Play.com social media marketing Case Study 19_09_11
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This is the presentation that Chris Howard, Director of Online Marketing at Play.com gave at the Social Media Marketing & Monitoring Summit 2011 in London on the 19th September.
![Facebook Strategy Accelerate Fan Recruitment Drive Fan Loyalty Turn Fans into Customers Leverage Unique Content Competitions and Apps Generate Conversation New and Exclusive Offers ,[object Object]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
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Play.com social media marketing Case Study 19_09_11
- 1. Play.com Case Study Turning Followers into Buyers
- 3. Rich content
- 6. Money can’t buy experiences
- 7. Viral apps to engage customers
- 9. Spark debate
- 11. Learn more about our customers
- 12. Urgency
- 13. Exclusivity
Editor's Notes
- Our Facebook challenge was threefold:Kickstart growth of our fanbaseIncrease frequency of return visits and engagement of Facebook fansTurn those fans into customersTo do that, we have done the following:Made the most of our strong USPs – access to talent, rich content and exclusive products via supplier relationshipsBuilt competitions and Apps using the ES platform to maximise the reach of that contentChanged our posting strategy, moving away from pushing products directly and instead seeking to engage our fans on topics related to the categories we cover in order to learn more about our interestsSlowly started to monetise these customers by giving them FB exclusive offers, emphasising urgency to improve conversion rate and embracing the viral opportunity offered by FB
- All of our Facebook content, whether it be offers, flash deals, or competitions such as the Harry Potter example, are created through easy to use wizards. This allows us to provide the information we need, such as copy, rules and assets for the EngageSciences system to auto generate all the components of the promotion – the scheduled messages to promote the campaign, the Facebook tab, application and form to gather entrants data and the viral sharing strategies such as referral incentives. After two hours training a member of my team was able to generate these campaigns herself within an hour or two. Frequent content refresh helps to keep users engaged
- Any promotional campaign can be fully viewed in an interactive preview environment before we decide to launch. This allows us to test all elements of the campaign from a design and functionality perspective to make sure that everything looks and works as it should do. This also allows us to generate previews of any co-branded campaigns to share with suppliers, film studios, labels etc so that they can ensure they are happy with the way in which their assets are being used – and to easily make edits to the competition to comply with their guidelines. This was a major headache prior to using the Engage system
- The competition apps built through the Engage platform allow us to make the most of the viral opportunities Facebook offers. Users who are not existing fans on Facebook are presented with a Like gate – they have to follow us in order to access the competition app.On entering the app, we gain permission from them to access certain personal information which we can use at a later date for Social CRMExisting fans primarilydiscover our competitions via posts on our Facebook wall, which go into their news feeds. On entry to the competition, a status update posts on their wall and therefore alerts their friends via their news feeds to the competition.To help the viral element even further, we give extra opportunities to win to fans who send direct messages to their friends inviting them to the competition– as they need to be fans to enter, this further accelerates fan recruitmentWe also drive traffic back to Play.com via a buy message
- As well as increasing the frequency of campaigns, we have also taken a much more deliberate approach in talking to our customers. We plan posts every day, using a conversational style even when announcing competitions or offers. A mixture of topics and post types, including photos, videos, polls etc, has led to a significant improvement in the amount of interaction we see from our customers on the back of each post, and in turn has led to us achieving a higher Edgerank.We have also created a Help tab on Facebook via the Engage platform, which allows us to much more effectively manage the conversation with customers regarding customer service queries. This has meant issues have been resolved more quickly than before, thus reducing the workload for our CS team and keeping our follower base happy.
- Taking Facebook management in house and using the Engage Sciences tool to manage our Facebook activity has had an immediate impact on fan recruitment. When we started working with Engage in May, we had just over 35k followers, and had barely grown that figure during the previous six months, despite working with an external agency to manage our Social Media channels.In the first couple of months of utilising the tool, we more than doubled our Facebook fan base, quickly overtaking Amazon’s UK fan base and accelerating past their figure
- We have also seen a significant improvement in the engagement of our fans. This chart shows the number of active users we get to our Facebook page on a daily basis, and the number of post interactions from those fans. Since we started running campaigns through the Engage Sciences platform, we have seen Active Users more than double and post interactions more than treble – which in turn aids our Edgerank, meaning that future posts are seen by a higher proportion of our followers.
- All of this is well and good – but as a retailer, in the medium to long term we need to generate sales off the back of this to demonstrate a positive ROI on our Facebook activity.In order to achieve this, we have also created an Offers tab which is the hub of our social commerce activities. We use this to run offers as campaigns, such as the recent ‘Bank Holiday Blowout Sale’, which gave our Facebook fans exclusive access to the best offers from our Sale 24 hours before they became available to the general public. The CTR and Conversion Rate of these offers was more than double the record we had previously seen from Social Media. Clearly this is a mechanic that works, and we now need to amplify it to give even more reasons for people to follow us on Facebook
- Even though we are still in the early stages of turning fans into customers, we have already seen significant improvements in the number of sales on the back of our Facebook activity. The chart above shows the number of sales on Play.com where the referring domain was Facebook. As you can see, earlier in the year we were seeing almost no return on the back of our Facebook activity, despite our posts being specifically designed to push individual products. The increase in fanbase we have seen over the past few months, and the increasing engagement of that fanbase, is already converting into more sales for Play.com, which we expect to continue growing over the coming months.
- One of the ways we intend to further leverage our Fanbase is through the Social Media database. Because we are launching multiple offers and competitions, we are starting to build up a detailed picture of a new database of customers that we have gathered from Facebook. This means we understand the levels of engagement of each fan in terms of the campaigns they have entered but also their activity at spreading our campaigns to their friends through tracking the amount of shares and invites they have made. We calculate the actual physical amount of people exposed to our offers and competitions through the actions of each fan. We can also match up their social activity with their onsite purchasing behaviour to create a detailed profile of our customers, their interests and their relationships with Play.com. In this way we can start to segment our database and run campaigns via email to people based on their social footprint.