Last night I attended Immediate Future's social speak easy event with Ben Carter, Marketing Director of notonthehighstreet.
The evening gave some great insights into the online retailer's social media strategy. When Ben joined NOTHS social sales contributed to 1% of overall sales. Over the last 12 months this has increased to 5-6%.
Ben explained 50% of notonthehighst's traffic comes from mobile devices, and believes 2015 is the year of mobile and tablet. This trend has mainly been driven by social media referrals and the integration of a new easy-to-use mobile site/app.
NOTHS tailors content and strategy by channel as they believe they have very different audiences across their channels. They have found Twitter works for engagement and Facebook for conversion. Their Facebook fans are twice as likely to be a customer compared to any other channel, and surprisingly they found Pinterest drives browsers instead of converters.
Ben believes their channels are just as relevant to engage new fans as much as they are for engaging existing fans – their marketing emails, for example, are not used for lead generation and are only sent to existing customers. They do not participate in data capture activities, and rely heavily on social media to attract new customers.
Ben explained NOTHS taps into different trends for targeting on GooglePlus. The biggest revelation of the evening was that NOTHS’s GooglePlus account is managed by their search team rather than the social team - 70% of the retailer’s traffic is generated through organic or paid search.
NOTHS’s current growth strategy is to partner across Europe (starting with Germany) and to expand the current UK product offering. Ben revealed the company turns down 9/10 business that apply as they believe their offering need to remain unique - 60% of what they sell is personalised and 45% is unusual homeware. Scale is essential for the retailer to accept new product partners, and the ability to deliver during gifting occasions is of the upmost importance as most of their sales are in November and December for Christmas.
The company also realises the importance of digital to physical, otherwise known as ‘phygital’ - many of their competitors have seen huge success through click and collect (such as Argos teaming with Ebay). NOTHS can’t appear on the high street, so they are currently looking at pop-up stores to fill this gap with the help of Appear Here.
The final insight Ben shared was that TV adverts raised awareness of the NOTH with the public, however they found there needs to be strong digital channels in place to convert awareness into sales.
The evening gave some great insights into the online retailer's social media strategy. When Ben joined NOTHS social sales contributed to 1% of overall sales. Over the last 12 months this has increased to 5-6%.
Ben explained 50% of notonthehighst's traffic comes from mobile devices, and believes 2015 is the year of mobile and tablet. This trend has mainly been driven by social media referrals and the integration of a new easy-to-use mobile site/app.
NOTHS tailors content and strategy by channel as they believe they have very different audiences across their channels. They have found Twitter works for engagement and Facebook for conversion. Their Facebook fans are twice as likely to be a customer compared to any other channel, and surprisingly they found Pinterest drives browsers instead of converters.
Ben believes their channels are just as relevant to engage new fans as much as they are for engaging existing fans – their marketing emails, for example, are not used for lead generation and are only sent to existing customers. They do not participate in data capture activities, and rely heavily on social media to attract new customers.
Ben explained NOTHS taps into different trends for targeting on GooglePlus. The biggest revelation of the evening was that NOTHS’s GooglePlus account is managed by their search team rather than the social team - 70% of the retailer’s traffic is generated through organic or paid search.
NOTHS’s current growth strategy is to partner across Europe (starting with Germany) and to expand the current UK product offering. Ben revealed the company turns down 9/10 business that apply as they believe their offering need to remain unique - 60% of what they sell is personalised and 45% is unusual homeware. Scale is essential for the retailer to accept new product partners, and the ability to deliver during gifting occasions is of the upmost importance as most of their sales are in November and December for Christmas.
The company also realises the importance of digital to physical, otherwise known as ‘phygital’ - many of their competitors have seen huge success through click and collect (such as Argos teaming with Ebay). NOTHS can’t appear on the high street, so they are currently looking at pop-up stores to fill this gap with the help of Appear Here.
The final insight Ben shared was that TV adverts raised awareness of the NOTH with the public, however they found there needs to be strong digital channels in place to convert awareness into sales.
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