Meeting shoppers right where they are. This principle is at the core of ShopLocal’s latest product innovation – the Weekly Ad Facebook App.
Instead of always trying to push and pull user to a specific destination site (e.g., retailer.com), smart retailer today are building out rich and inviting socially enabled experiences within the areas of the web that users spend most of their time within – namely portals and social sites.
Since Facebook is clearly the largest social site in the world with over 350 active users (see the rest of their insane stats below), making sure any given retailer’s brand is well represented within this massive ecosystem is now becoming a requirement.
- 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
- More than 35 million users update their status each day
- More than 55 million status updates posted each day
- More than 2.5 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
- More than 3.5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
- More than 1.6 million active Pages on Facebook
- Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans
- The US represents about 30% of total users
So why add weekly ad content (or any other store promotional or deal content for that matter) to a Facebook fan page? The answer is simple. To attract and retain “fans”, retailers must meet the needs of these shoppers. One of these key needs is to get something in return for their action of becoming a retailer’s “fan”. Namely deals, discounts and coupons. There is a certain social contract at play and it needs to be upheld. The weekly ad is a great source of localized promotions and deals that exactly meets the expectation that fans have.
“When a 1,000 “connected consumers” where surveyed in late 2009 about their digital habits and attitudes towards social media marketing, they found that promotions and discounts were primary drivers of “friending” a brand for over a third of social networking users” – recent Razorfish study
So what makes up ShopLocal’s Weekly Ad Facebook App anyways? Here are a few of the key features:
- Integration of common social Facebook features such as:
- Ability to browse localized weekly ad content by both categories and brands and sort the results of these by:
- Popularity
- Item Title
- Sale End Date
- Price
- Rich metrics of all of the user actions
- Multi-channel capabilities that enable retailers to drive traffic either back to their regular weekly ad site and/or retailer.com site
- Geo-target user location identification process that seamlessly determines the user’s nearest store location. It also offers the user a method for changing their system-derived location to a new one at any time
- View an item detail layer complete with the option to view a larger item image
Important Note: This finished, private Facebook app was not paid, approved or directed by Kohl’s. Rather Kohl’s circular content was merely selected to build and test around by the ShopLocal product development team due to its representative nature. This weekly ad Facebook app demo is just so be an example of what is possible for any given retailer. If you would like access to this private beta, all you need to do is simply become “my friend” on Facebook and I will set you up so that you can view this amazing demo app.
This is the "splash" page where the entire weekly ad experience begins. Facebook currently has a really dumb policy in place that prohibits a Flash movie from auto-running. Instead they force a rule that requires that the user to click to activate the flash experience. So this is the ONLY reason why this splash page exists.
Once the user clears the initial hurdle of activating the flash movie, the weekly ad experience comes to life. Right now, the beta app starts with all users viewing the most popular products overall, across all brands and categories.
If a user wants to more details on specific offer, a simple item detail screen is shown which allows the user to potentially buy the item online (at retailer.com), share the item as a link post with their Facebook friends or post a comment. In this case, the user is attempting to leave a comment on a specific item.
Since this user has never interacted with the weekly ad app before, there is a required and Facebook controlled popup that the user must grant the weekly ad app access to some of the personal information. This is a very standard popup that happens in nearly all Facebook apps. But all the same, it is hurdle #2 that Facebook forces us all to jump over.
Once the user has granted the weekly ad app access to their profile information, the comment can be posted. Notice for example the thumbnail image of the user now appears vs. the anonymous user image.
As a nice little feature, within the item detail area for an item, a larger image view is easily accessible.
As an alternate to browsing by category (which is the default method), the user can also choose to browse by brands at any time.
If a user decides that they want to share a specific item of interest as a "link" with their Facebook friends, they can very easily do so from within the weekly ad app. They can even write a comment to help provide some context of why they are sharing this "link".
And finally, here is how a "link" that is shared appears on the user's own wall. This is the #1 action that can cause viral spread of a weekly ad offer, since now all of the user's friends are now going to see this story within their news feed and be able to like, comment and re-share it.
A classic question that retailers often ask ShopLocal employees recently re-surfaced. “What’s the value to upgrading to ShopLocal’s latest and greatest circular platform (called SmartCircular 4.1)?”
The answer is simple. Across the board lifts on nearly every success metric such as on average page views went up 15% and 45% increase in the direct interaction of shoppers with the content.
For four (4) recent real retailers (their names have been removed to protect their identity, but are super big name retailers that everyone would recognize) that have choose to make this upgrade, here are the actual percentage % lifts that this site upgrade delivered:
Click the image to view the full size version of the table.
NOTE: User interest equates to detail views + adds to shopping lists + buy online clicks
For each retailer, here are the most noteworthy results that shown in the above table:
- Retailer A: Helping get their shoppers to go deeper with specific products and view an item detail page (+459%) and overall getting those same shoppers to be more engaged with the advertising content overall (+39%)
- Retailer B: Making the in-store printable shopping list a more useful and easy-to-use pre-shopping tool (+206%) and overall getting those same shoppers to be more engaged with the advertising content overall (+68%)
- Retailer C: Providing a better way for their shoppers to browse the weekly ad in circular page modes (+17%) and bringing to the center and increasing the usage of the most powerful ROBO shopper indicator of intent – the shopping list (+33%)
- Retailer D: Getting their users to stay and engage with more of the overall weekly ad site (+80%) and bringing to the center and increasing the usage of the most powerful ROBO shopper indicator of intent – the shopping list (+38%)
Within the Deal$ area of the search engine Ask.com, a new beta area called ‘Local Only’ is appearing that is currently nearly exclusively powered by the localized what’s on sale content that ShopLocal houses in it’s many SmartCircular sites.
Lots of SmartCircular retailer clients are showing up within the search results of this Ask.com beta area like Office Depot, Best Buy, Kmart and Target to name a few. Luckily this local content is not siloed, as it is woven back into the overall Deal$ result set, as I am guessing not many users make it into this specific beta area. One of the coolest things that Ask.com is doing in this beta site is calculating the percentage savings from the original price to the sale price.
Example results page for "Digital Cameras" within the Local Only Beta area of Ask.com's Deal$ part of their search index.
However the only current down side to the Ask.com beta implementation is that the landing page URLs are 100% generic and are not product or deal specific, which leaves plenty to be desired on the user landing page experience. So a user that is looking a specific digital camera within the beta area of Ask.com that clicks off is routed to the main “home” landing page. It also appears that the store filter doesn’t account for all retailers that are included within the results set.
So what does one learn by processing of all the print ads for the top 100 or so US retailers? Quite a lot about the makeup of a circular ad. For example, during the one year period from 9/1/2008 thru 8/31/2009 ShopLocal found that the:
ShopLocal has the unique ability to measure and trend the volume, depth and frequency of retail newspaper print advertising.
- Number of listings per promotion was on average: 137 (median = 99)
- Number of listings per promotional page was on average: 11.6 (median = 10)
- Number of overall pages per promotion was on average: 15.3 (median = 9 & mode = 9.5)
- Number of versions per promotion was on average: 17.3 (median = 3 & mode = 1)
- By converting a decent chunk of non-versioned content (e.g., catalogs), this is why the mode is 1
- Number of promotions per year per retailer was on average: 88.5 (median = 49 & mode = 9)
- By processing some catalogs, this is why the mode was 9 as some retailers that use catalogs only put out a few larger books per year
- Number of days that a promotion is live was on average: 30.3 (median = 9 & mode = 7)
- For most typical Sunday newspaper type circulars, the typical sale spans 7 days – Sunday thru Saturday
- English language promotions make up about 93%, Spanish contributes 6% and French contributes 2%
- Circular type promotions make up 84% of the overall ad volume and the rest is split between catalogs (7%), guides (1%) mailers (1%), ROP ads (1%) and other (6%)
I’m looking forward on doing some more analysis with the awesome heavy lifting that our in-house analytics team provides to help trend these stats against historical data going back to 1999 so as to gauge the level of print promotion decline that seems to be discussed frequently in the media lately. My hypothesis is that the decline will be very minimal at best and limited to certain retail industry segments.
The market has spoken. Getting a branded iPhone application live is becoming table stakes. The biggest retailers are already live, with many more in the pipe coming shortly as I am expecting a release rush before the holiday 2009 season begins. Many of these apps have already had numerous production releases which have continued to increase the usefulness of many of them. That is a great sign that these retailers are seeing real value in these apps, as they would not continue to refine them otherwise.
Below, we’ll explore in more detail the Best Buy, Sears (Sears2Go) and JCPenney (JCP) iPhone apps as they currently represent the “best of” the retail category.
As of this moment in time, this is the complete list of retail iPhone apps that are live.
The true product and deals centric retail iPhone app list today looks like:
- Sears
- Best Buy
- JCPenney
- Target
- Amazon
- Mastercard Priceless Picks (sort of, its a stretch as this spans)
There are a few other non-product and deal centric apps within retail which are:
- Macy*s
- Barnes & Noble
- Target Finder
- Wal-Mart
So if one was to try and find what’s in common with these three top retail iPhone apps, it would be:
- All have easy to use store locators
- All have some concepts of deals
- All have a variation of a shopping list (or a way of collecting items of interest)
Within these three featured apps, there are many other features, but these three (3) are the core basis of what I would suggest is the minimal marketable feature set for a retailer with a large store footprint.
Here is the Best Buy iPhone app broken down:
Main screen. Best looking overall for sure.
If a user wants to see "deals" they first need to narrow down what category of interest they want to view
Once a deal category is selected, a result set of appropriate deals are returned
Then a user can drill into a specific item of interest
All items can be added to this shopping list function called "Favorites" which is nothing more than a collection point for items of interest
The store locator is really simple and only brings up nearby locations to the user
And some basic store details are available with nice click to call and click to map buttons
Next up is the brand new JCPenney iPhone application:
The app immediately starts up and needs a user to interact with it by choosing a category of interest
This is the weirdest screen. Not a fan. This is a view that should be skipped and the user instead take to a list of relevant results
This is one of the nine deals Women's apparel deals. I missed the fact the first time that one can scroll left and right through all nine item results. Cool UI idea, just needs a stronger visual clue to help indicate that this interaction is possible
All items can also be added to this version of a shopping list, again called "Favorites"
The store locator is also very simple, with all of the details being forced up to this level. There is no store details page, but the push to call and push to map buttons are more prominent
Finally, here is the Sears iPhone app, branded Sears2Go exposed:
Nice home screen that balances some marketing messages and individual items
Within deals, it is a bit all over the place. Not a lot of organization of this content
If an deal item is clicked, then the longest item detail page (due to the mass amount of product related data that is being exposed) is brought up
The store sub-tab is straight forward and brings up a list of nearby stores
The store detail page by far has the most store level info available, but lacks a push to map button
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