Picture this: You’re walking through the store, your stomach is growling, and you’re looking for the perfect thing to eat. Then, out of nowhere, a person shouts, “Free samples!” and hands you a hot bite of pizza just oozing with melted mozzarella cheese. And hey, it’s dinner time…you want more! *Add to cart.*

Now, replace that pizza with anything else — wine, ice cream, a handheld vacuum. Once customers try it, they’re more likely to talk about it, buy it, and share it. That’s why, despite the costs, product sampling marketing is one of the most effective ways of collecting authentic content and increasing conversions on your e-commerce site, social pages, and beyond.

Chapters:

1. What is product sampling?
2. When should you launch a product sampling campaign?
3. Why you should launch a product sampling campaign
4. Product sampling strategies
5. Get started with product sampling

What is product sampling?

It’s the practice of offering goods or services to your audience in exchange for increased brand awareness, brand loyalty, reviews, feedback, and other revenue-boosting user-generated content (UGC). This is a form of experiential marketing because consumers are able to completely absorb and engage with the product prior to buying it.

Quick history lesson: Product sampling is a tried-and-true marketing strategy dating back to the 1850s. Benjamin T. Babbitt, a soap manufacturer, was one of the first people to hand out samples to his fan base. As time passed, the power of this marketing strategy was realized by others and has since become popular in a variety of industries.

Today, there’s several different product sampling methods:

• Traditional sampling means giving away free product samples to customers, so they will feel more confident buying the product
• Digital product sampling is a sustainable sampling method, where customers buy a product in a store or online with a provided coupon, or receive money back after uploading the receipt — no samples need to be shipped meaning no unnecessary packaging waste
• Sampler packs include small or trial-size products. If the customer likes the sample, they are more likely to buy the product at full size
• Mail drops are when you mail free samples directly to customers’ homes
• Limited time samples are free only for a specific amount of time, such as three days, a week, etc. This adds excitement and plays to the psychological fear of missing out (FOMO!)
• Virtual sampling is when consumers are able to try out a product online without visiting a store or receiving something in the mail. This type of product sampling campaign relies on technology like an app or artificial intelligence

When should you launch a product sampling campaign?

You should launch a product sampling campaign when you need to boost word of mouth or get feedback on a new product.

• You have a high-quality, effective product ready for people to test. It’s important to make sure you’re delivering something genuinely good before people’s opinions start flying. A bad product will be all the more maligned by product sampling
• Your budget can handle sampling costs. This includes the cost of the samples as well as shipping, handling, staffing, and marketing. Note: Digital product sampling alleviates a lot of fulfillment costs!
• You need increased brand awareness for an existing product. If your brand isn’t well-known but you have a great product, you need positive word of mouth to increase brand awareness and fill your sales funnel. Just make sure expansion is feasible for you based on your current business model
• You have a new product to launch. Product sampling will help with product development, as well as create some additional buzz. People who sample your product and love it are more likely to buy it, tell their friends, and even create shareable content about it

Why you should launch a product sampling campaign

Product sampling marketing helps brands boost feedback, conversion rates, positive reviews, and social content for both small and enterprise brands alike.

Get valuable product feedback

Product sampling is a way to connect with and get feedback from your audience.

According to Ryan Stewart, a marketing expert and the managing partner of WEBRIS, “We normally ask them questions about their experiences with our services, show how they use them, or even invite them to take part in an online contest that involves using our services.”

You can also use surveys to collect quantitative and qualitative data. This feedback can help you further develop the product into something your audience will love.

Boost sales and conversion rates

Sampling a product makes customers want to buy it. It’s wired into our psychology. Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University, knows samples create desire. “If I gave you a tiny bit of chocolate,” he says, “all of a sudden it would remind you about the exact taste of chocolate and would increase your craving.”

Take Costco, for example. An oft-cited study about Costco revealed the grocery store saw a significant boost in revenue thanks to its free food samples. And Stewart confirms sampling is a solid way to increase sales. He asserts, “People who feel like we value their opinions are more likely to buy from us when they need something similar in the future.”

Gathering UGC and reviews from shoppers also gives brands a significant boost in sales. Absolution Cosmetics wanted to support product launches, build brand awareness around their healthy skin care messaging, and boost customer loyalty and engagement to ultimately increase sales. The brand implemented a dual review collection strategy, combining an evergreen sweepstakes on their website, ensuring a constant influx of fresh UGC and reviews, and targeted product sampling campaigns to support new product launches.

As a result, in just a six-month period, Absolution increased its revenue per visitor from 14% to 123%, customer engagement from 28% to 61%, and earned $107K directly attributed to ratings and reviews.

Encourage positive reviews due to a sense of reciprocity

Free samples encourage potential customers to play into the idea of reciprocity. In other words, people who receive the sample want to do something for your brand in return — like posting a positive review on social media.

This by no means every review is going to be positive of course. Neither should that be expected. Product sampling isn’t “we’ll send you a product sample in return for a positive review.” By contrast, reviews should be honest regardless of the sentiment. And even negative reviews provide added authenticity for your brand.

But one of the reasons sampling does yield such positive results is because the right provider (like Bazaarvoice ) can create campaigns for a hyper-targeted audience across demographics, behaviors, preferences, and more. When the recipient is the exact target audience the product is for, the review is much more likely to be positive. Just make sure your sampling provider can accommodate this.

“Product sampling allows us to get our audience involved in the creation of our content, which gives them a sense of ownership over what we’re sharing,” says Stewart.

For instance, after TTI Floor Care North America allowed top brand loyalists to sample Dirt Devil vacuum cleaners for free, they saw an 86% response rate and more than 700 reviews full of positive, authentic UGC. As a result, Dirt Devil product reviews went from 2.8 to 4.5 stars. These reviews not only filled TTI’s own webpage but were also syndicated on major retailers’ sites.

Supercharging brand awareness with social content

You probably already know that social content is an important way to reach consumers. Combining the reach of social media with the effectiveness of sampling gives you a unique marketing campaign powerhouse.

Most Bazaarvoice Sampling customers are brand managers who use sampling to generate and feature content on social media.

“Linking sampling to social is a core tenant of any e-commerce plan,” says Kerry Bridge, Global Director of Advocacy at Bazaarvoice. “You need to be able to collect that great content from social in order to populate your product pages. Plus build your community.”

We’ve pinpointed a few different reasons why social content and sampling go hand-in-hand:

1. New product launches benefit greatly from large amounts of recent UGC. 89% of shoppers check reviews before making a purchase, and 60% of shoppers feel more comfortable making a purchase if they can see product images or videos first. A great way to collect this valuable UGC is to employ sampling
2. Entering new markets helps you expand your reach. Each demographic is different, and over 70% of shoppers are looking for perspectives that reflect their own. Product sampling can help you get your foot in the door and provide UGC that speaks to these new markets in a relatable way
3. Supporting your core SKUs with product sampling allows you to collect quality content at scale. Your core products are hot sellers for a reason — get them in your fans’ hands through a sampling campaign and encourage them to create content. Data from our Bazaarvoice Network of over 12,500 brands and retailers found a 135% increase in conversion rate and a 164% increase in revenue per visitor when shoppers engaged with social content from their peers
4. Working with the right content creators can help you skyrocket your brand awareness and success. Creator collaborations add to your content volume, and by sharing with their own engaged audiences, they also extend your reach

Relaunch your products

There may be times when you want to shift your brand strategy and reformulate or reinvent your product. With the introduction of the FTC’s 2023 review hijacking legislation, reformulating your product isn’t just about tweaking its features — it’s about ushering it into the market as if it’s an entirely new line. It’s a unique challenge, with the daunting task of resetting your review count and content collection to zero. But sampling can help you rapidly rebuild from this new starting line.

• Relaunch your product with fresh advocacy: Successfully relaunch your reformulated product by targeting the right audience, providing an experience, driving UGC from day one, and gaining actionable insights from product samplers
• Combat misleading reviews with authentic content: If the reformulation means the product is “substantially different” in “one or more material attributes” from the prior version (as per the FTC), it would be deceptive to continue using existing reviews. A sampling campaign can generate fresh reviews and customer photos quickly and effectively so you have an arsenal of new social proof you can show off to shoppers

Product sampling strategies

Ultimately, all sampling campaigns help your potential customers get a preview of what you’re selling while helping you get more visibility for your product and brand overall. The individual strategies can take several different forms, from in-store food samples (Costco) or mailed glasses to try on (Warby Parker). The details depend on your business model and campaign goals.

Here’s seven examples from the masters that you can imitate when you craft your own campaign, including the relevant sampling program they used.

Costco nails the traditional sampling strategy

Costco is famous for the traditional, in-store, free sample method. People have gone so far as to tour the sample tables at various Costco stores. The more samples people try, the closer they get to a free lunch. Personal finance and food bloggers have picked up on this idea as well and have even written articles encouraging the practice.

Costco’s store sampling draws people to its stores, thanks to one key message: Going to Costco is fun (and yummy!)

While you might be nervous about handing out “freebies,” the benefits far outweigh the costs. In fact, according to the College Marketing Group, “Interactions — the company that handles Costco’s sampling — found that their efforts led to a 71% increase in sales of beer and a 600% increase in frozen pizza.”

Traditional sampling works especially well for supermarkets like Costco, as well as other brick-and-mortar stores like makeup counters. Just remember that the goal for this type of sampling is to increase sales and positive word of mouth. You probably won’t get a lot of usable content out of it.

L’Oréal gets personal with virtual sampling

Since its target market is focused primarily on beauty, personalization and creativity are everything for L’Oréal. That’s why L’Oréal’s special offers and promotions are tailored to this demographic’s specific preferences and needs in the form of virtual sampling.

Customers simply select a product like hair dye or blush. Once they grant L’Oréal access to their camera, a small window shows them what they would look like wearing that product. It’s kind of like Zoom + the Sherwin-Williams ColorSnap Visualizer. But instead of paint, it’s a beauty product.

Virtual sampling is attractive because it’s incredibly scalable, not to mention germ-free. Brands aren’t limited by physical space in stores or the cost of making or shipping the product. Instead, consumers are able to instantly get a good idea of what the product would be like for them without the hassle of applying the sample color to their wrist (eww), applying to a program, handing over their personal info, or potentially wasting a product if they don’t like it.

This technique is also sometimes more helpful and realistic than physical store samples because the tool takes into account different product combinations and how they affect each other. For example, if I dyed my hair bright red, would that red lipstick look good? Hmm… maybe a more subtle shade would be better.

Brands can use virtual try-ons to fill their social media calendars. If you have a tool like this, inspire your customers to post a photo of themselves on social media “trying on” your product. Then collect, store, and track that content using Bazaarvoice’s AI-powered Media Library.

Warby Parker masters the mail drop

Warby Parker prides itself on its choice selection when it comes to new, stylish, and comfortable eyeglass frames. It provides a quiz to help customers determine exactly what type of frames will best suit them and then a personalized selection based on their responses.

After completing the quiz, customers can choose up to five frames that are delivered right to their homes, where they can test them for five days. After finding that perfect pair, customers can buy what they want and ship the rest back. The return shipping is free with Warby Parker’s return label.

For something you have to wear all the time (like glasses), comfort and style are paramount. Warby Parker helps customers feel assured that both needs will be met because customers can literally see the results for themselves at home before buying.

For brands that want a turnkey sampler program, Bazaarvoice offers a white-labeled sampling program to help retailers get their product samples directly into the hands of their community and start generating UGC.

Neuro optimizes product development

Sampling isn’t just to market and sell existing products. Kent Yoshimura and Ryan Chen, co-founders of wellness company Neuro, explain in this podcast one of the key ways they achieved their success: making sure Neuro Gum was as perfect as possible before they jumped into product activation. They gave out free samples of the gum to family, friends, and co-workers to test a variety of key details such as:

• Different ingredients (20 milligrams of caffeine to 80 milligrams of caffeine)
• New flavors
• Different sweeteners
• Hard chews vs. soft chews

After perfecting the product, Yoshimura and Chen surpassed their crowdfunding goal in just three days and ended up selling over 12 million pieces of Neuro Gum. And those people who sample the product became loyal customers.

“Once we introduce that product to somebody, the repeat purchase rate can be up to about 40, 45%,” said Chen. “Our challenge is getting people to try the product. Sampling is a really big opportunity for us.”

Neuro ensured it had a good, high-quality product and an active community of fans, thanks to product sampling. According to Chen, “We’ve grown such a loyal group of customers that they give us feedback all the time. It’s built a community which has been inspiring for us and has given us the motivation to keep going.”

After their initial success, they continued sampling with specific cohorts like the CrossFit community. They’ve also shipped product samples to new distributors to explore a potential new market in Africa.

Using samples and collecting customer responses is the most effective way to get meaningful feedback about your product, so you can improve it and launch with confidence.

Bazaarvoice’s sampling programs can help you learn from sampler feedback and expand into new markets via our robust, global Influenster community.

Home Depot doubles conversion rates with Managed Sampling

Home Depot Canada wanted to increase the volume of UGC, particularly reviews, its brands get on its product pages. So they partnered with bazaarvoice to create the Home Depot Seeds Sampling program.

“UGC is becoming increasingly important. It’s no longer a ‘nice to have.’ It’s a necessity. We see our site as a research tool, so even if people come into the store, they still use their phones to see ratings and reviews and make a final decision.”

Gabriela da Silva, Senior Brand Advocate Analyst, Home Depot Canada

Seeds Sampling is a review-seeding program that puts a brand’s highest priority products into the hands of its shoppers, in exchange for honest reviews on HomeDepot.ca. Since the program’s inception, it’s already led to some brands doubling their conversion rates on HomeDepot.ca.

It’s not just legacy products either. WiZ, a brand featured on HomeDepot.ca, used Seeds Sampling to generate buzz for new products and earn that UGC before they’d even launched. 

It worked, too. The conversion rate for the products used in Seeds Sampling was 68% higher than products not part of the program. Not bad at all.

Home Depot isn’t the first retailer to turn to Bazaarvoice for a Managed Sampling program. We’ve built sampling programs for Walmart, Target, and Sam’sClub, to name a few. And you could be next.

Get started with product sampling

Ready to experience the power of product sampling marketing in your own business? Bazaarvoice makes it easier than ever to get your products into the hands of the perfect customers, leading to a surge in reviews, social media buzz, authentic word-of-mouth, and sales.

You can learn more about Bazaarvoice Sampling here, or get started directly below.

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Buyer’s guide: Find the perfect product sampling partner

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Since 1914, AI has helped power commercial airplanes’ autopilot functionality. Today, spam filters, mobile check deposits, and facial-recognition technology all use AI to make consumers’ lives easier.

And in e-commerce, AI is used to improve website search functionality and make better recommendations based on recent browsing activity. The technology also helps power retargeting ads and chatbots.

Now, leading brands and retailers are tapping this technology to improve the shopping experience for customers in innovative new ways. Thanks to the growth of AI in e-commerce, shopping from home, in the park, or literally anywhere you have an internet connection, just got a whole lot more exciting.

Chapters:

1. Awesome ways AI is impacting e-commerce
2. AI in e-commerce examples
3. How to optimize your AI in e-commerce strategy

Awesome ways AI is impacting e-commerce

We’ve been watching the AI trend closely over the past year. Here are some of the most exciting AI in e-commerce use cases to date.

Though it would be fun to list all of the capabilities, approaches, and uses AI provides for e-commerce businesses, we’d be here for a while. Rather than forcing you to take a few personal days to get through it all, we thought we’d narrow it down to our favorite ways AI is changing the world of e-commerce.

1. Endless personalization

Oh, personalization. The hot topic that’ss taken consumer demands to another metaverse while forcing retailers to ask themselves, “Do I really know my customers as well as they want me to?”

Personalized shopper journeys are more of an expectation than an add-on these days. Luckily, AI algorithms can analyze colossal amounts of data, providing valuable insights into things like customer behavior, preferences, and trends. This information helps e-commerce businesses make data-driven decisions, optimize marketing strategies, and customize their offerings to each shopper’s needs. 

The result? A bucket load of customer satisfaction, increased engagement, and higher revenue. Personalization has also been proven to strengthen brand loyalty — 70% of consumers say that how well a company understands their individual needs impacts their loyalty. Give them what they want (personalized, relevant experiences), and watch their support grow.   

Personalized product recommendations 

You can’t talk about e-commerce personalization without mentioning its compatriot, AI-generated product recommendations. These subtle suggestions can create quite the shopper stir when delivered at the right time and in the right way.

First, AI algorithms analyze customer data, like browsing behavior and purchase history to identify shopping patterns. Then, that information is used to recommend products that might interest the shopper. And boom: more sales.

Intuitive cross-selling + upselling

Remember that important customer data we previously mentioned? AI systems can use it to identify relevant cross-selling and upselling opportunities. Even better, AI has a large capacity to learn and adapt, which means that over time you’ll be able to maximize your supplementary sales, propelling and improving your customer lifetime value.

2. It enhances the customer experience

One of the most meaningful ways AI is evolving e-commerce is by providing marvelously-engaging customer shopping experiences. From the very first search to the final post-purchase adieu, AI enables your digital store to function in a way that makes each shopper feel like it was created just for them.

Smarter site search

While it might seem somewhat unassuming, an e-commerce site’s ‘search’ can tell a huge story. And when powered by machine learning technology, its narrative includes advanced algorithms that are enhancing product discovery for online shoppers.

AI uses advanced natural language processing (NLP), making a user’s shopping experience faster, easier, and more intuitive. By understanding consumer language and combining keyword search and vector search into a single query, results are more accurate, and relevant. This means shoppers have a higher chance of finding exactly what they’re looking for, through two key ways:

1. Voice search. This well-known speech recognition technology allows shoppers to search phrases quickly without using a mobile device’s keyboard. Thanks to emerging AI, voice commerce has seen some impressive upgrades. For starters, speech analysis and contextual reasoning have led to more accurate voice recognition. It also saves customers time by reducing the effort (and chance for errors) of manual typing — handy for lengthy product names like, “Organic Queen Size Memory Foam Lavender Scented Pillow”
2. Visual search. Sometimes, a shopper wants to find a product but doesn’t know its name, type, or the category it falls under. Usually, it’s right about here that their search journey ends. But with visual search, potential customers can look for products using images and nothing else. If an online visitor doesn’t know the details of an item they’re interested in, all they need to do is use a picture to find what they’re searching for. Not only does this increase product exposure, but it elevates the customer experience by alleviating the friction between curiosity and acquisition

Interactive augmented and virtual reality

Both augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) enhance the e-commerce experience by providing immersive and responsive features that minimize the gap between online and physical (phygital) shopping.

Maybe it’s because AR integrates simulated elements with the real world, enabling shoppers to engage with products in their own surroundings. Or maybe it’s because AR can seamlessly work with existing devices, so shoppers can experience a product from their iPhone or tablet. Either way, the global AR market is expected to reach $300 billion this year.

Shoppers can try on virtual products, see how items will look and fit in their space, and participate in interactive demonstrations. Another cool AI-driven feature: online retailers can incorporate tailored recommendations and offers for an additional layer of personalization. 

Chatbots and virtual assistants 

One of the most significant ways AI is transforming e-commerce is through improved customer service. Most e-commerce businesses don’t have time to compose a personalized response to every incoming inquiry. This is where artificial intelligence can really serve a purpose.

Chatbots enable online retailers to provide 24/7 support to their customers. And because they never take breaks or get heated, chatbots can provide a level of service humans can’t match up to. Did we mention they don’t get paid either? 

Chatbots use NLP to understand customer queries. This allows them to provide immediate and accurate responses, help shoppers make smart purchasing decisions, and assist with order tracking and returns. These virtual assistants have already been a lifesaver for many digital stores and consumers.

Streamlined checkout process

Did you know that the average cart abandonment rate is around 70%? The good news is that AI can help to decrease the number of lost customers during the checkout process. 

AI algorithms optimize the checkout flow by assessing customer behavior and preferences to determine if any recommendations or messaging is needed for that final purchasing persuasion. 

Machine learning can also save shoppers time by inputting customer information, and offering advanced support by providing effortless payment processing. Together, this creates a more streamlined shopping experience that can minimize cart abandonment and maximize conversion rates.

3. It improves business operations

There’s a lot that goes on beyond what a shopper sees on their device’s screen. AI makes managing the back-end of e-commerce easier by providing tools that boost efficiency, save on costs, and help online retailers know exactly who to market to.

Increasing productivity

The use of AI in e-commerce empowers businesses to automate several procedures that are usually performed manually. By utilizing this innovative technology, online retailers can diminish their time spent on repetitive and arduous tasks, such as packaging items, restocking shelves, and troubleshooting issues.

The best part? The more AI software is introduced, the more its capabilities improve, resulting in a revolving loop of productivity.

It’s important to note that automation doesn’t mean extinguishing all redundancies or replacing people with technology. Rather, AI and machine learning streamline repetitive tasks, limiting the chance of operational errors. This frees your team from monotonous jobs, allowing them to channel their efforts toward more complex and creative responsibilities that have a greater impact on your bottom line.

Predictive analytics tools

AI-driven, predictive analytics tools can examine enormous volumes of customer data to forecast market trends, potential risks, and future opportunities. These insights enable you to make informed decisions and customize your sales and marketing strategies to better align with shopper preferences. 

Predictive analytics tools also play a crucial role in helping e-commerce businesses with supply chain management – but more on that in a minute. 

Customer segmentation

Thanks to AI technology, hyper-segmenting audiences based on data like browsing history, life stages, and even major hurdles, has become easier than ever. This information helps online retailers gain knowledge about everything from a customer’s preferences and behaviors, to their sentiments about products and services.

As a result, e-commerce businesses can tailor marketing campaigns and sales offers toward select shoppers. Plus it allows online merchants to get incredibly specific about targeting, messaging, and timing, which increases the chance of a better return on investment (ROI).

4. Superior supply chain management 

AI is modernizing the e-commerce industry by providing greater automation in supply chain management. Predictive analytics can help optimize stock levels, streamline delivery routes, and forecast potential disruptions. Here’s a quick breakdown for you.

Demand forecasting

Many online retailers rely on artificial intelligence for sales predictions to make demand forecasts more precise. Instead of using historical data, AI software makes sales and demand predictions using real-time data like weather, demographics, and online reviews, to name just a few. This allows you to adjust inventory levels and enhance operational adeptness.

Inventory management 

Good inventory management focuses on monitoring stock levels to ensure the right supply is always available to meet customer demand.

AI helps e-commerce stores maintain adequate inventory levels by utilizing data such as sales trends from previous years, projected changes in product demands, and impending supply-related issues that could affect stock availability.

And unlike pesky humans, AI robots can be used 24/7 to dispatch items immediately following an order, fetch inventory, or stockpile merchandise.

Optimized pricing strategies

AI-powered dynamic pricing lets e-commerce businesses adjust their pricing based on supply and demand.

Using data analytics and more machine learning methods, AI algorithms evaluate market trends, customer behavior, and competitor pricing to determine the best price for any product. 

Dynamic pricing algorithms can then adjust prices in real-time to enable digital retailers to boost revenue and maintain a competitive edge.

AI in e-commerce brand examples

AI is already well underway and brands are taking note. Here’s some of our favourite brand examples of AI in e-commerce.

Playing makeup at home

One of the best arguments for using AI in e-commerce is trying on items — virtually. NARS Cosmetics’ virtual try-on uses a shopper’s camera to instantly detect the contours of the face. As shoppers click on shades of lipstick, bronzer, and eyeshadow, the makeup is superimposed on their lips, cheeks, and eyes.

Occasionally a set of bright red lips appear in the middle of the screen, but the experience is surprisingly smooth and accurate. The technology also automatically evens out shoppers’ skin tone, making the makeup extra flattering.

Home sweet (virtual) home

Target’s See It in Your Space tool uses AR to allow shoppers to literally see how furniture and decorations will look in their home. Shoppers can either upload a photo of a room or use the Target app to access their device’s camera. Then, they select furniture to overlay on the image.

The tool helps them see if items will fit in the space, coordinate with other items, and decide which finish or color works best. 

Taking ‘see it for yourself’ to another level

Eyewear brand Warby Parker was an early adopter of AR. Its app allows shoppers to see how each frame will fit their face.

The brand’s Virtual Try-On feature also won a Webby Award. Shoppers can click through different styles and colors to see which best complements their face shape. Once they’ve picked their favorites, Warby Parkers allows shoppers to select 5 frames to try on at home for free.  

H&M’s personal stylist

H&M use an AI chatbot as their own personal shopping assistant. The bot learns each shopper’s style preferences through a series of questions, then presents options to the shopper to choose from.

Based on continual feedback from the shopper, the chatbot continues to offer up new suggestions, advice, and products for them to purchase.

3D luxury

Consumers looking for a new designer handbag or wallet can now view 3D images of their favorite Burberry products online. The items are scaled to size and then superimposed on the shopper’s camera screen.

Consumers can then see what a purse looks like on their shoulder or countertop and see how it complements their favorite outfits.

How to optimize your AI in e-commerce strategy

AI is clearly here to stay. Whether it’s transforming e-commerce by delivering endless personalization, enhancing the overall customer experience, or improving company operations, the AI revolution is changing the way we do business. But don’t forget: AI is here to enhance, not replace.

Ready to unlock the power of AI for e-commerce? Bazaarvoice Insights and Reports tools seamlessly integrate AI to boost efficiency and optimize your marketing strategy. Whether for boosting sales, improving products, or competitor analysis, our tools have you covered. 

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Masterclass: How to use AI strategically and responsibly

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E-commerce and brand managers will soon have to rely on first-party data — the data you collect directly from customers yourself.

Not just to stay compliant with privacy regulations such as the GDPR and CCPA, but because a first-party data strategy can enhance your revenue, provide value internally for your business, give you better customer data, and ultimately help you build a relationship with your customers. 

Chapters:

1. What is first-party data?
2. How to use first-party data
3. How to collect first-party data
4. First-party data e-commerce strategies
5. Examples of first-party data strategy in action
6. Maximize your first-party data

What is first-party data?

First-party data is customer information and data that you collect yourself — directly from your audience. Nobody else owns this data except you. It cannot legally be sold or shared, it doesn’t follow users outside of your website, and it’s made up of two different “types” of data.

1. Declarative data

Declarative data is the data that your audience self-reports, such as their name, email address, location, and more. It doesn’t just have to be rote demographic data, however. It can also be data such as their income level, the number of pets they have, and more. It’s especially useful for understanding consumer behavior and finding out what triggers buying behaviors.

Example: A customer informs you that they have pets: two cats. This information comes directly from the customer.

2. Behavioral data

Behavioral data is data based on the activities of a site visitor. This type of data is often collected via the use of a first-party cookie or tracking pixel. This cookie is unique to your site and your site only, and never follows the user across the web. Tools like Google Analytics are commonly used in conjunction with behavioral data to analyze site performance and user behavior, giving marketers and managers granular details about what parts of their website are performing and what parts need improvement.

Example: A customer likes several cat pictures and pages on Instagram but does not explicitly tell a business they have any cats. It’s up to the business to make that inference.

How to use first-party data

Before you start on your first-party data strategy, there’s some housekeeping and tactics that will need looking at first.

Align with stakeholders on what first-party data you’ll collect

First, you need to align with stakeholders on what first-party data you’ll collect. This way, you have buy-in from everyone on your team, and everyone’s needs are equally represented. Because this first-party data will become your only data source, it needs to be as robust as possible, while still keeping within regulations.

Aligning with stakeholders requires some prep on your end. Before meeting with the different stakeholders in your organization (managers, executives, legal, IT), come up with a list of metrics you’d like to track. Some common ones include sales interactions, emails, phone numbers, site behavior, purchase history, and common demographic information, such as age and location.

Next, you’re going to want to run this list of possible data points by your stakeholders, justifying why you want to collect each data type and how you’re going to do it, so there isn’t any friction between departments over what data is collected and how it’s being used.

Update to the latest Google Analytics data model

Google Analytics version 4 includes new ways to segment and track users, is GDPR and CCPA compliant, and is built to take on first-party data by utilizing AI to fill in data gaps that third-party data would ordinarily have filled.

The ever-popular analytics tool specifically addresses issues with the retirement of third-party data and inconsistencies in cookie consent options by using AI to fill in missing customer information, meaning you can still collect and analyze user data even if you don’t have a complete user profile.

Additionally, Google Analytics 4 helps you easily find and delete user data upon request, which means you can stay compliant with “the right to be forgotten.”

Looking to get started with a site implementation? Google has some valuable resources and a step-by-step guide to implementing Google Analytics 4 properties on your website’s analytics property.

Build new personas and segment your audiences based on first-party data

Because you’ll be using first-party data moving forward, you need your personas to be as accurate as possible; working with inaccurate or baseless buyer personas is a huge waste of time and resources. But you can’t keep relying on third-party data to build your buyer personas. Ask any marketer how accurate their third-party data is, and you’ll probably get back a “not very.” Survey data collected by Deloitte unearthed some startling facts about first-party data’s ugly cousin:

• Over 66% of respondents said that the third-party data about them was zero to 50% accurate as a whole
• Around 71% of all third-party data was deemed inaccurate after a review by survey respondents

As part of a first-party data strategy, personas based on first-party data are crucial to providing a personalized e-commerce marketing and advertising experience. Buyer personas based on first-party data have a number of benefits, including a 10–20% reduction in marketing and sales costs, a 20% higher customer satisfaction rate, a 10–15% increase in sales conversion rates, and a 20–30% increase in employee engagement.

Start by leveraging all the first-party data you can to build your personas. This might include data like location, age, purchase history, audience research, CRM data, or user account information, all of which can be consensually collected without the use of third-party data or cookies.

How you divide your customer base is entirely up to you. But some common shopper segmentations include: 

• Shared characteristics and behaviors
• Common interests
• Demographics
• Region
• Purchase or browser history
• Frequent shoppers or buyers
• New customers
• Recent cart abandoners
• Browsing or buying habits
• Engagement levels
• Average AOV (e.g. big spenders, sales hunters, etc.)

Build a data governance strategy that keeps you compliant

Data governance is the process of ingesting data and managing that data’s lifecycle from creation to storage to deletion.

Both the GDPR and CCPA have clauses that allow users to request their data be deleted — “the right to be forgotten” and “right to erasure.” Data governance strategies play a huge role in both of these clauses — you can’t comply with a data deletion request if you can’t easily find and manage that data in the first place.

Failure to govern your first-party and third-party data in accordance with regulations could put you in regulatory hot water. The GDPR imposes stiff fines for companies who fail to comply. Amazon was hit with a massive $887 million fine for not complying with the GDPR.

Failure to govern your first-party and third-party data in accordance with regulations could put you in regulatory hot water.

Building a data governance strategy requires you to consult with two teams: legal and IT. Legal will be able to tell you what needs to happen to the data you have from a governance standpoint. IT will be able to help you find a solution to managing your data.

Start collecting first-party cookies in place of third-party cookies

You may have seen those popups on some websites asking to place cookies on your browsers while also offering you the chance to opt in or out of data collection. That’s how first-party cookies are placed in a way that’s compliant with regulations — and it’s a crucial aspect of your first-party data strategy. There’s a few key ideas at work here:

• Customer information gathered from first-party cookies is gathered consensually
• This data is being used on this site and only on this site and will not follow the user across the web

Ordinarily, companies use third-party cookies — cookies that have been placed on users’ browsers by third-party sites — to gather customer data. These cookies are placed without the consent of the user, directly violating the GDPR and CCPA, which prohibit the non-consensual placement of third-party cookies. How do you start collecting first-party cookies?

You can do this manually by consulting the different teams in your org about how you’re going to implement a first-party cookie strategy. Design the language and copy, then take your plan to legal, and finally to IT, who can implement a first-party cookie solution. 

If you’re a small or medium-sized business, services like Cookiebot can help you set up collection popups. Larger organizations can rely on tools like OneTrust to do this at scale.

Value exchange

Value exchange is a tactic used to entice customers into exchanging their personal information for high-value content or services (you might recognize this as giving your email in exchange for an e-book or a discount from a company). Value exchange is consensual data collection that’s compliant with the GDPR and CCPA, and it’s mutually beneficial to your business and the customer. It’s a win-win that provides some great, long-term benefits.

Common value exchange tactics are to offer discounts, which help you gather emails, and loyalty programs, which can improve your bottom line and your brand’s relationship with your customers. You get their data and earn their trust, and the customer gets a valuable piece of content, item, or service.

Additionally, it represents your commitment to user privacy and data transparency. You’re being upfront about what you’re collecting, why, and what the customer is getting in exchange for their data. This type of approach is great for building goodwill with your customers and helps you stay compliant with regulations.

How to collect first-party data

Collecting first-party data starts with building users’ trust, gaining their consent, engaging the customers in ways that prompt them to volunteer information, and having the right tech to gather first-party data in place. Here are some tried-and-true methods of collecting first-party data:

Be transparent about the data you do collect. Customer trust is built on transparency, but one in five consumers still believe businesses don’t care about privacy. Separate your business from the pack by explaining how you’re going to use the data you do collect and how it’s being collected in your cookie consent popup.

Ask for reviews from customers. Asking for customers to review products in your e-commerce store is not only a great way to improve your sales performance but also gain access to customer data consensually.

Offer quizzes to your customers in exchange for personalized recommendations. Customers like personalized product or content recommendations — 35% of Amazon purchases come from product recommendations, and 75% of Netflix watches come from recommendations based on customer data. Learning a buyer’s likes, dislikes, and interests is a great way to improve the customer experience, your ROI, and consensually gather first-party data.

Let customers make accounts in your e-commerce store. Accounts are a veritable treasure trove of first-party data. By letting customers volunteer information via user-created profiles, you give them an incentive to return to your e-commerce store and can also mine their accounts for useful bits of data.

Reward repeat customers with a loyalty program. Building a successful customer loyalty program provides you with a dynamic source of customer data — a data source that is constantly evolving and is updated by the customer — as well as better sales numbers and increasing your brand loyalty. It’s a win-win for everyone.

Ask users to participate in surveys. Customer satisfaction surveys are an excellent way of improving your products and services. Surveys can also function as a source of first-party data, giving you the ability to tie interactions back to specific customers so you can identify points of friction within your e-commerce store or customer journey.

First-party data e-commerce strategies

Follow these best-practices for using first-party data to drive e-commerce growth.

Retarget hesitant shoppers

Retargeting is a super effective way to use first-party data to reach customers who have shown interest in your products but haven’t completed a purchase. Use data from website visits to create targeted ads that remind them about their viewed or wishlisted products or items left in their carts.

This subtle-yet-not-so-subtle nudge brings reluctant customers back to your site and also nudges them to complete their purchases.

Generate personalized product recommendations and promotions

With 91% of consumers more likely to shop with brands that provide relevant offers and recommendations, implementing this strategy into your e-commerce marketing plan is a no-brainer. Utilize purchase and browsing history to tailor offers and product recommendations that are most likely to appeal to each customer.

These can be displayed on product pages, in email campaigns, and even during the checkout process, and should include related or complementary items that encourage upsells and cross-sells to increase average order value.

Enhance the shopper journey

Strengthening customer relationships is paramount for any e-commerce business’s growth. The stronger the relationship, the greater the trust. And the greater the trust, the deeper the loyalty — which just so happens to convert to higher online revenue. 

Analyze your first-party data to identify any pain points and areas for improvement. This will allow you to optimize the customer experience by reducing any friction throughout the conversion funnel. For example, your first-party data might highlight that many of your customers make their exit during checkout after they see limited payment options.

So then you could add more payment methods, such as buy now, pay later.

Strengthen your loyalty program

A recent study found that 79% of consumers are more likely to do business with a brand because of its loyalty program, which translates to increased customer retention and revenue. Your best approach for making your loyalty program a reason that shoppers seek out your business?

Begin by using your first-party data, such as shopper preferences and previous purchases, to tailor your rewards to each customer. 

And with third-party data going away, loyalty programs are going to be more important than ever when it comes to customers actively sharing their information. With a well-executed, personalized loyalty program, you can increase your customers’ lifetime value, drive repeat purchases, and create champions for your brand.

Target shopping cart ditchers

Customers often leave your site and abandon their full shopping basket with no intention of ever returning to complete a purchase. While this might seem like a waste of time, it’s actually a great opportunity to build connections with online consumers you might never have heard from again.

First-party data can identify those who have recently abandoned shopping carts, and you can then send targeted email reminders or offers to encourage them to complete the purchase. This strategy is proven to work well, especially when an incentive like a limited-time offer is included. 

Looking to catch cart abandoners before they leave your site? Machine learning tech (like Bazaarvoice) can use first party data to identify when a shopper is likely to abandon, and intercept before they’ve made their exit.

Implement dynamic pricing

Dynamic pricing can help you maximize revenue by charging different prices to different customers at different times, optimizing based on each consumer’s willingness to pay. Determine whether this hyper-personalization strategy could benefit you by looking at first-party data like customer preferences, buying behavior, and historical purchases.

You’ll also want to take a look at competitor pricing to ensure you’re not over (or under) reaching. From here, you can adjust prices based on your customer segment and offer discounts to customer groups who would benefit from them most to encourage purchases.

Create personalized campaigns

A large part of your marketing budget is likely going toward advertising. Take your wealth of first-party data, including purchase history, browsing behavior, and demographics, and use it to create highly targeted campaigns that spark interest in your segmented groups.

For instance, a furniture retailer may target a group that has all purchased the same sectional with ads featuring a matching chair or ottoman, along with a limited-time discount if they buy it within a set time frame.

Don’t forget to test your strategies

Testing different strategies and messages based on first-party data is paramount to determining what resonates best with your audience.

Make sure to continuously refine your marketing and personalization strategies using A/B testing, and experimenting with different messaging, offers, and channels.

You can then use first-party data to measure the impact of these changes on key metrics like conversion rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and average order value.

Examples of first-party data strategy in action

First-party data is used like any dataset to improve your products, services, revenue numbers, or processes. In the following examples, you’ll notice a common thread throughout: a strong first-party data strategy is in place, and best-practice data collection techniques are used to do a lot more than just target customers for ads or remarketing.

B2C — The slipper store

An e-commerce store selling fun and stylized slippers severed its ties with its data vendor in order to build a first-party data strategy. Upon visiting its website, users are greeted with a prompt asking for their email and phone number in exchange for a 20% off coupon. The user fills in the form and collects their discount.

During checkout, the user is then prompted to create an account to speed along the transaction and manage future purchases. The customer creates an account, enters their shipping and billing information, and completes the transaction. The e-commerce store now has some data points it can use to help improve its products or services.

But that’s not all: first-party data can be used to retarget and nurture leads during the sales process.

B2B — Applicant tracking software vendor

An applicant tracking software (ATS) has a new website and a blog it’s using to capture organic leads. Employees notice that while the blog itself is attracting a fair number of leads for the company, once users navigate to the rest of the website, they bounce within seconds, most never completing an action beyond clicking through a few pages.

The company’s first-party data strategy helps uncover the problem. Using a first-party data cookie and Google Analytics 4, the vendor can see the users coming in via the blog, attempting to schedule a demo with the CTA link on the homepage, and then bouncing. Upon analysis, the vendor realizes that the form isn’t opening when users click the “schedule a demo” CTA. They re-work the form but have another problem on their hands: the vendor has no way of remarketing to leads who didn’t convert.

They turn to first-party data to help. The vendor creates high-quality e-books and assets and then gates them at the bottom of their highest-performing blogs, asking for some basic customer information, such as their email and phone number. Now the vendor can send personalized email content to their leads, educating them on the benefits of ATS in their business and qualifying them for a sales conversation.

Maximize your first-party data with Bazaarvoice

E-commerce managers and brand managers who don’t embrace first-party data are living on borrowed time. Regulations such as the GDPR and CCPA, in conjunction with unanimous motions to quash third-party data and cookies, have put additional pressure on businesses, that often don’t have the time or resources to prepare for third-party data’s retirement.

An easy solution is insights and reports tools from Bazaarvoice. Rather than waste time hiring third parties, the tools help you analyze customer behavior and sentiment, build your brand, and source more reviews to diversify the voices in your first-party data strategy.

That all sounds great, but how can you possibly know what each of your current or potential customers thinks and wants? The short answer is you just need to listen to them in the spaces where you coexist — your social media channels. Social listening is the launchpad to providing value for your customers, and how you respond will determine your success.

Learn how to listen, what to listen for, the best social listening tools, and what to do with the insights from those customer conversations in our social listening guide.

Chapters:

1. What is social listening?
2. Why is social listening important?
3. What to listen for and how to respond
4. How to set up a social listening strategy
5. Social listening examples in action
6. Manage and streamline social listening with Insights and Reports

What is social listening?

Social listening is all about actively tracking and analyzing the online conversations that matter most to your brand. Whether it’s your customers, competitors, or industry buzz, social listening tunes into these discussions across social media platforms. The goal? To glean insights into customer sentiment, preferences, and emerging trends, and to pinpoint any pain points or problems that need addressing. 

Social listening goes beyond keeping your digital ear to the ground. It’s about diving deep into the data you collect from social media conversations and analyzing it to understand public perception. This involves interpreting the data to uncover patterns, sentiments, and trends. By doing so, you can anticipate market shifts, innovate in response to customer feedback, and develop targeted digital marketing campaigns. 

Take, for instance, a beauty brand that uses social listening to track discussions around skincare routines.

They notice a growing trend in conversations about natural ingredients and eco-friendly packaging. By aligning their product development and marketing strategies with these insights, the brand successfully launches a new line of eco-friendly skincare products. The result is a product line that resonates well with their target audience, leading to increased brand loyalty and sales. 

Social listening vs. social monitoring

Social monitoring is another marketing tactic related to social listening, but the two are not the same. On the one side, social media monitoring is more targeted, with the goal of directly and immediately responding to a specific occurrence, like a brand mention or customer service question or issue. Whereas social listening is more comprehensive and aims to extract insights from social discussions to inform and shape your overall brand strategy.

Employing both social listening and brand monitoring allows brands to be reactive in customer engagement and proactive in strategic planning. Let’s run with the beauty brand example. While they used social listening to uncover an emerging trend and reshape their broader brand strategy, they might simultaneously use social monitoring to quickly address a customer’s complaint about a delayed shipment, and enhance customer satisfaction. 

Why is social listening important?

Social listening allows you to understand the key factors that affect your company’s success. It helps you become an invaluable presence in your customers’ lives and a force to be reckoned with in the eyes of competitors.

Understand customer preferences

Understanding the preferences of your customers is crucial for delivering products and services that attract and retain them. Through social listening, you can discover what particular features or qualities they love about individual products, your brand presence, and services like customer support, sustainability, and delivery. 

Customer preferences can be about your brand specifically, product categories, or your industry as a whole. By actively listening to and analyzing social media conversations, you gain the ability to pinpoint specific likes and dislikes. This process enables you to fine-tune your offerings, ensuring they hit the mark with your target audience. 

Address customer dissatisfaction

Customers might not always have a great experience with your brand or products, and that’s okay — addressing customer dissatisfaction is always an opportunity for growth and improvement. As we mentioned above, from a monitoring standpoint, social media can be a customer service tool to promptly address specific concerns and complaints before they escalate. 

At the listening level, you can use these instances to uncover the underlying causes of customer dissatisfaction and gain valuable insights into common issues within your industry. 

A clothing brand might discover through social listening that a significant number of consumers are frustrated with the lack of diverse sizing options in online shopping. This insight can prompt them to reevaluate and potentially revamp their sizing options, addressing a widespread customer need, boosting the brand’s reputation, and tapping into a new customer segment. Win-win-win!

Stay ahead of emerging trends

For your brand to stay relevant, it has to be ahead of trends. Social listening essentially serves as a radar for detecting the latest fads and preferences directly from the consumers, whether it’s must-have styles, music, products, or memes. 

Tracking trending topics and hashtags allows you to keep a finger on the pulse of shifts in consumer interests and preferences, so you can adapt your social media marketing, product, and customer service strategies in real-time.

Glean valuable competitor insights

Competition is fierce out there, especially in the world of e-commerce. While the focus should be on your brand, you also need to keep an eye on your competitors, their moves, and customer perceptions about their products, marketing, and customer service. 

Social listening helps you understand the competitive landscape, identifying both the strengths and weaknesses of your rivals, so you can uncover opportunities to outperform in areas where they fall short. It’s essentially an opportunity to capitalize on their missteps by enhancing your own products or messaging in ways that directly address the gaps left by your competitors. 

Find unique collaboration opportunities

Social listening is instrumental in finding potential influencers, UGC creators, complementary brands, and industry or subject matter experts to partner with. 

These individuals and companies are often at the forefront of trends and discussions, making them ideal partners for collaborative campaigns. When reviewing the mentions, hashtags, and keywords you track, you can find active and trusted voices contributing to those conversations.

Teaming up with them on campaigns introduces your brand to new audiences in a way that feels organic. It also aligns your brand with a voice that your target audience already knows and respects. Partnerships with the right creators and brands can cut through the noise, offering the kind of authentic content that builds trust with consumers. 

Enhance brand reputation and crisis management

For all the benefits social media has, it also puts businesses in a vulnerable position. A single misinterpreted tweet can go viral and break a brand’s reputation in a split second. Keeping tabs on what’s being said helps you safeguard the brand’s image and address any potential issues that could evolve into a full-blown crisis — in such cases, a rapid response can be the difference between a minor hiccup and a major PR disaster.

Social listening serves as an early warning system, allowing you to detect and respond to negative publicity or emerging issues promptly, and remain in tune with your audience’s perceptions and expectations. 

Improve your content strategy and marketing campaigns

Social listening takes the guesswork out of what your audience is talking about, feeling, and expecting. Using these insights, you can draw inspiration to craft content that not only aligns with but also anticipates current audience interests, leading to more effective marketing efforts. 

When your content is relevant to the audience, it naturally leads to higher engagement and conversion rates, turning those casual browsers into paying customers. 

Consider a travel agency that uses social listening to gauge the mood and preferences of its audience. They notice a growing interest in domestic travel and seize the opportunity to tailor their Google ads campaigns to focus on local tourism.

This strategic pivot results in a campaign that resonates with the audience’s current desires, leading to increased bookings and a chunkier bottom line. 

What to listen for and how to respond

There’s numerous conversations about your brand, products, industry, and competitors happening on social media, so focusing on everything isn’t feasible or efficient. These key areas of discussion are a good place to start if you want to reap the benefits of social listening.

Topics of interest

Monitor trending hashtags and popular content to align your marketing with your audience’s current interests. Pay attention to current events, big cultural moments, or trending hobbies that can shape your social media presence and interactions.

How to respond: Actively participate in conversations related to the major interests of your audience. Respond to their content or create your own that repurposes relevant content you already have, shares your brand’s perspective, and connects your products to popular use cases.

which side are you on? pic.twitter.com/Q71DeZLoOj

— Swiggy (@Swiggy) July 21, 2023

Invite your audience to share their thoughts — this not only positions your brand as a thought leader but also fosters community engagement.

Personal challenges and goals

Social media is a space where people often share personal challenges and aspirations. Social listening allows businesses to tap into these conversations, gaining insights into the real-life experiences of their audience. Access to these details enables you to offer solutions, support, and products that genuinely help customers.

How to respond: Craft campaigns and messaging that highlight how your products or services can address your customers’ needs or make progress toward their goals. 

Common issues and questions about products and services

Customers frequently turn to social media to seek information and voice their questions about products and services. Identify these common questions that come up when customers tag your brand or use your branded hashtags. This allows you to not only resolve issues quickly but also create permanent solutions and resources to improve the customer experience.

How to respond: Compile and maintain a list of the common questions that arise and use those to create online resources. For example, you can include them in a Questions and Answers section on your product pages, optimize product details with pertinent info, create a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) website section, and create social media content that addresses FAQs. 

Need a hand? We’re here to help! @/
-Check out the official Help Center https://t.co/R0nr73NoV4

-Visit our Community Forums page for more discussions https://t.co/f8Ncnj9Hsk

-For our Server Status & more → https://t.co/ILcKyJd79n

— Adobe Care (@AdobeCare) December 9, 2022

This is also valuable information to share with your customer service team and integrate into your live chat technology to prepare answers for these common questions.

Discussions about competitors

Social listening is a nifty tool for competitor research. Follow conversations that mention or tag your main competitors to find out what customers love or dislike about them. 

For example, you might discover sales and promotions, packaging, product details, subscription services, or something else that either works well or isn’t doing the trick. Then, you can use that information to do it better or step up your game in areas where they’re beating you out. 

How to respond: Share the insights you’ve collected about your competitors with the broader marketing, sales, and product teams. Make improvements to products, services, and marketing where needed, and highlight areas where you outshine competitors in your marketing and social media content.

Brand advocates and network partners

Pay attention to the customers who rave about your products and share content about your brand. These brand advocates are the customers who showcase your products in their everyday lives. You can also keep track of other like-minded businesses with products that would interest your audience.

How to respond: Develop relationships with creators and brands that might make good partners in the future. When someone posts quality content about your brand or industry, share it on your own social networks. Initiate deeper partnerships by reaching out to customers or influencers directly to be brand ambassadors.

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A post shared by Sarah Wolak (@sarah_wolak)

Likewise, reach out to other brands to co-host a giveaway or collaborate on product packages. 

Product mentions

Track conversations that call out your specific products and categorize them based on positive and negative feedback. 

How to respond: Evaluate the feedback about your products and identify any patterns that come up. For example, you might discover multiple complaints about certain products but rave reviews about others. Share this information with your product team so they can identify how to improve products or build upon successful ones.

How to set up a social listening strategy

Social listening is like a mind-reading superpower. While monitoring certain areas of interest ad hoc is helpful, executing an intentional social listening strategy can yield far more impactful results for your brand.

1. Define your social listening goals

Start by pinpointing what you want to achieve through social listening, be it understanding customer preferences, identifying pain points, or keeping a pulse on brand awareness. 

Make sure these objectives are specific, measurable, and, most importantly, align with your broader business goals. The latter ensures that every piece of data collected and every insight gleaned serves a larger purpose and drives the brand forward. 

Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) related to your social listening goals. These could include metrics like engagement rate, sentiment analysis results, the volume of brand mentions, or specific hashtag performance. Regularly tracking these KPIs will provide you with quantifiable data to evaluate the success of your social listening efforts.

2. Choose the right social media listening tools

From sentiment analysis and trend tracking to influencer identification, social listening tools are designed to cater to different business sizes and needs. The key is to find a tool that not only aligns with your specific social listening goals but also integrates with your existing marketing strategies. 

For small e-commerce businesses, the focus might be on cost-effective tools that offer essential listening features. These tools should be user-friendly and capable of providing insights into brand mentions, customer sentiment, and emerging trends. 

On the other hand, larger businesses might require robust platforms that offer advanced analytics, CRM integration, and data analysis capabilities. These social listening tools can handle larger volumes of data and provide deeper insights, which are key for big businesses with a wider audience reach. 

3. Identify keywords and topics

This step is crucial, as it determines the scope and relevance of the insights you’ll gather. First, identify the core aspects of your brand and industry (these can range from specific product names to broader industry terms). Include variations and common misspellings to ensure comprehensive coverage. 

Depending on your goal, you might expand your keyword list to include competitor brand names and key products. Don’t forget to add buzzwords, industry trends you’re already aware of, and seasonal topics that are likely to generate conversation. For example, if you’re a home decor brand, you might track keywords related to home improvement trends, seasonal decorations, and DIY projects.

To make your tracking more actionable, categorize your keywords into different themes or topics. This categorization can help you segment the data and analyze it more effectively. You might have categories for product feedback, customer service inquiries, and general industry discussion. 

Remember, social media is dynamic, and so should your keywords and topics be. Regularly review and update your lists to reflect new products, campaigns, or shifts in industry jargon. 

4. Determine your social media listening methods

There are various approaches to social listening and different techniques for finding meaningful conversations. Each method will unveil unique insights, and your choice will depend on the goals you originally set.

Track mentions and hashtags

Use a social media management tool to track mentions of your brand and your competitors, as well as the hashtags you designate. This way, you can access conversations on your different channels in one place. 

This is a holistic way to quickly gauge public reaction to new product launches, marketing campaigns, or company news so you can adjust strategies on the fly and ensure that your brand’s messaging aligns with audience expectations and sentiments. 

Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis measures customers’ perception of your brand and products based on positive and negative feedback and particular opinions expressed. And Sentiment analysis AI tools leverage machine learning that includes natural language processing (NLP) to interpret conversations and determine how people feel about your brand.

This method is particularly effective in identifying areas of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction, which are crucial for guiding strategic improvements and maintaining a positive brand image.

Trend tracking

Use your social media management tool or the specific channel’s analytics to reveal trending content and topics. For example, the TikTok Creative Center provides robust insights on trending hashtags, creators, songs, and videos over different time periods. Analytics features included in other channels like X (formerly Twitter) reveal high-volume keywords that inform what’s trending as well. 

Proactive listening

Initiate the conversation by asking your audience for questions and feedback on your social channels. Leverage engagement features like the Questions Sticker for Instagram Stories or ask your followers to respond to your posts as a comment or a video response on TikTok.

5. Analyze and interpret social listening data

This stage is where the raw data transforms into actionable insights.

Start with quantitative analysis, which involves measuring the volume of mentions, the reach of your hashtags, and the frequency of keywords. Social media analytics platforms use automation to provide you with metrics such as engagement rates, sentiment scores, and trend graphs. 

However, quantitative data only tells part of the story. Qualitative analysis is equally important. This involves reading through posts, comments, and conversations to understand the context behind the numbers. Look for recurring themes or sentiments in the discussions about your brand. Are customers consistently praising a particular aspect of your product? Are there recurring complaints or suggestions for improvement? This level of detail can provide deeper insights into customer attitudes and perceptions. 

6. Review and adapt your social listening strategy

Social media is constantly changing, so what works today might not be as effective tomorrow. Plus, your business priorities also change and your social listening needs along with them. Regularly assessing the performance of your social listening strategy keeps it relevant and effective. 

Incorporating feedback loops is also beneficial. Use the insights gained from social listening to make changes in your business, and then monitor social media to see how these changes are received. This approach ensures that your strategy is not just reactive but also proactive in shaping your brand’s presence and offerings.

Social listening examples in action

Social listening isn’t an exact science. It’s a practice that continues to evolve with many different purposes and applications. To better understand how to use the information that’s accessible to you, take a look at these social listening examples for how other professionals have done it with impactful results.

Petco’s branding and services evolution

Petco considers social media and search the “largest focus groups on the planet” and relies on signals and feedback from social to evolve their offerings. For example, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, they expedited a curbside delivery program based on listening to their audience’s preferences on social. 

In addition to offering new services informed by social listening, Petco shifted their focus to be a pet health and wellness company based on the priorities of their audience. Another way Petco leverages feedback and data is by answering customer questions on their website with Questions and Answers.

This feature provides a helpful resource on relevant product pages for customers who want to learn how specific products meet the unique needs of their pets.

Nestlé Canada’s product improvements

By listening to and acting on their customers’ feedback, Nestlé Canada saved a struggling product and returned it to its former glory. The major food brand ruffled some feathers when they modified the recipe for a favorite iced tea product. Within a month of releasing the new version, customers made their complaints known on Nestle’s marketing channels and in product reviews. As a result, their sales and review ratings dropped.

These insights led to action, and Nestlé responded to the negative sentiment by reinstating the original recipe. By finding and implementing customer feedback, they restored high customer satisfaction and raised their average customer rating for the product from 1.7 to 4 stars.

Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well” (10-minute version) 

Taylor Swift is not only one of the biggest pop stars of our time but also something of a marketing genius. Social listening is definitely part of her strategy to win over fans time and time again. One example is how the 10-minute version of the fan-favorite song “All Too Well” from her album Red came about. 

After hearing reports of a 10-minute version of the song, fans took to social media to call for its release. Taylor heard these messages and ultimately decided to record and release the complete version on “Red (Taylor’s Version)” along with a music video, which won a Grammy for Best Music Video. This is a great example of Taylor listening to her audience’s requests and responding with a new product release or, in this case, a song. 

Manage and streamline social listening with analytics

Social media teams can only do so much when it comes to conducting social listening. Small teams, multiple channels to review for social conversations, and manual processes limit what’s possible. That’s why automated tools are invaluable for managing and synthesizing large amounts of data.

Bazaarvoice’s Social Analytics tools measure your performance for social media efforts, influencer marketing, and revenue reporting all in a single dashboard. Check out the full capabilities here. Or get in touch below to learn more.

Chances are you’ve most likely been to a Home Depot or ordered from them online. Need a new drill? Repainting your living room? Updating your lighting? Bored on a Sunday? It’s off to Home Depot. 

The home improvement retailer has 2,200 stores in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, and offers more than one million products for its shoppers. They serve DIY customers, professional contractors, and installation businesses across North America. 

For brands that sell their products on HomeDepot.ca, figuring out how to maximize channel sales is critical for business. Brands can of course come to HomeDepot.ca with their own user-generated content (UGC) — like reviews, Q&As, and social posts — but the retail chain partners with Bazaarvoice specifically to provide robust UGC collection tools for brands. 

A UGC strategy done right increases the discoverability of products, boosts sales, and creates a valuable dialogue with customers and new shoppers. It also informs SEO benefits, provides insights for product innovation, reduces return rates, and ensures shoppers have a positive experience with your brand. The impact of reviews by numbers:

Customers who interact with UGC are 2x more likely to convert, according to Bazaarvoice research. Reviews help customers validate their purchasing decisions and feel more confident about the products they buy. 

Home Depot Canada has launched several Bazaarvoice solutions and features that improve the customer experience and help suppliers optimize UGC. One of its most successful solutions is its sampling program, the Home Depot Seeds Program. 

What is the Home Depot Seeds Program?

The Home Depot Seeds Program is a product sampling program that puts a brand’s high-priority products in the hands of Home Depot Canada’s most loyal shoppers, in exchange for honest reviews on HomeDepot.ca.

Bazaarvoice and Home Depot partnered to help brands select which key items to sample, identify Home Depot Canada audiences within the sampling community, and guide brands through fulfillment. 

How to leverage the Home Depot Seeds Program

Home Depot encourages its brands to enlist the Seeds Program for seasonal, exclusive, and new products. Or even any products that just need a fresh crop of reviews:

• New products: Brands can collect authentic UGC for products ahead of a new launch. Insights found within reviews ensure your products launch with a bang, and will help future shoppers feel confident about purchasing your new products
• Seasonal items: Optimize seasonal item product pages with UGC to boost discoverability and increase conversions during their limited time
• Home Depot exclusives: If your brand sells products exclusively through Home Depot, then HomeDepot.ca is the only place where shoppers can see that valuable UGC
• Products with outdated reviews: Search engines like Google favor pages with fresh content, so a a continuous flow of review content means more traffic to your product pages, which means more sales

Getting started with Bazaarvoice + Home Depot

The Home Depot Seeds Program has already helped some brands on HomeDepot.ca more than double their conversion rates. In addition, the program has been so successful that Home Depot vendors in the United States are now interested in using it to collect reviews for their Canadian exclusive items and product launches. 

Learn more about the Bazaarvoice + Home Depot partnership and more ways you can utilize strategies to increase channel sales over on our partnership page. Or get in touch directly below to get started.

But while we may be the leader (again, not our words), we accept we’re not the only option out there — there’s a few alternatives to Bazaarvoice. But how do they compare?

9 Bazaarvoice alternatives

Are you interested in exploring different UGC providers? Here’s nine Bazaarvoice alternatives and how they stack up to the Bazaarvoice platform.

1. PowerReviews

PowerReviews helps product-based businesses drive conversions by collecting, displaying, sharing, and tracking user-generated content. The app offers core features that support e-commerce growth, including customer reviews and ratings, UGC syndication, and product sampling.

Bazaarvoice vs. PowerReviews

Bazaarvoice offers a wider range of products and features. PowerReviews only collects and distributes UGC, while Bazaarvoice has other unique offerings for attracting and converting potential customers — from social media management tools to online and in-store brand activation events. With these additional features, Bazaarvoice reduces the need to combine multiple tools to perform tasks that can all be handled in one centralized provider.

2. Yotpo

Yotpo is an e-commerce retention brand that helps businesses collect online reviews and showcase visual UGC on their various website pages. It also specializes in SMS marketing, loyalty and referral programs, subscription offerings, and email marketing — all targeted at encouraging repeat purchases and boosting recurring revenue.

Bazaarvoice vs. Yotpo

Bazaarvoice is tailored to both customer acquisition and retention. Instead of focusing solely on retention like Yotpo, Bazaarvoice is a more holistic solution that prioritizes gaining new buyers just as much as retaining existing customers. Bazaarvoice’s Influenster community — a large community of product-passionate consumers — is ever-ready to promote your products in video, image, and text reviews that display across multiple sales channels. This influencer collaboration and review distribution system aids higher search engine rankings and product discovery.

3. Emplifi

Formerly Pixlee TurnTo, before being acquired by Emplifi in November 2022, Emplifi is a platform for e-commerce brands looking to invest in large-scale word-of-mouth marketing. The company leverages influencer marketing, social UGC, and customer ratings and reviews to convince and convert shoppers.

Bazaarvoice vs. Pixlee TurnTo

Bazaarvoice delivers better ROI. Actually Bazaarvoice has the same offerings as Pixlee and more (like social media management and analytics features), so our customers get more value for their money faster. But with more integration options and an expert services offering for personalized support and guidance, Bazaarvoice also empowers brands to optimize their UGC marketing strategy.

4. REVIEWS.io

REVIEWS.io is a review management and retail syndication platform. It helps companies curate reviews and ratings across various platforms — Google, Shopify, Klaviyo, and more — to use on their sales channels and paid advertising. REVIEWS.io also offers a survey feature for customers to measure customer satisfaction and a loyalty and rewards tool for them to create high-converting referral programs.

Bazaarvoice vs. REVIEWS.io

Bazaarvoice is better suited for enterprise. Because of our platform’s numerous functionalities and automations, Bazaarvoice is better suited for large businesses with extensive service offerings than REVIEWS.io. We also provide more sophisticated reporting options and a wider selection of marketing tools for social media management, product sampling campaigns, review monitoring, and more.

5. Trustpilot

Trustpilot is a well-known site for reviewing and rating the world’s top SaaS and e-commerce products. The review platform lets customers post both negative and positive feedback about a brand, so other buyers can make more informed purchasing decisions, and it helps businesses improve their offerings. 

Customers also use Trustpilot to research and learn more about certain products and services for personal or business use.

Bazaarvoice vs. Trustpilot

Bazaarvoice includes video reviews. While Trustpilot only lets customers drop text reviews, Bazaarvoice allows text, photo, and video product reviews, creating a visual way for customers to experience products before making a purchase. Brands can also leverage our dedicated and passionate community of everyday influencers to generate product reviews at scale and syndicate them across their top sales channels.

6. Sprinklr

A partner as well as an alternative to Bazaarvoice, Sprinklr is a customer experience management platform that provides tools for real-time data analytics, customer support, marketing, and social media management. One of Sprinklr’s most relevant social commerce offerings is its ratings and reviews product, which lets brands receive, approve, display, and respond to customer feedback. The app also seamlessly integrates with CRMs like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk.

Bazaarvoice vs. Sprinklr

Bazaarvoice is custom-built to drive e-commerce sales. If you’re looking to attract more customers to buy your products, Bazaarvoice is your muse. Unlike Sprinklr, Bazaarvoice is tailored to e-commerce businesses — from its shoppable image galleries to product sampling campaigns and review sourcing offering.

7. Dash Hudson

Dash Hudson provides a hub of social media management tools for businesses of all sizes. With features for top social channels like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, the platform enables efficient post scheduling, social monitoring, campaign planning, performance management, and more. Dash Hudson also has influencer-tracking software for managing and growing successful content creator programs.

Bazaarvoice vs. Dash Hudson

Bazaarvoice is more proactive. Dash Hudson and Bazaarvoice are very similar in the influencer marketing realm, but our platform wins thanks to proactive features like product sampling. With this feature, Bazaarvoice incentivizes customers and influencers to create authentic brand content in exchange for free product samples, helping brands to start seeing results from UGC quickly. Bazaarvoice is also the only provider that has a visual syndication network for distributing social content to retailers as a way of supporting their marketing and sales efforts.

8. Social Native

Social Native is a UGC and influencer discovery platform that helps brands leverage authentic social content to drive awareness and sales. In 2020, Social Native acquired visual marketing tool Olapic to strengthen its content sourcing, performance management, and insights tracking functionalities for marketers.

Bazaarvoice vs. Social Native

Bazaarvoice includes revenue attribution. Unlike Social Native and other competing brands, Bazaarvoice is the first end-to-end UGC platform that measures revenue directly attributed to social content. With Bazaarvoice, e-commerce brands no longer have to depend solely on vanity metrics like engagement rates and follower growth to gauge campaign effectiveness. 

9. Sprout Social

The final Bazaarvoice alternative on our list is Sprout Social — a social media management platform for online post scheduling, publishing, social listening, customer engagement, and insights tracking. Unlike other social media management solutions, Sprout Social also offers an employee advocacy feature for empowering team members to become online brand advocates and industry thought leaders.

Bazaarvoice vs. Sprout Social

Bazaarvoice leverages UGC seamlessly. Sprout Social is a great social media tool, but it does not have a clear-cut system for sourcing and utilizing UGC for business growth. Meanwhile, Bazaarvoice helps businesses provide rich shopping experiences that lead to purchases — using UGC. Our e-commerce marketing platform has smooth processes for creating organized product sampling campaigns, collecting and displaying customer ratings or reviews, turning social content into shoppable experiences, and more.

Bazaarvoice is your best alternative

Whoever your audience, Bazaarvoice is the ideal partner for collecting and leveraging UGC for customer acquisition and retention. With key products like Product Sampling, Social Commerce and Creator Partnerships, Retail Syndication, and more, our full-funnel platform makes it easy for e-commerce brands and retailers to leverage social content for reputation management and business growth.

And sure, there’s some strong alternatives to Bazaarvoice out there. But none provide the full ROI that Bazaarvoice does. An independent Forrester Total Economic Impact of Bazaarvoice study found that Bazaarvoice customers can experience up to a 4x increase in conversion rates and a 400% ROI with “a payback period of less than three months.” That’s not something you can find just anywhere.

If you’re an existing Bazaarvoice user who needs help with any of our products or services, log in to the Support Community for assistance.

And if Bazaarvoice isn’t part of your digital marketing tech stack yet, or you’re using an alternative but want to switch, get in touch with our team by filling out a contact form or calling to talk about how we can meet your business needs today. 

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Navigating tomorrow’s commerce: The Bazaarvoice product roadmap for innovation

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Chapters:

1. What is multi-touch attribution?
2. How to collect the right data for multi-touch attribution
3. Multi-touch attribution and the customer journey
4. Types of multi-touch attribution model
5. Multi-touch attribution tools for a privacy-first world
6. Data won’t tell you everything

In a privacy-first world, legacy approaches to multi-touch attribution are neither accurate nor reliable. Ad services like Meta and Google continue to remove user-level tracking capabilities from their reports in response to regulations, and marketers who rely on third-party cookies to quantify the mid-funnel are doomed.

User-level data is less reliable than ever and low accuracy isn’t a winning start to data-driven decision-making.

So, what are data-driven marketers to do — go back to the siloed, single-touch attribution models of Web 2.0? In an omnichannel landscape where consumers interact with brands across channels prior to a conversion, single-touch attribution doesn’t make sense. An effective marketing strategy requires a cohesive set of tactics that build on each other’s efforts to create and maintain momentum in a focused direction. 

Single-touch attribution only allows marketers to look at one tactic at a time, usually in the discovery or conversion stages. Marketers who rely on single-touch attribution to understand multi-channel strategies risk myopic decision-making by ignoring critical mid-funnel tactics. Brands need a fuller picture of what’s contributing to success to make informed multi-channel decisions. 

What is multi-touch attribution?

Multi-touch attribution is a marketing model that measures every touchpoint on the customer journey by assigning a numerical value to each channel so that marketers can see the impact each touchpoint has on conversions.

The mid-funnel is hard to measure, but investing resources in quantifying the mid-funnel pays off. Mid-funnel marketing makes a brand’s acquisition efforts more successful by lifting conversion rates across multiple channels. It also smooths the path to retention by building advocacy early, improving LTV, and taking pressure off of customer acquisition. 

Multi-touch attribution — assigning value to every stage of the customer journey — is still an important framework, but today’s version is a far cry from the third-party cookie-based approach marketers used to love. 

How to collect the right data

Third-party data collected through pixels and cookies used to be the primary source of multi-touch attribution. If a marketer wanted to track user behavior across channels, devices, and platforms, they just had to add a snippet of code to their website. Traffic would get tagged with a Facebook or Google cookie automatically without the user’s consent. That cookie would follow the user around the web to watch what they did and retarget them with relevant ads. Marketers would aggregate data from third-party cookies into multi-touch attribution reports to understand user behavior and optimize customer journeys. 

Today, that same user-level data is harder to access. GDPR and CCPA prompted Google, Facebook, and other platforms to phase out third-party cookies, a move that forced marketers to abandon tried-and-true methods of multi-touch attribution. 

Data-driven marketers have started to adapt to the new analytics landscape, leveraging first-party data and zero-party data to quantify performance across the marketing funnel.

The distinction between zero-party data and first-party data is relatively new. Until recently, all data that a brand collected was considered “first-party.”

Today, first-party data refers to quantitative behaviors that a brand tracks through their interactions with customers. First-party cookies, tags, and urchin tracking modules (UTM) are the common methods consumer brands use to collect first-party data. Omnichannel retailers might also track brick-and-mortar store visits in tandem with e-commerce customers’ behavior, like cart abandonment and email clicks. GDPR-compliant cookies can replace some of the metrics marketers used to track using third-party cookies.

Using them properly requires a privacy-first strategy that asks for consent and allows users to request that their personal data be deleted.

Zero-party data refers to qualitative information a customer tells a brand voluntarily. Customer support conversations, product reviews, survey responses, and social media comments all fall under the umbrella of zero-party data. Qualitative customer data can be invaluable to a brand if leveraged properly, but finding meaningful insights in text can be challenging to marketers used to relying solely on quantitative reports.

In an era of increased regulations and phased-out tracking systems, the best consumer marketers rely on Bazaarvoice’s zero-party qualitative insights to illuminate buyer journeys and find opportunities for growth.

Multi-touch attribution and the customer journey

Using multi-touch attribution in multi-channel marketing uncovers tactics to increase conversion rate, reduce average time to purchase, and improve average order value (AOV). 

Marketing tactics don’t exist in a vacuum — they exist in a multi-channel ecosystem. Giving full credit to any one tactic through single-touch attribution, no matter where it lies in the customer journey, ignores everything else that plays a role in customer acquisition. A brand’s relationship with prospective customers in the mid-funnel is crucial to earning more business and increasing revenue.

In a multi-channel marketing landscape, multi-touch attribution is the key to understanding what’s working and why. Consider this fictional six-step purchasing journey for a $500 Dyson vacuum cleaner. 

Using first-touch attribution, a marketing team might conclude that paid search was a clear winner. But paid search isn’t the full story. Dyson might not drive as many conversions without social proof from UGC and affiliates, which first-touch attribution can’t illuminate. 

If Dyson relied only on last-touch attribution, the team might decide to build their marketing strategy on discounting — a tricky move for a premium market player. Dyson’s products are unapologetically expensive, a pricing strategy that works because of Dyson’s proprietary technology and strong brand. Heavy discounting would counteract Dyson’s brand superpowers instead of complementing them, creating a race to the bottom that nobody can win.

Multi-touch attribution gives Dyson a better understanding of their paths to conversion, which presents more options for experimentation. Since UGC is known to improve conversion rate and plays a role in their (fictional) customer journey, Dyson might decide to experiment with more UGC ads the following quarter to increase revenue.

Types of multi-touch attribution model

Consumer marketers use linear, J-shaped, inverse J-shaped, and U-shaped models to attribute performance across the customer journey.

Linear attribution gives equal weight to every stage along the customer journey and gives marketers a balanced view of the path to conversion. It gives more credit to mid-funnel tactics than other models, which can be useful when focusing on the mid-funnel for the first time. 

It’s a good starting point, but it might inflate the value of unimportant interactions and undervalue crucial tactics. Linear attribution modeling can therefore help marketers challenge their own assumptions about what works but is rarely accurate enough in the long term to work for every scenario.

A traditional J-shaped model assigns more credit to the last stages of the customer journey, while an inverse J-shaped model puts more weight on the beginning stages of a customer journey.

U-shaped models, also called position-based models, assign equal weight to first and last touch with a smaller percentage attributed to everything in between.

Let’s look at how each type of multi-touch attribution would assign value to our fictional $500 vacuum buyer’s journey.

The attribution model a brand chooses depends on their scenario, priorities, and philosophies. Teams that are focused on building discovery might use an inverse j-shaped model to understand the beginning stages of their customer journey, while teams that are focused on the mid-funnel might apply a linear model to generate insights. 

Leveraging a multi-touch attribution model in multi-channel marketing

Here’s a scenario: a children’s apparel brand wants to find growth opportunities for their e-commerce channel. 

Using first-touch attribution, the team concludes that unbranded paid search traffic has a higher average order value (AOV) than customers acquired through paid social but generates less revenue overall.

If they stopped there, the apparel brand might conclude that despite the lower volume, paid search is a better use of their time and money. That could make sense but would increase end-of-month (EOM) revenue by a relatively small margin.

Baseline EOM Revenue: $212,350

Pairing a multi-touch attribution model with a first-touch report gives the team more options. 

When they run a buyer’s journey report in Segment, the team discovers that higher-AOV buyers from paid search traffic tend to visit a testimonial page on the store in the days preceding a purchase. The page highlights reviews from happy customers and is linked on product pages. 

Since the brand is looking at performance from an acquisition standpoint, they decide to use an inverse J-shaped model to understand the path to conversion from paid search, a high-AOV customer journey. 

After comparing the relative value of each interaction to those from lower-AOV buyers’ journeys, the team decides to direct paid social traffic to the testimonial page through a retargeting campaign, which might increase AOV from that channel.

Enter Scenario B: Leverage UGC, in this case ratings and reviews, to improve AOV and get more revenue from paid social. The team hypothesizes that AOV from paid social will increase to $99 as a result of the experiment. If it works, the experiment would increase revenue by a greater increment than Scenario A. 

Baseline EOM Revenue: $212,350

Multi-touch attribution puts complementary tactics in context, giving a team what it needs to make nuanced decisions with the constraints of their market and the strengths of their organization. 

Multi-touch attribution tools for a privacy-first world

Bazaarvoice’s suite of omnichannel commerce tools is the best way to collect zero-party data. 

Hardys Wines, the UK’s #1 wine brand, uses Bazaarvoice to collect zero-party data through ratings and reviews, two of the most important contributors to a purchasing decision. After syndicating reviews across retailers through Bazaarvoice’s platform, Hardys increased their review volume by 2,300% and improved their average star rating from 4.32 to 4.59.

Since many online shoppers filter results to show products rated 4.5 stars or higher, Hardys was able to get in front of more potential customers, building revenue across multiple channels with one mid-funnel tactic. Insights & Reports inside Bazaarvoice helps brands like Hardys maximize the value of zero-party data.

Pair Bazaarvoice’s tools with an owned marketing platform like Klaviyo to collect behavioral data that complements zero-party qualitative insights. Klaviyo’s customer profiles allow brands to map buyer journeys at the user level and then deliver a personalized experience through their suite of email and marketing tools. 

Leverage aggregation tools like Segment to quantify the customer journey across channels and uncover purchasing patterns at scale. Segment integrates first-party data flows from multiple sources, connecting insights to help consumer brands understand common buyers’ journeys and attribute performance across the entire purchasing journey.

With Segment’s Linked Profiles, consumer brands can segment customers based on affinity, buying patterns, and sentiment, getting more specific with multi-touch attribution to drive engagement and loyalty.

Data won’t tell you everything

Attribution models are just that — models. Every model has flaws, vulnerabilities, and blind spots. Brands that take quantitative data at face value without leaving room for nuance, insight, and intuition incur more risk, not more safety, in their overreliance on data. 

Multi-touch attribution is not perfect — even in the days prior to GDPR, multi-touch attribution models were never an unbiased picture of reality nor a foolproof blueprint for success. Every business uses a slightly different approach to marketing attribution — none are “wrong,” but all of them reflect different priorities and intrinsic biases.

Approaching multi-touch attribution like a model rather than a prescription is key to opening the door to strategic conversations and meaningful insights.

For a well-rounded view of customer behavior, pair quantitative attribution models with qualitative user data from Bazaarvoice. Ratings, reviews, and user-generated content are a goldmine of insights that consumer brands can leverage to understand their audience.

Bazaarvoice’s Insights & Reports tools equip brands with sentiment data, social analytics, and customer feedback trends to optimize the mid-funnel and improve conversion across channels.

Chapters:

1. What is agile marketing?
2. Benefits of agile marketing
3. Best practices for adopting agile marketing processes
4. Examples of agile marketing
5. Work with collaborative tools and vendors that support agility 

E-commerce marketers and leaders are taking cues from product teams to adopt leaner, more agile techniques for their marketing campaigns. In one report, 41% of marketers said they currently use agile tactics. 51% of marketers who don’t use agile tactics plan to start doing so, and most plan to adopt them in the next year.

If your team is looking to cut back on excess resources, be faster and more responsive, and cater your product and offerings to your target market, agile marketing is your answer. Let’s explore how agile techniques will change your marketing impact.

What is agile marketing?

Agile marketing is a dynamic approach that thrives on flexibility, adaptability, and iterative progress. Unlike traditional linear marketing tactics, agile marketing breaks down complex strategies into manageable, bite-sized tasks that are executed in short cycles.

This method values collaboration, open communication, and quick decision-making, ensuring your e-commerce team swiftly responds to changing market dynamics, customer feedback, and emerging trends. 

E-commerce leaders are leaning toward agile marketing tactics because they make it easier to streamline processes in a fast-paced market. Agile marketing fosters a culture of experimentation and continuous improvement that allows teams to refine their strategies based on real-time insights from their marketing campaigns. 

How agile marketing works

The agile marketing approach enables e-commerce teams to navigate competitive digital marketing landscapes with responsiveness and efficiency. There’s several components and characteristics of agile marketing that make this happen. 

• Task breakdown: Marketing strategies are divided into smaller tasks that can be completed within short timeframes, often referred to as sprints. These tasks are prioritized based on their importance and potential impact

• Sprints: These are short work cycles where teams focus on completing specific tasks and fostering collaboration and adaptability. Each sprint is a focused cycle, typically lasting one to four weeks. During a sprint, the team concentrates on completing just one specific project or task, aiming to deliver tangible results by the end of the cycle 

• Regular check-ins: Regular check-in meetings keep your team aligned. Each member provides updates on their progress, highlights any roadblocks, and discusses their immediate goals. Regular meetings ensure team alignment, quick adjustments, and open communication

• Iterative approach: Agile marketing encourages iterative processes. After each sprint, the team reviews the completed tasks and gathers insights from the data and feedback. Teams learn from their successes and failures, which helps inform planning for the next sprint and allows your teams to adjust their approach based on actual results

• Data-driven insights: Agile marketing relies heavily on the constant collection and analysis of data, feedback, and trends to guide decision-making. Performance metrics, customer feedback, and market trends are monitored closely to guide decision-making and optimize strategies throughout the process 

• Responsive to change: Agile marketing embraces change as a natural part of the process. It empowers teams to be proactive in addressing shifts in the market, customer behavior, and internal priorities

By embracing the components of agile marketing, e-commerce teams give themselves more opportunities to improve their products and campaigns. The iterative nature of agile marketing tactics leads to campaigns and projects that are constantly being refined, resulting in more effectiveness and better results over time.

The ability to respond promptly to market shifts ensures that e-commerce teams remain at the forefront of their industry, delivering impactful campaigns and driving business success. 92% of fully agile marketing departments say their team effectively contributes to the success of their business. This number decreases to 76% for teams that are partially agile. 

Benefits of agile marketing

Agile marketing isn’t just a buzzword — it’s a game changer. By embracing agile marketing tactics, your teams will reap several benefits that will help you make a bigger impact with your campaigns.

Adaptability to market demands

Customer demands are constantly changing, and sometimes, it feels impossible to keep up. This is where agile marketing helps. Agile marketing’s core strength lies in its adaptability. If unforeseen challenges arise, your team can quickly adjust their strategies during the next sprint rather than waiting for a major planning overhaul. 

Agile marketing creates adaptability by breaking down marketing strategies into manageable tasks that can be adjusted during sprints. When teams can adjust as needed, they’ll be able to quickly pivot their efforts in response to changing market dynamics, customer behaviors, or competitive pressures.

Plus, with your daily check-ins and regular evaluations, you ensure team members stay aligned and informed about shifts in trends or consumer preferences.

Faster delivery of marketing campaigns

Getting marketing campaigns out to the public quickly is important when demand is constantly changing and competition is high. When you can quickly launch campaigns, your e-commerce teams can seize timely opportunities and respond to current trends, capturing consumer interest when it matters most.

Agile marketing achieves faster time-to-market by emphasizing the delivery of campaigns during short sprints. E-commerce teams prioritize executing and launching core elements of a marketing campaign quickly.

This approach allows teams to gather real-time feedback and insights from initial releases, leading to refinements and enhancements in all subsequent iterations.

Increased competitive advantage

Because agile marketing promotes adaptability and speed, it helps teams adjust their campaigns accordingly to resonate better with customers. Teams that engage with their audiences and incorporate feedback into their strategies create offerings that align precisely with customer needs.

This customer-centric approach boosts customer satisfaction and loyalty, helping the business stand out from all the competition. 

Best practices for adopting agile marketing practices

Agile marketing is flexible — you can start small, and you don’t have to overhaul all your marketing processes and procedures at once. Instead, use these six best practices to get your team started with agile marketing. 

1. Identify goals and areas needing improvement 

Clarity is key to delivering successful marketing campaigns. When you start by identifying clear goals and pinpointing areas that need improvement, you’ll lay a strong foundation for agile marketing success. 

Set your goals before you begin to employ agile marketing tactics. When you need to pivot or take a new approach, you’ll always be striving to meet the same common goal. 

Knowing your goals and improvement areas helps you allocate resources effectively. Agile marketing often involves short cycles of work, and having a clear idea of priorities ensures that the entire team is investing time and effort where it matters most.

Evaluate your current marketing strategy and performance. What are your strengths? Where do you notice gaps or underperformance? Look for bottlenecks in your processes or systems. For example, if there’s a certain step or stage that the team gets caught up in and delayed, identify what you could change or adjust to make things move more quickly and efficiently. 

Next, set SMART goals — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound — for your campaigns. Whether you want to boost website traffic, increase conversions, or engage a certain target audience, defining these goals and recognizing areas that need improvement help your team gain a clear sense of direction. Agile marketing tactics should then be tailored to directly address these goals and areas, making your efforts more focused and impactful.

2. Foster cross-departmental collaboration

Different departments within your organization — such as product, sales, and customer service — all have valuable insights to help create and deliver the most impactful campaigns. Collaborating with these teams ensures that your campaigns are aligned with the latest product updates, feature releases, and customer needs.

Ongoing regular meetings are key to an agile process. You should create a schedule for meetings, establish clear channels for communication between all teams, and regularly share updates, insights, and objectives to make sure everyone is on the same page. 

During these regular meetings, gather input from other teams, like sales and customer support. These teams interact directly with customers and provide insights into customer pain points and trends. You should also use these regular meetings as brainstorming sessions to generate innovative campaign ideas that leverage insights from different areas of the business.

3. Prioritize delivering value early (and often)

The goal of agile marketing is to launch campaigns or components quickly to provide value to your audience rather than trying to make everything perfect before you release it. 

Waiting for perfection can lead to delays, missed opportunities, and excessive resources spent on minor details. With an agile approach, you’ll prioritize launching versions of campaigns sooner and more frequently, so you can engage with your audience right away and implement feedback faster.

This approach not only prevents the waste of valuable assets but also enables you to pivot in case a campaign doesn’t resonate with your intended audience. 

The first step in delivering value early and often is identifying the essential elements of your campaign that provide value to your audience. These could be key messages, unique features, or benefits that you already know resonate with your target customers.

Then you can work on developing a minimum viable version of your campaign with these core elements. Remember, it doesn’t need to be perfect. Instead, focus on delivering the most value to your audience with your messaging, visuals, and benefits.

By delivering value early and often, you’re continuously learning from your audience’s responses. This knowledge informs your decisions, allowing you to improve your campaign for the next iteration. 

4. Perform iterative testing 

The goal of iterative testing is to refine and optimize a campaign over time. It involves distributing the campaign, analyzing the results, learning what resonates with your target market, and making incremental changes in any newer versions. Each iteration builds upon the insights gained from the previous one.

Iterative testing involves testing multiple components within a campaign — such as messaging, visuals, and user experience — and adjusting them based on feedback. Consider starting smaller rather than testing across all platforms, channels, and mediums right away. You could start by testing copy and visuals on two or three social media platforms. Once you’ve mastered iterative testing on a smaller scale, gradually expand to other platforms and channels.

The iterative cycle of agile marketing ensures that campaigns evolve quickly so you can capitalize on trends, preferences, and customer demand before you lose relevance.

5. Create a process to collect ongoing feedback 

In agile marketing, your strategies and campaigns need to evolve alongside changing market dynamics and customer preferences. Feedback is your compass, guiding you toward what works, what doesn’t, and what your customers truly want. 

Agile marketing thrives on data-driven decision-making, and feedback is the most direct source of data you can tap into. It offers invaluable insights for making informed adjustments, optimizing campaigns, and ensuring that your marketing efforts genuinely resonate.

Make sure your business owns your listings on sites like Yelp and Google so you can collect reviews and ratings. You should also collect feedback from social platforms and online forums like Reddit or Quora. 

Once you’ve established easy, convenient places for your customers to review your products, you have to encourage them to actually leave a review. You should send out post-purchase surveys after a customer makes a purchase or interacts with your brand. Ask about their experience, satisfaction level, and areas where you could improve their journey. 

You can also try incorporating rating scales in your communication touchpoints. These could be in email signatures, on your website, or in post-purchase follow-up messages. Customers can quickly rate their experience on a scale, providing you with valuable quantitative feedback.

6. Use data to implement effective changes

Using both quantitative and qualitative data empowers you to navigate the evolving e-commerce landscape with precision. It’s about transforming assumptions into certainties, intuition into strategy, and reactions into responses.

By analyzing patterns, trends, and insights, you can pinpoint exactly where your efforts are paying off and where improvements are needed. This approach provides a solid foundation for iterative testing and ensures your strategies are aligned with audience preferences and market shifts.

After you’ve collected quantitative and qualitative data — from reviews, online discussions, industry research, and more — analyze the data to identify recurring trends, patterns, and correlations. Then you can prioritize the data and insights. Rank feedback and other data points based on their impact and relevance. Focus on insights that align with your marketing goals and objectives.

For example, if you have constant feedback about your slow site speed and also notice that a high percentage of people tend to leave the site after just a few seconds, you should prioritize making your website load faster. 

Create a plan that allows your teams to constantly implement the appropriate changes based on data and insights. Remove bottlenecks like inaccessible knowledge or a lengthy approval process so your team can make improvements quickly and continuously. 

Examples of agile marketing 

Many companies have successful agile marketing stories that your team can learn from. These examples showcase how brands have harnessed agile tactics to navigate challenges, streamline processes, and ultimately elevate their market impact. 

Mozilla embraces agility for predictable growth

Mozilla, an open-source web browser, needed a way to make its marketing initiatives more impactful with less guesswork and inconsistency. It faced a common dilemma in marketing — lots of ideas and projects stuck due to the absence of effective processes and systems. To address these challenges, the team began working in an agile way, implementing lean practices similar to those used in product or engineering teams.

Mozilla’s adoption of agile marketing allowed it to overcome the unpredictability that often plagues marketing efforts. By implementing agile practices, it transformed its marketing team into a well-coordinated and adaptable force, enabling them to predictably contribute to business growth and respond effectively to changing market dynamics.

Fresh quickly pivots to UGC to build awareness 

Fresh, a natural cosmetics brand, faced a significant challenge in raising awareness and fostering engagement among its customers both online and offline. The company collaborated with Bazaarvoice to embrace agile marketing tactics that would reshape its customer engagement and enhance its impact.

Using Ratings & Reviews and Retail Syndication, Fresh created an enticing shopping experience while leveraging user-generated content. By capitalizing on the power of authentic feedback and visual content, Fresh improved its online engagement and customer satisfaction.

Fresh’s partnership with Bazaarvoice to adopt agile marketing tactics enabled it to overcome challenges and achieve substantial results. By emphasizing authentic user-generated content, agile decision-making, and strategic review syndication, Fresh redefined its marketing impact, enhanced customer engagement, and witnessed a remarkable revenue impact of $1.48 million.

Work with collaborative tools and vendors that support agility 

To truly harness the potential of agile marketing, it’s crucial to leverage collaborative tools and vendors that support this mindset. By adopting solutions like ratings and reviews and retail syndication offerings, you’ll streamline your processes, drive customer engagement, and scale your marketing efforts efficiently.

Bazaarvoice also has a team of experts who are here to be your personal champions. Our Client Success Directors partner closely with you, developing tailored strategies, sharing expertise, and ensuring your business achieves its goals.

With 24/7 global support, white-glove implementation, and managed services, we offer a holistic approach to help you fully capitalize on agile marketing’s potential.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer “on the rise” or simply a passing trend — this disruptive technology is here to stay. In our 2023 AI research report, a third of people said they’d used generative AI tools. Of those folks, 55% said they’d use them again. 

According to research from McKinsey, the impact of generative AI on productivity could potentially add trillions of dollars in value to the global economy. As e-commerce leaders, there’s multiple ways it can work for us — to save time and resources and ultimately help our businesses grow. 

Chapters:

1. Three key benefits of AI marketing for e-commerce
2. How AI marketing works
3. Top applications of AI marketing
4. Drive your marketing forward with AI

Three key benefits of AI marketing for e-commerce

AI helps create smoother and more efficient internal operations that extend to the customer during the buying process. As Benj Fein, Group Project Manager at Bazaarvoice, puts it, “AI lowers the cost of your workflows so you can work faster and smarter.”

Here’s the top three key benefits. 

1. Improved marketing efficiency

AI empowers marketing teams to automate tasks so they can work smarter and achieve more significant results. Using tools with these automated capabilities takes the more time-consuming tasks off your plate, so you have time to focus on creating successful marketing campaigns and meeting company goals. 

AI lowers the cost of your workflows so you can work faster and smarter

It’s not just simple tasks that can be automated, either. E-commerce companies can employ AI to automate a lot of different marketing functions, including email campaigns, social media posts, ad targeting, and content optimization.

AI-driven tools analyze customer data and behavior to deliver personalized and timely content, streamlining processes and increasing efficiency.

2. Faster customer feedback and CX insights

When it comes to customer feedback analysis, AI achieves quicker and more detailed insights than traditional methods. Using natural language processing (NLP), AI can decipher customer experience and sentiment signals, like keywords linked to touchpoints and activities, and emotions that correlate with complaints or positive experiences.

Other tools like customer satisfaction surveys and Net Promoter Scores can’t extract this kind of nuanced data.

The CX insights that AI can unearth have a range of business benefits for marketing professionals. AI can reveal misalignment in customer pain points, expectations, and unmet needs. This information can help treat CX issues in real-time, as well as inform ongoing processes, procedures, and strategies.

For example, AI can analyze customer behavior, purchase history, and preferences which is information you can use to offer personalized recommendations. 

A better understanding of CX can improve staff training to provide better shopping experiences. This, in turn, leads to customer retention, loyalty, and long-term growth.

3. Personalized marketing messages

The use of AI in crafting targeted marketing messages has become increasingly common, offering e-commerce companies a powerful tool to streamline their communication strategies. AI uses keywords and sentiments to create highly personalized content that aligns with customer preferences.

Using the feedback and insights generated by AI, e-commerce businesses can now craft marketing messages that foster more meaningful connections with individual customers. 

A common example of this is automated A/B testing. AI can efficiently evaluate different message variations and identify the most effective ones based on real-time customer responses and engagement metrics. This iterative approach allows marketers to continuously refine their messaging strategies and deliver content that maximizes customer engagement and conversion rates.

How AI marketing works

AI e-commerce marketing uses data to assess customer behavior and intent through machine learning. AI tools can then take action by interacting with customers or providing predictions and recommendations for the appropriate business departments.

Because AI relies on data, e-commerce companies need to have data resources in place, including customer relationship management (CRM) software, campaign insights, and website data. They also need to establish goals for using AI and have internal or outsourced experts train on the technology. That way, you get the desired outcomes based on those goals. Part of AI’s capability is to automatically improve its performance with experience and management.

The companies experiencing the best results from AI are the ones that use advanced data, technology, and models in addition to core best practices. So, having an internal or third-party team dedicated to AI and data development will yield the best ROI.

Applications of AI marketing

Deloitte estimates the generative AI market will likely double every other year for the next ten years. You can capitalize on this growing trend by adopting AI for some of your marketing functions. Here’s a few common applications of AI marketing. 

Conducting keyword research

E-commerce companies can use AI to supercharge their keyword research efforts, gaining valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences.

AI augments traditional keyword research by leveraging its capabilities in NLP and data analysis. When you employ an AI-driven tool like Jasper or Surfer SEO, you can quickly process large amounts of data from search engines, websites, and social media platforms to identify relevant keywords and uncover hidden patterns in customer search behavior.

Using automation, you can uncover the words and phrases that resonate most with the target audience, enabling you to tailor your content and product offerings accordingly. This level of personalization can lead to better customer experiences and higher satisfaction. According to McKinsey, 71% of people expect brands to personalize their interactions, and 76% of people get frustrated when interactions aren’t personalized. 

AI’s ability to analyze vast data sets quickly and accurately allows for real-time keyword monitoring. This means that e-commerce companies can stay on top of emerging trends and adapt their keyword strategies promptly, maintaining a competitive edge in the fast-paced online market. 

You can incorporate these AI-generated keywords into your website copy, social media discussions, product descriptions, advertising campaigns, and more. By adding these keywords to your website copy, more potential customers will find you online.

And because the AI did the heavy lifting with the keyword research, your team has the time to engage directly with those potential customers.

Implementing voice commerce

Voice commerce refers to the ability for consumers to use voice commands for product search, discovery, and even purchasing. Globally, over four billion digital voice assistants are in use, including Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa. It’s a quick, convenient way for people to take an action — like shopping.

Voice commerce eliminates the need for manual input, which streamlines the purchasing process significantly. Users can simply say a command and the AI-powered voice assistant quickly responds with relevant product options and information. This level of convenience and speed saves valuable time for consumers, allowing them to complete purchases effortlessly, no matter where they are or what they’re doing.

Enable these digital voice assistants for your e-commerce app and website so customers can use them to browse and buy. You can register your business with Siri, Alexa, or other digital voice assistants, so customers can easily find your brand and products through voice commands on their devices. 

Creating effective advertising copy 

Use AI to craft compelling advertising messages that engage your target audience effectively. AI tools that use NLP can assess the language and tone that resonate best with your target audience. You can use these tools to make sure your ad copy aligns with your brand’s voice while appealing to their emotions and preferences. Through advanced algorithms, AI can craft unique copy that aligns with specific customer interests, boosting engagement and conversion rates.

By leveraging AI-driven data analysis, e-commerce companies gain a deeper understanding of their audience’s preferences and pain points. From there, you can use prompts with AI tools like ChatGPT to create copy that directly addresses customer needs, leading to higher relevance and resonance.

And it’s incredibly easy to do once you learn the program! You simply input customer data, such as preferences, purchase history, and social media interactions, into your AI copywriting tool. From there, the AI tool analyzes this data and generates personalized ad copy for each customer segment, highlighting relevant products and appealing to their unique style preferences.

AI tools can integrate with your existing marketing platforms, such as social media, email marketing, and website content management systems. This integration ensures a seamless data flow between your AI tool and all your other company tools.

You should also segment your audiences based on key characteristics so your AI tool can create more personalized copy for each audience. 

Improving product discovery

AI analyzes data to deliver personalized marketing messaging, especially in the shopping discovery stage. A big part of that is product recommendations on e-commerce sites, apps, and social selling channels. AI uses customers’ purchase history and other shopping behaviors, like product page views and abandoned cart items, to showcase relevant product recommendations. Personalized product recommendations are particularly helpful for those brands with extensive product catalogs.

There’s a lot of examples of how AI strengthened product discovery for large, prominent brands. IKEA leveraged Google Cloud’s Recommendations AI to create a better search experience for their customers with personalized product recommendations. Implementing this technology delivered accurate recommendations to customers in a quick, user-friendly fashion. The result was a 400% increase in relevant product recommendations, a 30% increase in click-through rate, and a 2% increase in average order value.

Better search means a better overall e-commerce experience, which the majority of consumers and website managers say leads to a high likelihood of repeat business. Not delivering relevant, helpful content to customers has consequences. Customers who can’t find one item they’re looking for will abandon their entire cart, and three out of four will give up and go to a competitor after an unsuccessful search.

Staples Canada significantly enhanced their product discovery performance with AI. With more advanced search results and personalized product recommendations, they’re able to show many more customers the products they’re looking for that also match their interests. This implementation led to a significant increase in conversion rate.

Likewise, Wayfair uses a multifaceted AI system to produce precise yet thorough search results on its e-commerce site. They train their algorithm to detect visual elements, like design features, color, material, style, and more, from customer, supplier, and rendered photos. They also manually tag their products with relevant keywords so the algorithm produces broader search results based on keywords and visual elements.

This feature led to an increased add-to-cart rate and completed purchases.

Presenting product reviews and detecting fake reviews

It’s well understood in e-commerce that product reviews are an effective tool for converting shoppers into buyers. AI can manage, organize, and display your product reviews from customers, which is essential for large-scale businesses with lots of products and reviews to wade through.

“In the purchasing stage, AI can help showcase reviews that can convince consumers to make the purchase,” says Fein. For example, Bazaarvoice’s reviews tools have a range of features powered by AI, like highlighting the most helpful reviews from a large volume of reviews and displaying them strategically throughout your e-commerce site.

AI can also scan your entire product catalog and identify items gaining traction that have few to no reviews. Fein says this automated process enables you to identify which products need review coverage or other content that adds value for customers, like visual user-generated content (UGC).

Insulated water bottle brand Takeya leveraged Bazaarvoice tools supported by AI to increase sales on their own site and their retail partner site, Target.com. They were able to display reviews for all of their products on both sites and automatically add visual UGC sourced from social media to corresponding products.

Detecting fake reviews

Ironically enough, AI can also help you detect fake reviews from bots that use AI. This allows you to remove them and protect your brand image and reputation. Consumers are much more discerning about reviews than they were several years ago — they can easily pinpoint a fake review from an authentic one. 

Using NLP, AI tools can comb through reviews on your website, social, and Google to examine the language and tone used in the text. Fake reviews often exhibit certain patterns, such as an excessively positive tone with repetitive phrases.

AI can also detect suspicious language patterns and grammar inconsistencies commonly found in fake reviews. It can compare the writing style of other reviews to look for indications of automation or bots. 

Enhancing the customer experience

A primary function of AI for marketing is to support CX teams. With the help of AI, they can handle customer interactions on a much larger scale and gain insights to refine their processes.

Chatbots

Chatbots are a classic example of AI in action. When interacting with customers, chatbots can provide personalized responses that go beyond the typical FAQ answer. A survey of high-level operations and CX professionals concluded that companies that invest in advanced conversational AI tech will reap benefits, including decreased operational costs, more productive agents, and more satisfied customers.

Conversational AI is instrumental in capturing and guiding customers during the research and discovery stage. It can quickly answer questions with live chat, enable purchasing via a chatbot, use NLP to correspond with users, and offer hands-free voice assistance. AI bots can also respond to user actions with prompts designed to inspire purchases, like validating their cart item by announcing that another customer just bought the same thing. This kind of messaging can increase conversion rates by 5x or more.

Some types of conversational or chatbot AI can also offer guidance to the human reps on the other end of the screen. They can analyze the customers’ tone and recommend different responses for the best resolution or suggest that a supervisor step in to manage the inquiry or issue.

Airlines are examples of companies that get a lot of customer service activity. And for a rapidly growing airline, that can be overwhelming. Before adopting an AI approach to customer service management, AirAsia relied on localized call centers to handle inquiries from international locations, which meant up to hour-long wait times and time zone conflicts.

To resolve this problem, AirAsia implemented a 24-hour, multilingual chatbot that could check flights, book flights, answer questions, update passenger information, and add bonus products to bookings. The ROI included a 98% wait time improvement, an 8x increase in upsells, and significant live agent relief.

Translation technology

With machine translation, NLP, and other capabilities, AI can automatically take your marketing efforts global. This is more than just translating basic small pieces of web content in other languages, which often doesn’t produce the most accurate or natural results. AI can pick up on tone and context to provide quality translation and communication on a larger scale. As with other AI applications, this doesn’t replace professional human staff but makes their job easier and more efficient.

The translation technology industry is in high demand and thriving because it can provide significant support in translating documents, software, and websites in multiple other languages. This is crucial for meeting brand, communication, and legal standards for all pertinent audiences.

Analyzing customer feedback

AI can mine through all your customer touchpoints — from website comments and messages to product reviews and social media interactions — to synthesize all kinds of customer feedback. These insights keep you up to date on any service or product issues that need resolving and let you know what customers are liking. So you can give them more of it. AI tools can organize this info by customer, making robust customer profiles by tracking positive or negative experiences, questions, product reviews, and more.

AI algorithms can understand vocabulary that expresses a range of emotions and perspectives that “can directly shape both short-term and long-term actions to retain customers,” according to Harvard Business Review. And it can deliver this analysis in real-time, so staff across departments can all be aligned on customer behavior and pain points.

Customers aren’t shy when it comes to making their grievances or exceptional experiences heard. That’s why Bazaarvoice’s customer sentiment analysis tools give you the full rundown of what customers are saying using advanced machine learning and NLP. Not only that, but our Premium Network Insights can categorize sentiment by topic and product and compare that feedback against your competitors.

Boosting efficiency and strategy optimization

AI supplies you with insights and goes the extra mile to recommend what actions to take in response. Fein considers this one of AI’s best functions. “The most effective features in AI for marketers are ones that are built with data personal to marketers, [so] the system is saving time making recommendations similar to what the marketer would choose if they had more time themselves,” he says.

An example of this is using customer reviews as a resource to inspire product and messaging improvements. The toy manufacturer KidKraft uses Bazaarvoice Insights tools to evolve their brand according to customer demand. These tools provide KidKraft with, “an automated way to understand what customers are saying about its products and see recommended actions the brand can take to improve its marketing strategy and design better products.”

This extends to social content as well. Fein says part of Bazaarvoice’s AI can, “highlight trends in your social strategy so that the content you are spending time pushing to your discovery path [is] more likely to receive engagement.” That capability includes recommending the types and timing of content that are likely to perform well based on your past content.

AI can even predict the success of partnering with different influencers. “We have AI to help estimate the value of content generated by your influencers to help you gauge the ROI of those relationships,” says Fein.

AI tools can scan product catalogs to reveal product pages that require content coverage like reviews and visual UGC to display that would enhance the product’s presentation. Customers who interact with this type of UGC on e-commerce sites are twice as likely to convert.

“AI can benefit e-commerce brands by [reducing] the amount of steps in scaling their business. When managing a full catalog and ensuring it’s properly covered in the tons of channels out there, AI can help step in and help automate some of the steps in that process,” says Fein.

Drive your marketing strategy forward with AI

Don’t you wish you could go back in time and invest in Tesla? Back when everyone else was still scoffing at the idea of a luxury electric car? Well, that’s the current situation with AI, and specifically AI marketing. Keep an eye on AI developments and grow with the technology as it evolves and expands.

And remember: AI doesn’t replace your marketing department. It complements and enhances it. here’s some examples of how top brands are using AI, for your inspiration

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Masterclass: How to use AI strategically and responsibly

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Beyond how to reach your niche audience, we’ll also demonstrate how to drive engagement by tapping into the voice of the customer and maximising your ROI.

Chapters:

1. What makes a niche audience different?
2. Define your niche audience with quantitative research
3. Understand your niche audience with qualitative research
4. How to engage with niche conversations online
5. Let your niche audience help you position your product
6. Build cross-functional commitment to deepen niche impact
7. Niche audiences fuel market trends

Story time. In 1950, the U.S. Air Force set out to redesign its cockpits to work for the “average pilot.” Believing that a more-average cockpit would fit more airmen and reduce crash rates, researchers measured 4,063 pilots and calculated average dimensions for things like chest circumference, ear-to-eye distance, and torso length. 

At the end of the research stage, they cross-referenced individual measurements against the average. They found there was no average. Not a single one of the pilots fell within the “average” range for every dimension.

In its attempt to create a cockpit that worked for everyone, the Air Force might have designed something that worked for nobody. Instead, it went niche, requiring manufacturers to support wider chests, longer torsos, and shorter heights. While manufacturers were reluctant to comply at first, they eventually introduced options like adjustable seats to support the individual dimensions of each pilot. 

The Air Force learned a valuable lesson — focusing too strongly on an aggregate blend of numbers, behaviors, preferences, or tendencies can hide critical nuances within a population and leave an organization vulnerable to critical errors. 

In the case of the pilots, lives were on the line. For marketers inside consumer businesses, the stakes are (usually) lower, but the lesson is the same: nuances make the niche, and niche audiences make up your market. 

What makes a niche audience different?

There’s no “average” consumer. At least not anymore. There’s only a collection of individual tastes, preferences, and needs that we can segment into niche audiences.

Often (but not always), niche audiences aren’t ideally served by the mainstream space. That could be due to the fallacy of averages that the Air Force stumbled upon. It could be because a different cohort gets all the attention from brands. Or it could be a new consumer trend that brands didn’t see coming.

Take plus-size apparel, an estimated $288 billion market. At that size, it’s hard to fathom plus-size apparel as a “niche” market, especially given that the average American woman wears between a size 16-18. And yet traditional retailers don’t prioritize plus-size inventory as highly as straight sizes, leaving pent-up demand, frustrated consumers, and untapped opportunity — three hallmarks of a niche audience.

In 2022, InStyle estimated that only 9% of Fashion Week retailers offered clothing in a size 20 or above. Not just runway styles. Clothing, period. Traditional retailers like Gap and Loft are scaling back their plus-size offerings instead of expanding inventory. StyleSage estimates that, “only 13% of products in the market were plus-sized” in 2020. 

Meanwhile, the plus-size apparel market is growing: According to The NPD Group, “Sales revenue for women’s plus-size apparel grew by 18% in 2021, compared to 2019, which is over three-times faster than consumer spending on the remaining women’s market.” 

When a market’s needs are not ideally fulfilled by existing options, consumers make do with what’s available, using a brand’s products in unexpected ways. Niche brands pop up to fill the gap between availability and desire. Once bigger companies catch on to the opportunity, they follow suit with the right product, positioning, messaging, and marketing strategy. 

Define your niche audience with quantitative research

Success with a niche audience requires a clear understanding of a group’s needs and wants, then applying those insights with a consistent, committed, and cross-functional approach. But you don’t have to start with a cross-functional plan that includes product changes. Marketing research and experimentation will help you validate your niche audience before making them a focus of your brand.

For example, say you noticed a curious buying pattern in an end-of-month report. Or maybe you saw a trend you didn’t expect in a few customer reviews. Those moments of curiosity could point to an untapped niche audience. Use your quantitative research to determine if these patterns are real effects that you need to understand or just random occurrences that can be ignored.

If you’re looking inside your existing customer list, try running a customer survey that includes one or two questions about a niche audience characteristic. Use the results to determine what percentage of your audience belongs to the niche you’re examining, and compare the niche cohort to your entire list to see how other characteristics differ from your customers as a whole.

If you’re looking for new customers outside of your customer base, leverage tools like Glimpse or SparkToro to identify emerging trends, flag niche behaviors to measure and optimize, and find niche conversations to engage with online. 

Understand your niche audience with qualitative research

Use quantitative analysis to create an initial audience profile — but don’t stop there. Use your qualitative data to support and enhance your quantitative data. Utilizing both will give you a well-rounded picture of your niche audience.

Spencer Lanoue, head of growth at Sugardoh, uses this combination to get a well-rounded picture of his niche audience.

“Quant data tells you what’s happening, qual tells you why,” Lanoue said. Qualitative techniques give you a richer picture of your niche audience, which feeds into marketing messaging and even product iterations.

To answer big-picture questions with real customer insights, conduct 1:1 interviews with people in your niche audience. If you’re already planning to run a customer survey, include a question like, “Can we follow up with a 1:1 interview?” so you can easily contact relevant members of your niche audience and ask them about their preferences. When it comes to the interview, engage with respect, let the customer fill the silence, and come with curiosity instead of answers. Remember: you’re there to learn, not to sell (yet!).

Depending on the audience, Reddit is also a haven for niche audience research. Niche fragrance fans have found community in places like r/IndieMakeupandMore, whose subscribers also pop up in Discord communities like Scented Waters, where they discuss fragrance trends, trade recommendations, and share their thoughts on the industry.

You can also spot unsolved problems, identify market trends, and validate hypotheses about niche audiences through existing niche communities.

How to engage with niche conversations online

If you’re just getting started with your niche audience, social media is a great place to start. Niche audiences talk to each other and bond on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, which means there’s lots of existing conversations that you can join.

Once you’ve started to create your own conversations on social media, you can repurpose that content as social proof on your website and in email marketing.

Partner with niche influencers to fuel awareness

Influencer collaborations usually involve a brand sending free products to an industry influencer or paying an influencer to promote its products. Influencers are a great way to find your audience online, as they often have a niche audience themselves already. Check who they’re interacting with regularly to expand your footprint in the space and generate new ideas. If you’re just getting started with social media, it makes sense to explore the classic influencer model.

If you’ve targeted a niche audience for a while with success, it’s time to take it one step further. 

Consider bringing influencers inside your company to work on a collaborative project, then releasing that project to your customers and the influencer’s audience at the same time. Your brand gets a bit of social proof in the form of a trusted tastemaker, your company gets an influx of new customers, and the tastemaker gets a payday for their help. Done right, it’s a winning proposition. Handled poorly, influencer marketing can be a PR nightmare — so tread carefully.

With bigger consumer companies, this looks like releasing a collection of products, like:

• Lulu and Georgia’s collection with celebrity interior designer Sarah Sherman Samuel
• Loloi Rugs’ collaboration with DIY Instagrammer Angela Rose
• Target’s long-running partnership with interior creator Emily Henderson. 

But this strategy scales smaller, too: Snif, a favorite independent fragrance brand among niche perfume lovers on TikTok, recently partnered with Emelia O’Toole. O’Toole, better known as @professorperfume on TikTok, collaborated with the brand to release a scent called Vow Factor designed for her wedding.

It featured the notes like fig and citrus that Emelia regularly touts on her channel, and her followers often share her taste. Emelia’s audience flocked to Snif, and Vow Factor sold out the same day it launched.

Scale organic social with user-generated content

User-generated content (UGC) is the rare marketing tactic that can fuel both discovery and conversion.

It increases intent-to-purchase by instilling trust — 84% of consumers are more likely to trust a brand’s marketing campaign if it features user-generated content. UGC reduces operational onus by delegating content creation to customers, which makes scaling social content a lot easier on a small team. Done well, UGC feeds the entire marketing engine with the authentic voice of the customer, something that can be hard to achieve organically.

Saltair, a personal care brand, uses UGC to increase awareness and build trust with customers on TikTok and Instagram. Partly due to its popularity on social media, Saltair recently formed a wholesale deal with Target, fueling revenue growth, which allowed it to expand into more product categories.

Every time Saltair launches a new product, whether a new scent (like Exotic Pulp) or a new category (like serum deodorant), it hands the mic to its niche audience and niche influencers to explain the benefits. In doing so, Saltair is harnessing a powerful tactic in modern consumer marketing: manufactured word of mouth. 

Let your niche audience help you position your product

Before committing to a direction for the entire brand, test and iterate inside of niche communities to clarify your positioning, ensure product-market fit, and seed engagement.

Marketers who engage with modern community channels have built-in testing grounds for niche messaging. For example, beauty brands are starting to experiment with Discord as a new way to engage with niche audiences in the places they already hang out. 

According to McKinsey, a haircare brand identified a “new niche of users who were proactive about preventing animal cruelty” through user research and community analysis. It implemented cruelty-free messaging and content for those users, which could be extended to other channels and other customer segments.

A brand in a similar position could run a sampling campaign with animal advocates to determine whether its new messaging would resonate with members of that niche audience who weren’t already customers, run A/B tests with anti-cruelty messaging on the website, and test PPC campaigns with similar messaging.

Depending on the results, the brand might extend messaging to things that are slower to change, harder to reverse, and more difficult to measure (like packaging). 

If you’re testing a product with a niche market instead of a message, consider a sampling program using the Influenster community. Like Rimmel London did when they tested a new eyeliner with a hyper-targeted niche audience of beauty enthusiasts through a custom sampling box, which led to a 44% sales lift and generated more than 1,200 product reviews, teeing up the product launch for higher performance in the market as a whole. 

Utilize your niche audience insights

Sampling can also generate valuable product insights on what might prevent traction in a niche audience. For example – Vertbaudet, a leading European retailer of baby clothes and maternity wear, learned of an area for improvement for one of their products from insights found in negative reviews.

Feedback from customers left in product reviews revealed the need for the retailer to adjust the design of a certain maternity line. Multiple customers commented that the dresses were too small and the fit needed to be improved. Seeing the repeated reviews of this issue, Vertbaudet responded by altering the measurements of the maternity line and fixed the cut, leading to a 12% increase in sales.

Sampling helps brands learn quickly and iterate before an expensive launch, reducing sunk costs and increasing the speed of product adoption.

Build cross-functional commitment to deepen niche impact

Staying on top of your niche audience’s wants and needs requires consistency across functions. If marketing makes a claim on the website that isn’t supported by product or customer support, niche audiences will see through the shallow attempt to engage and find alternatives. Niche marketers should leverage customer support and product teams to build a shared system of discovery so that they can operate cohesively as a brand.

Customer support teams are the “first responders” — the people who notice when a niche group is or isn’t happy for a specific reason. Their insight should be tapped for continuous discovery. Product teams are experts in qualitative research and excellent allies in answering deep questions about customers. When marketing operates in harmony with both teams to create a research-based, cohesive brand experience for a niche audience, customers notice.

Deep engagement with a customer is a brand’s dream, one that is fueled by cross-functional focus. When an entire team is committed to understanding and serving a niche audience, customers reward the brand with loyalty and revenue.

Niche audiences fuel market trends

Niche aesthetics — and the audiences that participate in them — aren’t just passing fads. They’re tastemakers, influencers, and market movers. 

If your brand becomes a favorite of a trendsetting niche audience, rapid growth can ensue. Take Hydro Flask, a water bottle that went from selling at farmers’ market booths to a household name, in part thanks to ‘VSCO Girls.’ Aka, “young women who embrace a beachy, easygoing, 1990s-inspired aesthetic,” according to the LA Times.

When brands turn pent-up demand and consumer frustration into commercial opportunities, new product categories start to emerge. The 2020s have brought us a slew of new products in anti-pollution skincare, non-alcoholic aperitifs, and gender-neutral fragrance, all fueled by niche audiences that caught on with larger markets.

Niche audiences share online to create communities, reflect their identity, and show support for things they believe in. Since UGC feels more like talking to a friend than listening to a sales pitch from a brand, it’s a natural fit for niche audience engagement. Learn more ways UGC can help you find the voice of your niche audience and drive conversions with this ultimate guide.

Or better yet, try the free Bazaarvoice UGC value calculator to find out the revenue impact UGC could have on your brand.

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