Improving online sales through social engagement

More for their money

Right now, customers are looking for more than just the cheapest products – they are looking for the best value. Do they get after sales support? Do they receive rewards for loyalty? Do they feel like they are an integral part of the business?

It is a well known fact in the marketing world that it is at least 5 times as expensive to continually attract new customers as it is to retain you current ones. This means we all need to be stepping up to the challenge to ensure our customers feel needed and respected, we can now do this by talking to them. Before you engage with your customers you must know the following:

• Who you are – A brand identity must be used clearly, consistently and effectively. It must be a true representation of your brand and it must be reflected throughout all campaigns to ensure there is no brand confusion. It also depends upon the next point...
• Who you are talking to – Without knowing who you are targeting you will not know their 'language' or which channels of communication are going to be best
• What you want to achieve – know your KPIs so that you can measure the success of a campaign during and after
• Where your brand exists – Ring fencing your brand is hugely important and there are tools such as KNOWEM which will essentially search 120 social media sites for your brand and tell you where it is being used. It is important you register you user name in these places so that nobody else can, even if you do not plan on using that particular social site
• Where your audience are – there are so many social media sites out there that you need to spend time finding out how much of your target audience are on which social media sites and how effective your campaign is going to be
• How to engage genuinely – "It's hard to shake somebody's hand while reaching for their wallet" Griner, 2009. Be patient and get to know your customers and the sales will follow, do not pretend to be interested and then bombard with generic offers and new products

More for your time

With social media you cannot set it up and expect it to work alone. You will need to update content and reply to people if you want this to work.

Some feedback may not be positive, but prove how pro-active you are as a company and let people know how you will resolve the issue. Remember you must also acknowledge the people that are positive about your brand so that they remain loyal to you.

If you spend the time you will create the buzz you're looking for around your brand and begin to increase the loyalty to your brand from your customers. If you're interested in finding out how you may be able to work out the resource time you may need, then read Paul's blog on planning time for social engagement.

Loyalty is a psychological state which triggers an emotional attachment to a brand, product or service. This often means that they will be willing to pay a little extra as they believe they are valued and respected by the brand itself and that they are getting something extra out of the relationship compared to another brand. Once loyalty is established it is potentially very difficult for competitors to break that relationship.

It is also possible to cross sell on social networks, but you must not be pushy – remember that quote I mentioned above at all times! We developed an application for Scalextric on Facebook, which enables people to buy from the Scalextric website quickly and with ease.

More than just social networking sites

Other ways of engaging with your audience include:

• Blogs
• Competitions
• Email marketing (personalised)
• Games
• Videos
• Downloads
• Membership/loyalty schemes

These elements still require a lot of time and strategy to ensure that they are relevant to your brand and your target audience.

These elements can encourage people to spend more time on the website and then they are far more likely to investigate into the website further.

...and there you go

Once you have established the wants and needs of your target audience and spend the time with them and keeping them interested they are far more likely to spend online and go on to repeat purchase. You must invest your time and really do your research to ensure that your brand awareness increases and you have a loyalty base to get those online sales increasing.

This blog post was written by Emma

If you liked this blog you may be interested in the following posts:

• Digital consultancy and digital strategy
• The evolution from website design onto social engagement and digital strategy
• Social Engagement, creating the buzz

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