How building a social community can boost your conversion rate

Social communities are the new conversion tools on the market

Social media can be an extremely powerful tool that can affect your conversion rate significantly. Done right, you’ll be hitting your goal conversion rate in no time.

However, there are tricks of every trade, social media networks like Facebook and Twitter are not the most effective conversion tools anymore. So how about building your own personal social community?

Driving traffic is not enough, you need the right tools to charm those visitors and turn them into customers.

Building your own social community will strengthen the relationship with your existing customers and affect the conversion rate significantly. Ultimately you will have more ways to engage with your customers and relevancy of your conversions.  Check out a few ways the social community can boost your conversion rate.

1. User generated reviews can increase your conversion rate by 105%

The social community is a user-centric place where customers comment, engage and discuss your products and services. Honest opinions from your customers engage visitors on a level that no other marketing tool does.

According to a study from iPerceptions, 63% of customers will make a purchase from a site that has customer reviews.  Visitors who interact with reviews and customer queries are 105% more likely to purchase while visiting, Bazaarvoice found in 2011, something that has likely not changed since.

User generated reviews impact the conversion rate across all types of industries significantly. Customers and visitors use social communities as a vent tool for their honest opinions and feelings. The social community is a powerful tool for entrepreneurs where they can manage discussions, interact and use every feature for the benefit of the company.

In the chart below the difference of the conversion rate from people that see user-generated content and people who don’t is prominent. However, good conversion rate besides reviews is affected by real-time engagement too.

Source: YOTPO

2. Real-time engagement can improve your conversion rate by 30%

It is a well-known fact that online users don’t have patience. They expect an immediate response to their queries and do not tolerate delayed and sloppy responses from companies.

According to The Social Habit, 32% of users who have interacted with a company on social expect a reply in 30 minutes or less.  The fast reply can be tricky since businesses nowadays have multiple profiles across various social media channels. The struggle with time management is a real problem for some companies.

Building your own social community can increase your reply time. You will have everything in one place and interact simultaneously with a large volume of people. For example, when you reply to a community post from a member, there is huge possibility that all of the members will see the reply and get their answer to the same question.

Improving response time can improve your conversion rate by 30%, it’s all about that unique user experience.

3. Customers and visitors request unique experience

Good treatment in the online world means that you are offering one of a kind unique experience. The offer has to be related to your product or service but still, has made the customers and visitors feel special.

What’s better way to improve your treatment than building personal social community? Online visitors will appreciate your effort in building a network for them, which will encourage engagement and conversion. For instance, Ning the social network platform has their own creators community as a place where all of their users can communicate, share experience and hints. Engaging and active communication with the users, resolving community-related issues, proximity to the customers, helped them in improving brand loyalty and in just 9 months they’ve decreased cancel rate by 4.5 times.

 

Part of the unique experience is presenting new products or services to the community in a pilot early form. You can gather in-depth insights from your social community about your future plans.

4. Insights about your new products or services will help optimization and conversion

The most relevant source for testing when it comes to launching new products and service can be your social community.

For example, before you publicly announce your product on the market you can organize quizzes, tests on your social community, gather useful information and optimize your product according to your target audience’s needs. Ultimately, you will have better conversion rates just because you are offering something that everyone will love.

Your personal social community will be the best source for market research and analysis.

Social community can affect your retention rate as well

Since social communities increase user satisfaction significantly, the percentage of reoccurring sales from the same people will increase.  Loyal customers are the core of your success, by providing user-centric online place your retention rates will only go up.

Thanks to Natalie Lesyk for sharing their advice and opinion in this post. Natalie is a digital marketing geek with narrow specialization in community building. She writes about social media, growth hacking, recent marketing technics, brand ambassadors and much more. She is a writer for Ning. You can follow her on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.

Contributer : Smart Insights