Often, there are too many unnecessary steps in the purchase journey that we experience while shopping. This is indeed the main reason why the majority of potential customers abandon the products in the cart and switch to some other brands.
The fact that needs to be understood is that customers want things in their comfort zones. They get attracted to brands that showcase the products in the simplest yet creative way.
This gave rise to the new marketing trend known as social shopping. Simply crafted, social selling is the process of using diverse social media platforms to sell a product, which makes it easy for customers to shop their desire by scrolling down their social media profile.
A social selling strategy, therefore, becomes an essential element for the brands to market their products in an effective way. To help you achieve more with social shopping, we have penned down the top 15 social shopping success strategies for brands in 2021.
- Invest In The Right Channels
There is a huge range of social media platforms that people use every day. But, knowing the fact that brands and marketers are bound to a finite budget and resources, they need to determine the best working social media platform for their marketing purposes.
It is crucial for the brands to know where their targeted customers hang out the most, and what type of content will engage them the most. Getting a precise answer to these questions will help the brands grow their social commerce strategy.
- Effective Use Of Visuals
One of the main difficulties that arise while leveraging social shopping is the engagement of the customers. This is because it is quite tough to magnetize and engage customers without meeting them in person. To make them trust your brand, it is important to display effective visuals such as videos, user-generated images, gifs, interactive content, and much more.
Visual commerce platform is the perfect solution to leverage visual content successfully and drive your social shopping strategy. A visual commerce platform turns visual content into shoppable galleries that inspires users and generates sales with a complete shopping experience.
- Showcase UGC
To deliver the best shopping desires to your customers, it is vital to showcase the reliability of the brand. The best way to do this is by displaying user-generated content.
With this, you can display the reviews of your genuine customers and the product images infused with their lifestyle. This adds credibility to your brand and increases the authenticity of your products.
- Get Your Customers Involved
Involving your precious customers to land new customers is one of the best strategies to boost social shopping. It is because people consider online recommendations while making a purchase. By displaying the user-generated content created by the real users of the brand, you can grab the attention of potential customers and provoke them to make a purchase.
- Display Shoppable Galleries
The most important strategy to boost social shopping for your brand is by leveraging shoppable feeds and shoppable galleries. As the name suggests, the galleries that let you shop, and the best part is without even leaving the page you are scrolling on.
All you need is to add shoppable tags to the posts of your social media profile. These shoppable galleries curtail the purchase journey of the customers by directing them to the payments page without any intermediate stage.
- Be Mobile Responsive
According to Statista, 73% of the eCommerce sales will be made on mobile devices by the end of 2021. Having the adaptability to fit in any size of the screen is a must-have feature for any brand, big or small. In today’s time, when people spend more than 50% of their time on their mobile phones, all the brands need to be mobile responsive. It expands the customer reach for the brands and increases customer engagement as well.
- Lower Price = Higher Sale
The well-known fact that the lower the price, the higher will be the sales. In fact, we are all attracted by the discounts, sales, and low prices of the products. To strategize their social shopping in a perfect way, brands must sell their products at a reasonable price as someone who will buy from social media will make an impulse purchase rather than a voluntary one.
- Optimize regularly
Your customer’s behavior continues to evolve with time and with different social platforms they use. So, just because a particular strategy worked in the past does not mean that it would work effectively again. To make your product selling on social media more impactful, your brand should inculcate a habit of regular optimization of the performance graph on different channels.
- Add Link In Bio
To make your products easily discoverable and to make your social shopping on Instagram more effective, you can add a link in bio to your Instagram profile. It would direct the customers straight away to your product catalog or to the shoppable gallery of your brand. This helps the brands to boost sales and increase the conversion rates to a great extent.
- Artificial intelligence For Automated Bots
Providing the best customer experience and customer service is the best they can offer. To make the services align with the growing digitalization, brands can employ AI (Artificial Intelligence) tools such as automated chatbots that can respond to all the customer’s queries instantly.
It can also be useful to understand the behavior and reaction of the customers towards the product they have purchased or going to purchase. This can help the brands to improve their customer’s experience and hence help them stand out from the competition.
- Transform The Shopping Experience With Augmented Reality
Imagine getting dressed up in the dress you are yet to purchase, or getting adorned by the jewelry you are attracted by and want to purchase. Confused?
Augmented reality is where you can infuse the digital elements in your real-life. With this technology, brands can provide the customers with an option to try the look before making a purchase.
This acts as a game-changer for all the online customers as it allows them to explore the product like they used to do with the traditional ways of brick and mortar shopping.
- Personalize The Feed
To know what your customers want, what are their likes, dislikes, desires, what they are attracted to, and what stopped them scrolling down their social media feed, is of utmost importance to all the brands and online marketers. Knowing about all the statistics related to the customers help the brands deliver a personalized shopping experience to their customers. This triggers the emotions of the customers and influences them to make a purchase with your brand.
- Partner With Influencers
Social media influencers are social media users with a huge number of people following them and their lifestyle. People tend to replicate the style of their favorite celebs on social media and get overwhelmed by seeing their following influencer endorsing a brand. This way brands can connect with the emotions of their customers on social media and can influence them to make a purchase. Also, with influencer marketing, brands can spread awareness to a larger audience and can generate more leads.
- Frictionless Payment Method
A complex payment journey is what customers hate to experience, and this is why the rate of cart abandonment is increasing for standalone eCommerce sites. To avoid such complexities, brands must focus on providing a smooth and frictionless payment journey to their customers. For this, brands can leverage social checkout features or shoppable social feeds as fewer clicks will lead to higher sales.
- Stories And Gamification
Instagram stories or Facebook stories, these 24 hrs content display platforms work best when it comes to spreading awareness about the brand in a creative and exciting way. Also, brands can conduct polls, run contests on their social media page to roll into the feed of the targeted audience. This way brands can attract customers and can influence them to make a purchase.
Conclusion
With many social platforms adopting the tool of commerce in their functioning, it has become quite comfortable for the customers to shop for their desired products.
So, choose the best suitable social shopping strategy for your brand and boost your sales like never before.