HOW USTRAA’s COMMUNITY INCREASED SALES BY 14x
Building a relationship with the customer, and inculcating a sense of community, beyond the transaction that occurs when a product is brought is the key factor of e-commerce. Creating a bond, or a connection with the customer, bends his loyalty towards the brand and in turn can help promote the brand organically through word of mouth and social media. These dedicated clients help market your products and increase your revenue.
Happily unmarried understood this clearly when they introduced Ustraa in India. Launched in mid-2015, it is a men’s grooming brand that leveraged the power of community to drive its sales off charts. Initially, they built a community of millennials, who were beard lovers. Like-minded people with similar choices, and who already trusted their parent brand. Running a campaign with Instagram worthy creatives, with aesthetics set to appeal to their target audience, targeting mobile-savvy young men, number of engagement activities and great rewards like freebies, discounts, etc., Ustraa changed the men’s grooming scenario in India forever. With only 6 months of campaigning on social media, there was a 14x increase in monthly sales, a 12x increase in revenue and a 3x increase in website traffic. Let’s understand what social commerce is and how can it have such a drastic effect.
As rightly said by Bhupinder Tomar of Your Story, “Social commerce is the use of social network(s) in the context of e-commerce transactions where the difference with e-commerce lies in the fact that there is a possibility of relation-building between buyers and sellers as both come through community itself”.
Social commerce a feature of community can be used in the below-mentioned ways to drive revenue and benefit the brand :
VISIBILITY
Social media is the perfect way to increase your visibility and reach broader and more audience, Apart from this, segments can be targeted easily on digital media at lower costs. Building a community, keeping in mind, your target audience can help in reducing the marketing spend to reach these people. Hence increasing the ROI.
REPUTATION
A brand that actively engages with its customers, value their feedback, empowers and educates its customers, tends to be more reputed and better positioned. Building and nurturing your community is the key to this.
In the above example, simply resolving queries in the community, regarding men’s grooming with the correct answers, helped build a reputation for the brand as a trustable one.
RECOMMENDATION
It’s about reaching the right customer at the right moment. And skeptical customers prefer to talk to previous customers for reviews. Online Communities can solve this problem by giving customers a stage to connect with other customers in real-time, and the brand at large. Personally, I’ve posted reviews and recommendations on various communities during my college years.
ENGAGEMENT
Generally, customers only come in contact with your brand is when they are using or purchasing the service or product. However, if they actively participate in activities in your community, they’ll be thinking and speaking about you more. This is called as lifecycle marketing. Customer loyalty is a key advantage of community engagement. This, in turn, can give you brand advocates who can market your brand further to their peer groups.
INSIGHTS
Data is everything now. One of the key benefits of community engagement is you can turn your community into a focus group. More reach means, the ability to gather more insights. Especially, if you are targeting millennials, who are active online. You can gather insights about the problems persisting, requirement trends and much more. Apart from this, brands can easily get to see from your customer’s point of view.
There are roughly 236 million internet users today, and subsequently thousands of brands in almost every segment. Hence, something different has to be done to stand out of the crowd and create your own database of loyal customers, who can become your brand advocates. Communities and hence social commerce is the way to go.
For more information on social commerce, community building and its benefits, send me a hi!!!
#Communitybuilding #Communitydevelopment #Socialcommerce #Ustraa #Ecommerce