6 Benefits of Selling on Social for your Online Store

As an online retailer, you would have witnessed the natural growth of online social media platforms since the world was ordered to stay home during the rolling COVID-19 lockdowns.

With record numbers of people turning to social media to replace real-world activities, a staggering 4.55 billion of the world’s 7.55 billion, is currently using social media.

1. Put your brand in the spotlight

To reach your ideal customers, you need to be found in places where your customers spend their time. Think of social channels as the world’s biggest digital shopping malls. Selling via or on social media means you have access to over half the world’s population (4.55 billion social media users) and your store has the potential to become a BIG DEAL, overnight.

2. Social media improves the buying journey

As social media platforms make it increasingly easy for consumers to shop without leaving their social media feed, the buyer’s journey has been truly atomized. Consumers can now discover, explore, and buy your products without ever leaving the platform.

By shortening the buyer journey, retailers stand to convert shoppers to customers faster, lowering their overall cost of customer acquisition (COCA).

Social media is a place where Word-of-Mouth advertising thrives as customers feel empowered to have conversations with other consumers about your brand and products. If retailers are not encouraging customers to talk about their products online, they are potentially missing out on one of the most effective ways of growing their eCommerce store organically.

Online feedback and recommendations can form a solid starting point for brand conversations. Where are consumers posting their feedback more than ever before? You guessed it, social media.

4. Convert followers into loyalists

A brand advocate is anyone who organically promotes your brand to others and includes people from a much wider audience than those who use your products.

In fact, growing customer loyalty is a smart way to grow your business.

• According to a Harvard Business School report, "increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%."
• Forbes magazine reports that loyal consumers are 50% more likely to try new products and spend 31% more, on average, compared to new customers.

Social media is the place where these valuable brand connections are easier to nurture as people use social to connect to communities for all sorts of reasons. If you think about it, there’s probably a community on social media that you are a part of.

This makes social an excellent platform for building brand connections that will increase:

• Share of wallet — consumer spend
• Share of life — invest time in your brand
• Share of love — invest feelings in your brand

5. Repurpose UGC into social proof gold

In the click and deliver era, it’s a challenge for brands to replace the high touch experience and excitement that is naturally experienced when shopping in-store. It is easy for retailers to use social media to maintain that brand connection during the post-purchase journey by leveraging user-generated content.

One example is called the “unboxing” moment. Retailers often include a personalised note or free gift with purchase and request shoppers to upload a picture to social using a hashtag. This level of engagement gets consumers talking about your products on multiple channels.

Retailers can also do this in more subtle ways, for example making their packaging worthy of social media. We recommend Better Packaging Co who are experts at sustainable packaging and can help you deliver a great experience for both your customers and planet!

Starshipit’s fulfilment automation software gives you one dashboard to manage all your couriers and easily integrates with your eCommerce platform and inventory software to automatically pull through orders (no more cut and paste).

You can print shipping labels, manage returns, and automate time-consuming tasks, saving you up to 80% in handling time. Most importantly for social commerce, you can send automated post-purchase customer notifications and use branded tracking pages to build loyalty.

Download The Ultimate Retailer's Guide to Selling on Social

If you're new to using social media to grow your business or you're looking to optimize your current methods, then download our new eBook. We offer everything you need to know when selling on social media in an easy-to-follow guide. You will gain insights into key trends, and we give you a breakdown of each social platform along with suggested tools and a framework to develop your social commerce strategy.