Generate more eCommerce sales with Instagram

It’s no secret that Instagram and facebook are some of the largest drivers of traffic and sales for mature eCommerce stores. In recent years, the process of extracting value and attention from these social platforms has become an art form in and of itself. If you are not already leveraging instagram for increasing traffic and conversions for your eCommerce store or direct to consumer brand, you are leaving a lot of potential value on the table. Over 1 billion people use Instagram every month!

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Instagram’s evolution as a shoppable platform also now makes it easier than ever to integrate your eCommerce offering in a user friendly manner. From instagram ads, to tagging products in your posts, to creating an instagram shop, there are many ways that your brand can and should be leveraging the most visually enticing social platform in the world.

Why should your eCommerce business be putting more effort into instagram?

• 500M – The Number of daily active users on instagram.
​​• 70% of users follow a business on Instagram.
• 75% Percent of users take an action after seeing a business post (i.e. visit a website, search.)
• 150M – The number of daily active Instagram Stories users just 5 months after launch.
• 33% of the most-viewed Instagram Stories come from business accounts.
• 36% of B2C brands consider Instagram to be “very important” or “critical” to their social media marketing, compared to 13% of B2B brands.

1. Leveraging Influencers

The power dynamic of influencers on instagram has seen brands rushing to partner with those who command large followings related to their target market over the past few years. Partnering with influencers to promote your brand and offers encouraged their followers to try certain products, and share discount codes to increase sales.

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​​According to HypeAuditor’s Influencer Marketing report for 2021, the Instagram influencer market is expected to grow 15% in 2021, to reach a market cap of $5.8 billion by the end of the year.

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One of the large benefits of using influencers for early stage brands is that they create beautiful user generated content for you, that can then be used across your marketing assets, like for social proof on your product page or in a press kit.

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Strategic campaigns with influencers who have an audience directly related to your ideal customer persona can see huge increases in conversions when directing traffic to your store. In fact, 62% of marketers say they’ve seen an increase in sales when working with social media influencers on an online advertising campaign.

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Influencer marketing on Instagram also removes some of the barriers of traditional advertising because customers are getting to know about your brand from someone they trust. When a creator recommends a product or service, it comes across as a credible recommendation.

2. Shoppable Posts

Instagram now also allows certain eligible business accounts to add shopping tags to the products featured in their posts. Slowly but surely instagram is modeling itself into a shoppable engine and this feature is one that all eCommerce brands should be leveraging.

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What does this mean and how does it work?

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Now, when your followers hover over or click on a post that contains your products, they will see the featured products names, their prices, and links to shop those products directly in your store. This completely streamlines the buyer journey and increases the chance of conversion.

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Not only this, but brands can combine influencer marketing with shoppable posts to tag products directly in influencer marketing posts, creating even more opportunities for users to discover and shop products.

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Also, by regularly creating Instagram Shoppable posts, brands stand a greater chance of being featured on the new Instagram Shop discovery tab.

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3. Instagram Shop

Midway through 2020, Instagram announced “Shops on Instagram”. An instagram shop is an ecommerce portal in itself that allows your followers to buy from you without needing to leave the platform. Once followers arrive at your instagram shop, they can browse products, explore collections, and purchase products.

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To make things even easier for you, if your business is already using Shopify for its store, ​​Instagram Shopping connects the products that you have in Shopify to your Instagram business profile so that customers can view your products in Instagram. Your entire product catalog can be seamlessly imported into your Instagram business profile.

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Some examples of brands who have had good success with Instagram shopping:

Natori: Increased Instagram traffic by 1,416%.
Magnolia Boutique: 20% increase in Instagram revenue.
SpearmintLOVE: Instagram traffic grew by 13%.
Native Union: Instagram traffic saw a 2,666% increase.

4. Instagram Stories

Once you have enabled Instagram Shopping for your account, you can also tag products in your stories and direct users to your product pages. This makes it easy for them to buy a product they like, directly from your Instagram stories.

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If you have over 10K followers on your Instagram account, you can also add direct links to your Stories with calls to action like “Swipe Up” or “Shop Now.”

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Some of the most successful brands use scarcity coupled with instagram stories to increase sales and conversions. Instagram Stories vanish within 24 hours, so this content creates a sense of urgency that helps to encourage online selling as users take actions faster.

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Brands can also leverage product stickers within instagram stories to give users a quick call to action. Just like shoppable posts, product stickers allow brands to choose products from your catalog and tag it in your story. Viewers can tap on it to learn more about the featured product without leaving the app.

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5. Instagram Ads

For brands with large enough budgets, instagram ads are a great way to drive traffic and increase sales. There are numerous ways in which you can go about using instagram ads to drive traffic to your store.

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To outline it simply, the first main type of ads are in-feed ads that appear after every few posts as a user scrolls down their feed. You can also leverage Instagram story ads that appear in between various user stories and appear to be native content.

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One of the most important things to remember when leveraging paid ads is your customer acquisition cost (CAC) in relation to your customer lifetime value (LTV). Knowing how much an average customer is worth to your business over their lifetime will allow you to create measurable campaigns on instagram that drive customers to your store at a low enough cost.

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You can reach highly-engaged users through targeted stories ads and drive sales through them. Using high quality visuals coupled with minimal text works extremely well to pique users’ interests and entice them to click through on your call to action.

Conclusion

If you are yet to fully explore the potential of Instagram as a business or Direct-To-Consumer brand, then you are missing out on a lot of opportunities. As we have seen, Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms and is packed with tonnes of features to help you drive eCommerce sales.

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Its highly visual nature and highly engaged users make it the perfect recipe for expanding your brand awareness and generating more sales in your store.

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