Make Your eCommerce Store Social-Shopping Ready

In the era of social networking platform, social shopping is gaining prominence. When we talk about social shopping, we are talking about sharing of outfit ideas on Pinterest to tweeting links to coupon codes to more. If you aren't trying to explore this avenue for more sales, you are losing out on a lot. Are you wondering how you are going to take advantage of the new phenomenon? If so, you just need to make sure of three things – be mobile ready, merge online and offline marketing and offer personalized shopping experience.

Be mobile ready

Consider these figures:

Mobile sales is expected to rise from $204 billion in 2013 to $626 billion in 2018.
29% of the American consumers made at least one purchase on a smartphone in 2013, 28% on the tablet 535 million consumers worldwide are expected to make a purchase in 2014 through mobile 46% of American smartphone users engage in mCommerce

Now do you think ignoring mobile users is a smart strategy, especially when we are talking about social shopping? One of the best ways to make sure that your website/eCommerce store is accessible through all types of smartphones and tablets is to use responsive/adaptive web designs. If you are receiving majority of the traffic from smartphones, you can even get a special mobile website designed.

Merge online and offline marketing

A recent study by Econsultancy and IBM Tealeaf revealed that most of the retail stores fail to seamlessly merge online and offline shopping experiences for the buyers. Although most of the stores display their store location and hours on the website, they fail to provide retail product information and services through social media. The study also revealed that less than a third of businesses optimize content for local and mobile search, and only 18% allow customers to place an order online and pick it up on the store.

To merge online and offline marketing efforts, you have to look for ways to bring social media, online shopping and local promotions together. You can get started on this task by emailing a coupon code that offers extra discount when used in the physical store; and by offering flash sale notifications or limited-time coupons. Depending on your target audience demographic, you should also explore other means to offer unified shopping experience.

Offer personalized shopping experience

If you think a single deal or promotion will appeal to all your customers, you need to think again. If you are looking to create loyalty while pushing up the sales, you will need to personalize the deals based on the customers' demographic and shopping history. But it's easier said than done, especially when customers are unwilling to share their social media or any other contact details. To make the unwilling customers into willing customers, you have to win their trust, and to win their trust, you need to put more marketing control in their hands. Let them decide how frequently they can receive deals and promotions from you; let them decide what kind of information they would like to receive.

Future of social shopping

Social shopping is here to stay. Many companies are even coming up with apps that helps companies share data throughout all the platforms, including POS systems, eCommerce stores and mobile apps. You too can look for this kind of apps and get ready for social sharing.

Read more »

Tips to Leverage Pinterest for eCommerce Business

Pinterest is one of the most popular social networking platform. Generally, there are five types of Pinterest users – passion, profession, pastime, project and preference. If you want to make the most of Pinterest, you have to offer the content that your target audience wants.

Pinterest Media Optimization

The task, however, doesn't end with just offering the content. As there are over 750 million boards with 30 billion pins, if you aren't using Pinterest properly, your content is never going to be found by the target audience. Following are some of the tips that you should use to leverage Pinterest effectively.

1. Optimize pins

As we said earlier, there are millions of boards with billions of pins. To make yourself visible, you should:

Make your pins descriptive. If you are selling sweaters, pinning it as just a sweater isn't enough. Mention the color, the kind of wool that's used and so on. If you are getting confused about it, just think how would you optimize the description for Google and other search engines.

Pre-populate pin descriptions on the website. This means, you should include thoughtful descriptions about the products people pin from your website. You can even use Pinterest's widget builder to add pins to your website.

2. Reach Pinterest mobile users

75% of the Pinterest users are from smartphones and tablets. So it definitely makes sense to reach those 75% of the user base by understanding how the social networking platform works on the mobile.

Make your pins and boards mobile friendly. While creating boards and pins, think how they will look on mobile devices.

Add the Pinterest mobile SDK to your mobile app. When you do this, a “Pin It” buttons will be added to the images in your app, which in turn will increase your pins and referral traffic.

Have a mobile-friendly website. As Pinterest is great for driving traffic to the eCommerce sites, make sure that your website is mobile-friendly.

3. Use Pinterest Analytics

Through this tool, you will be able to keep track of the images that are being pinned from your website, how the pins from your Pinterest profile are performing, which pins and boards are driving the most impressions, clicks and repins, and which pins are driving engagement across different platforms.

4. Utilize Promoted Pins

Promoted Pins is Pinterest's advertising platform. Just like Facebook Ads and Twitter Promoted Tweets, you can set your own budget to promote your products.

5. Follow Pinterest portfolio boards

To inspire users and businesses, Pinterest has put together a collection of boards. By following these boards, you will be able to connect with people from your field.

6. Get featured on Pinterest's business blog

At regular interval of time, Pinterest spotlights on businesses to talk about how they are using the platform to promote their business. So submit your profile to Pinterest with a brief summary about how you use Pinterest for your business. You might find yourself featured over there, giving another boost to your presence.

Read more »