Social media has proven itself as a valuable tool for eCommerce to increase acquisitions, conversions and retention. Return from Social can come in three forms: engagement ROI, data ROI and revenue ROI.
Last month a specialty brand went live on Social Annex’s social commerce platform, driving over 20,000 contest entries in less than 30 days. They saw increases in their engagement, data and revenue and were finally able to see their Social ROI.
1. Engagement ROI
Engagement ROI is measured in the number of interactions a brand receives across social networks. This includes likes, shares, follows, and comments. Engagement helps humanize brands and keeps them involved in their growing online brand communities. This specialty brand has had a large social fan base, but was never able to directly associate their fandom with return. They decided to run a Facebook and Pinterest contest and saw phenomenal results. They tracked their results from the Pinterest contest and saw that it resulted in over 10,000 pins, flooding Pinterest with their specialty products.
2. Data ROI
Data ROI is measured in social data collected from social network APIs that can be used to build out more complete customer profiles with attributes like verified email addresses, geography, sociodemographics and likes and interests. With every contest entry, this brand was able to collect a verified email address and other social data to inform their future marketing campaigns.
3. Revenue ROI
Revenue ROI is measured in direct dollars earned from social and can be the hardest to prove. Retailers too often fail to extract direct revenue value from their social presence and therefore are quick to dismiss it. But with powerful analytics, like the Social Annex ROI focused dashboards, brands can have complete transparency over where their social revenue is coming from. In less than 30 days, this brand saw over 100 referral orders from social.
Finally able to prove their social ROI, the brand is moving forward with building a customer loyalty program, a long term strategy designed to grow the value of their current customers while driving a flood of social referrals.