IRCE Workshop: Boost Conversion without a Social Cast of Thousands
This is the IRCE workshop Boost Conversion without a Social Cast of Thousands, presented by Michael Lee, Senior Vice President, General Manager - Epsilon, Susan Kim, Chief Executive Officer, Plum District and Jai Rawat, Chief Executive Officer, Founder - ShopSocially. Leveraging social media can be challenging, and measuring ROI can be difficult.
The big 4 social channels are Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram. Each are used differently:
- Facebook - nonpaid (engagement) and paid (acquisition)
- Twitter - customer conversation (engagement) & reach
- Pinterest - brand engagement (outside of the transaction)
- Instagram - brand engagement (outside of the transaction) & acquisition.
Facebook tactical execution
- Active page management through non paid posts and content
- Paid advertising against lookalike audiences, with full-tracking implemented
- Quarterly sweepstakes that requires a like to drive engagement
One retailer's Facebook results:
- Grew new acquisition 30% year over year
- Decreased churn to 1%
- Increased revenue per subscribed 2x
- 150,000+ Facebook fan acquisition
Encourage users to submit their own images to build your social presence.
Your social strategy should be 2-pronged: 1) acquire new customers via social 2) transform existing marketing in other channels (SEO, PPC, etc) with social media.
Connect with the right fans on social - not just freebie-seekers, but intense fans in the center of your target market. Free ticket give-aways may generate a lot of likes, but they don't stay engaged with your brand.
Use social profile data to better target and personalize your offers to each specific user, which can improve your ROI in all of your other marketing channels.
Social login increases user engagement. 51% of consumers use social login. 84% of social login users will share a positive comment about your brand. eCommerce sites absolutely need social login.
In 2013, Google changed their official SEO blog to replace the word “back links” with “sharing” as the key SEO ranking driver.
Realtime social buzz legitimizes your products.
Move beyond customer reviews to photo testimonials shared with a specific hashtag.
Include a flyer with a hashtag in all of your product shipments and encourage users to post photos of them with the product.
True social engagement via social buzz on product pages gave one retailers a 15% increase in conversion rate.
Add realtime social buzz on your site to help improve engagement, conversion rate and SEO rank.
Social media marketers for eCommerce shouldn’t think as B2C, but instead C2C - encourage customers to share their experience.
Marketing via paid social media marketing is expensive - it requires more money and more resources (as it's high maintenance and requires dedicated resources). Bringing social into eCommerce is less expensive, has a proven ROI and customers do the marketing work for you.