Although we are past Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday, we are still in the depths of the retail season and it’s a perfect time to think about how marketers can fully utilize every opportunity to make connections with their customers. According to ShareThis, “millennials users are 3.6x more likely to share content on social networks, and 2.3x more likely to click back on content shared by their peers. ” This shows the exact impact every customer can have if we properly encouraged, or incentivized brand engagement on social media platforms.
The sharing activity of a generation accounting for $200+ billion in spending power (Abrahamson, ShareThis, 2014), is very telling about the data we should be receiving at the check out after your customers virtual shopping cart is full and they are ready to purchase. Currently, many companies rely on sharing buttons after purchases are made to poorly encourage customers to provide free marketing on private social networking profiles. I personally have never seen anyone in my social network share their purchases on their social media site and I’m willing to wager that customers rarely utilize these features when they buy products online.
However, there are other ways companies can encourage their customers to share purchase related content online. By simply asking customers to connect their social pages or provide their social media handles at check out, companies open themselves up to a relationship with their customers. This can allow companies to interact with their customers after a purchase, follow up with them, and use the data collected from a purchase to create personalized messages. Since Millennial’s purchases are driven, in large part, by their social connections, companies should start behaving as a friend to their customers and interact with them on social sites.
Harvard Business Review states that companies who show empathy towards customers online are more successful in their social media marketing efforts. Through showing empathy, companies can make a customer feel valued (Parmar, Harvard Business Review, 2015). For example, if Starbucks utilized data from app downloads to tweet to customers asking how their coffee was that day, or if JetBlue tweeted at their customers wishing them stress free travel before their flight, they would build on their customer relations and improve their brand experience.
Many companies have begun to interact with customers online but we need to begin to engage and learn from every customer to humanize our brands by showing our customers we care. Since the majority of buying decisions now begin with the advice from friends, it’s time that companies became friends with their customer through utilizing the benefits of social networking. By adding a field at check out for customers to enter their social media handles and web pages, you can open a valuable avenue of communication for you and your customers. ||||
erica susan krauss 