- How To Use Social Selling To Drive Ecommerce Website
- How To Use Social Selling To Drive Ecommerce Websites
- How To Use Social Selling To Drive Ecommerce Business
- How To Use Social Selling To Drive Ecommerce Marketing
According to recent statistics, the number of social media users worldwide has grown to 4.14 billion. An average user spends about two hours and twenty-nine minutes on social platforms every day.
Image viaWe Are Social
Starting competitions on social media is a great way to encourage sharing of your ecommerce products across various platforms. This usually works best in conjunction with current deals, sales or exciting announcements like a new product launch. Instead, build your strategy around engaging your fan base, then subtly marketing your ecommerce “goods” (be that a physical product or service) to them in an unobtrusive manner. With all of this in mind, here are 5 of the best ways to use social media to bolster your ecommerce bottom line. Find Them on Facebook. Social selling is about finding and engaging with prospects (and customers) online. Each time you login to a social media network to identify new prospects, connect with them and provide value by answering questions and sharing relevant content, you are social selling. Think of social selling as a softer sales approach. Learning how to sell on Instagram offers businesses of all sizes incredible opportunities to reach their target audiences and drive sales. In September 2017, Instagram announced that its business community had grown to 2 million advertisers, just six months after reaching 1 million advertisers earlier that year in March.
If one of your e-commerce goals is to increase sales, then you need to engage consumers where they are.
How can leveraging social media marketing benefit your e-commerce business?
This post lists some of the benefits that social media marketing offers for e-commerce, which include:
1. Quality e-commerce site traffic
Social media offers multiple options that you can use to drive quality traffic to your e-commerce site. These include:
Social media ads
You can showcase personalized ads to potential buyers based on their previous interactions with your brand. For example, you can:
- Remarket to users who’ve viewed your products or abandoned their carts.
- Cross-sell and upsell based on previous purchases.
- Use lookalike audiences to find potential leads.
Social media posts
You can create a landing page with a specific offer, discount, or new product launch and use social media posts to drive traffic to it. You should include a link to the page in your post captions and then use an opt-in form to collect their email addresses.
For example, when you click on the link in Amy Porterfield’s Twitter bio, it takes you to a landing page where you can join the waitlist for her Digital Course Academy.
Image viaTwitter
User-generated content (UGC)
Did you know that 79% of consumers say that UGC influences their purchase decisions?
Image viaStackla
You should use UGC to share social proof and build trust. You can request that buyers share reviews on social media and reward customers for sharing their carts on social media during the checkout process.
Influencer collaborations
Influencers have followers who trust their recommendations and look up to them for inspiration. They drive purchase decisions with 80% of consumers purchasing products that their favorite influencers have recommended.
When you partner with them to promote your products, they can help drive quality traffic to your product pages.
2. Increased engagement and conversions
When followers engage with your posts, they allow you to understand them better and build relationships. The more often you provide solutions or offer exceptional experiences, the more confidence they will feel in purchasing from your store.
How can you use social media to generate engagement and increase conversions?
You should:
- Create visually-appealing content and post consistently.
- Listen to your audience and be responsive.
- Run contests and giveaways to create interest in your products.
- Partner with influencers and other brands to promote your products.
- Post content on more than one social platform.
Most importantly, you should usemanagement tools like Hootsuite, Awario, and Buffer to track your social media engagement. You can use these tools to track brand mentions, retweets, sentiments, and keywords associated with your brand.
3. Amplified brand voice and reach
You should encourage people to vouch for your brand. These people may include employees, customers, influencers, and industry partners.
When a lot of people talk about your brand, it can help increase the reach of your brand, increase social signals, and improve SEO results.
But how can you leverage social media to amplify your brand’s voice and increase your reach?
You should:
- Create an employee advocacy program and encourage employees to share branded content on their social profiles.
- Engage with industry thought leaders and share their content. Doing this can increase the chances of them returning the favor.
- Collaborate with relevant influencers to promote your products.
- Create viral content.
- Become a valued and trusted member of niche community sites like Reddit and Quora.
- Run affiliate and loyalty programs.
You should track all of these conversations to learn more about your audience and the kind of content they prefer. You can integrate your analytics andautomation tools with social media to get better insights and make informed marketing decisions.
4. Increased conversions
One of the reasons why a prospect abandons their cart is due to a long orcomplicated checkout process.
But there’s good news:
Social commerce allows you to sell products directly on social networks like Facebook and Instagram.
Instagram and Facebook introduced Shops, a feature that your e-commerce business can use to make product discovery easier. Users can visit your Shops from your feed, profile, or Stories and browse, explore, and purchase products without leaving the app.
Image viaFacebook
Other features you can leverage include Shopping Tags, Instagram Ads, Checkout, and Live Shopping.
On Facebook, you can leverage features such as the Buy Now Button, Facebook Shops, and Facebook Marketplace.
On Pinterest, you can use Rich Pins and Shop the Look Pins.
5. Boost your return on investment (ROI)
According to a2020 study, 89% of marketers who use videos got a good ROI. 66% of consumers also prefer watching short videos to learn about products.
Another study showed that 45% of consumers discover brands through video ads.
Image viaAnimoto
How can you create video content that stands out?
This will depend on the topics you want to cover and your niche. Here are some video content ideas that you can use:
- People in the videos: Have an influencer or employee explain what your products do, offer tips, or connect with the audience.
- Product reviews: Offer audiences close-up images of the product.
- Testimonials: Shoot videos of customers sharing thoughts on your products or ask them to send short video clips.
- Tutorials: Share videos showing how customers can use your products.
Using these types of videos can help you explain product usage, provide social proof, and increase user engagement. This can lead to more conversions and better return on investment.
6. Improved customer experience
Remember that not every customer lands directly on your site and makes a purchase. In most cases, they have visited various touch points including your store, forums, review sites, and social media profiles before buying.
And, therein, lies one of the majorchallenges e-commerce business owners face.
Delivering effective omnichannel experiences.
You need to communicate with your audience when, how, and where they want to, which is something that social media can help you do.
Image viaWix Answers
How can you leverage social media to offer exceptional customer experiences?
You should:
- Constantly engage your customers by posting interesting content, replying to their comments, and sharing their branded content.
- Respond to customer questions promptly using live chat services.
- Leverage social listening tools to monitor brand mentions and respond appropriately.
Ready to reap the benefits of social media for your e-commerce store?
No matter how big or small your ecommerce business is, these social media tips can help you grow your business. They can help you reach your ideal buyers, increase traffic to your site, and boost your ROI.
Do you need help integrating social media into your e-commerce marketing strategy? Let me answer your questions about social media marketing in the comments below.
I don't know if it's bad form to begin by stating the obvious, but there really is no digital retail success story greater than Amazon's. The figures lay it down bare. There are 310 million active Amazon customer accounts worldwide, 90 million of which are Amazon Prime members who spend an average of $1,300 per year on the platform, with the remaining 220 million non-Prime members spending an average of $700.
Put it all together and you've got the most popular and most valuable online store in the US by far. Annual net ecommerce sales of physical goods totaled $52.8 billion in 2017 - nearly four times that of Amazon's closest ecommerce rival Walmart - which, combined with Amazon's service sales, gives the company a brand value of $139.29 billion.
(Image source: statista.com)
These are jaw-dropping figures indeed.
Though, what is perhaps most remarkable is that they are not at all surprising. We have all heard of Amazon, and I'd be willing to bet my Kindle that each and every one of you who is reading this blog will have bought something from the site before, or at least know 10 others who have.
The popularity of Amazon is nothing short of phenomenal, and the gargantuan e-tailer has managed to muscle its way into practically every aspect of our lives - from the books on our shelves to the devices in our pockets and the parts in our cars.
The question has to be - how on earth did it do this?
Well, in truth, the story of Amazon's success comes down to a variety of factors. But one thing in particular that the company has got right time and time again over the years is its handling of social media - which indeed it seemed to master even before such a thing truly existed.
Let's dig a little deeper to illuminate this point...
Driving Customer Engagement at Every Level
We'll begin by considering Amazon's reviews system.
Online customer reviews are practically synonymous with Amazon. Indeed, garnering buyer reviews has always been fundamental to the Amazon strategy. As anyone who has ever used the site will know, reviews are promoted throughout - both before and after purchase.
Every item that's listed on Amazon has a star-rating - awarded by Amazon customers - and is normally accompanied by numerous reviews left voluntarily by previous buyers of the same product. Buyers, incidentally, can also leave reviews of sellers.
Reviews have always been critical to the Amazon model. Since buyers cannot touch or test a product before they commit to a purchase, previous customer appraisals provide accountability, and serve as an indicator of quality for buyers who would otherwise just have to take the seller at his/her word.
But, equally important, is the fact that reviews generate genuine consumer engagement with the platform. Indeed, the highly active customer reviews columns found all over Amazon.com could almost be described as a consumer-driven social network in its own right.
Customers get to know their favorite sellers and engage with them. They also get to know their favorite reviewers and trust their opinions, star-ratings, and recommendations. To make product reviews even more useful to customers, Amazon also enables community moderation by encouraging customers to vote on the usefulness and relevance of each review that's left, and shoppers can even post follow-up questions directly to the reviewer. And of course, the Amazon algorithm is in a constant state of up-sell - 'Customers who viewed/bought this item also viewed/bought that item', buyers are notified at practically every turn.
All of this engenders true interaction with the Amazon.com platform. Indeed, it's more than just an online retail site, it's a community that Amazon has now been nurturing for 24 years.
And so it's no surprise that when social media took off in the past decade or so, Amazon knew exactly how to play the online community game to its advantage.
Amazon On Social Media
How To Use Social Selling To Drive Ecommerce Website
Almost exclusively posting product promotions across its various social networks, Amazon is able to drive more sales than any other online merchant. Here's how it's done...
Amazon currently has over 28.7 million likes on its Facebook page. An incredible figure, but if you take a quick scroll down its news feed you can see why it's so popular. Amazon replies to a staggering amount of comments left on its posts - and it does so quickly, politely, provides useful information and links, and adds the human touch by addressing commenters by first name, with the Amazon employee signing off each comment using their first name also.
A few examples:
(Image source: facebook.com)
When someone asks a question, Amazon answers it. If someone expresses a frustration, a response is quick and helpful. And Amazon also creates and contributes to conversations, which is imperative for brand success on social media. Indeed, in keeping with the social aspect of Amazon's social media efforts, customers with Facebook-connected accounts will see product reviews written by their Facebook connections appear in their feeds, as well as products their connections have put on their Amazon Wish Lists (so you know what you can buy them for their next birthday - directly from Amazon, of course).
Promotions-wise, Amazon also uses Facebook to highlight products, and offers date-related coupons and discounts to encourage sales. When Mother's Day is just around the corner, the Facebook page becomes awash with gift ideas and discount coupons to purchase them - followers, who were likely going to buy a gift online anyway, have no need to look elsewhere.
Amazon's Twitter campaign is today less heavy on promotions than it used to be, and instead serves as a vehicle for driving its 2.7 million followers towards Amazon's additional services such as Prime Video and Amazon Music. The Amazon Twitter feed is also used to promote the company's blog content - a lot of which offers small business advice to those selling on Amazon - and deliver news about the various things and innovations the company is involved with and up to.
(Source: twitter.com)
Essentially a platform for content marketing rather than driving direct sales, Amazon's activity on Twitter nonetheless serves to create and nurture an engaged community of customers, and encourage as many as possible towards Prime membership.
How To Use Social Selling To Drive Ecommerce Websites
Pinterest for Amazon is essentially an extension of its main online store. Pinterest is of course the one social media site where a significant percentage of users go to browse for purchase ideas. But when they find a Pin from Amazon, they can simply click on it and are taken either straight to a page on Amazon.com where they can purchase the product directly, or otherwise to the seller's own website from where the customer can complete the purchase via Amazon.
Amazon also uses Pinterest to promote bespoke lines, such as Handmade at Amazon, Amazon Home Services, and Amazon Style for Women. It's all very carefully set up to drive Pinterest users towards Amazon purchases - and it works.
(Image source: pinterest.com)
Spark
Last year, Amazon even went so far as to launch its own Instagram/Pinterest-like Amazon Spark, which could be described as a social network for shopping.
Residing within the Amazon app, Spark is designed to create social engagement that will lead directly to product purchases.
How To Use Social Selling To Drive Ecommerce Business
When users sign up, they are asked to identify topics of interest from an extensive menu, which includes product categories as well as lifestyle areas such as travel, art & design, fitness, and so on. Users then receive images of products and other items of interest in a shoppable news feed, where they can leave comments, make recommendations, and of course click through to make a purchase.
(Image source: marketingland.com)
Aside from being yet another social channel through which Amazon can drive direct revenue, Spark also generates data, and gives the company a whole new set of signals for customer targeting that it can use further down the line.
How To Use Social Selling To Drive Ecommerce Marketing
Of course, Amazon already knows what its users search for and buy, but with Spark, it can also learn more about their interests and aspirations, all of which can be used to inform targeted ad campaigns in the future.
Final Word
Amazon has always believed in a thriving and engaged community, even before the advent of social media. But through the extensive utilization of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and now its very own Spark network, one of Amazon's keys to success is to promote itself and its products across a plethora of social channels, and facilitate conversation, engagement, and discovery among its millions of followers.