Singaporean luxury tea brand TWG Tea is launching more than 20 new official online stores on third-party marketplaces in new and emerging markets across APAC, North America and Europe on platforms such as Zalora, Amazon and Lazada.
The online storefront expansion will add to the brand’s existing official stores on marketplaces such as Amazon UK, Lazada Vietnam, BliBli Indonesia, Lazada Indonesia and Tmall China. It currently has nine official online flagship stores.
The aggressive push is part of TWG Tea's strategy to create an omnichannel digital experience for tea lovers. It also recently launched a new m-commerce app which offers brand promotions, offers, and its MyTWG membership programme.
In a statement to Marketing, Maranda Barnes, director of corporate communications and business development and co-founder of TWG Tea, said it will be promoting its new stores and online-only tea collection using a combination of traditional PR and new media.
It will also be tapping on optimised keywords, targeted brand and product ads, its global customer database, and its offline locations in each market to close the loop between offline experience and online purchases. According to TWG Tea, its digital sales are growing quickly, with a 180% increase recorded last year.
Barnes said that as an experiential brand, its brick-and-mortar tea salons and boutiques will always be an integral part of its DNA, but e-commerce will probably play a bigger role moving forward to reach out to customers on a wider scale.
"Not only are we putting resources behind these digital expansion efforts, but we also have developed an experienced in-house team with the expertise to expand these platforms in line with our positioning as a global luxury brand," she added.
Research from Shopping online is the activity most likely to see a long-term gain after the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak ends, according to data from GlobalWebIndex. Half (49%) of consumers expect to shop online more frequently after COVID-19, the highest share among the seven activities asked.
A recent report from Forrester noted that consumers no longer need to trade off price, convenience, and an emotional experience, so brands must cater to all these needs at once.
“But brands will need strong websites, digital marketing prowess, customer data and insights, and an appetite for price/offer matching to be best positioned to thrive,” said Forrester, adding that the future of B2C buying is not a shift from traditional to digital or abandonment of self-service in favour of delivery: It’s all the above.
Sourced from Marketing Interactive
