Why is Tmall important for brands?
Tmall is an online B2C store owned by Alibaba born in 2008. It is the first platform for online purchases in China, in fact, it occupies 63% of the market and has 755 million monthly active users. This platform offers consumers all kinds of products from over 100,000 brands. Authorized brands and retailers are present on Tmall through the creation of a real Flagship Store graphically customizable. This allows you to successfully promote the brand identity and create a very accurate user experience, almost as if the user was actually in the store. This is precisely what Alibaba‘s format, called Flagship Store 2.0, focuses on. It was designed to offer more personalized experiences for consumers.
What is the Tmall flagship store 2.0?
One year ago, Jiang Fan, president of Taobao and Tmall, said: “the next-generation flagship stores are part of a series of service and technological innovations that Alibaba is planning to roll out this year, including search and recommendation, marketing, and brand operations, which would further improve platform efficiency and generate growth for merchants, while bringing all-new, online-to-offline shopping experiences for consumers”.
“Tmall 2.0” offers brands a host of new features that represent Tmall’s dual vision of:
- “From product management to people management”
- “From traffic generation to member engagement”.
Read: Tmall Merchants Guide
What are the Tmall flagship store 2.0 features?
020 integration
New flagship stores will integrate with offline brand touchpoints, highlighting:
- their closest store locations
- which items are sold in those stores
- products pages will offer quick access to click and collect
- offline try-on functionalities
These channels essentially give their physical stores an online presence, helping brands better connect online and offline operations. In this way, brands can give their physical stores an online presence and further boost traffic both online and offline.
Customers can also:
- purchase an item and then collect it in the respective brand’s physical store
- reserve a product and then go and try it on at a store
Tmall “mini-stores”
Tmall mini-stores represent Tmall’s equivalent to WeChat mini-programs.
Applications that can be accessed through the Tmall app and enable brands to create personalized interactive experiences by mixing content, customer service, and e-commerce.
The “Store lofts”
To help brands enrich their in-store content, Tmall has adopted Taobao’s popular “drag-and-drop” pop-ups, which are special pages of content that users access by dragging the screen on their mobile phones when they visit a flagship store.
Tmall calls the pop-ups “Store Lofts”, because the lofts live “above” the home page of a flagship store.
On their loft, brands can create personalized pages with rich content or interactive experiences similar to Wechat H5 mini-sites.
Benefits for customers in the brand’s “Fan club”
Activities like:
- adding a product to your shopping cart
- leaving a review
- playing an interactive game
- browsing products
- read branded posts
- watch videos
generate a “brand-loyalty score” that offers consumers benefits inside the Flagship Store’s “Fan club”, obviously, the higher the score, the more benefits consumers earn.
Personalized customer experience
Popular products based on individual customer preferences are easy to find and clearly displayed on the store home page, eliminating the need for shoppers to manually search for products.
The 2020 Tmall flagship store feature
Tmall 3D shopping experience
This initiative goes hand in hand with Tmall’s Flagship store 2.0 for the personalized customer experience announced last year. This idea is to offer an immersive shopping experience for consumers.
This week Tmall officially launched its 3D shopping feature which creates an immersive and interactive e-commerce experience that replicates many of the in-store shopping elements, in fact, with just their phones, consumers can browse the 3D showrooms of over 100 brands.
The 3D shopping feature is expected to help retailers with physical stores that are still closed due to the coronavirus epidemic.
Among the retailers, there is IKEA, which presented an online version of one of its Shanghai stores. The first 3D live shopping technology launched allows customers to visit IKEA at home.
Interesting Alibaba group’s video about Tmall 3D store:
Why are these features useful for brands?
With Tmall 2.0 brands have an opportunity to:
- show brand storytelling
- create added value
- build interactivity
- improve brand loyalty
- improve CRM
- differentiate themselves through content and experience
Show brand storytelling
“Store lofts” offer brands an additional place to communicate their story through:
- images
- short-videos
- content from key opinion leaders (KOLs).
Create added value
Tmall 2.0 features, reserved for selected Tmall partner brands, greatly expand possibilities for brands to create value-added shopping tools.
Categories such as furniture, clothes, or cosmetics greatly benefit from 3D, VR, and AR environments by using product trials from physical stores.
The following points are an example of how these features are helping companies.
- Ikea’s 3D stores
- La Roche Posay’s acne diagnostic tool uses selfies and AI to recommend the right anti-acne routine
- Valentino’s launch of its 3D virtual pop-up store (Click here to watch the video on Youtube)
Build interactivity
New features such as the loft will unlock opportunities for the activation of interactive brands on the platform. These interactive experiences can take the form of games, user-generated content activities or rich media displays.
Currently, live streaming on this platform also is used to create and increase interactivity with consumers.
Improve brand loyalty
Tmall is offering ways to boost brand engagement with consumers. In fact, as mentioned above, the platform created what it is called “brand-loyalty scores,” where consumers collect points for some actions that are made in the flagship store.
Improve CRM
Tmall 2.0 establishes single-brand stores as CRM showcases. In fact, the interface will also offer easier access to coupons and promotions reserved for members and back-end tools will expand the solutions for targeted VIP marketing.
Through targeted content, experiences, and promotions, brands can cultivate long-term relationships with members, activate high-value segments, and encourage repeated involvement.
This CRM strategy should go beyond coupons and prices and integrate the specific benefits and experiences of members that create a sense of exclusivity and community for loyal fans of the brand.
Differentiate themselves through content and experience
Using Tmall’s smart tagging system, brands will be able to offer different storefront designs and content to different customer groups.
For example, cosmetics are able to configure its home page to display anti-acne products to young customers and anti-aging solutions to older age groups.
GMA can help you to create your best digital marketing strategy on Tmall
Our services include:
- Shop Design
We make your shop attractive to Chinese buyers, putting your products on the best possible light.
- In-platform Advertising
Tmall is more than a store. It is a product Search Engine. We use Tmall promotion tools and Ads to help you Sell.
- Off-platform Marketing
KOL, e-reputation, and Banner ads, we have experts for each of these promotional strategies.
- Reporting & Analysis
We monitor your shops & ads results, and optimize them to get you the best ROI. Then we provide you with easy-to-digest reports.
Do you want to know more about How to use the Tmall e-commerce platform to boost sales? Contact GMA a digital marketing agency, specializing in the Chinese digital market.