Matt Sullivan
Does this sound like you or your brand?
You realized early on that social commerce was going to be huge, and you knew you had to be a part of it. You took a risk and dove in, first developing your social fan bases from the ground up and engaging with them on a regular basis. Then the time came where you were ready to reward your community through giveaways, contests, specials, and flash deals. You feel you did pretty well; you made some sales and gathered a few new fans in the process.
But you know that’s just where the fun begins! How can you improve? Why did one of your social commerce campaigns perform better than another? Here are the five social commerce measurements you and your brand should be watching…because knowing what works means you can make better decisions in the future.
1. Traffic to Your Storefronts/Offers
We all know the famous real-estate saying, “location, location, location” and how important it is for a brick-and-mortar store to have enough traffic to sustain itself. The same can be said for your own social commerce storefronts and the offers you are presenting to your fans.
It’s important that you get your offers in front of as many eyeballs as possible. This means promoting a storefront on your Facebook Fan Page wall, but also taking that offer to the homepage of your website, posting it to Twitter, distributing it to your affiliate partners to place on their blogs, promoting on Tumblr, and asking your fans to share it with their friends.
By thinking of social commerce as more than just Facebook Commerce, you open your campaigns to a whole new group of potential customers.
2. Campaigns
Speaking of campaigns, what does that entail, exactly? Glad you asked! Basically, a social commerce campaign is a cluster of storefronts that you create that may have different intentions and placements but are ultimately aligned with the same goals.
For example, let’s say you are running a campaign called “Black Friday Deals.” You create a Facebook-focused store featuring a pair of shoes for 50% off, an affiliate store with two or three 50% off products, and a storefront for your website’s homepage with numerous 50% off products for Black Friday only.
Grouping these storefronts together as a campaign allows you to measure the effectiveness of the campaign as a whole. That way you can compare one campaign to another and determine what properties set your best-performing campaigns apart.
3. Conversion from Impression
Even if you’re driving more traffic to your storefronts than you could ever imagine, you
still need to convert those visitors to paying customers. This is basically E-Commerce 101 stuff; taking the number of successful orders across a campaign and dividing it by the total number of opens your stores received.
Converting visitors to customers isn’t as straightforward as some other metrics, but you can still gather great insight into what works best. Are your shipping costs scaring away customers during checkout? At what product price-point do your fans convert the best? Which storefronts generate the most orders per open and why?
Knowing the answers to these questions will allow you to create better campaigns focused around what your fans just can’t pass up.
4. Average Order Size
Social commerce isn’t about just recreating your catalog store and sticking it on your Facebook Fan Page; it’s about rewarding your fans with targeted offers that
further the fan/brand relationship. Some of your offers may be small, one-item campaigns, and some may be bundled packages or one-of-a-kind items that your superfans will do almost anything to get their hands on.
Keeping tabs on your average order size means you can experiment with different items and offers to see what increases those orders. Will customers add more items to a cart if you offer free shipping at a certain price point? Does adding a digital item to your offer change the average order size?
Like a science experiment, create your “control” store and experiment with the items and messaging in your “variable” stores to see what properties of your campaign are the real game-changers.
5. Revenue
Ah, revenue. The bottom line. It really all comes down to this, right? In the end, your social commerce campaigns are measured on how much revenue they generate. But be careful; just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, neither is your fan base. Don’t get discouraged if your first social commerce campaign isn’t what you thought it’d be. It takes time for communities to get used to seeing offers presented to them and you can always learn something from every campaign you run.
Instead of making revenue your primary focus, let each campaign be a learning opportunity to get better. Did you launch three storefronts? What can you do to get five storefronts out there? Was the offer compelling enough for your fans to snatch it up? If not, what can you do to create a better impulse buy?
Keep an eye on these measurements and you’ll soon see how any brand, at any size, can find success in social commerce. It’s all around building a base of loyal fans, rewarding them with offers, and learning from the campaigns you’ve run before.
