either choose a solution like a discount at your store, but why not instead offer something that’s unique. A guide to a particular kind of jewelry could be an excellent resource to get people interested, as well as build trust. After all – you are reliant on trust as a business owner. You don’t want to appear to sell rubbish to your customers! If you become an expert in your niche you can be the go to person for your industry for a particular type of jewelry.

And with that mentioned, if you go down this route, and you serve EU customers – make sure you make your site GDPR compliant!

From there, you need to decide on what to send. Ideally, you want to send not whenever you have a sale or want to make money. Ideally you want to send monthly, even with news, a top tip, or even a background to your company – people want to see the human side of you! This is important, as by not asking for conversions every email, you are more likely to convert when you do. By all mean, feature new products, but don’t make it the main selling point. A solution like MailChimp – which is compatible with WP Email Capture – could be used to manage your mailing list on your behalf.

Bring People In Using WordPress Plugins

Now you need to bring people into your business. This takes the form of advertising. Your SEO should be on point, but you can look at other options for you.

First off, at the very least, make sure you have your social media buttons present on your site and make sure you use all features to encourage further interaction. Be sure to include your twitter user in your account, as well as your open graph data is working fine (you can use the Facebook debugger to check this), that could open up more interactions and a potential customer or business relationship. Then begin from a social standpoint to look at advertising.

Where are your customers coming from? If you look at Google Analytics you can begin to look at what channels are converting. If you are clueless with Google Analytics here’s a great article on 5 things to look for in your report. Could you look at Facebook Advertising? Advertising to your local area can really be a useful solution, and cost effective for a small business. Maybe look elsewhere for advertising – even smaller networks such as Instagram or Pinterest could be worthwhile investments and may be cheaper.

Now, begin to look at other channels. You are wanted to support your business and the best you can do is from your area. Look at local advertising in more traditional senses – it’s cheaper than you think. You can even use innovative ways to bring people to your shop. Why not encourage your visitors go get an Uber or other taxi to your shop? It sounds crazy, but it just may work. Using a plugin such as WP Taxi Me can help quickly and easily add an Uber button to your site so users can come from their location direct to their business.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this will give you a few ideas on how to begin to get a web presence for your jewelry store quickly and easily, and most importantly cheaply. By using WordPress, free plugins, and an affordable theme, you can use more money marketing your site and making your home on the web high traffic and high converting. A lot of plugin and theme developers have spent a lot of time and money making sure their products convert incredibly well, so why not take advantage of that?

The most important thing though is to not rest on your laurels. Jewelry is a highly personable item, so people want to buy from people, rather than from web shops, your web presence (both sites, as well as social media) should be therefore personable. That way you can build trust.

That should give you a few ideas for generating a strong, stable web presence for your jewelry store. What ideas do you have? Do you have anything to share? Please leave your ideas in the comments below!