Avenue® reveals secret of 11.05X ROI from referral marketing in ShopSocially webinar

New research shows a 222% increase in customer acquisition costs, this puts renewed focus on e-commerce profitability and repeat sales. A loyalty program enables brands to retain their loyal customers.

Leader in plus-size fashion industry, Avenue® converted its brand into a word-of-mouth powerhouse using effective referral marketing strategies. Using ShopSocially’s (a.k.a. Zinrelo) premium social, referral and retention platform, Avenue® drove high-quality referral traffic to its site and got an impressive ROI of 11.05X. In a webinar conducted by ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo), Kristen St. Peter, Director, E-Commerce at Avenue® shared how they achieved this referral marketing success story.

ShopSocially’s (a.k.a. Zinrelo) platform helped Avenue® derive the following benefits-

1000s of customer referrals in form of viral social posts
Impressive sales conversion rate of 28.48% for users who connected with Avenue® brand through Facebook Connect
11.05X ROI for referral marketing efforts
88% high sales conversion rate for referral traffic generated through social sharing of purchases
Overall increase in customer engagement and brand engagement

This blog post includes the recording and presentation used in the webinar and highlights the strategies that converted Avenue’s brand into a word-of-mouth powerhouse.

Recording of the webinar:

Presentation of the webinar:

ShopSocially Webinar – How Customer Referrals are Transforming Avenue® into a Word-of-Mouth Powerhouse at a 11.05X ROI from Shop Socially

Key highlights from the webinar:

Avenue® used ShopSocially’s (a.k.a. Zinrelo) Social Connect app on its website to encourage users to share their love for the brand on Facebook. As users connected with the brand, they created a social post and endorsed Avenue® brand on Facebook. Each social post acted as a referral and brought in quality referral traffic to the website. Entire interaction happened on site and users did not leave the website. High quality referral traffic originating from these referrals converted at a high rate of 28.48%.

Avenue® witnessed amazing results from this strategy as below:

Viral and non-stop email acquisition via Facebook Connect
Acquisition of pre-verified email addresses used for Facebook login
Word-of-mouth spread of brand through social posts by real users
Uplift in SEO rank through social sharing and back links generated by Social Connect
Access to rich social profile data of users like email, birthday, gender, locations, friends, friends’ interests etc.

ShopSocially’s (a.k.a. Zinrelo) Share-a-Purchase app encouraged Avenue’s customers to share their purchases on social media. Customers delight is at its highest when they complete a purchase. Using this app, Avenue® leveraged this customer delight and incentivized their customers to share their purchases with friends on social media. This created numerous social testimonials from real customers for Avenue® and drove high quality referral traffic to its website which converted at a high rate of 14.88%.

Referral marketing strategies brought in tremendous value for Avenue®. Socially shared customer referrals carried the good word for the brand far and wide and resulted in high yield word-of-mouth promotions for Avenue®.

Excerpts from the question and answer section of the webinar:

Question: How can marketers run targeted campaigns using the social profile data acquired through Social Connect app?
Answer: Social Connect enables marketers to acquire rich social profile data of users, which can be leveraged in 2 ways:

Aggregated Social Profile Data: By aggregating social profile data, marketers can get deep insights into social persona of its customer base. Marketers can understand age and gender distribution, location spread, brand’s social reach and most importantly preferences of customers. Aggregation of Facebook Likes of customers can help marketer design a customized marketing message, ad creative or campaign which will immediately connect with its customer base.
Discrete Social Profile Data of users: Marketers can offer individually customized offers to its customers based on information like birthdays, anniversary, etc. Marketers can offer differential rewards to individuals based on reach of her social circle (i.e. number of friends) and explicitly mentioned interests on Facebook. This makes campaigns highly targeted and extremely effective.

Question: Apart from having product reviews, is there a way these reviews can be showcased on the website?
Answer: Yes, ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo) can pull in the reviews; comments shared by users on social media and showcase them as an internal element on the website. This data can be made available through an API channel, and can be embedded deeply with website interface. These reviews can also be showcased on Facebook page in form of trending products gallery. The product recommendations act as social proof that can go a long way in converting a tentative website visitor into a paying customer.

ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo) is a comprehensive platform for social, referral and loyalty solutions. 1000s of brands are using ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo) platform to enable referral marketing, visual commerce, customer loyalty, social login, social gamification and other such programs on their site.