Pearl Uppal Keynote Adtech New Delhi
Social Commerce: Shopping Meets Social Media
So we have arrived at the penultimate session of the day & I am looking forward to hear what Pearl has to say. As she walks up the stage & into the spotlight I am very suprised to see what she is wearing. Oops! she didn’t realize it but it was a wrong choice of material to be wearing in the spotlight. For those of you who don’t know, Pearl Uppal is the co-founder and CEO of Fashionandyou.com and her keynote focuses on trends surrounding social media and ecommerce. She starts by recommending the book “Socialnomics” and also plays a video which is about social media (amazing video if you haven’t seen it and love that soundtrack) and got to admit that video gets my attention when putting social media in perspective. Also an interesting stat Pearl shares is the 25% of the SERPS are dominated by user generated content when running a search for a branded keyword.
She also shares interesting insights about how major companies are cashing in using the social media phenomenon. A few examples of such companies are :
- Amazon.com uses FB powered recommendations as a way of convincing prospective customers whether to buy a product or not.
- Macys – they used an awesome magic fitting room concept by way of which they allowed users to try on new clothes virtually and then share their new outfits via Facebook. This was immensely successful and led to two thirds of the customers using Social media to share their experience with friends and family.
- Best Buy- now a case study on twitter, they are famous for using twitter as a platform for customer service and attending to customer queries. The @twelpforce has provided over 38,000 answers to customer inquiries and has been well received by the customers and best buy employees alike
Hmm defiantly some interesting examples of how brand and companies can leverage social media to their advantage. Apart from the examples, Pearl now talks about Fashionandyou.com which has now raked up about 10 million users in just 12 months. Her USP, offer irresistable discounts on big brands with a limited time offer and to an exclusive member base (closed user group). Hmm all this has me thinking what Pearl did for promoting her brand. It turns out that she promoted her brand using the following key elements.
- Viral Marketing – Collaborative tools (Social sign in thru FB) & power of referral marketing
- Fan first promotions –Pearl rightly says that it’s important to give something back to your fans. E.g they run a promotion “Twitter Tuesdays”
- Videos – putting up interesting content on YouTube can help your brand grow in terms of customer recall and brand value.
- Enhanced customer service – the boys at Best Buy showed that social media can be used very effectively for attending to customer queries.
Case Study – Carlton London- have done 9 sale events with Fashion & you & have sold 25,000 units in 4 months generating a total revenue of approx 2 crores. Their primary motivation was to check if the Indian market is ready to accept their products.
She caps it off by saying they haven’t spent money on offline advertising and this month they will ship 100,000 orders! Wow, well done Pearl!
Please note: Credit for all the photos go to the photographer Naina Redhu.