Opinion: How can retailers turn social media engagement into revenue?

Social media plays a big role in everything your customers do: it’s where they get their news, learn new skills, find jobs and tell the world about their accomplishments.

Marketers like you have been pouring advertising budget and resources into it, but now it’s time to move beyond simply using social media for brand awareness and make sure the money you spend on it actually delivers revenue.

Having a long list of people who ‘like’ you or ‘follow’ you isn’t the same as having a carefully curated list of email subscribers that you know a lot about: such as the products they bought from you in the past, added to a shopping basket or even browsed.

Use the technology embedded in your commerce platform to really target your healthy social media following and start converting them into buyers, without spending a fortune.

And why not use social media to benefit the one programme that gives you keen insight into your customer’s behaviour – email? By incorporating one into the other, you get so much more than you ever could from either channel on its own.

To help you to do that, we partnered with Retail Week to survey 1,000 UK consumers about the social media platforms they prefer. We also asked them to tell us which retailers already stand out in social media.

We hope the information in this guide will give you just the tips you need to develop a killer social commerce strategy.