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Maximizing Clicks from Social to eCommerce


Key Article Takeaways: 

  • There are a few simple rules for maximize clicks on social:
    • Let them go where they want to go
    • Utilize coupons
    • Stack your links
  • Influencers are taking advantage of sources like Linktree to get around the 'link in bio' nature of TikTok and IG
  • Any good UX person will tell you that you lose 50% of people for every click you make them endure to get to an outcome
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For this week’s article, I wanted to build a bit on the Shoppers Shifting Preferences post from last week and offer a couple of simple rules for maximizing clicks on a social post. 

  1. Let them go where they want to go. This directly derives from the last post. If your shoppers shop at Walmart, give them a Walmart link vs. trying to change their behavior. You aren’t going to convince shoppers to love your product AND change their shopping behaviors in the same post. One. Thing. At. A. Time. If you want to convince people to try Walmart Online Grocery Pickup, that’s a separate program. And one we’ve done, successfully, many times for Walmart, Amazon Subscribe and Save and many other ‘services’. Teaching shoppers how to use programs like those is interesting and valuable. 

  2. Utilize coupons. Coupons and discounts absolutely work to drive clicks and sales. I fully recognize that they also impact profitability for the brand so for sure we aren’t insistent on using them but if any of the following apply to your situation, I’d highly recommend the tactic:

           - You still need to prove internally that influencers can drive purchase behaviors
           - You need or want to minimize the “leakage” from people discovering the content on social but                not using the links to purchase the product
           - You need to move volume fast

  3. Stack Your Links. This is especially valuable on YouTube where the description field allows you to have essentially unlimited links. We mentioned this capability in the Which Platform post at the beginning of the series. You might think that multiple links might be off-putting or create a paradox of choice for the viewer but that’s not the case. It’s a shopper convenience and definitely helps curb leakage (ie - a consumer simply typing amazon.com into a new tab instead of clicking on the trackable link). I’d even include “learn more” links in addition to shoppable links assuming your goal is truly to maximize clicks. Below is a graph from a memorable campaign that showed me the value of link stacking links. A brand wanted to support all five of their key retail partners and while at the time this was an unorthodox strategy, the influencers were fine with it and so we stacked all of the links for a product that I expected to underperform relative to the 3% benchmark for the category, represented by the orange line at the top. 
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Now at first glance you might be saying, “it did underperform…everything is under the benchmark.” But those columns are the individual retailers, all of which appeared in each post. So in this case, the graph has to be read as additive (I suppose it should be a stacked bar instead of separate columns). When you do that, we crushed the 3% goal. And we never looked back….

The trick with tactic three is that on TikTok and Instagram, you can only have one link at a time and it has to be in the influencer’s bio. To get around this hurdle influencers are using link in bio services the redirect to a landing page that offers multiple links to their other social channels, causes, merch and more. This is making the best of a bad situation but beware a couple of probably obvious things:

  • Any good UX person will tell you that you lose 50% of people for every click you make them endure to get to an outcome. We find this rule absolutely applies and so routing through one of these trees is going to hurt your conversion rate to the final retailer without a doubt
  • Clear the Clutter: Likewise, either in these link trees or even in the YouTube description box, you should require that the influencer not include 10 other links (as noted above). These will absolutely distract the shopper (“oooohhhh….merch!”) and they’ll never get to your product page. 

Nothing too wildly complex about these rules but executing them well takes discipline and vigilance. Happy clicking!