News that both John Lewis and Procter & Gamble are joining the growing number of big retailers creating online magazines to support their e-commerce activity, is a sign that these same brands are waking up to the power of content to help drive conversion and sales within their online shops.

Once it was enough to have a few good pictures on your site and a blog to share your views, but as user experience is becoming increasingly important, shoppers are looking for more compelling and engaging reasons to keep coming back. This is where regularly updated magazine-style content can and will play an increasingly important role in e-commerce. Not only does it allow retailers to build a closer bond with their customer by giving them the content that they are interested in and that reflects their lifestyles and interests, but it also allows them to directly sell to their shoppers – not that I’m advocating that content should be sales driven.

One of the best examples of this is Net-a-Porter, where founder Natalie Massanet – a former fashion editor of Vogue – uses the content as a key driver for sales across the site. Not only does the site offer a rich mix of media – including video and written comment – it also provides sections covering areas such as new arrivals and trends, helping to engage the viewer and push them to purchase items that they wouldn’t otherwise be browsing.

For maximum impact, it’s crucial that all this content is searchable and linked to the relevant items so shoppers can get the most benefit from this functionality. By using content in this way your average ecommerce site ceases to be just a shop window or glorified catalogue, but instead becomes a powerful sales tool that draws people back and directs them to new and interesting things to buy.

However, to my mind, there are two key challenges that retailers need to address before they can successfully move down this route: the first is relevance. Any content you deliver needs to be relevant to your customer otherwise they will just dismiss it. This means you need to know your customer and know what they are interested in.

The second is having the skill set to develop the content. Natalie Massanet came from a magazine background, and, unless you’re a company like Sony that has its own editorial team, the chances are that you won’t have these skills in-house. So this means either buying this in, which could be expensive, or finding a partner to work with to do this. And I think increasingly we’re going to see ecommerce agencies teaming up with publishers or other content producers to offer this service to help retailers plug this gap in their marketing.

Get it right and it can be one of the most powerful tools you as a retailer have to keep you customers coming back for more.