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Merrick, NY—Our fourth installment of One Smart Thing features Matthew Perosi, Chief Thinker, Sapphire Collaborative, and founder of jWAG, the Jewelers Website Advisory Group. jWAG's website is designed to give jewelry store owners very specific information of what to do and what not to do with their jewelry website. His topic is online marketing efforts for bridal inventory.

The Centurion: What's ONE smart thing a prestige jeweler can/should do to start off the year right?

Matthew Perosi: With holiday engagement ring sales now behind us, it's time to start reviewing your marketing results from all channels and how they affected your in-store and website traffic. 

Website optimization is crucial because, even without e-commerce, online traffic eventually turns into foot traffic and sales. Valentine's Day is just around the corner and now is the time to improve upon last year's engagement ring marketing efforts.

Start with rethinking the word "bridal." Even though it's industry lexicon, your engagement ring customers don't associate that word with their engagement ring!  Google's public trends clearly show that customers search for "engagement rings" and "wedding rings" but not "bridal rings" or any other query permutation including the word bridal.  Website conversion rates and out-of-home ad ROI should reflect and uptick when you employ the customer understood phrasing of "engagement rings."

The next step in customer friendliness is to edit your website and all your marketing to use gender neutral phrases that will appeal to the emerging same-sex engagement ring market; but without alienating your traditional customers.  As same-sex weddings become more accepted, those couples will seek non-discriminatory jewelers who have subtly swapped out "bride and groom" phrasing on their website for inclusive words like "couple," "partners," and "betrothed," or ambiguous designations used on registries like "fiance(e)."  I find the website GayWeddingInstitute.com to be a great resource to help jewelers find out how to best capture this emerging same-sex wedding market.

Between the proper use of "engagement rings" and gender neutral terms on your website, you should see a positive change in your engagement ring sales for the entire year to come.

Missed the first three installments? Click here for Jon Parker on Personnel and Ellen Fruchtman on Marketing and Dan and Lori Askew on Inventory Management.