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We just wrapped up a great events season with IRCE and Salesforce Connections in Chicago. We were fortunate to have several partners speaking at the events and we’re happy to share their great presentations with you. The first comes from Ben Johnson of Spy Optic, who speaks about how they used CGC to boost their sales—at an even higher rate than discounts! Check out how in the 10-minute video below.

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We just returned from a great week at Magento Imagine 2018! One of the highlights was hearing Brittany Graham of Tombow share her story on how they leverage customer generated content. We couldn’t be more thrilled about our relationship with Tombow, what a great story!

Check out the video below:

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You probably know that sending an email post-purchase to request a product review is critical to getting a healthy volume of reviews. But you may not know that it’s also essential for ensuring that the sentiment of the reviews you collect fairly represents the sentiment of your customer base, overall.

Here’s an example from Jockey.com. After switching to TurnTo for ratings & reviews, there was a period of 6 weeks when they were not sending out review solicitation emails (RSEs); the only reviews they collected were from shoppers who returned to their site, on their own, to submit one. Then Jockey turned on the RSEs. Not surprisingly, the volume of reviews they collected increased by 7X.

But here was the surprise: the average rating also improved – by over half a star, from under 3.8 to over 4.3! That’s a huge improvement, with the critical benefit of accurately signaling to shoppers the high quality of Jockey products.

Why the improvement in average star ratings? It turns out that the people who go through the effort to come back to your site to write a review, without being prompted to do so, are disproportionately the unhappy ones – the ones with a complaint to vent. So if you are only capturing reviews from this group, you are over-representing the negative sentiment in your customer base and under-representing your happy customers. When you reduce the barrier to writing reviews by sending customers an email requesting one, you get a review-writing population that is much more representative of the overall sentiment of your customer base. In the case of Jockey, the before-and-after gain of over a half-star across their full catalog is the kind of improvement you might otherwise have to do a product-line refresh to achieve.

So in case the benefits of a much greater volume of reviews aren’t enough to convince you to send out a review solicitation email, keep in mind that you’ll be more accurately showing the positive sentiment of your customer base, too!

That’s exactly what Ian MacDonald, Director of eCommerce for Silver Star Brands has experienced leveraging TurnTo’s Community Q&A. Ian was looking to improve SEO performance, increase website traffic and lift conversion rates. He thought he’d find an answer using customer-generated content, but he already had ratings and reviews. He needed more.

Ian implemented our Community Q&A and proprietary “Checkout Chatter” products which immediately began creating Customer-Generated Content.

Silver Star Brands’ customers can get quick answers to their questions right on the product detail page from fellow customers, staff experts, and the store’s FAQ content from the help center. To maximize the usefulness of this utility, Ian strategically used an “input teaser” on the product page, enabling shoppers to submit their questions without having to scroll.

Additionally, at the time of purchase, Silver Star Brands’ customers are asked the simple question “Why did you choose this?” TurnTo’s Checkout Chatter enables the company to collect short, positive sentiments from customers, equating to more Customer-Generated Content for their sites that is indexable for search engines.

RESULTS
Here are just a few results Silver Star Brands have realized thus far (a link to the full case study is below):

As a “bonus” – this incredible volume of Customer-Generated Content from both Q&A and Checkout Chatter is indexed by search engines, which has greatly improved Silver Star Brands’ SEO.

If you’re looking to lift your conversion rates and increase CGC, click here to schedule a demo today. You can read more about Silver Stars Brands’ success in this case study.

Collecting great customer-generated content (CGC) is only half the game.  Figuring out how to use it for maximum impact is the other half.  Here’s an example of a brand using a particular type of CGC – what we call “Checkout Chatter” – to power a great email campaign.  Tip-of-the-hat to Sur La Table for their creativity.  We think you’ll find this inspiring.

Here, Sur La Table is building the email around a selection of the checkout comments from their “Cart Talk” pinboard.  They are not only introducing the Cart Talk function of the site, they are making a range of their products look super attractive by augmenting the product images with this particular type of CGC, providing endorsement and social validation.  While customer reviews can be difficult to work into outbound messaging without undermining their authenticity, checkout comments have a different feeling – an immediacy – that makes them well-suited for promotional uses.

Sur La Table’s “Cart Talk” captures customer sentiments at the time of purchase with the simple question, “Why did you choose this?” and turns it into a social share on the site for those still browsing.  Because it is captured at the point of purchase, the sentiment is consistently positive and it is a great asset to build enthusiasm around products – not to mention SEO.

It’s just one piece of the ongoing strategy Kevin Ertell, SVP of Digital at Sur La Table has for building community with customers leveraging product insights contributed by the customers themselves. You can read and hear more about that in our previous blog entry.

Our clients using Checkout Chatter capture these checkout comments from shoppers on up to 15% of all orders. What brand wouldn’t benefit from massive amounts of positive-sentiment user-generated comments about their products that could be easily sprinkled throughout their site?  Empowering customers with the ability to share their thoughts or experience with purchased products helps reassure their fellow shoppers that they will be making a wise decision. And that leads to increased conversion rates.

Learn how Kevin Ertell, SVP of Digital at Sur La Table, was able to seamlessly build community with customers by leveraging product insights contributed by the customers themselves.

He spoke recently at a key industry trade show and shared Sur La Table’s secrets for using Community Q&A to answer shopper questions quickly with detailed responses — and elevating engagement between customers beyond what Ratings & Reviews alone could ever provide.

Dear Newegg,

Thank you for the opportunity to work for you, and thank you for the recognition.  The best is still to come!

Your friends at TurnTo.

Newegg Awards 2015 Eggie to TurnTo as Best Community Partner

Saks Fifth Avenue’s Senior Director of Product Management Jordan Lustig sat down with our CEO George recently to discuss how Saks is using TurnTo Q&A.

Saks is always looking for ways to improve their customer experience. They have a fact-based, customer first culture. Content plays an integral part in crafting a great shopping environment, and Saks recognizes that the customer has a voice and wants to use it.

Jordan began the conversation with TurnTo as a way to:

• Increase the amount of user generated content on the Saks website
• Create more relevant content
• Fill in the gaps of product categories that were low in product reviews

It was important to Saks for customers to get their questions answered while in the purchase funnel. TurnTo Q&A is able to get shoppers those answers immediately without any staff involvement (through Community Q&A).

In this video, Jordan talks about how impressed he is by the speed of the answers and ability to post those responses in real time.  TurnTo is crowd sourced and reactive, so there is no burden on the Saks staff. And customers love it because they get a quick, informed response to their question that is much more relevant than reviews that can be overly general and time consuming to read.

Saks has seen tremendous success with the program; in fact TurnTo emails drive one of the highest conversion rates across all marketing initiatives. And that lift has not only been from people asking questions, but also those shoppers who are answering and browsing the Q&A content.

An additional benefit to Saks has been the merchandising insights delivered by TurnTo, which Saks credits with bridging product content gaps and uncovering user experience issues.

Zachary Ciperski, Vice President at CoffeeForLess.com joined TurnTo for a webinar to discuss the success CoffeeForLess.com has had using Social Q&A to solve their online engagement challenge.

Watch the webinar now:

Han Wen, VP, Digital & E-Commerce Americas at Clarins, joined TurnTo for a webinar (below) to discuss how they use Social Q&A to enhance their online shopping experience.   She also discussed how Clarins uses Social Q&A to gain valuable product insights and touched on what initiatives they have in store for the near future.

Watch the webinar now:

Matt O’Donnell, the President of North Shore Commercial Door, recently joined TurnTo for a webinar (below) to discuss the results he sees with Social Q&A on his site.  They’ve had much success, including increasing their user engagement and gaining valuable insight about their products, since implementing the Social Q&A in 2012.

Watch the webinar now:

We recently hosted a webinar with Liveclicker, a provider of video commerce solutions, where we had the privilege to interview Karen Hansen, the Digital Product Manager for The Vitamin Shoppe and Robert Reed, the Video Producer for Blinds.com, regarding two leading e-commerce tools they recently adopted – social Q&A and video commerce.

In the webinar below, Karen and Robert discuss why they chose these tools and what results they’ve delivered.  Check it out!

For the last few months, Shoes.com has been evaluating TurnTo Social Q&A vs. a competing Q&A tool by running them side-by-side on their product detail pages. We took the opportunity to run a comparison of the social answer rates the two systems deliver.

We asked typical shopper questions through both the TurnTo and competing systems about 6 different products; for each product, we asked the identical question through both systems. And we kept track of exactly when the answers came in. As with past tests we’ve run, we monitored both the time when we received an answer email and the time the answer appeared on the Shoes.com website, and we credited the earlier time if there was any difference. Since the TurnTo system had just been installed, Shoes.com had not yet begun providing staff answers for the TurnTo questions, but we kept track of the staff answers from the competing system anyway. You can see all the questions we asked at the bottom of this post.

Overall, the TurnTo system generated 27 social answers in the first 24 hours. The competing system generated no social answers in that period and only 4 social answers total after 4 weeks. In total, the TurnTo system generated over 7x the amount of social answers as the competing system.

The next charts show the answers received question-by-question at both the 24 hour mark and at 4 weeks.  After just 24 hours, 100% of the questions asked through the TurnTo system received at least 1 social answer.   On the other hand, 2 of the questions asked through the competing system never received any social answers, even after 4 weeks.

TurnTo Social Q&A once again generated dramatically more and faster interaction between shoppers and past customers.  If you are interested in upgrading to results like these, give us a call.

These are the questions we asked about each product:

Congratulations to InkJetSuperStore for winning the Social Media Marketing category of Retail TouchPoints’ Customer Engagement Awards 2012!

You can read Retail TouchPoint’s article here and download the complete Customer Awards Report from there, but in a nutshell it was through a nomination process, the winners were selected based on, but not limited to, four specific criteria:

1. Unique shopping/promotional offerings
2. Customer engagement strategies
3. Customer analysis
4. Technology innovation

Using the TurnTo technology, InkJetSuperStore has increased conversion, AOV, and loyalty.  Here are some of the results from the past couple of months.

• Shoppers who asked questions or read Q&A from others converted at a rate 80% higher than those who didn’t – an especially significant lift since Inkjet Superstore is a replenishment business with a high repeat customer rate and a very high conversion rate.
• The average order value of shoppers who interacted with TurnTo was 14% higher than the AOV of those who don’t.
• 16% of all purchasers answered the question “Why did you choose this item?” following check-out (through the TurnTo Purchase Sharing function).

You can see from the complete list of winners below, InkJetSuperStore is sitting in good company:

• 8ta
• Casual Male Retail Group (CMRG)
• David’s Bridal
• Foot Locker
• Hot Topic
• Inkjet Superstore
• Moosejaw
• Rutter’s Farm Stores
• Tasti D-Lite
• Urban Outfitters

And if winning the award was not exciting enough for InkJetSuperStore and TurnTo, George and I were at the Retail TouchPoints booth @ NRF on Monday as he accepted the award on behalf of ILan Douek, President of InkJetSuperStore, as Ilan was unable to attend.

Here is a pic of me with the Inkjetsuperstore.com award

Over here we like to say “When you connect your shoppers to your customers, good things happen!” and apparently that not only means conversion, loyalty and SEO for our customers, but now includes industry recognition…again, congratulations to InkJetSuperStore!

To learn how TurnTo can improve the metrics that mean the most to you and your business, give us a shout @ 908.752.9658 or email sales@turnto.com (yes, a shameless plug from me).

It’s always nice to get positive feedback from someone, and it’s even nicer when you don’t know them yet. The team at KitchenDesigns.com recently had some nice things to say about one of our clients, LightingShowroom.com, and the on-site features that they use to improve the shopping experience. In their post, they mentioned two of the products in TurnTo’s Social Commerce Suite. First, they referenced our best-in-class Social Q&A product Ask Owners:

“In addition, [LightingShowroom.com] has integrated social hooks that fascinated me. Their “ASK others” button allows a person to direct questions to past customers about the product or to pose any kind of question to the staff or to Facebook contacts.”

Then, they brought up our Social Merchandising application which allows customers to “see what your friends bought here”:

“If this isn’t enough, they incorporated a slider on the right that displays things other clients bought and includes social hooks where you can engage in a dialog about the product purchased. It can also select from zip codes if you would like to ask local buyers what they thought…”

We love to be reminded that our work at TurnTo is having benefits for both our customers, and especially for their shoppers. Thank you to everyone at KitchenDesigns.com for the shout-out!

What’s the best online shout-out that you’ve ever given or received? Tell us in the comments below.

We’re thrilled to welcome Adorama to the TurnTo Network.  See the press release here. Adorama is one of the leading online photo gear specialists.  Though they apparently chose to skip the IR rankings in the most recent version, they were previously ranked as high as #381.

In their first full month using the TurnTo social Q&A product, Ask Owners, Adorama has seen a remarkably high engagement rate from their customer base.  Questions about popular items received an average of 4.3 social answers each, with the first of those reaching the asking customer in about an hour.  The answer rate on question emails sent to past purchasers was 9%, bringing a large number of past customers back to the Adorama site and providing valuable user-generated content for future visitors and for SEO.

While we’re delighted at the success Adorama is having with Ask Owners, we think the real significance here is bigger than just: further evidence that “TurnTo works”.  The real significance is this: social Q&A for ecommerce is no longer just a tag-along application to customer reviews; social Q&A is now emerging as its own category of ecommerce tool.  Leading online merchants are starting to take a top-down approach to defining what they want from social Q&A – and it looks different from what their customer reviews vendors have been offering them.

Before they chose TurnTo, Adorama did a competitive evaluation of alternative Q&A tools.  Presumably it would have been convenient for them to work with the product from their customer reviews provider.  But Adorama didn’t just want the most convenient solution.  They wanted an approach designed from the ground up to tap into the enthusiasm, expertise, and good will of their customer base.  In short, the wanted a truly social approach to Q&A.

If Adorama were the only online merchant we were hearing this from, we might figure it was an exception.  But they’re not. Unlike 2010, when most merchants adopting Q&A were just reacting to vendor push (hey, including ours), we now talk to many who have already developed specs and RFQs with demanding requirements.  In particular, they want Q&A to be a key part of their Social strategy, not just a customer support tool.  They see that, used right, Q&A enables shoppers to get in touch directly with past customers that can help them make smart purchase choices.  In short, they understand that with real social Q&A, customers become salespeople for them in the best sense of the word; not paid advocates, but trusted advisors.  And while they recognize that it’s simple to just accept what their reviews vendor offers, those that want to achieve this vision are looking for true best-in-breed providers – ie they are looking elsewhere.

And that is not just a nice vendor success story, it’s a sea change!

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For more details, check out the formal announcement in our Press Room.

Here’s the full video from our webinar on Tuesday with our partner and leading Yahoo Store design and development shop FastPivot.  It’s about an hour.

This shows the conversion rate of shoppers who interact with the TurnTo Social Merchandising widget while on one of our partner merchant sites vs the baseline conversion rate for that site.  Each letter here is one store.  We’ve picked the biggest stores from our network, since the data are most robust there (ie not just the ones where the data are most positive).  Full-month for July.

Here is the conversion lift data for the larger sites using TurnTo for the last couple months.  We’re comparing the baseline conversion rate for the site to the conversion rate for shoppers who interacted with the TurnTo system at some point in their shopping path on the site.  The 2-7X lift factors we were seeing in the first couple months of the year are still evident.

These charts compare the conversion rate of shoppers who open the TurnTo widget to that of those who don’t on the largest sites in our network.