In the overcrowded online shopping space, identifying viable methods of winning customer conversions, brand awareness, and long-term loyalty requires constant vigilance. But what if you could “set and forget” a winning strategy that brings new customers to your eCommerce store more affordably and with a greater chance of purchasing?
Our recent partnership with the innovative Shop with Friends aligns seamlessly with our dedication to client success. By installing Shop with Friends from the Shopify App Store, eCommerce websites can tap into the growing phenomenon of social shopping to do “all of the above” while winning new customers and reducing cart abandonment.
Shop with Friends founder Kevin Hanna believes his company is a good match with LION Digital because both have proven eCommerce victories and the flexibility to meet client needs.
Kevin says polls are a “no-brainer” for eCommerce businesses, from start-ups to major brands. It’s easy to install and offers a wealth of opportunities. Shop with Friends mainly partners with Shopify stores with over 100K monthly visitors. The platform can be up and running within 3 minutes, and polls take users 2-3 seconds to create—1 tap to create, 1 tap to share.
What Polls Can Mean for Your Business Growth
Shop With Friends results in 20% lower customer acquisition cost (CAC), with the app’s customers averaging 26% YoY growth and more than 6 million voters engaged. Votes come from shoppers who rely on input from friends before purchasing. Shopify stores that have installed the polls have seen an increase in 4x conversions and 5x user LTV (lifetime value).
Users can send polls anywhere on all social media platforms using the Shopify Shop with Friends app. It takes seconds for an online shopper to create and share a poll with friends, transforming it into instant viral marketing for your brand while the poll creators become your brand ambassadors. Each poll, on average, acquires 2 new customers for your eCommerce store and often proves the power of social validation for influencing hesitant shoppers.
The app’s Analytics menu tracks useful data to help identify buyer behaviour. The dashboard itemises sales orders, product engagement and performance, how many people are voting, and on which products, what type of devices customers use, customer location worldwide, and revenue gained directly through polls. These insights can help you tailor your inventories to match user demand.
Key Benefits and USPs
Compared to other customer engagement tools on the market, Kevin says, “We’re the first tool to tap into the social shopping behaviour of the younger generations”. Generations Z and Alpha do “most of their shopping from their phones and like to get input from their friends from their phones, too.
“We’re also 100% performance-based. Shop With Friends is a ‘set it and forget it’ widget that, once installed, lives on the site and will continue to help eCommerce brands grow at an exponential rate.
Shop with Friends benefits include:
- Increase Conversion Rates: Shoppers who send a poll have a 12.5x higher conversion rate due to buyer confidence in their purchase.
- Improve New Customer Conversion: The poll recipients see that their friend trusts the brand, initiating a conversion rate 3-4 times higher for new visitors than on other channels.
- Reduce Cart Abandonment: Poll senders are 19% less likely to abandon their cart than other shoppers.
- Boost AOV (average order value): Poll senders spend about 45% more on average than other customers.
- Grow Word-of-mouth Expansion: Each poll drives about 2 new visitors to eCommerce sites.
Shop with Friends: How it Works
Especially popular with 18 to 30-year-olds, users create polls from your Shopify website’s inventory styled to your brand. Shop with Friends founder Kevin Hanna explains that the polls have been very popular for jewellery, shoes, sunglasses, handbags, and apparel, but they could apply to anything.
The user experience for creating polls is like an online version of real-time shopping for a party dress with your bestie at a brick-and-mortar store, then taking a photo and sending it to your mum and sister while asking all three opinions. Except, Kevin discovered some astounding data from Shop With Friends, which was that in the eCommerce landscape, the users being asked to vote on the items would often purchase from the Shopify store as well.
“The Shop with Friends app appears over the Shopify website in the background, so the poll creators and voters think the poll is simply a cool feature on the site itself,” says Kevin. But, as he explains, apart from increased engagement and purchasing, once poll recipients “vote on the app, they’re left on the Shopify site. So voters who may never have visited the site before will now decide to buy something from the site” as the inventory has been given the ‘thumbs up’ by their friends.
Some brand examples showed a 36% increase in sales from the person who posted the poll, with another 33% of their friends buying from the same site.
Polls Prove the Potential for Social Validation
Polls are yet another initiative sparked by the drastic shift towards online spending that grew out of the pandemic. The polls users create can muscle up your brand with their virality, as they’re social and designed to be shared with friends.
As the 2020 lockdowns pushed people indoors and out of traditional shopping trips with friends and family, shoppers were still relying on opinions from the people closest to them to decide which item to buy: for an upcoming event, a social occasion, or simply to add a new piece to their wardrobe, often via group chats and sharing wish lists on shopping sites.
Kevin has a long-established career foundation in digital marketing, focusing on customer acquisition. He started the Shop with Friends company with his co-founders as an app to take advantage of this trend of sending polls to friends, focusing on a few verticals, including travel and eCommerce. However, they noticed that eCommerce polls were obtaining the majority of engagement, at about 30-40%, and were “about what to buy, from Amazon, Shopify sites, Etsy, etc”, says Kevin.
Two years ago, the team white-labelled their app to focus on eCommerce but found the development integration quite complex. About 8 months ago, they produced the app specifically for Shopify sites, which was the “game-changer”, according to Kevin. “We went from 20 customers to 200, and instead of taking an hour to add polls on a site, we got it down to 2-3 minutes.”
Performance-based Fee Structure Delivers Less Risk
The business operates on a 100% performance-based model that is free to use for the first month. Best of all, the initial 30-day free trial is extended unless the Shop with Friends App is driving at least USD$500 a month from the app, and you can cancel at any time.
So, if your business hasn’t generated revenue from the Shop with Friends widget, you don’t pay anything, “as opposed to user-based or subscription-style apps”, says Kevin.
Kevin explains that Shop with Friends operates across 6 pricing tiers, starting from Free and increasing in incremental amounts that a business is charged each month after the 30-day assessment. “Most of our clients make 15x to 20x ROI based on our tier structure,” he says.
“There is greater flexibility in a performance-based fee structure as it’s calculated every 30 days, based on your revenue for that month. So you’re paying for the next 30 days in advance”, which future-proofs your business, “in case you experience a slow month of sales, you won’t continue to pay the higher tiers”, says Kevin.
While polls are geared towards increasing traffic and driving sales, you can have peace of mind knowing that your business can recover without suffering losses based on peak performance, which in turn has created improved client loyalty.
The Social Polls Are Just Like Shopping With Friends
The trusted word-of-mouth referral method makes up 82% of Americans’ purchasing decisions, while 77% value their inner circle’s opinion when buying something they’ve never bought before.
Shop with Friends has grown brand awareness and profitability for many stores, especially in America, where it was originally developed. These include 12th Tribe fashion label, Ever-Pretty US and UK wedding and formal gowns, Little Trouble children’s clothing, Erimish stacking jewellery, and Fresh Sends gift boxes.
“We are obsessed with the user experience,” says Kevin, “So we make it really fun for the shoppers themselves.”
Brands can align with new ways of shopping that bring virality to their brand via cost-effective engagement with an exponential reach, boosting sales and rapidly growing brand awareness.
At LION, we only collaborate with businesses that help you amplify your offer and increase your ROI. Install Shop with Friends from the Shopify App Store and contact us about further increasing your reach online.
Talk to the team at LION and go from ordinary to extraordinary today!
GET IN CONTACT TODAY AND LET OUR TEAM OF ECOMMERCE SPECIALISTS SET YOU ON THE ROAD TO ACHIEVING ELITE DIGITAL EXPERIENCES AND GROWTH
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