Written by Jinah Kim, Marketing Coordinator (@jinah) & Jennifer Ladds, VP of Account Planning at Moxie.
Armed with a staff of young, hip, Millennials, Modcloth has been at the forefront of the social shopping wave, naturally thinking ahead of their competitors. As other retail giants create separate social shopping sites to draw in Gen Y, Modcloth integrates new features directly into its main site, leading the charge.
And it’s not just Gen Y they’re after—Americans are changing their shopping habits in the digital age. According to Nielsen’s recent white paper on digital shopping, digital technology will continue to grow rapidly. Over 274 million Americans now have access to the Internet, and as of March 2012, 117 million people have smartphones. Further, 80% of these device owners use their phones for shopping activities like finding stores, making lists, checking prices researching products, sharing content and purchasing.
Regardless of the proliferation of technology, people want to satisfy 3 fundamental needs when they shop: convenience, choice, and value for money. ModCloth delivers on all accounts with their innovation, moving faster than click and mortar franchises such as Gap Inc. and Limited Brands.
Clicks vs Bricks (from Nielsen)
ModCloth Background
Started by Susan and Eric Koger in 2006, ModCloth began as a labor of love to control the size of Susan’s ever-growing vintage collection. The site blossomed naturally to include both independent and major designers, and is flourishing both in sales and in social spaces. With over 692K Facebook fans, 97K Twitter followers, and over 1.3M Pinterest followers, it’s easy to see that ModCloth effectively and creatively integrates social into overall business strategy.
The Importance of TouchPoints in Digital Shopper Marketing
Nielsen found that there are differences across categories and people in terms of whether email, blogs or websites work best. Three key themes emerged:
– People use a variety of media and sources of information and these vary by category and demographics
– In an integrated approach, leveraging both traditional and digital touchpoints is most effective
– Strategies must recognize with touchpoints are effective.ModCloth’s features, content, and overall marketing strategy are now newly defining practices for online retailers, by introducing unorthodox approaches and improving on existing methods. Without specifically aiming to, the company has grown into a key example of how to do social shopping right.
Some key takeaways from their runaway success:
1. Make sure all of your items are not only sharable, but easily sharable.
While the inclusion of sharing buttons are a given for most e-commerce experiences, some major e-tailers have yet to truly embrace them, or leave them out completely. Apple does this the most prominently, not using social platforms for marketing purposes, with no whisper of a like/want/share button anywhere on product pages.
Others, despite the appearance of a strip of sharing buttons, clearly aren’t pushing the social aspect on each product page. Amazon, for example, slips in the tiny icons below the “add-to-cart” buttons, far and away from the main focal point of the page.
ModCloth tucks this information in close proximity to the main information customers seek: the price tag. And to make everything as effortless as possible, each share button is prefilled with the appropriate hashtags, comments, and shortened URLs.
2. Tie in real customer experiences.
Customer reviews are by no means a new and shiny feature for e-commerce. Even the photo upload option has been a longstanding feature, allowing customers to share how they use a certain product. But ModCloth takes things a few steps further to make the review space more interactive. Reviews are not only uncensored, both glowing positive reviews and scathing poor reviews are often met with responses from staffers, indicating to buyers that their input is taken into consideration.
The crowdsourced photos in the review section are supplemented with the item detail photos, which are a mix of in-house stylist outfit suggestions, outfit photos from partner bloggers, and images from the ModCloth Flickr community, where members post high quality images of themselves wearing pieces from the site.
3. Allow your shopper to take a stake in their own shopping experience.
The most innovative experience ModCloth has to offer is their “Be the Buyer” program. Due to the fickle nature of the fashion retail industry, buying for future seasons is always a gamble for clothing retailers. With minimum purchase requirements, travel limitations, and sometimes buying stock based on technical sketches, it’s difficult to determine what, how many, which color to buy 6 months in advance of the season.
With the launch of “Be the Buyer” in 2010, ModCloth now crowdsources feedback to gauge interest in an item before placing an order or sending to production. By working closely both with suppliers and small independent designers, the company is able to order made-to-order pieces, resulting in a win-win-win situation. Not only do suppliers and Modcloth win, the customer wins as well. There is less waste as only the truly popular items make it to production and only certain quantities are purchased. Customers are more apt to purchase something they provided input for, and ModCloth makes the extra effort to alert them if an item they voted for has gone into production.
To similarly benefit from consumer feedback and engagement, manufacturers and retailers should measure the impact of digital marketing programs, understand the drivers of success or causes of failure, and constantly adjust these programs to better align with core shopper needs.
How to do Social Shopping Right: A Case Study | Moxie Pulse.
