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Is Social Media Key To The Future Of Loyalty Programs: Interview With Shep Hyken

Loyalty programs have come a long way from the days when companies merely rewarded customers for their purchases. They have become a cornerstone of companies’ capacity to build a base of dedicated brand ambassadors. According to recent statistics from Colloquy, 76% of customers see loyalty programs as an important part of their relationship with brands.

This is where harnessing the power of social media becomes pivotal. Adapting your loyalty program to reward customers for 360? social engagement is the key to building lasting relationships with customers. And enduring customer relationships are crucial to companies not just surviving but thriving in the cut-throat world of eCommerce.

In order to gain insight into the latest trends governing loyalty programs, ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo) has been connecting with though leaders in the customer service field. To this end, we set out to interview Shep Hyken, a customer experience expert and the Chief Amazement Officer of Shepard Presentations. Shep is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author and has been inducted into the National Speakers Association Hall of Fame for lifetime achievement in the speaking profession.

According to Bain & Company, customers who engage with companies via social media feel more connected to them and tend to spend an average of 20–40% more with them. This brings us to our first question for Shep.

Q: Is social loyalty the future of loyalty programs for eCommerce?
Shep: Social media gives the customer a voice, amplified like never before. Asking customers to share their comments (both good and bad) suggests that the company wants to deliver an experience that earns them accolades. It raises the bar for employees and benefits the customer. The visibility of interactions is a showcase opportunity for the company. Rewards for leaving comments are an incentive for the customer, but I caution that there needs to be a balance between rewarding loyalty and “bribing” customers for their loyalty.

It is evident that advancement in technology and the rising power of social media are shaping the trends in new age loyalty programs. Tapping on the upcoming trends will aid marketers preserve customer loyalty and drive positive ROI in 2016. Let’s look at some of the imminent trends growing in the customer loyalty arena shared by Shep.

Q: What do you see as the top 3 customer loyalty trends for 2016?
Shep: Many trends occur as a result of growing online/social media opportunities.
• The number one trend I see is the use of analytics. Companies will have better tracking of customers’ activities due to better systems. It’s far beyond a “punch card” for each visit or points rewarded for purchases. Companies will be able to track a large amount of data empowering them to make decisions based on trends in demographics, regions and even individuals.
• Technology enables the customization of loyalty programs. Companies will do more than give points. They will give perks and rewards that are tied to their customers’ behaviors; buying history and more. Generic rewards can become customized rewards.
• Loyal customers will allow their favorite places of business to have more information about them. When customers trust the company, they will give the company personal information – including a cell phone number – and allow the company to communicate via that very personal and valuable channel. Customers may also allow the company to track in-store and buying behaviors. The trick is for companies to not abuse these relationships with irrelevant promotions that will prompt customers to want to end the relationship.

It is crucial for marketers to take an educated guess as to where to focus their marketing resources; how to identify effective strategies; track customer purchasing trends and much more so they can adapt their loyalty programs accordingly and maximize ROI. Advanced analytics tools embedded into socially driven loyalty programs can pinpoint the precise scenario in front of marketers for quantification of ROI and easy decision making. In the next question, Shep shares his views on quantification of ROI for socially driven loyalty programs.

Q. Can social media be integrated into loyalty programs for quantification of ROI?
Shep: The nice thing about social media for loyalty programs – or many/any other programs – is that there are analytics. It’s easy to collect data and quantify trends and ROI.

In the increasingly competitive world of eCommerce, the value of loyalty programs should not be underestimated. Customers are looking to engage with their favorite companies; by giving them the opportunity to do so via a variety of channels, including social media, and rewarding them accordingly, companies can realize the full potential of their loyalty programs to maximize their market share and secure devoted brand ambassadors.

To learn more about our influencer Shep Hyken click here or follow him on Twitter

To learn more about how Zinrelo (f.ka. ShopSocially) can help you leverage customer loyalty to grow your business click here or download our Loyalty Best Practices guide for more information.

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.

5 Must-Have Strategies for 10X Social ROI – Webinar

Social media features by default in all marketing plans of today’s marketers. But they are still often clueless on how to harness the true power of social channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Email effectively to achieve maximum social ROI. To help marketers get maximum juice out of their social media efforts, Yahoo! and ShopSocially joined hands to present a joint webinar to showcase 5 must-have strategies to generate 10X social ROI. This blog post has recording and other details of this webinar.

Recording of the Webinar:

Presentation used in the Webinar:

5 Must-Have Strategies to Boost Conversion, Get Referrals, and Generate 10x ROI – Webinar by ShopSocially and Yahoo! from Shop Socially

5 Must-Have Strategies for 10X Social ROI:

1. Move to Viral Email Acquisition: Marketers should replace their traditional email marketing widgets with Facebook Connect. This will acquire not only email but complete social profile of user. Rich social profile data like birthday, gender, location, interests, friends, etc. can be collected via this method. ShopSocially’s Social Connect app helps you achieve this.

2. Drive Customer Acquisition via Referral Programs: All marketers know referral marketing but very few actually add the social flavour to it. To maximize social ROI, customer referrals should be made social in nature. Your customers recommending your site to their friends on social media becomes the most potent brand endorsement you can ever get. ShopSocially’s Refer-a-Friend app can enable this for your site.

3. Encourage Visual Commerce by Converting Selfies into Sales: Its a visual web today, and selfies are the best manifestation of it. Your customers are already sharing photos of your brand or products on channels like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. Aggregating them via a hashtag into a nice visually attractive gallery can convert these selfies into a sales machine. Adding such gallery on your product page acts as social proof and increases conversions. ShopSocially’s Photomonials app is what you need to employ this strategy.

4. Use Social Login to Increase Conversions: In today’s socially connected world, enabling social login is an intuitive thing, but is often ignored by marketers. Social Login seamlessly extends users’ default social browsing behaviour onto your site and reduces “password fatigue” of remembering login details across multiple sites. Social Login reduces transaction/ cart abandonment rate, increases user engagement and drives sales conversion uplift. Use ShopSocially’s Social Login app to get this strategy for your site.

5. Increase Loyalty by Rewarding Customers for Social Actions: Loyalty program has been one of the surest ways of increasing customer loyalty and driving sales from existing customers. But in today’s social media dominated world, these loyalty programs now need to incorporate social into it. Reward your customers with loyalty points for their social actions on your site. This will increase social actions on your site and enhance customer loyalty, driving multiple repeat purchases. ShopSocially’s Social Loyalty Program is the go-to app for this.

Excerpt from the Question and Answers Section of Webinar

Question: How does social couponing help in referral marketing?
Answer: By using social couponing in referral marketing, we get customers to invest their social capital in availing the offer. As users put an effort to refer the site to their friends, they feel they have “earned” the coupon. This makes them value the coupon more than other giveaway coupons, leading to a higher conversion of coupon and an uplift in sales conversion rate.

Question: How can we use A/B testing for social media campaign? Can you share some test scenarios?
Answer: A/B testing can be used to test various scenarios and evaluate the impact of social campaign in clear business terms. Some sample scenarios are to test campaign creative, placement of app on site, campaign incentive strategy and so on.

ShopSocially is a comprehensive platform for social, referral and retention needs of marketers. 1000s of marketers are using ShopSocially platform to enable referral marketing, visual commerce, customer loyalty, social login and social gamification programs on their site.

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

Boost SEO Rank Using Social Signals – ShopSocially and Americaneagle.com Webinar Tells You How

Social signals are influencing SEO Rank. 7 out of top 8 SEO Ranking factors today are social in nature. Marketers using back-links and keyword optimization to drive SEO are still not aware of the full potential of social for their SEO needs. To help marketers unlock this latent power of social, ShopSocially and Americaneagle.com conducted a webinar to showcase proven strategies to boost SEO Rank using social signals. Below is the recording of the webinar and the presentation used.

Recording of the webinar:

Presentation used in the webinar:

Strategies to Boost SEO Rank Using Social Signals – Webinar by ShopSocially and Americaneagle.com from Shop Socially

Strategies to Boost SEO Rank Using Social:

1. Increase content sharability via onsite social apps:
Google’s official blog now says that sites can rank better if their content is shared often by users. To increase sharing, marketers should embed social apps on their site. Marketers can also incentivize sharing so that customers do social SEO for them. This results in C2C spread of brand on social. By encouraging social sharing of purchases on their e-commerce stores, retailers can convert customer delight on order completion into SEO boost for their sites.

2. Optimize shared content for maximum SEO benefit:
Marketers should ensure that the content snippet shared on social media is optimized to derive maximum SEO benefit. Besides optimizing the title, description and image for SEO purposes, marketers can also influence the share blurb by asking a leading question in the sharing interface. Leveraging Google Authorship is an important tool for content marketers. It shows the author’s Google Plus profile in the search results, increasing the credibility and click-through rate. See the recording/ presentation to find out how to set up Google Authorship.

3. Channel social UGC for SEO benefit:
Customers are already sharing a lot of content about brands on social media. From simple Facebook status updates to rich visual testimonials on Instagram, this social UGC can be used for SEO benefit by getting users to add brand hashtag to it. Hashtag in social SEO is equivalent of keyword in content SEO. It defines the intent of user and increases the searchability of brand on social media. Search engines show more social results when users search for a hashtag.

4. Show social UGC as social proof on site:
Social UGC acts as excellent social proof on website. This is social buzz by real people with their true social profiles, and hence increase the user engagement on site. Also by embedding this social UGC natively on site using Product Stories app of ShopSocially, marketers can have a fresh content on their page regularly, further boosting the SEO Rank.

Excerpt from the Question & Answer Section of Webinar

Question: How do different search engines treat hashtags? Do they show different results?

Answer: All search engines have already integrated hashtags in their index. If user start typing a keyword with hashtag (#) symbol, you will get a different auto-complete suggestions as compared to normal keywords. For example, if user searches on Google for “Social SEO” and “#SocialSEO”, different results are shown. Hashtags as search keywords brings up more social media results. This clearly shows that hashtags are being treated differently and search engines.

Question: What are some of the key considerations to use social signals for enhancing SEO rank of an e-commerce site?

Answer: To ensure that your sharable content is being optimized for SEO, e-commerce sites can do following:

Make sure that product details are included properly in OG tags; product images are indexed and relevant
Link social sharing posts to relevant product URL on your website
Product videos can significantly add to the virality. In fact, YouTube has now become 2nd most popular search engines
Monitor your social community to ensure positive reviews on social network

Question: Are all users created equal or are there some users that may have a bigger impact on SEO?

Answer: Users with a larger and/or more active social network have bigger impact on SEO. For Social brand UGC like Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook visuals, getting a user with an active social network gets more clicks and drives more sharing. With more number of social signals, it has higher SEO impact.

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

Generate Measurable Social ROI | 5 SProven trategies by Demandware and Zinrelo

Retailers are using social media as mainstream marketing channel but are still often unsure when it comes to determining true ROI of their social commerce efforts. Retailers have generated user-engagement and increased brand awareness using social, but haven’t been able to measure the precise business impact in terms of revenue uplift. Demandware and ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo) conducted a webinar to help retailers with 5 proven strategies to generate measurable social ROI. ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo) customer Totally Promotional co-presented the webinar. CEO of Totally Promotional Tom Casad and Social Media Coordinator Erin Siefring added insights from their successful social commerce strategies using ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo) platform which have yielded them 16% increase in sales conversion rate.

Recording of the webinar:

Presentation used in the webinar:

5 Proven Strategies to Generate Measurable Social ROI – Demandware and ShopSocially Webinar from Shop Socially

5 Strategies to Generate Measurable Social ROI:

1. Bring Social to Commerce:

Adding onsite social commerce modules on e-commerce site capitalizes on existing purchase intent of website user and converts them into ‘real’ Facebook fans. Custom canvas printing site Fabness USA used this strategy to acquire 15,000+ ‘real’ Facebook fans who converted at a high rate of 33.28% on their site.

2. Use Social in Right Context:

Identifying the points of customer delight and using social media influence at these points in right context results in maximizing the social impact. Totally Promotional used this strategy for their customized table covers products site Totally Tablecovers to capture customer delight when they received their custom-printed table covers. Customers shared their delight in form of picture testimonials shared on Facebook through mobile. These customer reviews resulted in an increase of 16% in their sales conversion rate.

3. Encourage Social Sharing of Purchases:

Retailers can turn their shoppers into brand ambassadors over social media through social sharing of purchases.Popular firearms manufacturer Beretta used this strategy to encourage their customers to share their purchases on Facebook. This generated word-of-mouth reviews and brought back quality social referral traffic. Beretta earned an average revenue of $19 from each socially shared purchase.

4. Show Social Proof on Product Pages:

Retailers can influence the customer’s purchase psychology through social proof by showcasing reviews from real customers on their product pages. Leading private-sales site for wine invino used this strategy to present real product reviews complete with users Facebook profile. This led to an increase in user engagement and an uplift of 22.22% in sales conversion rate.

5. Generate Deep Insights into Social Persona of Users:

Instead of using the now-obsolete methods of email-acquisition pop-up, retailers can encourage website visitors to connect with their brands using Facebook connect. This allows acquisition of rich social profile along with pre-verified email address and generates deep insights into customers social persona. Beauty retailer Carol’s Daughter used this strategy to identify social influencers among their customer-base. Users who connected with Carol’s Daughter through this method demonstrated a sales conversion rate of 29.79%.

Excerpts from the Question and Answer section of the Webinar:

Question: How does Facebook ads compare to word-of-mouth promotions driven by onsite social commerce apps?
Answer: Users’ comments on Facebook about retailer’s brand generally has a higher CTR as compared to brands driving their message through promoted posts on Facebook. Also, buying Likes through legitimate methods on Facebook has resulted in accumulating fake Likes for brands. This dilutes the engagement rate for retailer, further decreasing the organic reach of brands’ content on Facebook. Please check this viral video titled Facebook Fraud which highlights this effect in detail.

Question:How does social impact SEO rank of a website?
Answer: Social signals are a key driver for SEO Rank. Facebook Likes, Google Plus shares, tweets are impact SEO Rank. In fact, 7 out of top 8 SEO Ranking factors are social in nature. User reviews shared on social network generates backlinks for website further adding to SEO impact of social. For more details on this topic, please check this article titled “Want SEO, Get Social” from Jai Rawat, CEO of ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo).

For more details how to employ these social commerce strategies for your brand, please write to us at [email protected] or visit Zinrelo.com

Zinrelo Webinar Reveals How Wine Retailer invino Increased its Sales Conversion Rate by 133% using Social Media

Based in the heart of Sonoma’s Wine Country, popular wine retailer invino partnered with ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo) and increased its sales conversion rate by 133%. Invino embedded social commerce apps into its website and makes its site more social.

invino used the Refer-a-Friend and Share-a-purchase social apps to promote their daily offers. Refer-a-Friend app increased user-engagement causing a viral loop of referral friend traffic.

ShopSocially’s (a.k.a. Zinrelo) Share-a-Purchase app induced shoppers to unlock the promotion by sharing purchases on various social networks. An incentive well earned has 5-7X higher conversion rate as opposed to an incentive provided as a freebie. Share-a-Purchase helped invino gather rich social profile data. These social insights helped invino to run targeted social campaigns.

Powerful social app Shopping Community increased visitor’s engagement and improved SEO rank. invino embedded the Shopping Community app on its website to reinforce social proof and visitor’s trust in the invino brand.

ShopSocially’s (a.k.a. Zinrelo) social media strategies resulted in impressive gains for invino:

3% of invino’s site visitors referred invino to its friends using Refer-a-Friend.
15.67% sales conversion rate for traffic originating from social referrals.
20.93% sales conversion rate for traffic originating from social sharing of purchases.

ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo) conducted a Webinar to unravel the social media strategies used by the wine retailer, invino. Tony Westfall, CEO at invino, presented the Webinar along with Jai Rawat, CEO of ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo). Wine lovers attending the Webinar actively interacted with questions and comments.

Recorded video of the Webinar:

Presentation used in the Webinar:

ShopSocially Webinar – How Wine Retailer invino Increased its Sales Conversion Rate by 133% using Social Media from Shop Socially

Key Highlights from the Webinar:

ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo) enables brands to convert its visitors and shoppers into brand ambassadors. Social testimonials are the biggest influencers in the user’s decision making. The social testimonials act as a ‘social proof’ and give significant boost to SEO rank of e-commerce website.
Shopsocially’s (a.k.a. Zinrelo) social apps engage website visitors and convert them into rich customer profiles.
Each social action creates a post on social media leading to referral traffic and viral spread of the brand.

Excerpts from the Question and Answer section of the Webinar:

Question: How to get traffic to website on consistent basis for daily sales targets; instead of being lost in the internet.

Answer: The key strategies to get traffic are SEO which gets organic traffic and social media which amplifies existing traffic to get referrals. ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo) helps retailers gather social proof which helps with SEO rank as well as referral traffic.

Question: How did invino best utilize ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo) tools to boost its sales conversion rates?

Answer: Three specific strategies:

Increased Conversion: Users clicked on the Refer-a-Friend app to “earn” a coupon. Such earned coupons convert at 5-7X better rates. This increases the overall conversion on the website.

Repeat Traffic: Shoppers were given an incentive to share their purchases with friends. That incentive was an opportunity to bring shoppers back to the invino site.

Referral Traffic: Each share by shoppers and users resulted in a post on Facebook and Twitter. When friends discovered it and clicked on it, it created referral traffic.

Question: How social action drives SEO rank?
Answer: According to Google’s latest algorithm, sharing of a website is important than back links. Each social action increases sharing, thus driving up the SEO rank.
Additionally, testimonials generated from ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo) can be displayed on product pages as fresh, user-generated content. This is critical for SEO. It bumps up the organic SEO rank of webpage’s.

Zinrelo Webinar Unravels How Plum District is Getting 35% Sales Conversion Rate using Social Media

Plum District is a popular mom-focused daily offers and ecommerce site. It was ranked among the top 100 sites for women by Forbes in 2012 and 2013.

Plum District is using Zinrelo platform to add social commerce modules to their site and make it more social. This is resulting into stellar success as follows:

5.57% website users converting into quality Facebook fans
20.5% of newly acquired Facebook fans also becoming email subscribers
11.06% shoppers sharing their purchases on social networks
High sales conversion rate of 34.9% seen for traffic originating out of social sharing of purchases

Zinrelo conducted a Webinar in which Jennifer Nuckles – CMO of Plum District – unraveled the social commerce strategy they have adopted to achieve this success. This blog post has the recording and presentation used in the Webinar and highlights of the winning social commerce strategy of Plum District.

Recording of the Webinar:

Presentation of the Webinar:

Zinrelo Webinar – How Plum District is getting 35% sales conversion rate using social media from Zinrelo

Winning Social Commerce Strategy of Plum District:

Off-site Strategy: Plum District is different social media channels to achieve the following:

Facebook: Non-paid activity for engagement, paid advertisement for customer acquisition
Twitter: Engagement and Awareness
Pinterest: Engagement and Awareness
Partner blogs: Awareness and Acquisition

Plum District uses email marketing and off-site social media channels like Facebook to promote their daily offers. While these channels are good to increase exposure and reach, when it comes to sales conversion, they haven’t been effective enough.

On-Site Strategy: Plum District has embedded social commerce modules from Zinrelo to achieve the following:

Acquisition of quality Facebook fans
Sales conversion and Revenue uplift
Driving word-of-mouth recommendations
Generating deep social insights into their customer base
Increasing user-engagement on site

Specific social commerce modules from Zinrelo that Plum District adopted to achieve the above objectives are:

Get-a-Fan app is converting 5.71% of website visitors in quality Facebook fans. 20.61% of these newly acquired fans are also becoming email subscribers
Share-a-Purchase app has resulted in 11.08% shoppers sharing their purchases on social networks. Traffic originating out of this social sharing of purchases is converting at a high rate of 36.08%
Product Stories app is aggregating the valuable social testimonials created by Plum District customers and showing them as “Trending Deals” on their Facebook page. These testimonials are also displayed on website as social proofs, increasing the user-engagement and driving conversions
Social Connect app is gathering rich social profiles with data like users’ interests, birthdays, information about friends and similar data. Deep social insights can be generated using this data

Besides this, Share-on-Mobile (which captures the customer delight when she receives the product shipment and generates mobile social testimonials) and Viral Flash Sale (one-page interaction that makes a flash sale go viral) are another two apps in consideration.

Excerpts from the Question and Answer section of the Webinar:

Question: How does photos and comments of real users appear on Plum District website? What is the impact of this?
Answer: Yes, these are real users whose comments and photos are gathered using Product Stories app. When users share their purchases using their Facebook account, their profile picture and comment (Facebook post) is captured by this app. Plum District is using the data API provided by Zinrelo to showcase these photos and comments in real time on the product page as social testimonials. This keeps the page fresh with auto-generated new testimonials.

Question: We are a smaller store with limited technical resources. What is the effort required to get these apps on the e-commerce site?
Answer: Embedding these apps on site is quite easy as it requires adding a couple of javascript to the site. The nice part is that once the integration is done, the rest is controlled by their dashboard. Retailers can play, pause, auto-schedule, target and A/B test the campaigns without any IT support. Any new apps they launch become automatically available as well.

Question:Can you please give more details on Share-on-Mobile? Is that an app one has to download?
Answer: Share-on-Mobile does not require any tech integration or an app download. Internet retailers can share a unique URL with their new and existing customers and ask them to share their product usage or product unboxing photos. App also supports QR codes. Through this, valuable mobile social testimonials are created which can be collated and displayed on website/ Facebook using Product Stories app.

For more details about the social commerce success story of Plum District, please write to us at [email protected] or visit Zinrelo.com

How Carol’s Daughter is Generating 8% Revenue Uplift via Social Media

Carol’s Daughter is generating an impressive 8% revenue uplift by using ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo) social commerce platform. By embedding social media modules on their e-commerce site, Carol’s Daughter is achieving social commerce success as indicated by business metrics below:

8% increase in revenue
33% sales conversion rate for visitors interacting with social modules
ROI of 670%
2.58X higher conversion rate for social referral traffic
15% increase in Facebook fan count
Identifying loyal and socially influential customers

ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo) conducted a Webinar to reveal the innovative social media strategies that Carol’s Daughter is adopting to achieve above numbers. Jessica Klein, Director of E-Commerce at Carol’s Daughter, presented the Webinar along with Jai Rawat, CEO of ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo). This blog post has the recording and presentation used in the Webinar and highlights of the social media strategies used by Carol’s Daughter.

Recording of the Webinar:

Presentation of the Webinar:

Webinar: How Carol’s Daughter is Generating 8% Revenue Uplift via Social Media from Shop Socially

Social Media Strategies Adopted by Carol’s Daughter:

Off-Site Strategy: Primary objectives for off-site social media engagement are:

Engagement
Feedback
Customer Service
Branding and PR
TV (Home Shopping Network) and Events

On Facebook, Carol’s Daughter has 930,000+ fans who are very engaged. However turning them into quality traffic to website which converts into purchase is a challenge. Carol’s Daughter have also tried re-targeting and look-a-like profiling for Facebook advertisement.

On Instagram, Carol’s Daughter has grown rapidly to around 24,000 followers in less than 6 months. Cross channel promotion in which Instagram exclusive coupons are promoted via Facebook and $100 gift card sweepstakes promoted via email are showing good results.

On-Site Strategy: Primary objectives for on-site social media engagement are:

Engagement
Conversion Rate/ Revenue uplift
Word-of-Mouth Amplification
Rich Social Profile Acquisition
Deep Social Insights (social influencers, trending products, etc.)

Using ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo) apps, Carol’s Daughter is integrating social media engagement methods in the e-commerce flow to drive conversions, revenue uplift and boost word-of-mouth endorsements by their customers. Specific ShopSocially apps used by Carol’s Daughter are:

Get-a-Fan: To acquire quality Facebook fans and email subscribers, increase sales and improve SEO rank
Social Connect: To acquire email + rich social profiles, enhance customer acquisition rate, increase sales and improve SEO rank
Share-a-Purchase: To convert shoppers into brand ambassadors, promote social sharing of purchases, create SEO friendly back-links, identify loyal customers and influencers
Product Stories: To add social proof, boost social discovery of products, increase sales conversion rate

Using this strategic approach, Carol’s Daughter is achieving a ROI of 670% and increase in revenue of 8%.

Excerpts from the Question and Answer section of the Webinar:

Question: For Social Connect, does asking access to rich profile data like birthday, friend’s data, etc. result in higher abandonment rate for the app?
Answer: We have found that asking for rich social profile data does not have a major impact on the abandonment rate. The abandonment rate for Social Connect app (relatively high-effort, multiple click activity of allowing access to profile data and sharing on Facebook) is higher than Get-a-Fan (low-effort, single-click activity of becoming Facebook fan) because of extra steps that user has to perform to engage, and not because of additional information asked for.

Question: How does these tools increase SEO Rank?
Answer: Social commerce modules makes an e-commerce site more shareable. Through social sharing of products and purchases, valuable back-links are created which enhances SEO Rank. Recently, Google officially stated on their blog post that webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and “share”

Question: Besides these apps, what are the other social commerce offerings from ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo)?
Answer: ShopSocially (a.k.a. Zinrelo) has recently launched Share-on-Mobile to drive off-site social commerce for retailer in the upcoming Holiday season. This app captures the point of delight when a shopper receives a purchased product. Using their mobile phone, shoppers can share a photo and a comment about that product on social networks, driving word-of-mouth advertising for the brand. This app can also be implemented to run a popularity contest via mobile using social voting.

For more details about the social commerce success story of Carol’s Daughter, please write to us at [email protected] or visit Zinrelo.com