I have been listening to a few great webinars recently. And with some help from an impressive digital retail agency by the name of Fluid, and from Paul Marsden, I have done my best to summarise some of the key points. So here goes; how to deploy an effective social commerce makeover for your brand:
1. Start selling on Social Platforms – Open a Facebook store and simply experiment. It’s fast, inexpensive and simple to implement. It should not only drive your online sales; but will doubtless increase your Facebook followers too.
2. Add Mobile into the social mix – Allow users to share content to mobile via SMS. This is one of the fastest areas of growth in the market. If you implement a share by SMS icon to your site, your sales will jump.
3. Implement Facebook Social Plugins – start by adding the Like button to product pages on your e-commerce site. By doing this, you get your product onto Facebook walls – where click through rates are a fantastic 6.5%. This drives traffic to your e-commerce site. The Like button is the new mini review. See Tripadvisor.
4. Cross-sell/Up-sell with personal recommendations – 90% of people trust recommendations from people they know vs. 70% who trust anonymous reviews, and 67% of people spend more online after recommendations from friends. Therefore make allowing people to make personal recommendation on your site a priority! See Levi’s.
5. Integrate chat on your e-commerce site – so friends can shop together and discuss products. Luggage brand JanSport saw a 59% increase in product views and a 147% increase in time on site after integrating a Chat feature on its site.
6. Make your website your social flagship – social features are not just for social media platforms. You should use them on your website, by adding social media conversation feeds to your site, whilst exporting your content to social media platforms. Give your customers a multitude of reasons to keep coming back!
7. Bring the in-store experience online to social media platforms – to make all your channels social. Such examples could be live webcasts of in-store events.