6 ways that e-commerce businesses can increase social media ROI

Social media is critical to the success of an e-commerce business. According to Marketing Sherpa, 95% of young adults follow a brand on social media. This is where your audience is and how well you interact with them there has a big say in whether a follower becomes a customer.

A study from Social Sprout showed that 74% of shoppers make buying decisions based on social media. Consumers are looking at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for opinions — to see whether your business is worthy of their investment. To capitalize on this, and increase return-on-investment, you have to make this interest count.

In this article, we’re going to show you six ways to make social media a profitable marketing tool — one that as rewarding for you as it is for your customers.

1. Find the right channels

For your social media campaigns to have any success, you need to be pushing content to where your audience is. Facebook is the best channel for e-commerce, simply because it’s by far the largest platform. Twitter is the second most popular and is helped by the fact the algorithm on this platform isn’t as restrictive as Facebook. Instagram has now surpassed Twitter in active user numbers and is becoming more popular for B2C marketers. It’s also helped by the fact is strongly tied to Facebook.

Use your ideal customer profile (ICP) to decide where to focus your social media efforts. According to Sprout Social data, Facebook has a pretty even spread of ages, locations, income, and education. Twitter, however, is more popular with millennials, while Instagram is more popular with 18–29-year-old women from urban areas.

2. Give people a reason to like your page

People have to be persuaded to like your page. A like is a transaction of trust, and it isn’t handed out without some interest in what you offer. Provide social media users with an incentive to like your page by creating relevant content and offering a reward.

Paired with GIFTD solutions, BitRewards lets you reward followers by giving away a free gift card to every new follower of your accounts. After following your page and reposting, the user is sent the gift card automatically which they can then redeem on your website.

Once the customer has used the card to redeem a purchase, work on retaining their custom by rewarding them for their loyalty. BitRewards sends out BIT Tokens to a customer whenever a purchase is made. These can be spent however the customer chooses, or saved and exchanged for physical cash.

Why is this part important? Because customers are your best salespeople…

3. Leverage existing customers

80% of consumers are likely to purchase an item based on friend’s suggestions. Take advantage of this by encouraging customers to share your store with their social followers.

Leverage customers by allowing them to share your gift cards with their friends and family. By sharing, your customer gets a discount to use on your store (again rewarding customer loyalty), and by clicking, the follower also receives a discount, giving them greater incentive to like your page and complete a purchase on your website.

4. Show your worth

Online surveys are a great way to gain valuable customer feedback and show-off your expertise. Create a survey and post it to your social networks with the offer of a time-sensitive discount or gift card in exchange for honest feedback (again encouraging people to spend money on your website).

Letting customers complete the survey by connecting their social accounts gives you access to social profiles to improve marketing effectiveness and, crucially, feedback that can be placed on your website and pushed out across social media to earn trust.

Being able to show off a customer-based “9 out of 10” rating across your social pages shows followers that your brand is doing things right.

On the flip side, if the feedback of the survey isn’t what you hoped, you can work on improving your business to better meet customer needs.

5. Build relationships with influencers

Influencers should play a key role in your social media strategy. Influencer marketing has become big business for its effectiveness, so much so that the term “influencer marketing” has risen by 400% in Google Trends in the last two years.

71 percent of consumers are more likely to make a purchase based on a social media reference. Connecting with the right people drives social traffic to your website, earns credibility, and improves ROI.

To find a credible influencer, look for someone that has:

• A large organic follower base
• Trust and believability
• Inspires people to take action
• Exceptional networking skills

The quickest way to engage an influencer is to compensate them. In exchange for promoting your products on social media, offer them gift cards and BIT tokens that they can easily redeem without restriction.

Allow the influencer to also earn rewards for referrals and provide followers with discounts and gift cards that can be used for purchases on your website.

6. Reward website visitors

If a person has visited your website but left without purchasing, you can target them on social media with incentives that encourage them to give you another look. Retargeting lets you show ads to users that have visited specific pages on your website. Use this to your advantage by creating personalized content that includes a limited time discount or key feature of your rewards program. Give them a reason to click.

For customers that have previously bought from you, BitRewards’ AI-based BitRecommendations can be used to gather purchase data to recommend products and rewards. This data can be used to create personalized content for specific users to promote repeat purchases.

Once you have them, keep them

Social media is an important tool for building brand awareness and establishing trust. Ultimately, though, its vehicle for driving traffic to your website and creating more customers — that’s where the real ROI is realized. The tips we’ve featured here can all be implemented with the help of our motivational marketing platform, GIFTD, as well as BitRewards. But marketing is only one part of the e-commerce puzzle. Once social media has brought the customers in, you need to work on keeping them by rewarding loyalty. This is where BitRewards is worth its weight in…er, cryptocurrency!

Find out more about BitRewards and our Token Launch at our site BitRewards.Network

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