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by Yvonne Gando, Social Commerce Analyst

If you’ve been following our tweets and the latest social buzz, then you already know about the 2009 Community and Social Media Research Study that we conducted with the e-tailing group. The study revealed that companies rank customer engagement as the number one goal in using community and social media tools. Taking this a step further, the Altimeter Group’s landmark study of the world’s top 100 brands (among them: Starbucks, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Mercedes-Benz) uncovered a direct correlation in companies’ deep engagement in social media and top financial performance. Companies who earned the designation of “social maven” were remarkably proficient in their efforts to engage with their customers using social media tools. On average, social mavens experienced 18% revenue growth over the last 12 months alone. Conversely, their socially uninvolved counterparts experienced a 6% decline in revenue over the same period. In short, “Money talks and it’s declaring that it pays to engage meaningfully in social media.”(Source: Altimeter Group).

What does this mean for your business? Engagement is not only a key metric for companies today; it is absolutely vital for business growth and fundamental to understanding your customers.  Read on to find out how one retailer transformed a challenge into an opportunity to increase customer engagement.

Abe’s of Maine Uses AnswerBox to Increase Customer Engagement and Gain A New Traffic Channel

If your customers have product-related questions and can’t find the right answers on your site, it makes sense that they’d surf elsewhere until they find what they need. How do you prevent these potential customers from leaving your site? How do you find ways to truly engage visitors, increase conversion and build word-of-mouth?

Well-known camera and digital electronics retailer Abe’s of Maine was faced with this challenge. Visitors to their site had tons of questions, and this meant countless resources were spent addressing the same types of inquiries for multiple customers on the same products.  Worse, customers who didn’t find answers to their questions right on the product page were lost to other sites or online forums. Abe’s of Maine wanted to find a more efficient way to keep their customers better informed, keep customers on their site, and increase conversions.  Net-net, they wanted to find an effective way to better engage their customers.

Abe’s of Maine turned to AnswerBox, our solution that allows shoppers to ask product-specific questions and receive answers from customers and designated staff experts. Customers who ask a question are given the option to leave their e-mail address to be notified when their question receives an answer. The retailer was able to quickly and seamlessly plug the solution into their web site in a matter of days. Unlike the traditional one-to-one support channels (such as e-mail and phone) that Abe’s of Maine had previously relied on, AnswerBox captures conversations, answers, and insights by displaying them directly on the product detail page for all current and future customers to see.                                                                      

The Results

Within seven months, the implementation of AnswerBox demonstrated significant gains in customer involvement on the retailer’s website. During this timeframe, more than 5,200 questions were posted to the site, with 97 percent receiving an answer. Of the people who requested email notification, more than seven percent returned to Abe’s of Maine to make a purchase via the email link. Further, the return rate for these purchases was 40 percent lower than Abe’s average.  Through all of this, AnswerBox provides Abe’s of Maine with a new traffic channel with a customer acquisition cost of less than $24, a strong number in comparison to their $30-$40 CPAs from many other channels, including comparison shopping engines. 

While these business metrics are noteworthy, particularly amidst a challenged economy, Abe’s of Maine was equally excited about the opportunity this solution provided to build its brand long-term.  AnswerBox helped the retailer increase engagement by:

• Keeping visitors on their site and  eliminating the need for shoppers to seek answers elsewhere
• Initiating dialogue with the 73 percent of customers who provided email addresses when making inquiries via AnswerBox
• Building trust and credibility in the highly competitive world of online digital electronics  by offering user perspectives and real-world scenarios
• Using customer feedback to improve site usability

Listening and responding to its customers’ questions and concerns is continually helping Abe’s of Maine discover more about what their customers want, allowing the company to become better informed and more relevant. The retailer’s success story clearly demonstrates that going social means more than diving in and waiting to see what happens. If money talks through social, then it is earned by allowing your customer community a voice to help tell the story of your brand. It is now critical for companies to engage in the conversation, and Abe’s of Maine did just that, by addressing specific questions and providing answers, thereby building on interactions and deepening relationships with their customer community.

To learn more about how Abe’s of Maine achieved customer engagement success, download the full case study here.