‘Word of mouth’ marketing is one of the oldest tools in the marketer’s handbook. Even in the age of e-commerce, personal referrals remain crucial. Customers are 90% more likely to make a purchase from a brand recommended by a friend. And according to a survey by Nielsen, 88% of customers placed the highest level of trust in brands recommended by people they know.
Customers are 90% more likely to make a purchase from a brand recommended by a friend.
In the past decade, ‘word of mouth’ marketing has been revolutionized by social media marketing due to the role of brand ambassadors or influencers — people whose credibility and social media relationships increase brand awareness and sales. It has become vital that brands leverage the powerful ability of influencers to boost sales funnel conversions, retain customers through meaningful engagement, and increase ROI.
During the pandemic, customers have looked increasingly to trusted connections and influencers for assurance and comfort. It is thus even more critical that you focus on your customer experience management strategy to provide positive experiences to your customers so that they become your brand ambassadors in your social media marketing practice.
In other words, if your customers are not actively promoting your brand, you are losing sales.
So, as an e-commerce merchant, how can you convert your site visitors into social media ambassadors? While there are many products in the market, I think only a handful of applications that provide the full range of functionality that can seamlessly support the visitor to the brand ambassador journey. SAP Commerce Cloud is one.
Let’s take a look at how SAP Commerce Cloud (originally, SAP Hybris) can help you leverage social media marketing through influencers by providing the best customer experience – perhaps the most powerful way to increase positive engagement with your brand.
The core capabilities of SAP Commerce Cloud that support this outcome are:
- It creates personalized, compelling product stories
Built to help organizations thrive in the digital economy whether B2B, B2C, or B2B2C, SAP Commerce Cloud offers an integrated digital business solution to help your brand deliver seamless customer experiences – the key to driving positive engagement. It takes into account both digital and physical touchpoints with your customers to offer a unique and personalized experience.
In simple terms, this means that core features of SAP Commerce Cloud can help you become a successful digital business by enhancing your customer’s journey from the point of landing on your website to becoming a social media brand ambassador.
You can tap into your customer’s sentiments and behavior to craft a compelling, well-told story around your product, helping your customers relate to your product and your brand. The goal for your customers is to share this product story and their customer journey on social media channels, thus becoming brand ambassadors. This acts as ‘social proof,’ which influences their followers to experience your product as well.
- It delivers individualized, curated content through an omnichannel storefront
Your customers’ journey is more complicated than ever. They will likely go through multiple online and offline channels before even considering buying your product. So, as a company, you’ll need to reach customers through multiple and diverse touchpoints. Unfortunately, these varied interactions increase complexity and create data fragmentation for the seller and can result in a lack of a personalized experience for the customer.
SAP Commerce Cloud’s omnichannel, responsive storefront helps in overcoming this fragmentation by delivering a personalized experience for all visitors. First, it is optimized for all your customer’s devices. Second, it provides individually tailored content, promotions, and recommendations for your site visitor, thus enabling an easier conversion to loyal customers and eventually, a social media brand ambassador.
- It drives consistency across channels with centralized content management
Nothing sparks loyalty in your customer more than a consistent content strategy throughout all the touchpoints. SAP Commerce Cloud’s centralized content repository helps you manage all your product content from one place, helping you to effortlessly catalog products in multiple languages and content types, ranging from attributes, images, and videos.
This feature not only simplifies product content management but also enables in-built workflows for seamless collaboration between departments — thus cutting operational costs while increasing productivity and efficiency.
As a result of single-source customer experience management, your customers enjoy increased consistency across all channels. This will, in turn, improve customer engagement and result in more user-generated content.
- It promotes positive engagement through real-time Customer Experience Management
Customers face an endless stream of content and information. The key to upselling is curating a highly customized and memorable customer experience. Commerce Cloud offers business-friendly website editing tools (such as Smart Edit) to help you to create a single, intuitive interface for your customers across platforms — online, mobile, or tablet.
You can also segment your customers based on their history and shopping sentiments in order to deliver relevant product content, recommendations, and promotional offers. You can then analyze customer sentiments in real time to identify pain-points for your brand. This data can be used to tweak your customer experience approach to increase positive engagement.
Another great feature is the Customer Service Cockpit. When a customer is shopping online and needs help, the cockpit helps Customer Service Representatives to login and view their shopping carts so they can guide them until the customer places the order. This can then help you identify and support unhappy customers and, with personalized help, get them back on the journey of becoming brand ambassadors.
- It delivers hassle-free order management across multiple channels
Managing orders across multiple channels can be a significant challenge for your company without an efficient order management tool. When customers land on your site, they expect flexible buying options, quick delivery, and easy returns. A convenient shopping experience is a sure-fire way to drive customer loyalty.
The Order Management module ensures that your customers have a hassle-free shopping experience from start to finish with a range of buying options and easy return services, which helps your company optimize order allocation, cut shipping times, and lower costs.
It offers you a single view of inventory, pricing, promotions, shipping, and returns across the entire organization, thus enabling streamlined order management. Customer self-service tools provide fast and efficient returns.
SAP Commerce Cloud: A cost-efficient solution optimized to drive personalized and seamless customer experiences
SAP Commerce Cloud is a fully integrated omnichannel commerce platform deployed in a cloud environment. This offers complete flexibility and customization while minimizing costs and reducing time to market.
However, its real differentiator comes in the form of accelerators and ease of integration. These are omnichannel solutions that provide readily available storefront templates to speed up implementation. The accelerators include industry-specific capabilities to suit your needs. SAP Commerce Cloud also comes with easy integration into your existing ERP systems.
This is crucial as it can help you avoid most integration costs, which are usually 30% of the total project cost. According to a study by Forrester, the SAP Commerce Cloud suite helps enterprise customers achieve an ROI of 307% and can bring benefits and pays back in millions of dollars within a year.
As consumer behavior shifts increasingly to digital platforms, it’s imperative that you revise the social media marketing of your brand accordingly. SAP Commerce Cloud offers a quick, powerful solution to help you streamline your digital business and convert site visitors into your biggest social media brand ambassadors.
To learn more about how to find the right CX solution for your business, please check out our recent whitepaper, “CRM vs CX: Understanding your options.
