S-Commerce – The most effective way to attract student customers?
Social Media is some of the most addictive on-line behaviour ever created. Users will spend hours a day consuming and creating social content and advertisers and retailers have rapidly caught onto the opportunities this gives them.
Unlike search engines, Social Media is deliberately designed to hold onto browsers for as long as possible. Also, Social Media has the ability to tailor its content to the users, making sure they see content that captures their attention. This ability is an immensely valuable resource that social media platforms can use to focus their advertisements to the right potential customers.
This has created a whole new area of commerce – Social Commerce or S-Commerce where businesses use the audience size of these platforms, the long dwell time and the customised content to generate sales.
So how are retailers leveraging all this to maximise revenue and profitability from S-Commerce?
Targeting not Diluting
If you know the type of customer you want, then these platforms can present your content to them with an extremely high degree of accuracy. For example, if you have special offers focused on the student marketplace then you can use these social media platforms to direct your advertising to this user group without those offers leaking out to non-students.
Of course once you have their eyeballs then you need to make sure your marketing message is worth their time. The simplest solution is to offer special offers and discounts but you need to make sure that only those who qualify for these discounts can use them – otherwise you’re giving away profit margin. In an ideal world you would be able to use social media targeting to offer discounts to new customer segments whilst retaining sales from existing customers without the costs of giving them discounts.
You can isolate special offers away from general browsers of your store using several e-commerce, marketing, and technical strategies. The goal is to make specific promotions invisible or inaccessible to the general public, targeting only authorized, loyal, or specific user segments.
There are a number of ways to isolate special offers:
- Customer Tagging: Using your e-commerce platform (e.g., Shopify, BigCommerce) you can tag specific customers (e.g., “student”) and configure promotions to activate only when these users connect. Linking these back to the source of the lead will help you not only focus offers on a customer basis but also track the effectiveness of the marketing.
- Unlisted Pages: Social Media links can be directed to a special landing page for your promotion that is not linked in your site’s navigation, footer, or search results.
- Traffic Source Targeting: Use marketing tools (particularly social media) to show specific offers only to users who clicked on a specific paid ad, rather than organic visitors.
InAcademia can help you “Close the Loop” to access the student market
If your social media is focused on students, then InAcademia can help you close the loop and turn their interest into sales. By using InAcademia’s student verification you can ensure that the offers you’re providing students are only usable by the target audience. This avoids these special deals and discounts leaking out to other potential customers and therefore InAcademia can maximise ROI for your promotions.
InAcademia does this by leveraging the international student verification systems and provides you with confidence that the customers claiming the special deals are eligible for them, without you having to collect, process and store sensitive information. This system reduces the friction in the checkout process giving you assurance and the customer a safe, easy-to-use experience that generates confidence in your brand and service.
Used in combination with focused S-Commerce marketing, InAcademia can revolutionise your student marketing strategy.
To find out more about how InAcademia can help you reach the student market contact us