While no one these days would likely doubt the importance of integrating their ecommerce business with the world of social media, there is endless debate over how to turn that involvement into increased ROI. How do you measure profit through likes, and conversions through followers?
Many retailers, who seem to strive for brand awareness above all else, even question whether ROI is the goal marketers should be after. For a long time, it has been widely accepted that social media is little more than a vehicle of awareness, from which conversions cannot be accurately tracked, and ROI is little more than a broad expanse of good will among the community.
While brand awareness is an important goal and one that social media is well suited to tackle, it is certainly not the the only way that ecommerce businesses can leverage social media to improve the usability of their websites—and yes, even increase conversions.
Here at Upshot Commerce, we’ve created four useful extensions that integrate your website with social media in unique and useful ways that go beyond the standard marketing strategies.
Simplified Sign-Ups
Sure, having followers and likes on your Facebook page is useful, but in order to turn them into customers, they need to become users on your website. Fortunately, a plug in with Facebook makes that a breeze. Our Social Log In Extension makes it easy for new users to create accounts with your site by allowing them to sign in using their already existing Facebook username and password. This means there will be less log-ins for your customer to remember, and less lost sales for you due to what we call “sign-up fatigue.”
Social-Driven Pricing
Coming up with new and different ways to engage social media users can be a real challenge. By Christmas, most online consumers have probably seen just about every coupon and discount out there, so it can sometimes be difficult to create conversions without offering increasingly steep discounts.
How about engaging customers in a different way, turning their interest and excitement in your products directly into deals and discounts? Our Social Pricing Plug In does just that. This extension give retailers the ability to tie the price of their product directly to the number of likes it receives on Facebook. When a predetermined number of likes is achieved, the price of the product automatically falls to the promotional price. This causes users to feel more engaged in the deal they are attempting to gain, encourages them to share the deal with others, and makes everyone more likely to take advantage of the deal when it becomes available.
Share the Love
After making a purchase with their favorite store, lots of shoppers want to tell the world—why not make it easy for them? Share-a-Sale allows customers to easily share items that they have purchased from your ecommerce store directly with their social media community. After placing an order with your site, customers are prompted with the option to let others know about the products they purchased via Facebook. If the customer opts to do so, an easy to post link is created, which displays the product as well as including a link back to your own site.
Boost Your SEO
Many ecommerce retailers have discovered the ease and benefits of using Facebook Social to integrate reviews onto their site. Users tend to be more familiar with the format, and many find the process much simpler than on-site review interfaces.
However, this is only getting at half of the benefits you can achieve with our Social Comments Extension; it can also be used to help improve your SEO ranking. Using our Smart API technology, we integrate Facebook Social right into your ecommerce platform, which allows the review content to be indexed and crawlable along with all of your website content. Reviews are full of all sorts of important keywords and content that is important to consumers searching for products online, and even more important to googlebots that crawl websites looking for relevant information to create organic searches. This makes having lots of unique, dynamic product content incredibly important; it can be the difference between putting your site on page five to page one of search results.
All of these extensions make an excellent addition to any retailer’s ecommerce platform. In fact we are so convinced that these extensions will help boost sales on your website that we are offering them for the first time in one discounted social bundle! The Social Bundle includes:
- Social Log In Extension
- Social Pricing Extension
- Share-a-Sale
- Social Comments
All of these extensions can be integrated into any Upshot Commerce Platform for just $500 set up and a $150 monthly fee. Don’t wait—start getting more out of social media today!