Leveraging Social Shopping Trends and Customer Experience Factors to Influence E-commerce Purchase Decisions

Social Shopping Trends

Shopping is less about buying and spending and more about the buying experience. And the businesses that understand this science behind selling never go wrong with picking up the user communication pitch and marketing plan that connect with their customers and sales eventually happen.

To get in terms with this idea of building the right customer experience to influence user decisions, we should accept the fact that it demands the right social media integration to act sustainable and valid to serve modern e-commerce programs.

As we are in the times when shopping is increasingly going online and plugging in with social media to build user experiences to drive purchase decisions.

The concept of socially integrated commerce is getting highly relevant as users are getting more active in social media. With the social nature of shopping being exploited through ever-inventive modes of communication, platform features, and engagement factors. This requires e-commerce businesses to feed on the trending ideas of social shopping more than ever.

E-commerce and social media are all tuned to serve the idea of social shopping and this is impacting significant trends in e-commerce selling. Here’s how these trends translate in the form of market dispositions and user tendencies.

As per Vendasta, over 93% of customers believe that their shopping decisions are somewhere and somehow influenced by online reviews by other users. Before making a purchase, they look into how well a product or service is received and is rated on social media.

According to Podium, 82% of customers find the content of a review responsible for convincing and driving them to make a purchase decision.

Brands that leverage social media communication and are actively selling their product on social platforms are 70% more likely to get their products recommended.

50% of users accepted that they are ready to pay a cut above if a product has received positive user reviews and community ratings or has been endorsed by a social influencer.

The progressive e-commerce businesses that have been keeping close with social media are already gaining the social lead by actively engaging audiences on different social channels like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Reddit.

More new businesses are joining in increasingly to crack the opportunity lying across the social media landscape. This is allowing businesses to gain higher traction and drive more traffic to their e-commerce sites. Which is making the entire act of customer communication a dynamic and integrated affair that ropes in ever-inventive methods and practices of social selling. And this is allowing them to level up the game of user experience and engagement value in their segment of e-commerce selling.

Going with the Latest Social Commerce Trends

latest social commerce trends

To stand out in this breeding ground of competition and come out winning is a tough bet. Doing this, you need to build your strategy to get an inclusive and validating response from your audiences.

This requires tactical marketing and communication plan that makes the latest social marketing trends and customer experience factors work for your e-commerce entity. This should be involving all the aspects and objectives of social shopping integration that focus on everything across user reach, audience engagement, brand building, and value conversions – with an underlying goal of elevating social purchases.

Here, you need to employ smart social marketing techniques rightly addressing the online shopping trends and user experience objectives to get the most value with socially integrated commerce.

Mass Marketing via Messenger

Facebook’s Messenger is one of the most credible tools to be used to drive messenger-based marketing programs for your social audience.

The very first reason behind this is the huge audience base of 1.3 Billion it connects you with.

Secondly, you do not need to go with any sort of opt-in process and any requirement to install an app to have access to users limited to the number of downloads.

The direct messages sent through messenger have a notably high open- and response rate. Which is much higher compared to emails in any given format or category.

The highly effective messaging layer from the business-empowering social platform proves to be a prominent way to reach out to the prospects and directly connect with them on the message board.

Mass Marketing via Messenger

Quizzes get Customers Talking

Quizzes may sound a bit off-beat and unimportant to engage shoppers, but they are a time-tested tool to get you higher user engagement. Quizzes are a way to intrigue users into doing something that wins them a sense of achievement along with some sort of reward. This gets them to keenly respond to the hidden brand communication and get their buying decisions reassured with the tactically framed questions that influence e-commerce purchases.

Here, users get to be a part of the social and sharable aspect of quizzing and this gets the e-commerce brand to get a growing reach across social channels.

Here’s an example of social quizzing that not just entertains your audience but also educates and instigates them about your offerings subtly and indirectly. This is where you get the chance to persuade users who are not having an immediate need or intent to buy your product.

social quizzing

One-Click Social Purchase

It is a well-acknowledged fact that the more steps you put in between the customer and the check-out event you have more chance of losing them. This applies to everything from the opt-in forms to the point-of-sale counters.

You need to keep the process lean and steps optimized at all levels. Get it more interactive and intuitive to get the whole act of purchase to deliver a smooth and effortless experience to the users.

Here, you can connect the social shops with your website landing pages and checkout sessions cutting down the tedious and elongated steps of the purchase.

This should be built on an unobtrusive one-click purchase strategy for marketers, primarily focused on the purchase situations that are targeted towards mobile users. To grab yourself a minimalist checkout design for socially integrated e-com purchases you can be well served with Stripe.

While doing this, make sure you have social sign-ins implemented so users get an easy way to register and place the order without having to put that extra effort to hop across pages and create new credentials.

One-click social purchase

Ephemeral Content

In the simplest words, ephemeral content is short-lived content that surfaces online for a limited time and disappears. The much-in-trend social stories are a type of ephemeral content that is much prevalent on Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Facebook, and now on LinkedIn as the most recent example.

Seven years back Snapchat introduced this idea and it went incredibly viral. It gained wildfire popularity and is being exceedingly accepted by the users on social media. Clearly, the FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) effect worked remarkably!

This is one heck of a trend to follow to stay active socially and keep your users addicted to your e-commerce brand. With this, you can increase the average time of engagement of your audiences or followers on your social profiles and get to increase the chance of them visiting your product pages on the site.

This is a great way to enhance your user experience and affirm a greater number of traffic and visit-time scores contributing to higher sales on your store.

Ephemeral Content

User-Generated Content

Social shopping is highly influenced by the content created by users. This content can be in the form of product or business reviews, social comments, testimonials, product unboxing videos, forum discussions, and feedback/experiences/queries shared on Q&A platforms.

Most of the users who are dropping by your website through a social media page are most likely to get influenced by those User Generated Content. As per a study, UGC-driven traffic gets you up to 5 times the conversion rate. And this is where you get to create a long-term customer base serving a greater response and higher retention rate.

Your users need to know in and out about your product and they want this to be coming from a genuine unbiased source. So, you need to fairly provide for and allow your users to viably access and consume it in the most sorted way possible.

Here’s how the new-age e-com players do it most effectively using platforms like Visual Commerce enhancing the chances to get the most out of UGC.

User-Generated Content

Nano Influencers

There’s a new study around social marketing that defines a section of influencers to be highly effective and impactful in getting genuine followers. These social media handlers are addressed as nano influencers.

These renowned social media profiles are not the verified accounts of celebrities but have a great influence on the limited group of users following them on the channel. Typically, nano influencers have 1000-5000 followers who are perceived to be an expert in their category of interest or profession. They have genuine and ardent followers who give them great importance and value their opinion highly.

In recent times, when influencer marketing has gained high recognition and importance, nano influencers have emerged out to be a great substitute for brands who are looking for cost-effective and accessible ways to explore influencer marketing.

Nano Influencers

Shoppable Feeds

Instagram is ruling the game of social shopping and the most prominent reason behind this is the commercially aligned social feed features it puts up with. The most notable of which is shoppable feeds that continue to deliver as one of the most operative and effective ways to persuade users to buy through your Insta posts.

These feeds allow businesses to exploit the tendency of mobile shoppers who tend to spend via social shops. These feeds have customer photos, lifestyle snapshots, and mood boards tagged with the product with feature specs and price details.

This induces trust and loyalty among your users and they get inspired by seeing the posts they can relate with and visualize to be able to make a more confident buying decision.

So, going with this social selling feature you get to significantly convert a random stop-by user into a high-intent customer with social tagging of your products.

Shoppable Feeds

To Conclude

We live in a time where Facebook users are more than any country’s population in the world. And 1 out of 4 users spends over an hour on the platform every day. Clearly, social media is the place where all the new-world socializing, entertainment, and business takes place and this is growing at a relentless pace. And customer experience turns out to be a game that is much dependent on the trends that are prevalent in the social landscape.

Much relatedly, as we see the technology evolving, marketing automation and mechanized practices take over the customer communication process. This is where you start lacking that personal touch and your users crave personalization.

The above-discussed social shopping trends can get that experience revived and make your users feel more connected with your idea and trait of the offering. With everything from direct messaging to community-influenced shopping you are directly engaging users and influencing them to buy with you. This has a growing impact on online sales and is turning out to be a staple for e-commerce businesses much agreeably.

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