Building consumer loyalty is particularly vital for fashion brands, because it can keep consumers coming back to shop whenever new collections come out.
Unique Vintage, a fashion retailer selling vintage dresses and apparel, already had a loyal following, but saw the opportunity to build engagement through all channels. Unique Vintage partnered with social commerce platform provider Social Annex, leveraging its Sharing and Referrals and Visual Commerce solutions.
“We’ve really had this luxury of having this passionate, involved and engaged fan base,” said Courtney Lear Wallace, Director of Digital Marketing and Ecommerce at Unique Vintage. “We saw how active and excited they were on social media, whether it was Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest or Twitter, and we really catered to that with our marketing department. We realized that we had this fantastic untapped resource that we wanted to harness both externally and to bridge that gap to our e-Commerce site, to make that a more seamless experience.”
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In total, the Social Annex solutions have resulted in a 25:1, or 2,500%, ROI for Unique Vintage. With a new loyalty program powered by the Sharing and Referrals solution, the retailer was able to offer consumers the chance to earn points for purchases as well as rewards for completing a variety of social actions, such as signing up for the newsletter, creating accounts and writing customer reviews.
After implementing the loyalty program, Unique Vintage has seen an average increase of 8.5% in its repeat purchase rate, an increase of 450% in account creations and a significant boost in engagement with its newsletter.
Social Annex customized the Sharing and Referral solution by creating a “Share, Save and Earn” widget, giving Unique Vintage customers the opportunity to share their favorite products with their friends and earn 10% off when these friends clicked off the share. The Share, Save and Earn solution integrates with the loyalty program, allowing Unique Vintage loyalty members to earn points for referring friends. Consumers can earn as many as 2,500 points when referred friends make a purchase after clicking on the shared item.
“One of the things we loved about the Social Annex loyalty program was that it wasn’t just about dollar for dollar, in which you buy something and we’ll give you points,” Wallace said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “It was about creating brand ambassadors and rewarding these loyal fans for coming to the site, sharing their favorite products and taking a lot of these organic referral actions that are valuable for us.”
Since March, the Share, Save and Earn program has seen an average of 2,400 orders per month directly generated by sharing and referral actions. Additionally, 42% of unique web site visitors made a purchase after interacting with the Share and Save widget. On average, customers who interact with the Share and Save widget convert at a rate that is 158% higher than users who do not.
Generating Engagement Through User-Generated Content
While the Unique Vintage team bolstered their customer loyalty initiatives with the Sharing and Referrals solutions, the retailer also generated a lot of buzz through the Social Annex Visual Commerce feature.
With Visual Commerce, Unique Vintage can not only further express its brand by posting image galleries of its dresses and apparel on its e-Commerce site, but it also can gather and collect user-generated photos from social media sites to learn more about the consumer. Pictures from the Visual Galleries are utilized across the entire web site to inform, engage and inspire the customers.
“For any fashion brand, being able to tie in that visual inspiration is a key factor to success,” Wallace said. “For us, it’s even more important, because while we are a vintage-inspired clothing line, we’ve discovered that our customers come from all different walks of life. There’s not one way to wear these clothes.”
Consumers have submitted as many as 6,000 pictures to Unique Vintage in a single month. The influx of photos sent in and posted to the site via the Visual Commerce feature have even served as the inspiration for the retailer’s #iamunique social campaign, which was designed to illustrate that the Unique Vintage brand is a fit for every consumer’s fashion style.
“We were able to leverage social media to give our customers a platform to express their individual style and show how they take these pieces of clothing and make them their own,” Wallace concluded. “Someone coming to the site a year ago, before we had this feature, may have seen a black and white polka dot swing dress, and thought ‘Oh, I could never wear that.’ She will now see that same dress worn five different ways on five different body types and think, ‘Wait a second, I can pull this off.’”
