From Bankruptcy to 11.05X ROI–How Social Commerce Can Turn Around A Retailer's Business Altogether

Marketers often complain of limited impact of their social strategies. Mostly these are instances when social media is seen more as a communication channel with its impact restricted to brand building contests and some other funny social antics on their Facebook pages. Some go bit more ahead and use Twitter for their customer conversations, but still fail to grab the real benefits that social media promises to offer. What these marketers lack is the understanding of potent power of social media as an influence to impact sales. With proper application of this influence, and including this influence seamlessly in their overall marketing plan, marketers can realize real meaningful uplift in revenue using social media.

An excellent example of this is the success of Avenue® with social commerce. Just two years back, Avenue® was on a rocky path staring at bankruptcy. But when a change of ownership resulted in renewed marketing efforts; which encompassed social media as an integrated part of the marketing plan; things soon changed. Social now started delivering rapid increase in conversions, got customers to recommend Avenue® brand to their friends and resulted in profitable new customer acquisition through referral channel.

Avenue® initially tried the traditional routes of email marketing; but soon realized that the spike in traffic – and resultant business – was momentary. “We found that we were talking to a lot of the same people over and over again,” says Kristen St. Peter, Director of Ecommerce at Avenue®. “Our email list isn't our entire customer base, or even everyone who shops our website.”

Avenue® also delved into paid social options using tricks like lookalike targeting, but the real ROI-positive impact was realized only when they started using onsite social commerce modules on their e-commerce site. Using ShopSocially's (a.k.a. TrueLoyal) platform, they got their customers to share Avenue® brand with their friends on social media. By encouraging social sharing of purchases, Avenue® converted its customers into brand ambassadors. The highly effective social commerce strategy helped Avenue to drive word-of-mouth promotions resulting in a referral traffic that is converting at a rate as high as 28.48%.

Kristen St. Peter, Director for E-Commerce at Avenue®, shared more details on these social commerce strategies in a webinar with ShopSocially (a.k.a. TrueLoyal). Kristen presented how they are:

• Encouraging website users to share their social profile data with Avenue®
• Generating thousands of referrals from customers
• Driving high-quality friend referral traffic to Avenue® website
• Achieving a viral spread of the Avenue® brand on social media
• Achieving a 10X ROI on their word-of-mouth marketing efforts

You can watch the on-demand webinar here.