That's the case for the innovative clothing retailer WetSeal, which is years ahead of most companies in not just learning about online social networking with its customers but getting results. WetSeal was named the top innovator in the use of wireless technology at the 2010 InformationWeek 500 Conference.
WetSeal launched a tool in 2008 on its Web site that lets girls create outfits that combine different WetSeal tops, bottoms, shoes, and accessories. That allows for user generated content Girls have created more than a half million outfits on the site, and they provide a stream of new-and credible-content for WetSeal.
That application got a lot more interesting when, in 2009, WetSeal embraced its “social merchandising” strategy that blends the Web strategy with Facebook and smartphone, beginning with the iPhone.
In Facebook, Wet Seal's fan page offers a better way to share outfits that girls put together using WetSeal clothing sharing them not just with other WetSeal shoppers, but all of a person's Facebook friends.
On the iPhone, they can view those outfits, including while shopping in stores. They can enter a barcode number of a shirt into the iPhone app and see what outfits girls have put together around that shirt. Beginning this month, they can beta test an iPhone game that lets them choose what clothes they’d stock if they ran a WetSeal store. From the WetSeal.com Web site or Facebook page, girls can “shop with friends” connecting their sessions live so they show each other outfits.
The results from Wet Seal’s merchandising efforts turned out to be quite impressive! Shoppers using the outfit tool are 40 percent more likely to buy something, and buyers spend 20 percent more. “Shop with friends” users become buyers at 2.5 times Wet Seal’s average conversion rate online. The iPhone app generates about 5 percent of Wet Seal’s overall Web traffic, and the app has been downloaded more than 65,000 times. Girls look at about 500,000 outfits a week with their iPhones-traffic that spiked to about 750,000 a week the two weeks before back-to-school.
Facebook has become one of the largest marketing bases for store traffic, thanks to coupons and campaigns, and one of the biggest drivers of traffic to WetSeal.com Just as importantly as those results, Wet Seal's Shawn Keim, the company’s director of development, offers some hard-earned wisdom from the past year of marketing on social networks and smartphones. Here are some of the lessons learned
Be in the Game-or Else: When Wet Seal went to create its Facebook fan page, it found someone already had claimed it. Fortunately, it was one of Wet Seal’s own stores, which had done it just for that location. Keim’s warning “The reality was, we needed to get out there if you don’t get out there, someone will fill the gap.”
It Can Take Time to Catch On: When the company puts out a new tool, whether on Facebook or the iPhone, it’s rarely an overnight sensation. “It typically takes six months to get engagement of one of our initiatives,” Keim said. However, you will get feedback quickly from a small group of early adopters, and you need to address it right away In addition, your infrastructure needs to be ready well before any traffic spikes. WetSeal first launched iRunway on a single server, since there wasn't a big user base. When that server went down briefly within a day there were six complaints and the app’s ranking went from five stars to two. The application is now split across six servers.
Different Platforms, Different Actions: Girls tend to create content-outfits-on the Web site, but they share those outfits using Facebook. iPhone users generate the most e-mail-20 times more than they generate using the Facebook app-but they don’t do a lot of outfit creation or sharing by smartphone. They don’t go into the Facebook app via iPhone much. Wet Seal tried its Virtual Runway app in stores, to show the outfits girls made on kiosks, and it wasn’t a big hit. On Facebook, it has been a big hit. The lesson is that social, mobile, and e-commerce strategies have to complement each other. They'll each do different things for the same customer.
Know Your Audience, Part I: To succeed in this market, WetSeal needed its executives experimenting with social networks and smartphones. That meant doing a lot of things “IT doesn’t like to do.” Keim said. Like getting executives iPhones to use, and opening Wet Seal’s firewalls to Facebook and Facebook-based online games, like Farmville. Getting execs to use iPhones wasn’t hard, but getting them active on Facebook was tougher. The IT team urged executives’ daughters to show them how they use Facebook. “While our executives don’t use our clothes, their daughters do.” Keim said.
Know Your Audience, Part II: When WetSeal wanted someone to monitor its Facebook fan page, it turned to someone who was doing a lot of posting on the site-and gave her an internship.
Facebook Is a Customer-Support Gold Mine: The intern isn’t the only person checking the site. “For customer service, it’s one of the primary tools they use to know if there are problems out there.” Keim said. Don’t expect active social networking types to necessarily call about a problem-they’re as likely to just post and vent with friends about it. Wet Seal doesn’t erase complaints, but tries to resolve problems in that environment, so people see the issues getting taken care of.
Keep It Current: With its iRunway app, WetSeal is updating the functionality about every three months, adding some things and dropping others that haven’t caught on. When it comes to content, that has to be changing constantly to bring people back. For WetSeal, the only viable answer for that is user-generated content, like the outfits that girls create. That’s cost effective, of course. But it also brings the connection and sharing girls want.
The real issue here is that most of what WetSeal experienced applies to just about every business on the Internet. Perhaps not as urgently as it does for WetSeal, with its hyper connected teen audience. Perhaps. But without a doubt, some element of it will. Just like Amazon and Google shape what people expect on every other Web site, from banks to governments to company intranets, Facebook is shaping how people expect to interact with each other. And companies such as WetSeal are doing the tricky and sometimes humbling work of figuring out how a new generation of customers expects to use Facebook and other interactive tools to do business with you.