Marketing
Boosting customer engagement by fostering community connectivity
Melissa Tatoris, chief innovation catalyst at Acoustic, shares why retailers must focus not only on attracting customers, but retaining them for the long haul. To accomplish this in a largely shop-from-home world, retailers need to look for creative ways to foster community connectivity.
November 25, 2020 by Melissa Tatoris
The pandemic continues to disrupt many of America's favorite in-person gatherings, from Thanksgiving to holiday doorbuster sales, creating anxiety for retailers who rely on these annual traditions for sales. Despite the uncertainty, there is room for optimism. Retail sales have been up both month-over-month and year-over-year each month since June, according to a report by the National Retail Federation. Although consumer spending remains below last year's levels, retail sales are up 8.6% since January, the report noted.
What's the takeaway for retailers? While sales seem to have generally recovered since the pandemic's early days, retailers now must focus not only on attracting customers, but on retaining them for the long haul. To accomplish this in a largely shop-from-home world, retailers should look for creative ways to foster community connectivity.
Community connectivity refers to an approach to customer engagement in which a brand proactively enables touch points among its loyal fans, whether through social media, message boards, contests, or other programming. This approach builds trust among consumers by incentivizing real people to share their experience with the brand with other like-minded shoppers. And the best part? Brands can foster community connectivity virtually.
To unpack this further, let's explore how brands leveraged community connectivity before the pandemic, how they could apply the concept this holiday season, and future applications.
Sephora: A case study in community connectivity
Sephora created a highly engaged community on their website called the Beauty Insider Community. Sephora describes this community as "a place for friendly discussion, questions, photo sharing, product recommendations, sharing experiences, and connecting with other beauty lovers." The program offers free shipping, members-only events, and priority access to select product launches, among other benefits. It also allows members to seek product recommendations from real Sephora shoppers just like themselves. Members can even see how beauty products look on real shoppers who are part of the same community — not just how the products look on models.
Why does this approach work? By building this community — which has more than 4.1 million members and 2.5 million posts — Sephora has created a platform through which consumers can learn about the brand from other shoppers who are just like them. This creates a feeling of belonging, of connection with the brand and with other members of the community.
Applying community connectivity this holiday season
It's not too late for retailers to leverage community connectivity as part of their holiday strategy. Imagine, for example, you are a home improvement retailer. A consumer is scrolling through your website, searching for holiday decorations. Imagine if the website included crowdsourced photos of the very same holiday decorations on real consumers' properties. This might incentivize the consumer to buy those decorations because they can see what they look like on a real person's home, not just in professionally shot imagery.
This approach creates a win-win-win scenario. The consumer who is looking for holiday decorations might be more inclined to buy them when they can see how they look in real life. The consumer who submitted photos of their own holiday decorations should receive rewards or loyalty points as an incentive for sharing their content. Meanwhile, the brand successfully attracts a new customer while rewarding and retaining an existing one.
Future applications of community connectivity
I spent three years as senior director of marketing at ULTA Beauty, and I still follow the brand closely. Recently, I noticed one of their top-selling mascaras has nearly 23,000 online reviews. Clearly, this is the hallmark of a popular product, but would any retailer really expect consumers to sift through thousands of reviews? Imagine if ULTA took this one step further, using the power of data to tag the product with unique customer descriptions like "great for the boardroom" or "weekend favorite." This would allow shoppers to find new products using filters that were created by real shoppers, rather than the same-old filters like "best sellers" or "top rated." It creates a point of differentiation for the brand.
In the COVID-19 age, Americans are more isolated than ever, but we have not stopped shopping — far from it. This holiday season, and in the coming year, brands have a tremendous opportunity to act as the glue that binds us together. After all, if there's one thing we're craving as 2020 comes to a close, it's community.
Melissa Tatoris is the chief innovation catalyst at Acoustic, an independent marketing cloud.
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