How to Make Your Ecommerce Store Appealing to Early Adopters
There is a cluster of people in every demographic category who start using a product or technology as soon as it becomes available. Known as early adopters, these were the first people you ever saw holding an iPhone on the street or driving a Tesla Model S. They tend to be the influencers within their peer groups and have no qualms about paying more for a product to be among the first to have it. If you can figure out how to make your e-commerce site appealing to early adopters, you’ll have a great shot at being successful.
Court Their Fear of Missing Out
These people love to be “in the know.” They also harbor a significant fear of missing out. If you appeal to those traits in your marketing efforts, you’ll attract early adopters quite readily. Social media is the perfect forum for this. Tout the cutting-edge nature of your store and its products loudly. Show early adopters how shopping with you will increase their “cool points” among their peers and you’ll pique their interest.
Appeal to Their Intellectual Nature
Another trait of this group is a love of intellectual stimulation. If you want to attract their attention, give them a problem to solve, a puzzle to figure out or a smart quiz to take. Remember the Pokémon Go phenomenon? Early adopters loved unlocking the different levels of the game and were walking all over town, visiting places they wouldn’t have ordinarily entered—because the game led them to do so. Leverage social media to put something similar into play for your e-commerce store to draw these people in.
Function and Form Must Meld
Another shared characteristic of early adopters is an appreciation for aesthetics. However, things can’t be lovely just for the sake of being lovely. Beauty must be an intrinsic aspect of their functionality. When you’re creating a web store with the intention of attracting early adopters, you’ll do well to choose an e-commerce theme within which utility and beauty go hand in hand. In other words, you want your theme to look good because it works—in which case it will work because it looks good.
There Must Be a Significant “Why”
Getting back to the iPhone and Tesla examples for a moment, both of those products had a significant “why” story. The Tesla Model S was the first luxury electric sedan with a range approaching 300 miles. This made it useful as an actual car, rather than yet another novelty device. The iPhone combined a telephone with an iPod with a camera with a web browser and many other useful features. In both cases, the “Why” of those products was readily apparent. In your efforts to reach early adopters, you’ll need to present a compelling reason for them to check you out.
Keep it Seriously Simple
While early adopters tend to be intellectually advantaged, you’ll lose them if you ask them to deal with something too complex. Don’t mistake their enjoyment of figuring things out to mean you can hand them something overly complex and expect it to fly. When you’re considering how to make your e-commerce store appealing to early adopters, keep in mind logic, and intuitive function are just as important to this group as intellectual stimulation. In fact, the more you do to simplify complexity, the more appreciation they’ll have for your offering. Plus, it will be more readily accessible for mainstream consumers once the early adopters have attracted the masses to you and moved onto the next new thing.
