In our recent review of metrics on social media, we were struck by the huge disparity in fan base and followers between retailers, even within the same category. Some large retailers command hundreds of thousands of fans – even millions – while others, of competitive stature and digital presence, have only a few thousand. Not only that, the rate of fan growth varies greatly as well. Why?
Between the months of November and January, for example, Nordstrom’s fan and follower base jumped by nearly 100%. Despite the holiday season handicap, not all major retailers experienced parallel growth. A deeper dive into industry news, Nordstom.com and Quantcast yielded some clues to success differentiators.
The biggest clue was industry attention to Nordstrom’s re-launched e-commerce website, Nordstrom.com, in August 2010… Just in time for Back to School and the Holiday Shopping season. At its peak in 2010, Nordstrom’s website reached over 2.7 million U.S. monthly visitors. Nordstrom obviously saw the benefit of building affinity with that audience and chose the perfect time of year to start working a prime owned media asset – its commerce site – to convert more target audience members into engaged fans and brand advocates.
The stroke of simple genius is the site’s customer centricity. True to Nordstrom’s “it’s all about you” tag line, their site features relatable fashion images, many look like photos from an album, and it creates a comfortable environment for shopping as well as for authentic, customer-focused conversation about fashion and trends. They’re also fostering customer engagement with calls for user-generated content in the form of photos, reviews and personal comment and on a robust conversation tab that features specific topics and a blog. Of critical value, Nordstrom.com also uses nearly every page and subpage to promote conversational opportunity and content sharing via personal Facebook and twitter profiles as well as the retailer’s other social sites. The customer is empowered to converse wherever and whenever is most comfortable. Perhaps it should be no surprise that while, in fact, the commerce site does succeed in capturing customer participation, a good degree more conversation is growing on Nordstrom’s Facebook and Twitter pages… not to mention the added remarketing value of sharing on personal pages.
As more conversation grows on Facebook, embedded links in Nordstrom content send customers right back to the e-commerce site. And guess what? More traffic on e-commerce translates into more retail business too, as noted by Kevin Hillstrom, President of MineThatData and former VP of Database Marketing Nordstrom. Same-store sales for the 5-week period ending January 1, 2011 increased 8.4% against the U.S. retailer industry average increase of 4%. Did Nordstrom’s customer-facing initiatives contribute to that? We think so.
This is a modern case of what goes around comes around – in a good way… And the whole cycle is fueled by the company’s largest owned media asset outside of its brick-and-mortar locations. Nordstrom doesn’t just rest on its conversational laurels… But that’s subject for another blog… The takeaway for other retailers, especially in today’s retail landscape, is that now is not the time to sit on your assets. Don’t think that if you have Facebook and Twitter, the rest will come. You’re gonna need a smarter strategy for 2011 (see our recent predictions) to tackle the retail marketing challenges of a social world. And if you’re uncertain about how to take the next step, we know just the firm to call.