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In the hustle of holiday shopping, moving into social commerce may seem a little intimidating—but don’t let the ability to communicate freely with customers overwhelm you

Put simply, “social commerce” combines social media marketing techniques with the sales potential of e–commerce. This interactive evolution of e–commerce allows for brands to participate in customer communities; leveraging their networks to drive sales, increase revenue, and build powerful brand ambassadors.

Ultimately, moving into social commerce is easy and can be segmented into 3 simple dimensions:

Social Shopping: Social shopping seeks to mimic the interactions found in brick and mortar stores by involving a customer’s friends in the shopping experience. Group shopping sites (like Groupon), recommendation engines, and online marketplaces all bring customers together in a central location allowing for an interactive, social experience.

Customer Reviews: Easily accessible user forums ease customers into making educated purchase decisions. By harnessing the wisdom of crowds, positive reviews can be game changers in a customer’s decision to choose your brand.

Peer–to–Peer Referrals: Proven to be the most effective way to drive new business, happy customers will take their satisfaction a step further than a positive review and share a peer–to–peer referral with friends and family. In fact, according to a Nielsen study, customers are four times more likely to buy when referred by a close friend.

With social referral software built into your e–commerce platform, you can easily reward customers for sharing information about their purchase, referring new friends, and driving sales. If social commerce is all about promoting word–of–mouth activity, implementing a customer referral program is critical to successfully entering this new marketing sphere.

You may have noticed a common theme: establishing a trust–based relationship is critical to effectively leveraging social commerce.

Shoppers today have an inherent distrust of branded messaging. Instead, they look to friends, family, and online communities for purchasing wisdom. The choice to utilize social commerce for commercial gain is simple. Now it’s up to your brand to act on it.

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Here’s a quick rundown: clicking “Want” adds a product to a “Wishlist” on a user’s Timeline. “Collect,” adds it to a Pinboard-esque page called “Products.” On the “Wishlist” and “Products” pages, the “Buy” button directs users to make purchases offsite.

The “Wishlist” is visible to friends of friends, while the “Products” page is only visible to direct friends.

These new Facebook features are a big win for eCommerce. Not only are they great for promoting sales, but the new features also have huge potential for generating friend-to-friend referrals via Facebook.

“Collection” activity is visible in users’ news feeds allowing friends to engage with a collection and share new products they’re interested in. Clicking on the “Buy” button gives Facebook users the opportunity to buy it right from the retailer’s website.

We know that social media networks love images—they’re by far the most effective generator of click throughs. In fact, posts on Facebook that include a photo increase fan engagement by 120%.

That’s part of the reason why Pinterest is such an effective generator of referrals. Referred Pinterest users are 10% more likely to make a purchase and are likely to spend double the amount, in part because the site is focused entirely on photo sharing.

But rather than having to develop an entirely new profile on Pinterest, users can collect and share cool products right where their friends already hangout.

Beyond individual Facebook users, company pages are also able to create collections to build an online catalogue of all their products. The one difference is company collections are only viewable to their Facebook fans. If pages want more people collecting, resharing and clicking they’re going to need a well-developed fan base.

Customer referrals via social media rely on giving people an easy way to promote their favorite brands. With that in mind, Facebook now allows users to promote, like and share products right from a profile page, all while making the purchasing process as seamless as possible.

What eCommerce business doesn’t “Want” that?

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In March 2014, researchers found that an average of 67.91% of online shoppers abandon their carts.

While ecommerce sites will never enjoy zero abandonment, there are tricks marketers can employ to encourage more shoppers to complete their purchases. Part of lowering the abandonment rate is figuring out exactly where in the shopping process people are leaving; it is not always during the actual checkout process. To get the most from your consumers, be certain to adhere to these online shopping best practices.

Transparent Pricing

Many online merchants try to hide pricing from shoppers. One way this is often done is requiring a shopper to add a product to their cart in order to see the price. Not only is this an annoyance to the visitor, it will lead to higher cart abandonment rates.

Clearly Indicate Availability

Another inconvenience to shoppers is learning that a product is out of stock when trying to checkout. Do not risk having the shopper abandoning their entire cart over one or two items being out of stock. Backordering is fine, but let them know that it will be back ordered — along with an expected arrival date — before they put it in their cart.

Shorten the Checkout Process

There is a big push towards one-page checkout. The sooner you implement one-page checkout on your own ecommerce store, the better. This simple trick alone can significantly lower your cart abandonment rate. If you absolutely must deploy a multi-page checkout, it should be no longer than three pages. Whether it is one-page or five, never make the customer enter correct details twice. Abandonment will go up if a shopper has to re-enter all of their details because one field did not pass validation. Going even further, use logins and cookies to pre-fill as much data as possible.

The Home Depot doesn’t utilize a 1-page checkout process, however they make sure to display where in the checkout process the user is, and how far they have until they are finished.

Keep it Clean and Simple

Do not overwhelm your customers with product details. Sure, make them available, and provide enough information to encourage a sale, but use a tabbed container to hide details most consumers will not care about, like technical specifications. This will keep the page design clean while still allowing those who want to see the details to do so.

Use tabs on your product detail pages to hide technical information.

Enable Different Payment Methods

There is no sound business reason for not accepting payment through third party providers like PayPal and other digital wallets. Make it as easy as possible for customers to pay you using the method they prefer. Once enabled, feature these payment methods early in the shopping process so that customers know they can pay using them. Allow users to save preferred methods of payment for an even more seamless process the next time around.

Make sure to let your visitors know early on what types of payment methods you accept.

Use Remarketing

Remarketing can be done both on the web and by email. Remarketing by email is a great way of getting shoppers back to your site. Try different ways for wooing them back, such as emailing discounts or coupon codes. Remarketing on the web will place your ads in front of shoppers as they surf other sites. While they may not have been ready to purchase when they abandoned their cart, remarketing is a great way to stay top of mind. Since the user has already been introduced to your brand, your remarketing ads are more likely to catch their attention.

Instill Trust

A shopper that does not trust your site will not make a purchase. This is doubly true in an era of increasing theft of credit card details. If employing cookies, be sure to have a page explaining exactly what they do. Also have a page explaining your sites security features for those weary of providing their credit card details. Publish a clear and easy-to-understand privacy policy that explains to customers exactly what you will do with their private information and how you will protect it. Make sure to use an SSL certificate from a reputable source like verisign, and include a seal on your site to show that your data is encrypted. Customers are more at ease when seeing the logos of recognized brands, so if you are selling the products of these brands, put the customer at ease by using logos where appropriate.

Optimize

It is true that changing the color of a button or even moving it can increase sales and decrease abandonment rate. Use an A/B testing tool like Optimizely to A/B test everything on your site. Start with broad tests and narrow them to be more specific as you gather insights.

Speed it Up

Pageload speed not only affects your placement in Google, it can also drive away shoppers. Milliseconds matter. Do everything you can to speed up your site. You can keep an eye on page load times from inside Google Analytics in Content > Side Speed.

While the above tricks will not drop your cart abandonment rate to zero, implementing them should improve your overall metrics. Every ecommerce site deals with cart abandonment; the best proactively minimize the chance of it happening. At the end of the day, these tricks will lead to more transactions, sales and profit.

Customers referred by other customers have a 37% higher retention rate. Schedule a free consultation to learn how else a referral program can help you achieve your ecommerce goals.

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No matter what happens, you can bet that consumers and products won’t be taken out of the equation. In order to stand out from the crowd and entice loyal customers, brands must develop creative ways for customers to interact with products and services. Acquiring customers, expanding reach, and exploring a new revenue stream may sound like a tall order, but developing an eCommerce referral program can be an innovative, all-in-one marketing solution for your online shop.

By enrolling customers as brand ambassadors for your business, you empower them to refer your company to others. With an automated eCommerce referral platform, your company can track brand ambassador activity while managing new and existing leads. Perhaps you haven’t considered incorporating a referral marketing strategy for your online shop, but it’s necessary if you want to stay ahead of the eCommerce curve.

eCommerce referral programs allow your customers to:

Become brand ambassadors and influencers

Brands love customers that are loyal and loud. With an eCommerce referral program, your brand can connect with those customers that have a personal connection to your company and aren’t afraid to tell everyone about it. Your company probably has an image of the ideal buyer persona that will evangelize your business, but companies can use actual data and real-time activity gathered from referral marketing campaigns to see who is really sharing. This insight can guide future campaigns and even uncover a new group that needs nurturing.

Engage anywhere and everywhere

Automated referral marketing platforms give you the ability to reach your customers in various ways to refer your business via their preferred method of sharing. Emails, social media shares, and text messages with shareable links that are unique to each ambassador can be as easy as a click of a button. Pretty soon, you won’t just be an online destination, you’ll be a brand that rides along with customers on their journey.

Participate in one-of-a-kind opportunities

Showing your customers that you appreciate them becomes much easier when you have a simple way to reach out and offer exclusive perks. Maybe you want to reward VIP customers with a special offer or give brand new leads an incentive to keep them coming back. eCommerce referral marketing platforms are flexible and customizable enough to reach your customers in ways that other marketing collateral can’t.

Setting Up Shop

Any online shop that wants to empower their growing community of customers while diversifying their buyer journey should automate their eCommerce referral program. It’s the best way to drive revenue while blazing new paths for customers to find and love your products.

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While cash is certainly king when it comes to rewarding referrals, (77 percent of Americans prefer to be rewarded with cash for referrals), the ability for eCommerce businesses to upload custom online voucher codes is a necessary feature for any referral program software.

According to RetailMeNot, 93 percent of Americans shop with coupons and the same study even reported that on average, consumers will spend 2 hours a week dedicated to hunting for deals online. Furthermore, 65% of those consumers say that online voucher codes “often finalize their purchase decision if they are undecided.” eCommerce voucher codes are powerful, they are convincing, and more often than not, decision altering. And in recent years, the internet has revolutionized the way that eCommerce businesses leverage vouchers.

How Marketing With Vouchers Creates Brand Loyalty

Amazon is a prime (pun intended) example for how eCommerce companies can use vouchers and discounts to seize the attention of their customers. Daily deals are emailed each morning and sponsored Twitter posts fill the timelines of their target audience. They entice potential purchases with the psychological implication that their customers can’t pass up a deal this good. While these vouchers may reduce the amount of profit Amazon makes on a particular transaction, the goodwill and brand loyalty they build amongst their customers leads to repeat purchases.

Check out today’s #DealoftheDay – Shop Now! https://t.co/NxIeBfci8s pic.twitter.com/QHtfMSMcAW

— Amazon (@amazon) January 7, 2016

The newspaper industry had to rapidly adjust in the digital-age, and just like many businesses, they were forced to adjust their marketing strategy. Even publishers like The New York Times have begun to use one-time vouchers to encourage sign ups for digital access to their content. Like Amazon, they advertise through social media and utilize email marketing to send vouchers that could open up new revenue streams.

Referrals + Vouchers

Did you know that the lifetime value of a referred customer is 16 percent higher than a non-referred customer? It’s the reason many eCommerce businesses use cash or vouchers as rewards for referrals.

Back in 2013, Forbes.com saw the evolution of referral marketing amongst eCommerce businesses when they broke down how businesses ran referral programs: “To move things along, consider providing an incentive for sharing. Include a code on each coupon that correlates to an original customer, then keep track of how many coupons come in with that code in order to reward loyal customers with an additional discount or free item in exchange for their kindness.”

However, there is no longer a need to manually track each coupon, because referral marketing software does exactly that: tracks, automates, and builds your customer base through word-of-mouth. Cash payouts can still be part of part of your overall referral marketing strategy, but the ability to also reward with voucher codes will encourage purchase after purchase.

Online businesses should be careful not to create a habit of offering discounts at every instance, but these vouchers coupled with referrals are a marketing tactic that has been proven to increase revenue, LTV’s, and brand loyalty.

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The future of eCommerce is in the cloud. For online retailers, social media, website optimization and inbound marketing will take center stage. Are you prepared for the social commerce revolution?

Source: http://www.thecreativefinder.com/

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To help you prepare for the festive season, we spoke with Trustpilot, the most powerful review platform, for the top strategies they recommend to ready your eCommerce store for the holidays.

Read on for part one, and come check back next week for part two!

Collecting Consumer Insights To Give Customers What They Want

It’s a simple question, but one that a lot of companies can’t answer: what do your customers want?

The easiest way to really understand your customer is to listen to what they have to say and incorporate that into your offer. Listening is essential in order to get to know your customers better, understand their needs, and get to the core of their problems. It also helps businesses offer better services by working on what can be improved until they reach a point where the company exceeds customer expectations every time.

Collecting customer feedback will give you all sorts of insights into what your customers want and expect from you: faster delivery, better communication, and a good customer experience.

Treatwell allows customers to leave a review after each treatment they receive

Matching customer feedback with your business’ data will provide a clearer picture of the situation, improve your customer experience, and go after the right opportunities. Observing a dip in numbers and receiving negative feedback from your customers could help you understand where your business needs to invest more efforts and what can be improved for future customers. So if you’re not collecting consumer insights just yet, don’t panic!

Here are three easy ways to start: 

1. Give consumer surveys a try
Typeform and SurveyMonkey are great tools you can use to easily conduct a survey.

2. Check your customer reviews
If you don’t have a review management strategy in place already, use trusted third-party sites applicable (for example: Trustpilot for online businesses, Tripadvisor for travel, and Yelp for local businesses).

3. Social listening is essential
Leverage social listening to get a snapshot of what your customers are saying about you online.

Personalizing The Customer Experience

If you’re not personalizing your eCommerce website or marketing experiences, then you’re already behind. In fact, 75% of consumers are more likely to buy from a retailer that recognizes them by name and recommends options based on their past purchases.

Shoppers go through a considerable amount of research before deciding with which company they’ll engage. In such a competitive market, it’s important to employ strategies that will help you stand out – and one of the best ways of doing that is to personalize your customer experience with insightful and relevant content like offers, podcasts, blogs, videos, products or even events.

Personalizing the customer experience with relevant pieces of information creates better brand awareness and loyalty, encourages customer relationships, and elevates your brand as a thought leader.

ASOS’s personalized mobile experience

Gartner says smart personalization could also enable digital businesses to increase their profits up to 15% by 2020.

If you want to start seeing results this season, try one of these five ways to implement personalized marketing into your business strategy:

1. Pop-ups
Try an add-on website app, like Sumo, for a free solution that’s easy to set up

2. Emails
Cart abandonment emails are a great place to start

3. Limited-time offers
The holiday season offers plenty of opportunities to offer an extra incentive

4. Recommendations
Use buyer history to suggest purchases that turn one-time buyers into repeat customers

5. Content
Share the images, videos, blog posts, or other content that educates visitors and keeps them coming back

Implementing these strategies will help you retain the extra traffic you’ll get during the holiday season, improve your customers’ shopping experience, and increase your conversion rate.

In our next blog post, we’ll cover three more strategies to help you anticipate consumers’ needs, reduce shopping friction, and ensure your user experience is as good as it can be in time for the festive season. Stay tuned!

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