Overseas shoppers are showing growing interest in what UK retail has to offer, the latest figures from theBritish Retail Consortium(BRC) suggest.
Retail searches from overseas grew by 57% in the first quarter of 2012, compared to the same period last year, according to today’sBRC-Google Online Retail Monitor. That’s well ahead of the 11% total growth in retail-related searches that the monitor detected during the period.
Stephen Robertson, director general of the British Retail Consortium, said the figures showed the potential importance of exports to the UK retail sector. He said: “Internet search traffic from developing countries like Mexico and Pakistan has more than doubled. These statistics demonstrate the growth potential of online for UK retailers and the part retail can play in building a recovery based on exports, given the right conditions and a genuinely free-trade world market place.”
Peter Fitzgerald, retail director atGoogle, said the figures showed the importance of an international presence for retailer brands. The highest growth came from Mexico, with growth of 135%, while searches from Pakistan rose by 101%. “Interest also grew in the BRIC countries,” said Fitzgerald.
The other big trend to emerge from the monitor was evidence that shoppers on tight budgets are researching their purchases on the internet to make sure their money is going as far as it can.
Searches for both food and drink and health and beauty items grew by 21%, while mobile searches for food and drink grew by 172%. In total, the number of searches taking place on mobile and tablet devices grew by 132% in the quarter.
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Some have questioned the effectiveness of Facebook as a commerce platform, but can you dismiss an ad and marketing channel with 800+ million users?
Here are some tips for increasing the opportunities for commerce on Facebook.
Recently, Bloomberg published an article about several retailers, J.C. Penney, Nordstrom, Gap and Gamestop, who all closed their Facebook stores in 2011.
As a consultant implementing s-commerce (Social Commerce) solutions for my clients, I am writing to let you know that Facebook commerce (f-commerce) is alive and well and customers are making money selling products and services via Facebook.
I can’t speak about the f-commerce implementations of the aforementioned companies, only from my own experience.
For one company, Grassroots Festival, we created a Facebook store to sell discounted tickets on the festival’s Facebook fan page.
The Facebook store generated a 4.1% clickthrough rate, resulted in a significant ROI and also cut-out the middle men in terms of ticket sales, who require substantial commission.
We have also seen considerable success with smaller clients who do not currently sell their products online. The success of their s-commerce efforts has prompted them to commercialize their businesses online with e-commerce functionality on their websites.
For larger online retailers, unless they are offering specific incentives for their Facebook Fans to purchase from their Facebook stores, why would a consumer purchase something anywhere other than their website?
It is even more effective to find a specific niche or focus on clearance lines, rather than replicate your entire inventory in a Facebook store.
We have many hotel clients who have seen considerable volume in their Facebook stores specifically for gift vouchers, a growing category in the hospitality sector. Their websites are not usually geared up for anything other than booking rooms, and even then, they usually use a third party booking engine rather than managing their own functionality.
More at: http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/9428-why-facebook-commerce-is-alive-7?
Social commerce company Reevoo has released research that suggests bad reviews are good for business.
The company found that 68% of consumers trust reviews more when they see both good and bad scores, while 30% suspect censorship or faked reviews when they don’t see anything negative at all.
Not only this, but shoppers who go out of their way to read bad reviews convert 67% more than the average consumer.
Reevoo CEO and founder Richard Anson said that though this may seem counter-intuitive, negative user-generated content is actually one of the most effective conversion tools.
This is because shoppers who seek out bad reviews are highly engaged with their pre-purchase research, viewing almost four times as many products as the average visitor to a site, and staying considerably longer.
The company discovered that three times as many consumers actively seek out and read negative user-generated content as look for positive content: negative reviews are even more popular than ‘most recent reviews’, or ‘reviews from people like me’.
Figures quoted are from data collected across Reevoo’s network of 150 UK and international partners and from Reevoo.com, the company’s consumer website, as well as from independent consumer surveys.
The results contrast with a study last year, which found that reading between one and three negative reviews would deter the majority of customers, though much depends on whether there are any good reviews to outweight thr bad.
More at: http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/8638-bad-reviews-improve-conversion-by-67
Pinterest is arguably the hottest social media site on the Internet—user traffic to the online social catalog has skyrocketed since mid-2011—but the website also boasts strong audience engagement, retention, and “virality” among its core demographic, according to a report by RJMetrics.
Based on data collected and analyzed by RJMetrics, key findings from the report include:
- Pinterest is retaining and engaging its users 2 to 3 times more efficiently, on average, than Twitter was at a similar time in its life cycle.
- “Pins” link to a huge array of websites. For example, Etsy is the most popular source of pin content, but it accounts for only 3% of pins.
- 80% of pins are “re-pins,” attesting the viral nature of the Pinterest community. By contrast, at a similar point in Twitter’s life cycle, roughly 1.4% of all tweets were re-tweets, according to a study conducted by Hubspot in 2009.
- The “quality” of the typical new Pinterest user (where quality is defined by a user’s level of engagement and likelihood to remain active) is high, but declining. Users who have joined Pinterest in recent months are 2 to 3 times less active during their first month than users who joined before them.
Below, detailed findings from the RJMetrics report Pinterest Data Analysis: An Inside Look.
Pins Connect to a Vast Array of Web Sources
On Pinterest, every pin (or linked image) ties back to an external link. Among a sample of roughly 1 million pins, more than 100,000 distinct source domains were found.
Among those 100,000 domains, the following chart shows the top 20 sources. The most popular domain was Etsy, which powered just over 3% of pins. Google was a close second, though almost all Google links point to Google Image Search, which is technically misattributed content from other 3rd party domains, RJMetrics points out.
Flickr (2.5%), Tumblr (1.1%), and weheartit (1.0%) round out the top 5, after which no domain represents more than 1% of pins.
The Viral Nature of Re-Pins
The analysis also broke out the population of pins by how those pins were posted to Pinterest.
Remarkably, over 80% of pins are re-pins, demonstrating the impressive level of “virality” at work in the Pinterest community.
By contrast, a study conducted by Hubspot at a similar point in Twitter’s history found roughly 1.4% of tweets were retweets.
Surprisingly, a low proportion of pins originate from pinmarklet, a browser bookmarklet that allows users to pin content from any website via one click.
Read more: http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2012/7173/whats-driving-pinterests-amazing-growth#ixzz1nWWleNvG
A recent study has shown that Pinterest is more popular with men than women in the UK. This is, at first glance, quite surprising seeing as 83 per cent of Pinterest’s US users are women.
However, a closer look at the data reveals that many UK users are in fact professionals working in the media industry. This perhaps explains why the gender split is more even in the UK (44 per cent female, 56 per cent male) compared to the US, where women have adopted the site for social rather than professional reasons.
More at: http://www.thinktank.org.uk/blog/2012/02/uk-pinterest-users-buck-us-trend.php
New research about digital marketing trends published today shows that social media engagement is rated as both the top priority and most exciting opportunity for companies this year.
But while the fourth Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing, published by Econsultancy in association with Adobe, shows a huge appetite for social media programmes, there is a worrying lack of commitment to investment in associated analytics and measurement.
Research for this report found that, along with content optimisation, social media engagement is rated as the top priority for digital marketers out of a range of digital-related marketing activities and disciplines.
Asked to indicate their top three priorities for the year ahead, companies surveyed by Econsultancy and Adobe found that these areas will be more important in 2012 than other disciplines including conversion rate optimisation, mobile optimisation and content marketing.
Social media analytics lagged behind in ninth place.
More than 600 companies surveyed for this report were also asked about the ‘most exciting’ digital-related opportunities for their organisations in 2012.
More than half of client-side respondents (54%) said that social media engagement featured among the three most exciting opportunities, way ahead of mobile optimisation (38%) and content optimisation (37%). Again, social analytics is much further down the pecking order, this time in eighth place.
Facebook is investing further in its outreach programme to retailers to bring clarity to the term “social commerce” and promote social integration on their websites.
Gavin Sathianathan, Facebook’s strategic partner manager, is leading the social network’s bid to promote social commerce in the UK and said that agreed definitions are a key building block in its evolution. “It’s really important we nail what we mean by ‘social commerce’,” he said. “At Facebook, we do not equate ‘social commerce’ with opening a store within the network.”
The comments follow a story last week in which retail brands including John Lewis and Reiss told new media age that selling items via social networks, such as a Facebook Store, was not on their 2012 agenda, favouring to hone their m-commerce strategies instead (nma.co.uk 19 January 2012).
Defining social commerce, or “f-commerce”, simply as a transactional store on Facebook is a restrictive way of thinking, according to Sathianathan. “From a defininiton perspactive, it’s important we’re all clear on that,” he saidd. “When I talk to retailers about this, I try to make it clear that it’s about how we can bring social media to bear on the purchase process, be that in a Facebook store or not.”
Most of the discussions taking place between Facebook and retailers centre on integrating Facebook functionality, such as a Like or Shar’ buttons, into their own websites, according to Sathianathan.
Top of Facebook’s priority list are supermarket and FMCG brands, while those that have experienced notable success in their f-commerce strategy stem from the fashion and ticketing vertials, according to the social network.
“We talk a lot to FMCGs and grocers [whose goods or services are not necessarily social] and talk to them about the social aspects of their products,” said Sathianathan. “For instance, a can of baked beans may not be social but the meal you have them with could.”
Earlier this week, Unilever used its Facebook storefront to help debut its Lynx Attract for Her brand – the first time it has attempted to appeal to female audiences with the brand (nma.co.uk 23 January 2012).
The FMCG giant sold all 100 cans it was offering via the platform, retailing for £3.25 each, within two hours of launch in a campaign that met most of its initial performance metrics.
More at: http://www.nma.co.uk/news/facebook-urges-clearer-understanding-of-social-commerce/3033576.article
