Major brands now add similar Black Friday home electronics promotions into their summer sales and are a major category on Amazon Prime Day.
We’re now seeing discounts in nearly every product category. As more home and personal electronics, like white goods, audio and visual products feature in the July/August end of season clearance sales, retailers are looking at ways to improve their customer experience to attract and convert customers in the face of bewildering choice.
Taggstar has successfully supported some of the largest online retailers during their Golden Quarter campaigns, for the past five years. We’ve learnt a thing or two about how social proof can successfully convert customers during promotional periods. We’ve recorded conversion rate uplift across product categories from fashion to travel, ticketing to toys – plus home electronics – which is important news for retailers who are looking for new ways to optimise their retail conversions during the summer sales.
In the last year we’ve also added our social proof messaging into more retail marketing channels including referral vouchers, in-store digital display and re-marketing ads. By the time you read this post, a major pure play retailer will also be featuring social proof in their marketing emails, increasing engagement, conversions and related sales.
How Taggstar Works
Our messages collect and display real-time trends including sales, views, trending products , plus stock levels and customer reviews.
Consumer research shows that opinions and behaviour of our peers has a positive impact on convincing us to engage with a product and buy it. The higher sales conversions and revenue we’ve seen from the brands using Taggstar on their product pages is testament to the power of the crowd. In fact, some brands have seen up to 12% conversion rate uplift. With proven results in other product categories, we believe social proof messaging is a powerful way to convert home electronics customers.
As we enter the summer sales period, this article explores how to social proof messaging can improve both the home electronics customer experience and bottom line results:
1) Bring In-Store Sales Assistant Online
Home electronics sales rely heavily on experts. Whether you’re selling through bricks and mortar stores or online-only, supporting your buyers is central to closing the sale.
Of course, with total sales flat but online sales growing, retailers are looking at new ways to optimise their eCommerce channel. Home electronics retailers know that their buyers are rarely experts, and the choice can be overwhelming when faced with a product list page of hundreds of search results. Which is where extra help in the form of previous customers’ behaviour and feedback, can simplify and demystify your customers’ shopping experience.
It’s an imperative which has long-time been tipped as a major trend for online retail, with Forbes 2019 retail roundup ‘How To Rule Retail: 10 Essential Tactics, Trends & Innovations To Back In 2019’ defines how online stores now look to attract and sell through live and interactive eCommerce.
Recent announcements from major electronics retailers support the trend. One brand recently commented on its plans to provide its website customers with quality content, including explainer videos, tutorials and blogs. Tellingly, it also plans to build its team of live chat experts as part of a wider strategy to move from a transactional website (like some of its giant competitors), to a retail destination where electronics buyers can be satisfied that they’ve made the right product choice the first time round.
Assistants are on-hand to sell and advise. Good assistants help customers to make the right product choices, and also reduces product returns and negative online reviews. When buying expensive items like high end TVs or professional cameras, consumers typically take longer to choose, and browse multiple, competitive sites, which increases the likelihood that they’ll churn.
When the success of a sale depends so heavily on expert advice, social proof messaging is a key tool that retailers can use to replicate the in-store experience online. Messages can be applied throughout the home electronics sales funnel to show real-time sales, views, reviews and add-to-basket trend data for individual products, plus the latest product reviews and stock levels.
For the online customer, who’s shopping alone, this information provides the assistance they’re looking for. It’s reduces choice by drawing their attention to products that have been popular with others. Information like purchase volumes, views and add to basket volumes then helps them to make a further shortlist, emphasises the reasons why they should buy, while stock volumes inject urgency into the purchase decision. This helps them to navigate to the right product, reducing time on-site and improves the online experience.
Because reviews are important to home electronics purchase decisions, Taggstar can be integrated with BazaarVoice review data, to support customers making a more considered, expensive and long-term purchase. The dialogue provided by social proof messaging both increases customer engagement and meets their need to have their choices affirmed by other trusted peers.
2) Unlock Analysis Paralysis
Customers see product options and recommendations from more sources than ever before. And yet, more choice hasn’t helped to cut decision-making time, in fact, it’s added to it. Social proof gives home electronics customers a different sales experience.
Imagine searching for, and scrolling through 150 drone choices on your product list page. You see three drones highlighted with a ‘Popular’ or ‘Trending’ badge. This narrows your shortlist. On clicking, you see richer detail on each trending product such as ‘50 others have bought this today’ or, ‘39 others have rated this 5 stars for coverage.’ Ta dah! Your shopping experience has been transformed. You’re now aware which products are most popular, and highly reviewed, making it easier to define a shortlist and make an informed choice.
Taggstar has also introduced a new message type, which further injects urgency and prompts customers to make a decision. Returning customers are shown what’s happened since they last visited a page. This gives them specific, personal data about how many have sold, been viewed or added to basket in that timeframe. This can be effective for converting home electronics customers who typically look at a product two or three times before deciding to go ahead and buy.
What was a general product search has become social and interactive using the trends and reviews of previous shoppers. It’s trend data that almost every enterprise retail site is collecting through its data layer. By showing these aggregated trends to shoppers, you’re able to tell them how popular a product is, how its rated and how many are left.
It’s information that can increase confidence in a product choice, and reduces the risk of the shopper making the wrong choice. But most important for the retail bottom line, products showing social proof messaging are proven to be more likely to convert to a sale than products without. Read how retailer N Brown saw conversions grow using our software.
3) Add Value to In-Store Digital Display
In the last few months, Taggstar has injected social proof messaging into the in-store experience. This meets the demand from retailers to add interactive support to bricks and mortar retail, and create a seamless experience for customers.
Because our messages display real-time data, we’re now able to show rich product detail, like popularity, stock volumes, reviews and more, on in-store digital display. This gives in-store customers reasons why they should choose a product at the point of consideration or sale.
This is important for home electronics retailers. Consumers spend significantly more per visit in-store than online (source: Forbes). According to the First Insight Report, 71 percent of all shoppers surveyed spent $50 or more when shopping in-store. This compares to only 54 percent of respondents spending more than $50 when shopping online.
Using the same technology we use online, our software can also aggregate and display product trends, from all of your stores, anywhere in the world.
Imagine being able to display social proof about the real-time top five trending items as they happen e.g. “24 others have bought this fridge freezer in the last hour” or, “Trending: 18 sold in the last hour.”
4) Social Proof Powers Email
Email marketing remains a popular and important way to tell home electronics customers about your latest offers and products. It’s why we’re announcing a partnership with Moveable Ink to enable greater customer interaction with product marketing email campaigns. It sees real-time social proof messaging added to the featured products, alongside contextual data like location, device, weather and product price added to these direct comms.
This gives retailers more options to activate live product and customer data, and to generate compelling calls-to-action at the moment the email is opened, boosting engagement and conversions.
5) Make it Personal
Buzz about personalising the customer experience has been building for some years. It’s peaked in the last 12 months and we’re now in the domain of hyper-personalisation or “adapting your customer relationship in real time, in terms of the offers provided and the overall customer experience.”
Retail commentators are looking at how customer-focused digital interactions, which deliver messaging such as content, offers and other interactions, enhance customer experience, eCommerce and improve profitability. We’ve incorporated their guidance into our social proof messages and can now show aggregated real-time product views, add-to-bag volumes and sales volumes since the individual shopper last visited a product page.
A website visitor returning to a product page will now see message personalised to their behaviour. E.g. “Since your last visit 2 days ago, 22 others bought this” or, “Since your last visit 1 day ago, 12 others added to their bag.”
These messages are configured to display specifics about the visitor’s engagement with the product (‘2 days ago you visited this item….’), and to increase their product consideration using the behaviour of other shoppers (‘22 others have bought this since your last visit’).
The powerful social proof combination is a clear way to tell shoppers that others are viewing that item, how quickly it’s selling and how many have sold. It’s another way to nudge shoppers towards the basket, and to increase online conversions and revenue.
Taggstar is the only social proof message provider to offer personalised social proof. It’s just one of the message types that are available as standard to all our customers. They’re another way to drive conversion rate uplift by as much as 12 per cent.
With Black Friday planning already underway, find out how Taggstar can support your home electronics sales, contact us here.
