Posts Tagged ‘holiday’

User-Generated Content

Sam Decker User-generated Holiday Card winner!

January 18th, 2010 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

Rachel Lightfoot on TwitterWe launched our Bazaarvoice Holiday Card a month ago, asking you to tweet your holiday stories for a chance to win. Out of tons of entries we chose 31 daily winners, one each day in December. And now it’s time to announce our grand prize winner!

@catchfoot: “Left curdled milk for Santa because previous year he gave the rainbow-haired-unicorn-My Little Pony to brother. Dad had runs for days. #bvhs”

@catchfoot is Rachel Lightfoot, a San Francisco production coordinator at VIZ Media. She writes about food, film, and other interests on her blog, The Informer. Here’s Rachel’s reaction, in her own words:

I knew I had a [true] story that even my regular followers might get a kick out of – or unfollow me over. I was eight years old, and my brother six. Santa had gotten me an entire My Little Pony play set. They were already unwrapped and set up in their MLP dance studios, castles and cars. I was thrilled!

I guess Santa felt like he had gone a little overboard with the gifts, pitied little brother and wrapped one of the Ponies for him to open, too. Little did Santa know that the one he decided to give little brother was the single most coveted pony of all – the rainbow haired Pegasus unicorn – duh! Oh, we fought over that thing for hours, but once little brother realized how much I wanted it, there was no giving it to me. The rest is history. Santa sure learned his lesson after that.

Congratulations Rachel! Expect your $500 American Express gift card soon.

Check out all of our winners here. Thanks to everyone who contributed to our Holiday Card!

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Ask & Answer, Bazaarvoice Stories, Ratings & Reviews

Brittany Blackmon Deck the Halls with user-generated content

December 16th, 2009 by Brittany Blackmon Client Success Analyst

With the holidays being one of the biggest seasons for most e-commerce sites, we see a large number of creative and whimsical campaigns from our clients during November and December. And since we know that 43.7% of purchases are affected by word of mouth (BIGresearch, December 2009), it makes sense that companies would want to leverage the customer voice in their holiday promotions.  I’ve rounded up a few favorites.

Emotional stories help shoppers find heart-felt gifts

The holidays evoke all kinds of emotions, and retailers capture this with Stories campaigns. Beauty products brand Thymes asks consumers to “Share Your Holiday Tradition,” and Burt’s Bees asks shoppers, “Who Is Your Reason for Giving?” Each brand offers a chance to win a prize while honoring something or someone special for the season.   Philosophy links the holiday spirit directly with e-commerce by asking customers to ”Share your Holiday Magical Moment” and including a link to their favorite philosophy products. When a shopper reads a story they connect with, they can immediately link to the writer’s favorite products and buy them.

philosophy Stories with Social Recommendations

Urban Outfitters helps shoppers find the perfect gift

Urban Outfitters came up with the perfect way to solve any holiday gifting woe by launching Ask & Answer Holiday Edition to help UO fans give gift givers ideas for their favorite people. Customers can also link directly to the product they suggest, driving shoppers directly to purchase pages. My favorite question on the site was posted by a mom who  asked “What should I get for my 14 year old daughter?” adding that “she  likes to be a trend setter, she’s always trying something new, and our sense of style really differs.” The answers submitted are sincere, varied, and fall into many different price categories – giving the mom a plethora of choices.

Customer feedback helps givers uncover gift options

Ice.com Top Rated CategoriesCustomer reviews definitely help gift shoppers. Home décor retailer Wrapables helped its customers with a holiday-themed email featuring top-rated gifts, along with discounts on these customer faves.  Urban Retreat’s online luxury hair and beauty store, Beautique.com, sent an email focusing on products that make a woman look great in her little black dress, which included top-rated products to show shoppers which products women love best.  Ice.com has a whole category dedicated to top-rated gifts for him, her, and the top-rated overall gifts. Segmenting top-rated lists adds an even richer experience for the consumer –  if Ice.com had only featured a top-rated gift guide, none of the men’s products would be featured!

These are just a few examples from hundreds of clients; we’d love to hear how user-generated content has helped you find the perfect gifts this season! And if you’d like to see more holiday promotional ideas, click here.

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Bazaarvoice Stories

Heather Brunner PETCO’s Howl-o-Ween puts pet stories center stage

October 16th, 2009 by Heather Brunner Chief Operations Officer

The blog post is guest-written by Amy Niemann, Bazaarvoice Community Manager.

PETCO continues to innovate with social initiatives – in this case, Bazaarvoice Stories – to increase interaction and drive sales on its site. PETCO knows its customers love their pets – and love showing them off at Halloween – so they introduced their “Howl-O-Ween” contest to not only highlight their consumers, but drive site traffic and sales as well.

This fun contest allows all types of pets to share why “they” chose their Halloween costumes, complete with photos and videos. PETCO promoted this on their home page and in emails.

PETCO Howl-o-weenPETCO partnered with Science Diet to give away prizes, which drives responses, and the responses were overwhelming (and adorable)!

First, contributors and readers can sort by their type of pet – no need to have gerbil-lovers comb through dog stories – creating a customized experience for each visitor. Readers can also vote on their favorite stories and costumes, which lets writers drive additional traffic to the site. Another fun twist? PETCO has changed their regular paw-print rating graphics into season-specific pumpkins.

PETCO Howl-o-ween

As you can tell, photos are very important to this campaign – so far, 85% of the pet stories contributed also include at least one photo, and submitters can designate a “hero” image for each story as the main image, making the layout fun and easy to read for all visitors.

Petco Howl-o-ween

But what really sets this campaign apart is its potential impact on sales. With Social Recommendations, pets (and their “parents”) can link directly to their favorite products. So when a proud pug admires the Gene Simmons costume below, he (or she) can also see what makes the pug so beautiful and wild. We’ve seen about 25% of all entrants link to products, which helps influence other contributors and readers.

PETCO Howl-o-ween

Of course, all this new content helps keep PETCO relevant for natural search – especially for pet Halloween costumes – while continuing to engage its already active online community.

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Ask & Answer, eCommerce

Chad Bockius Help holiday shoppers find the info they need

July 8th, 2009 by Chad Bockius Former Director of Product Marketing

The holiday season is approaching, is your business ready?It’s a fact: shoppers who can’t find the information they need will leave your site and buy elsewhere.  In the past year, we’ve seen a 2.5x surge in the number of questions and answers served through Bazaarvoice Ask & Answer clients during the holiday season – and 40,000 questions were served up in December 2008 alone. What’s more, from December 2008 to December 2009, we will double the number of retailers and manufacturers that let consumers ask and answer questions on their sites.

Is your website “stocked” with plenty of information for the holidays?

Sure, you can plan now to buy massive quantities of merchandise for the holiday shopping season, but have you thought about how to beef up your site with the right answers for holiday shoppers? You can add in-store sales associates as the holidays get closer, but they can’t have all the answers, at any time, for every customer.

And while you may have a stellar customer support line, you want those folks helping customers place orders – not answering product questions. With Ask & Answer, customers ask their question once, then you and/or the community answers it. The answers remain directly in the purchase path, where others can use this information to make purchasing decisions quickly. Customer service actually improves while the overall cost dramatically decreases. Retailer Canadian Tire decreased its support costs by up to 81% with Ask & Answer.

Manufacturers should get involved, too

According to research from Channel Intelligence and Forrester, 58% of online researchers start at the manufacturer’s site – more than any other source. And research across our client base has shown that questions about products answered by manufacturers are more helpful than any other type of answers, so it’s important for manufacturers to be proactive in answering customers’ questions. Bazaarvoice enables manufacturers to answer questions both on their own sites and on top retailer sites.

Add more answers in time for the holidays

We can help you get Ask & Answer up and running on your site quickly, and your Community Manager can help you maximize consumer, manufacturer, and your own staff’s involvement to increase sales (up to 22% for one retailer), reduce returns (a 23% decrease for JCWhitney), and give your customers a great shopping experience this holiday season.

The holiday shopping season could be make-or-break this year, and it’s coming up fast. User-generated content like customer reviews and community Q&A can help make your brand the preferred source for holiday research and shopping. Stay tuned to this blog for ideas about how to get customers engaged, and read our other holiday-ready blog: “It’s 100 degrees. Are you ready for Christmas?”

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BrandVoice, Ratings & Reviews, eCommerce

Chad Bockius It’s 100 degrees. Are you ready for Christmas?

July 2nd, 2009 by Chad Bockius Former Director of Product Marketing

Bazaarvoice provides customer reviews for more than 60% of the IR500 – the nation’s top internet retailers – so we start thinking about the holidays in July. We continue to see that reviews help drive holiday sales, and now’s the time to start.The holiday shopping season is coming. Is your business ready?

Holiday shoppers read reviews.

Last year, 80% of holiday shoppers read reviews while deciding what to buy. It’s important to build review volume now, so shoppers find all the information they need on your site come shopping season. In November through January, reviews served surges over 140% for the year – 3.6 billion reviews were viewed in December 2008 alone!

Now’s the time to increase reviews on your site.

The more reviews you have, the more they drive visitors to your site (read how SearchVoice increases traffic 142%, on average) and the more they help shoppers make decisions. Take the time now to capture reviews from all your shoppers this year. For example, Argos sent a post-holiday email to all shoppers and gained 70,000 reviews in a day! Stay tuned to this blog for many more ideas about how to drive review volume.

Manufacturers should get involved, too.

Shoppers research products on manufacturer sites, so it’s important to have reviews there. At the same time, it’s important to share the reviews collected on manufacturer sites with top retail sites – where shoppers will actually buy. BrandVoice lets manufacturers seamlessly share reviews with retailers who use Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews. In fact, 76% of all revenues from the top 25 Consumer Electronics Retailers flow through the Bazaarvoice exclusive retail network.

Don’t have reviews on your site?

There’s no doubt; this year’s holiday season will be critically important to all brands. If you’re considering reviews, it actually hurts your business to wait – if you implement in the next two months, you could gain a 6.8% increase in net sales. Our SaaS model lets you implement Ratings & Reviews – and Stories and Ask & Answer – in weeks, not months. We know your technical team is busy, so we do most of the heavy lifting.

Contact your Community Manager today to drive review volume for the coming months.

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Community, Marketing Strategy, Multichannel, Ratings & Reviews, User-Generated Content, Word of Mouth

Heather Brunner HO-HO-Whole lotta Holiday Promotions

January 16th, 2009 by Heather Brunner Chief Operations Officer

This holiday season, several Bazaarvoice clients featured Ratings & Reviews and Bazaarvoice Stories in their holiday promotions – we saw more than 15 clients use UGC as the center of their holiday promotional activities. Many Bazaarvoice clients offered suggestions for top-rated gifts and others merchandised top-rated products in their gift guides. Here are some of the most notable campaigns featuring customer-generated content.

Click on each image to see it full-size.

Williams-Sonoma has quickly realized the value of UGC. This holiday season they used customer reviews in several emails to promote holiday foods and merchandise top-rated cookware.

 

Beauty products purveyor philosophy re-styled the look and feel of Ratings & Reviews for the holidays. They also used top-rated gifts as one way to merchandise products in their holiday shop and promoted this on their homepage.

 

 

 Throughout the holiday shopping season Best Buy featured three different homepage banner ads with pop-up URLs to direct the consumers to various shopping categories. One of their favored merchandising categories was top-rated products.

 

 

 

Levenger featured top-rated products as “Customer Favorites” in their holiday gift guide and highlighted this in an email.

 

 

 

Land of Nod gave away a $1,000 gift card in return for reviews…just in time for customers to do some holiday shopping and for the Land of Nod to collect some great content to help indecisive shoppers.

 

 

This holiday season saw a huge reflection of the customer voice in retail. We’ll keep you posted on other unique holiday promotions this year!

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Ask & Answer, Marketing Strategy, Ratings & Reviews, User-Generated Content

Sam Decker Bazaarvoice serves up over a billion opinions to holiday shoppers

December 5th, 2008 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

As millions of shoppers flocked to get great deals over the Thanksgiving weekend and on Cyber Monday, we served up 1.2 billion impressions of customer reviews and customer-generated Q&A – that means that customer opinions played a huge role in helping shoppers determine what to buy.

We saw huge spikes on Thanksgiving night, as shoppers were planning their Black Friday shopping in stores. Studies show that 72% of consumers research products online before purchasing (e-tailing group, October 2008), and reviews have a huge impact on offline sales – for every $1 spent in online sales, the Internet influences $3.45 of in-store sales (eMarketer, 2007).

There was another huge spike in review use on Cyber Monday, December 1, when shoppers tend to do their holiday online shopping. We served more than 165 million reviews via Ratings & Reviews and 24 million customer-generated answers hosted through Bazaarvoice’s Ask & Answer solution.

Most significant? Review impressions increased 132% over Cyber Monday 2007, while sales growth is at 2%. So retailers without reviews are clearly losing market share.

As I’ve been saying for months – and our diverse client list proves it: reviews are no longer a “nice to have.” They’re critical to driving sales, especially as shoppers buy more carefully, and turn to trusted sources for making purchase decisions –other consumers like themselves.

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Research

Sam Decker Want Millionaire Customers? 90% Read Reviews.

November 25th, 2008 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

I read an interesting article in MarketingDaily about how millionaires shop, based on research conducted by Google. John McAteer, Google’s retail director, gave some great insights into what the results mean to retailers – something that’s top of mind for us here at Bazaarvoice.

In general, the study found, millionaires value time as much as they value money – the biggest misconception people have about the wealthy is that they are idle. Instead, when they shop, they devour as much information as they can to make the best purchasing decision so they don’t waste time on the “wrong” products.

Their lack of time means they usually use the Internet. High-end stores spend a lot of money to create a great in-store experience, but 94% of the millionaires polled said they made a luxury purchase online in the past six months, and 56% of them actually prefer shopping online to shopping in a store.

They also rely strongly on the Internet when deciding what to buy: those polled said the Internet is the leading influence, with 82% of respondents saying they use it. Word-of-mouth comes in second, with 78%, and magazines next, at 68%.

Millionaires read online reviews: just over 90% of millionaires say they always or often read other customers’ reviews online, in their quest for the “real” story about products. Compare this higher stat to Jupiter and Forrester studies which report just over 70% of average consumers seek reviews before buying.

In short, millionaires shop and compare for several of traits while shopping, so it’s critical that luxury retailers include as much product information as possible online. Customer-generated reviews and Q&A enhance this, and is trusted among the very wealthy.

This research is especially interesting as we hear from more and more luxury brands who are initially reticent about sharing customer reviews online. We have helped several luxury retailers go live with reviews and seen their customers enthusiastically rave about their quality products, helps underscore the importance of customer input – no matter what type of customer you’re trying to attract.

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