How Personal Care Brands Can Win Online Conversions After The Holiday Rush

Darcy Bickham

How Personal Care Brands Can Win Online Conversions After The Holiday Rush

While your personal care brand likely has a marketing strategy in place through the holiday season, the start of a new year is a great time to re-evaluate your efforts. Which marketing strategies worked in 2021, and where is their room for improvement? Some marketing efforts vary in success depending on your specific business, while other strategies are tried and true and should help all personal care brands win online conversions.

Leverage User-Generated Content

One of the best ways your personal care brand can win more online conversions is through user-generated content (UGC). Consumers like to picture themselves using your brand's products or services, which can be done through UGC. The data speaks for itself. Eighty percent of consumers say UGC highly impacts purchase decisions, 8.7 times more than influencer content and 6.6 times more than branded content. If your personal care brand isn't already leveraging UGC, think of all the opportunities you could be missing out on. So what exactly is UGC, and how can your personal care brand get more of it? User-generated content includes, but is not limited to:

Customer testimonials
Social posts sharing a positive experience with your brand
Customer photos of your product or services
Positive reviews on local search and social sites
Comments left on social content

Your personal care brand can find great UGC by monitoring your local search and social channels. If you see a positive review, or a social post raving about your product, your local team can reach out to the customer who provided the content and ask to share it on your business's own website or social media channels. Similarly, you can ask these customers to give testimonials that your multi-location business can use in the same fashion. Finding and leveraging UGC is key to winning more online conversions.

Create More Opportunities to Collect Leads

It may seem simple, but your personal care brand can convert more leads if you increase the opportunity for your business to collect customer information. For instance, adding more CTAs on your website, social channels, and even local search platforms is essential. The more opportunities you have to collect leads, the more you can convert them. We'll get more into A/B testing later in this blog, but when it comes to CTAs, your multi-location business should test what works. For instance, you can try changing the copy of the CTA to see if it gets more conversions. Rather than "Sign Up Now," you could test a CTA that says "Access My Discount!" or something that compels the customer to click. Other tests could include but are not limited to the color of your CTA, the placement of the CTA, and how much information a user has to fill out after clicking on a CTA. Keeping track of what performs best is critical. Once your business adds more CTAs and starts collecting more leads, you can't forget them. Nurturing leads through the other tactics mentioned in this blog is key to ultimately converting them.

Add Chatbot Functionality

Chatbots are also a great way to enable your multi-location business to win online conversions. We recently created a blog on this exact topic. Chatbots can answer consumer questions in real-time while also collecting lead information. For instance, if a consumer wants to know more about an ongoing sale your business has or has a question about your holiday hours, a chatbot can quickly provide those answers. Your business can also program the chatbot to ask for the user's contact information at the beginning of the conversation or the end when asking for feedback. Sales or other marketers can then use this lead information to turn the lead into a conversion.

While chatbots can increase online conversion rates through lead generation, they can also improve conversions by providing consumers with a positive experience. For instance, chatbots can answer a customer's question instantly, saving them time and effort having to look for more information. In the past, a customer would have to pick up the phone or write an email to answer their question. By the time your business might have responded, they would have already moved on. Consumers crave convenience, and chatbots can provide this. If your multi-location business can keep customers happy through chatbots, you'll increase the chance that they'll convert with your business when the time comes to make a purchase.

A/B Test Your Organic and Paid Social Copy

Your local social strategy can help your business's conversion rate as well. Regardless of how consumers engage with your paid and organic content, there's always room for improvement. A/B testing allows your business to understand what type of content consumers like best, allowing you to tailor your content strategy accordingly. For instance, you can test two versions of an ad, one with a GIF and one with a 15-second video, to see what performs better. Similarly, you can try two different variations of a CTA to see which has the higher click rate. By using A/B testing, your multi-location business will be able to create social content that resonates more with your audience, helping you increase conversions. Three out of four consumers say they discovered a new product or offering based on recommendations and posts on social media, so the more you're able to widen your reach on social media and get more people talking about your brand, the better.

If your business is unsure about which type of content to A/B test on social media, our Localized Social Content Guide can help. This guide breaks down everything you need to know about creating a solid social media strategy that works.

Start 2022 Off Strong Than Ever

After the holidays have subsided, it's time to start dominating the competition through more online conversions. With 100s or 1,000s of business locations, we understand that it can be challenging to focus on conversions across locations, but SOCi is here to help. SOCi has everything your multi-location business needs to create a successful localized marketing strategy that converts. From SOCi SmartBot, to SOCi's social media management solution, we have everything you need to start 2022 off on the right foot.