Referral Program

How To Unlock The Potential Of Brand Advocates With Advocacy Marketing

A few years back, influencer marketing was an up-and-coming modality that was setting the industry ablaze. Today, the phrases “advocacy marketing” or “advocate marketing” are beginning to flood the internet in the same fashion that influencer marketing once did.

The reason these buzzwords are cropping up all over the web is because advocacy marketing is a powerful new way to drive significant results. Advocate marketing is no flash in the pan or passing trend, either. This marketing tactic has the potential to become one of the most universally lauded and leveraged modalities because of who it leverages and how.

Advocate marketing is all about your customers. These are the superstars of your content, campaigns, and growth. Advocacy marketing works by engaging your most loyal of followers and leveraging these supporters, or “advocates”, to help spread your business through word-of-mouth advertising. And word-of-mouth is the most powerful form of promotion there is.

As it stands, 92% of consumers trust the recommendations of other individuals, even if they don’t know them personally. This is part of why consumer reviews are so critical. And in the age of social media, word-of-mouth praise can travel further than ever before. Hence why advocate marketing is becoming so important.

But it’s not just the peer-to-peer influence that advocate marketing can breathe new life into; it can generate compelling new content, bring brand loyalty to astonishing new heights, and help you build a full-fledged community around your brand.

If you are finding your interest piqued by the potential benefits this form of marketing can bring, then read on. Regardless if you are B2B or B2C, this is how you can establish your own community of brand advocates.

Getting Started

Truth be told, assembling a community of brand advocates is not rocket science and can even be fairly simple. Start by compiling a list a customers from your CRM and email them with the simple ask of posting an online review or referring someone they know to your company. Once they have completed said task, recognize their service and send them a gift card, a free product, or even just a heartfelt email thanking them.

Once you run through your list, however, you cannot continue to spam the same group of people. They will get tired of your requests and burnt out on your brand. This is why building an all-out community is necessary.

A Company Congregation

In order for advocacy marketing to provide you more than a few referrals and a handful of reviews, it is pertinent to build a community of advocates. The first step in building this digital colony relies on setting goals. Without the proper objectives and milestones in place, your program will be no more than the blind leading the blind. Establish the goals you wish to achieve through an advocacy program and align these with your business’s overall ambitions.

The next step is arguably the most important aspect of advocate marketing – get intimate with your audience. Your advocates will not take action unless your company compels them to. In order to be compelling, you must know your advocates inside and out; where they work, their interests, pain points, hobbies, hopes, dreams, and so forth. As with any marketing campaign, your message will never land if you don’t know the audience you are aiming for.

While knowing your advocates is massively important, so are the tasks or challenges that you send them. If you continually send requests to refer people or share your latest blog post, people will lose interest – fast. Keep folks entertained; send out quizzes, quirky assignments, games, and other materials that will keep advocates entertained and intrigued. Gamification is a powerful motivational tool; you can establish a points systems with leaderboards so that there is a competitive element to your community. Make them smile, laugh, and most importantly, want to engage with what you are sending out. You want folks to look forward to your emails.

As the community grows, remember that this is not an isolated following; engage other teams within your company as they can benefit just as much. Advocates can provide insights to your content and marketing teams, beta testers for product development, feedback for customer service, new leads for sales, and can help virtually support any other team within your organization. Be sure to also educate all involved teams so that they can have a clear understanding of how advocates can be leveraged.

At a certain point, you will need to build a dedicated location for your advocates to convene. Establishing a central advocate “hangout” gives these folks a sense of community, allows them to engage with each other, lets them swap ideas and stories, and enables a deeper sense of connection, making the community even stronger and more valuable.

In many ways, advocacy marketing is the future of marketing itself. The internet and social media has taken the power out of the hands of advertisers and placed it squarely in those of the consumer. Advocate marketing plays into that dynamic and amplifies the messages that your customers are already sharing. If you want your marketing dollars to go further than ever, and your brand loyalty to run deeper than you ever thought possible, it’s time to enter into the arena of advocacy marketing.

About The Author

Conscious online marketer, Web executive, and multi-faceted writer, Tina Courtney has been creating and fostering online innovations since 1996. She’s produced and marketed innovative content for major players like Disney and JDate, as well as boutique startups galore, with fortes including social media, SEO, influencer marketing, community management, lead generation, and project management. Tina is also a certified Reiki practitioner, herbalist, and accomplished life coach. Connect with her on LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+. Learn more here.

New Age Referral Marketing: The Next Big Thing

Referral marketing as a concept is not a new one. In fact the Manchester Business School conducted a study (1998) on word-of-mouth marketing, citing unique examples that date back to the time of Aristotle. Though the study may be dated, the underlying principles governing referral marketing remains the same; that people love to have their opinion heard, and love to know what their friends and family are saying about products and services.

A more recent global study by Nielsen backs this up with its finding that 84% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family and they’re 4 times more likely to make a purchase in response to a referral. While a Landmark study found that word-of-mouth drives 13% of consumer sales.

What has changed with the advent of modern media channels is the way we communicate and – due to its instantaneous accessibility – modern media has catapulted word-of-mouth into a whole new era, securing its place in the top three most effective marketing strategies. Modern media is the referral marketers’ “new best friend”; one which is constantly developing and expanding, and generating ever greater potential for customer conversion.

ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo) has been reaching out to key influencers to get their expert opinions regarding new age referral marketing and why they believe it is the next big thing. This week we had an opportunity to interview marketing mover and shaker, John Jantsch, on the growing impact of social media on how customers’ engage with their favorite brands.

John Jantsch is a marketing consultant, speaker and author of Duct Tape Marketing, Duct Tape Selling, The Commitment Engine and The Referral Engine. He founded the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network to train and license small business marketing consultants around the world, and his blog is recognized by Forbes as one of the 100 Best Websites for Entrepreneurs.

Q. Why should marketers care about word of mouth marketing?

John: Well I guess the simple answer is because it’s going on whether you care or not. People are talking about your brand, but are you directing, shaping and amplifying it in a way that generates new business? Being shared is the new currency of marketing.

Q. What are the top 3 trends in referral marketing for 2016?

John: The funny thing is that referral marketing doesn’t really change that much. People are wired to talk about experiences they enjoy. The only thing that’s really changed is the way they share. It’s become essential that marketers make it very easy for people talk about their products and services in all of the various places people publish information today.

Q. How can a business generate positive ROI from a referral program?

John: When you understand the lifetime value of a loyal customer and further understand the marketing cost of acquiring a loyal customer it’s pretty easy to generate very positive ROI from a referral program which typically converts new clients at a far lower cost than any other form of lead conversion.

The Revolution Is Here

The overriding reason why referral marketing is so effective is because it taps into the very basic human need that is your customers have to be heard; to know that what they’re saying – their opinions – about products and services counts for something. Your customer is inquisitive to see if others value their input about their favorite brands and willingly then act on this information by trying out the new-to-them product or purchase.

New age referral marketing channels give your customers an opportunity to gratify this need. That is the beauty of social media; it’s made it possible for people from all walks of life to easily have their say and so become market “influencers” in their own (small) way.

To learn more about our influencer – John Jantsch – you can find him on www.ducttapemarketing.com or follow him on Twitter

To learn more about how Zinrelo (f.k.a. ShopSocially) can help you leverage a referral program to grow your business click here or call us at +1 650 701 7759 today.

Demandware, Avenue And Zinrelo Unveils How To Enhance Your Conversions By 40% This Holiday Season

Marketers often look forward to holiday season as much as customers do. The onset of a festive season always sets the tone right for shopping and customers plan to spend more lavishly than they usually do. This undoubtedly creates an incredible opportunity for marketers to make more sales. Though it is a reason for marketers to beam with excitement, more traffic does not necessarily mean more sales. With the modern day online shopping trend, Merchants need to catch up and adopt modern-day marketing strategies and use Social to exploit every chance of making a sale.

That’s the reason why Avenue, Demandware and ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo) joined hands to present a special three-way webinar to showcase how the right use of Social and referral marketing strategies can help marketers fetch up to 40% more revenue from their holiday traffic.

This blog post includes the recording and presentation used in the webinar and highlights the strategies that helped Avenue, a leader in plus size fashion clothing reap 11X more ROI.

Recording of the webinar:

Presentation of the webinar:

Demandware, Avenue and ShopSocially Webinar – How merchants can get up to 40% more conversions from their holiday traffic? from Shop Socially

Key highlights from the webinar:

Holiday season is a reason enough for marketers to be excited over the expected rush of more number of visitors on their sites. However more number of visitors does not necessarily mean high quality traffic. It is in fact most likely that due to SEO and SMO campaigns there is a rush of low quality traffic that mainly comprise of window shoppers. Another challenge during Christmas and Thanksgiving is that of a clutter of deals. These endless deals often urge customers to hop from site to site before their final purchase. Photo sharing is popular, however it often limits at friends and family pics sharing and does not happen enough in the direction of people sharing their purchase experiences or product stories. Lastly, the holiday email campaigns’ clutter swamps people’s inbox only to irritate them and dissuade them from looking at some genuine offers.

Advantage ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo):

ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo) Omni Channel Marketing Solutions platform comprises of a referral program that helps in new customer acquisition, modules which remove conversion barriers and provide social proof, and loyalty solutions which ensure that clients come back for more. Complementing these functions is a list of features including easy personalization, detailed reporting, A/B testing, and mobile friendliness. ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo) offers seamlessly integrated apps plugin for major ecommerce platforms such as Demandware.

Avenue’s Journey:

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%.

The second ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo) app Avenue embedded was Share-a-Purchase app, which turns buyers into brand ambassadors by allowing them to share their purchases with friends in return for a small discount on their next purchase. The app has also helped acquire new customers via referrals, generate real-time social buzz, and increase repeat purchases by 26%.

Together with the Social Connect App, Share-a-Purchase App helped Avenue get thousands of word-of-mouth referrals on social media, improve their standing on search engine results pages through social sharing and backlinks, and enjoy a 11.5x ROI on their efforts. Individually, the first app converted visitors at a 28.48% rate while the latter converted at a 14.88% rate.

ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo) Strategies:

Sameer Palnitkar, Director of Zinrelo (f.k.a. ShopSocially) highlighted more strategies that can help marketers achieve up to 40% more conversions.

Customer Acquisition suite

Referral Program: ShopSocially’s (a.k.a. Zinrelo) referral marketing program delivers 10-15% increase in high quality traffic. Referrals are the most trusted sources of traffic. When referred by a friend or relative, people are 4X times more likely to buy.

Conversion suite

Social Login: Usually registration acts as a hugebarrier making it one of the main culprits against conversions. Social Login eliminates the need to create a different login identity every time a user wants to use a website. This often brings in a pleasant experience makingonline shopping more successful in terms of conversions.

Visual commerce: Visual commerce is all about picking photos from Instagram, Twitter and Facebook and displaying it on the website. This shows how several customers are using certain brands, which in turn is helping create social proofs that initiate quick purchases.

Customer Q & A: The Customer Q & A App is interestingly can be tracked and fully moderated. This necessarily creates authentic user generated content that helps remove the conversion barriers, boosts SEO and also shows that other people are buying the products. This leads to an increased engagement rate and naturally leads to more conversions.

Loyalty Suite:Having existing customers comeback to you, is like having gold on one’s hands. Going beyond the traditional Loyalty Programs and rewards for social actions; a 360 degree social loyalty solution is a modern-day strategic app that is set up in tiers, has qualification points, redemption points etc. Having this loyalty program gives immense retention value, as 80% of any company’s future revenue is generated from just 20% of their existing customers.

Some excerpts from the question and answer section of the webinar:

Question: How Customer Q & A helps to boost SEO?

Answer: Customer Q & A helps you publish user generated content on your website. This is organic content by customers for customers which is considered highly useful and ranked high by Google and other search engines. This put together gives you better SEO.

Question: How to get ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo) App on Demandware platform?

Answer: Demandware merchants can simply install the ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo) plugin on Demandware Link Marketplace, with help of the installation guide and contact ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo) to sign an agreement and get a partner _id. Within few hours you will be up and running with your chosen programs on your site.

For more details how to employ these referral marketing strategies for your brand, please write to us at [email protected] or click here to request a free demo.

6 Reasons Customers Trust Social Word Of Mouth More Than Display Ads

When it comes to increasing conversions, there is no better way than by word-of-mouth marketing and we don’t mean in the traditional sense but social word-of-mouth marketing. Many businesses aren’t realizing the potential social media has for sales as they have usually been told by marketers that social media is only good for brand awareness … this is not the case. Social media is the modern day word-of-mouth marketing and if used to its full potential, could increase your sales as well as achieve a higher ROI than display advertising would.

By getting recommendations on social media from customers and social media influencers, their followers, friends and family will instantly have trust with your brand. Referrals that have come through these social media recommendations will have a much higher chance of converting than users who have come to your site through a display advertisement. Why? Because customers trust other customers, friends and family.

What is Social Word of Mouth

Social word-of-mouth marketing is quite simply the traditional word-of-mouth marketing ramped up to fit into the modern day.

Word-of-Mouth in 1995 – I go for a bit of window shopping and spot a food processor that I end up buying. After trying it out at home and loving it, I naturally tell my friends and family that they should get one too. I would tell them either the next time I saw them (whenever that might be) or over the phone whilst having to describe the way it looked and worked.

Word-of-Mouth in 2015 – I browse online for a food processor and spot one that I like the look of after watching a video online. I buy the product and tell everyone via Facebook that I have just bought a food processor along with a link to it so they can see for themselves. After trying it out at home and loving it, I share a photo of it again on Facebook and tell everyone to get one.

The difference between these two is that it would take a lot longer in 1995 to spread the word than it does today. Now customers can share their purchases instantly with hundreds or thousands of people, whereas in 1995 customers could share their purchases with a few people over a period of time.

Why Social Word of Mouth Marketing is More Effective

Now that you know what social word-of-mouth marketing is it’s time to look at the main advantages it has over display advertising:

1. People Trust Friends & Family – One of the main reasons why social word-of-mouth marketing works over display ads is that people trust recommendations from their friends and family over an impersonal ad. In fact a recent survey showed that 92% of people trust their friends and family over all other forms of advertising.

2. Better Targeting Than Display – Customers who have bought from you know who out of their friends and family will also want to buy the same product resulting in a much targeted reach. With display advertising you are never 100% sure where exactly your ads are showing and who they are showing to resulting in worthless CPC costs.

3. Social Reach is a Lot Greater – If a social media influencer likes the look of a product you sell or has bought it and loves it; they are going to spread the word on social media. Because social influencers have tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of followers who are all inspired by what this person wears or does, those tens of thousands of people will also be excited about your product and share it themselves to their hundreds of followers, and each of those hundreds of followers will also share, and so on and so forth. Now can you see why social word-of-mouth marketing is a winner? Can display advertising generate this much genuine excitement and interest?

4. Higher Conversion Rates and a Greater ROI – The part that all businesses want to know… the bottom line. Coming back to the people trust their friends and family point, those that have been referred to you through social media by their friends and family will be more likely to buy from you than those that have clicked on your ad for the first time to see what you are all about. If you’re still not convinced, a study proved that 68% of 18-34 years old social media users said they were more inclined to make a purchase after seeing a post about the product from a friend, family member or social influencer.

5. Go Viral with Referral Marketing – Whilst talking about social word-of-mouth marketing is great, it’s another thing to get the ball rolling and get customers and social influencers to start talking about your brand. One way you can do this is with the Refer-a-Friend app which is a simple widget that can be integrated with your website. This app will expose your referral marketing program at different points of purchases on the website to give the user a chance to share your site on social media. This referral marketing program results in acquiring more referrals from customers. You can use rewards such as discount codes and reward points to motivate customers to spread the word about your products.

6. Establish Trust With Visual Social Proof – As social media users tend to engage more with visual content, it makes sense to encourage customers to share their images of products they have purchased on social media for all their followers, friend and family to see. Having customers share their images will result in higher conversion rates that display advertising as customers trust and buy from other customers. Display advertising doesn’t have this trust factor or this personable approach. How can you get customers to share their images? Using the Photomonial app, you can display a photo gallery on your website as well as customer images on product pages to act as visual testimonials. After setting a hashtag of your desire, you can encourage customers to share their snaps with the product on social media using your chosen hashtag and their photo will be featured on your website. This is a great reward system to encourage customers to share their photos and it’s a great way to reach out to customer’s followers who might not yet know about you or might not know of the product. By using visual social proofs, you could potentially see a 21% increase in conversion rates.

Daniel’s Jewelers is using the Photomonial app and has an impressive photo gallery on their site full of customer generated images. They are now converting 4.84% of all website visitors into email subscribers by using social proof as their social word-of-mouth marketing.

Conclusion

The one thing to remember with marketing and advertising is, people trust other customers, their friends and their family. In order for your brand to be deemed trustworthy, you must encourage those that have bought from you to talk about you and share their purchases and your site on their social media timelines.

Social media is important in today’s world so the more you open your arms to it and work with it rather than against it, your business will see increased sales and a higher ROI than what you would get from display advertising.

6 Strategies To Get Maximum Referrals From Your Referral Campaign

It’s no secret that referrals are among the most efficient ways companies get new leads and new business. It’s one of the best ways to be awarded from a customer as they are referring others to you, which indicates they find your business not only successful, but also loyal and efficient.

People and businesses alike put trust into word of mouth referrals through friends, family and colleagues. If you have ever purchased a product simply because you had heard good things, you have been referred. This is a great way of introducing people to new business, and this tactic needs to be applied when marketing your online strategy.

Why Referral Marketing Should Be Part Of Your Marketing Strategy?

Referral Marketing is all about driving your customers to recruit new customers and for them to buy your products or services, and it relies massively on using incentives to drive this recruitment. As a referral is extremely valuable to business, you want to make the referral process as easy as possible for customers.

Many online companies turn to referral marketing as it has proven an effective way of securing links and new customers from existing customers. Due to the popularity of social channels, it can spread faster than traditional offline marketing strategies.

How To Acquire Maximum Referrals?

A referral is an extremely beneficial factor for your business, and therefore you want to make the process as easy as possible for customers. I have put together the top factors that will increase the reach of your referral programme to ensure new business continues to come in.

1. Strategic Placement- So, you have set up a referral program for your company- but are your website visitors aware of it? You need to tell your audience of your programme and that referrals are appreciated and wanted by your company. There is a range of different ways you can position the program on your website; one format is a pop-up. Avenue, a fashion leader for plus size clothing, used a pop-up to highlight its referral programme, ensuring all visitors would have to view it as soon as they entered the site. This helped them to draw high quality referral traffic to the website. Other methods of placing your program include a banner at the top of your website or in a purchase confirmation email to customers.

2. Advertise It – Share the program across all your online channels including social media, email marketing campaigns, blogs and your email signature with links to the referral signup page. When sharing it, make sure you ask those who receive it, to share it through their network- Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. By referring friends through social media can increase the reach of your program and potentially make it viral!

Make sure your referral campaign is visible to everyone- make sure it’s on your website homepage, your about us page and also the checkout page and invite existing customers to check it out!

3. Rewards- In order to maintain strong relationships with existing clients, create a referral program that offers them a reward, or a thank you, for referring new business to you. For example, if you are a shoe store, why not offer a 10% discount code for customers who have their friends sign up to your newsletter. It will encourage them to discuss your business and at the same time benefiting from new leads. Companies such as Airbnb and Uber both offer customers money off their next purchase if they are successful in referring a friend.

4. Social Media– Today, social channels play a massive part in the referral process. Therefore, you need to create a regular plan on what to share on social media. People use these channels to find out advice and research on your business. Ensure you have a plan that will continue to help people and direct them to your referral program on your website. Keep promoting your referral program along with your regular posts on social media for followers to keep on top of the program. This way, you can maximize your customers’ exposure to your programme.

5. Post- Purchase Referral- In any purchase cycle, customers are most happy when they complete their order; This is one of the best times to nudge them into recommending your brand to their friends. Incentives such as free delivery or a discount code for next time they shop are both easy ways of converting customer delight into customer referrals. Through sharing a purchase via social media or email, buyers can turn into your very own brand ambassadors. There are a number of unique apps, for example, the Share-a-Purchase app from ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo) that can be easily integrated to leverage the post-purchase excitement of customers into referrals.

6. Target Audience- As with any business, it’s important to acknowledge the main purpose of your marketing plan- your audience. Research around your customers before you begin your program. Discover what the average customer is purchasing or searching for. You need to do have good incentives that are encouraging them to participate in it. Look into their buying habits and tailor your work to suit your customers’ needs.

Although a Referral Marketing Strategy can take time and a lot of hard work, seeing the results which you have achieved can be very rewarding. It’s a strategic plan which should be a vital part of your marketing plan in continuing to develop your business.

If you do this correctly, you will continue to build new relationships with clients, but also be maintaining them with existing clients.

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

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® 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.

For more details how to employ these referral marketing strategies for your brand, please write to us at [email protected] or contact us here.

From Bankruptcy to 11.05X ROI–How Social Commerce Can Turn Around A Retailer’s Business Altogether

Marketers often complain of limited impact of their social strategies. Mostly these are instances when social media is seen more as a communication channel with its impact restricted to brand building contests and some other funny social antics on their Facebook pages. Some go bit more ahead and use Twitter for their customer conversations, but still fail to grab the real benefits that social media promises to offer. What these marketers lack is the understanding of potent power of social media as an influence to impact sales. With proper application of this influence, and including this influence seamlessly in their overall marketing plan, marketers can realize real meaningful uplift in revenue using social media.

An excellent example of this is the success of Avenue® with social commerce. Just two years back, Avenue® was on a rocky path staring at bankruptcy. But when a change of ownership resulted in renewed marketing efforts; which encompassed social media as an integrated part of the marketing plan; things soon changed. Social now started delivering rapid increase in conversions, got customers to recommend Avenue® brand to their friends and resulted in profitable new customer acquisition through referral channel.

Avenue® initially tried the traditional routes of email marketing; but soon realized that the spike in traffic – and resultant business – was momentary. “We found that we were talking to a lot of the same people over and over again,” says Kristen St. Peter, Director of Ecommerce at Avenue®. “Our email list isn’t our entire customer base, or even everyone who shops our website.”

Avenue® also delved into paid social options using tricks like lookalike targeting, but the real ROI-positive impact was realized only when they started using onsite social commerce modules on their e-commerce site. Using ShopSocially’s (a.k.a. Zinrelo) platform, they got their customers to share Avenue® brand with their friends on social media. By encouraging social sharing of purchases, Avenue® converted its customers into brand ambassadors. The highly effective social commerce strategy helped Avenue to drive word-of-mouth promotions resulting in a referral traffic that is converting at a rate as high as 28.48%.

Kristen St. Peter, Director for E-Commerce at Avenue®, shared more details on these social commerce strategies in a webinar with ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo). Kristen presented how they are: