Gift-giving – when you get it right, it can be a highly rewarding experience. But the process of finding that perfect gift can be daunting and frustrating.
Special occasions such as Mother’s Day marks an important sales period for many retailers. While once marked as the prime season for cards, chocolates and flowers, the Mother’s Day gift market has today evolved to include beauty, jewelry, fashion, accessories as well as unique experiences.
The immense amount of choice doesn’t make it any easier for shoppers to narrow down what to buy. By implementing features to help shoppers more easily find gifts and make informed and confident gift purchase decisions, online brands and retailers can elevate the customer experience and boost online conversion rates and long-time loyalty.
Helping shoppers find the best gifts
When gift shopping, it can be extremely helpful for shoppers to understand what items are trending and popular with other shoppers. The use of “bestseller” or “trending” badges has become table stakes, but without accompanying data to support these claims they often lack credibility. There is also a tendency among retailers to overuse badges which can lead to message blindness.
Popularity messages are much more effective when real-time data is used to quantify just how popular a product is. When leveraging Social Proof Messaging retailers are able to display how many of an item has been bought in a specified period or how many people are looking at a product at any given time or time period. This added context provides credibility and also enables retailers to deliver more engaging onsite experiences.
Leverage social proof across the shopping journey
Social proof messaging can ease gift shopping across the eCommerce shopping journey. On a crowded product list page, social proof messages help shoppers more easily find popular items to consider, and on the product detail page and in the cart, social proof creates a sense of urgency that can prompt customers to buy, lowering cart abandonment rates.
Helping shoppers find the right gifts is an important part of the customer experience for Uncommon Goods – a popular online destination for unique gifts. The online retailer curates products by occasion, price range and interest, for example, to help shoppers hone in on what to buy. The retailer uses social proof messaging to enhance the shopping experience even further by helping shoppers feel more informed and confident in their purchase decisions.
Shoppers who may be gift-buying for the active mom, can benefit from Fabletics’ use of social proof. Real-time messages such as ‘Hot Item! Sold 245 times in the last 48 hours’ help showcase the hottest colors and styles – information that is very useful when searching for the perfect gift. The Fabletics improved conversion rates by 3.19% in only five days when it first implemented social proof messaging.
Elevate social proof with review and attribute messaging
By adding aggregated reviews and rating data to social proof messages, retailers can further highlight what other customers think about a product, instilling greater confidence in the purchase decision, and thus driving higher conversion rates.
Attribute messaging helps shoppers more easily spot essential product attributes – such as “organic”or “vegan luxury” – that might be particularly appealing for gift buyers looking for that extra special touch. Combined with social proof messaging, attribute messaging provides useful information “above the fold”, that helps shoppers spot relevant produuscts and make better purchase decisions.
Give your customers the gift of confident shopping experiences
Social proof messaging will not make gift-shopping completely painless, but it will help shoppers more easily find gifts that will delight rather than disappoint. By implementing social proof, your customers can make better buying decisions even when they don’t know what to buy.
Better informed and confident shoppers lead to significant increases in conversion rate and revenue. And by buying right, your customers – and their gift recipients – are less likely to return their purchases.
