Tell us a little bit about your business and any unique selling points?
Headquartered in Jersey, feelunique.com is recognised as one of Europe’s largest online retailers of beauty products and one of the UK’s fastest growing companies. Launched in 2005, the business was founded to meet the increasing requirements of beauty customers to research, review, compare and buy leading brand beauty products online. We now stock more than 16,000 products from over 500 brands and have a customer base that’s growing at over 51,000 a month!
How are you using social media to provide customer service, how does this compare to when you weren’t using social media?
Social media channels like Facebook and Twitter have fundamentally changed the way in which customers can communicate with us and as a result we have had to adapt our business accordingly. A few years ago our Customer Services Team used to respond to emails, phone calls and perhaps the odd letter. Now they must be aware of all the in-direct communication that we receive via social media channels. In terms of how we are using social media to provide customer services we predominantly monitor social media for any queries that need responding to and do our best to respond in a timely and informative manner. We use sites such as Facebook & Twitter to post customer service updates as well as marketing messages. Our main goal here is to be as proactive and transparent as possible in order to reduce the volume of customer service related enquiries received via the website.
How are you using social media to engage with your customers on a more personal level? Have you found that using exclusive offers to fans creates a more loyal customer base?
Over the last few years we’ve made a concerted effort to engage our customers via a number of social media channels. We are particularly active on Facebook where we regularly run custom tabs, surveys and other interactive incentives. Every Friday we have a Facebook Friday special offer just for Facebook fans, this has proven to be a great driver of both engagement and sales. We work with Wildfire, a social content management platform that allows us to schedule and target posts to certain demographics – with a worldwide customer and fan base this has proven particularly beneficial over the past 6 months as fans are now receiving more relevant communication. We make a conscious effort to pose rhetorical posts on Facebook, these increase user engagement and recently we have been sharing much more content from Beauty Talk our content site in order to generate conversation.
Do you think social media has been helpful in improving the experience your clients have, and how has social media changed the relationship you have with your clients?
For a certain customer social media has vastly improved the experience they are likely to have with feelunique.com. Social media and the Internet generally has really changed the way in which we all interact with brands, it’s bought brands and consumers closer together and consumers can now really engage with brands on a level that was previously not obtainable. We see this on a daily basis with customers choosing to communicate with us or our ‘community’ via social media channels rather than by using our customer services team. We see loyal fans leaping to our defence and offering up pearls of wisdom on a regular basis and this type of user generated communication is invaluable to create a ‘good feeling’ around our brand.
Which social media platform do you feel is the most successful? How do you use each platform and how do you find the audience differs on each?
For us it’s Facebook without a doubt. We have over 27,500 Facebook fans compared with just over 4,300 followers on Twitter. We see Twitter as a broadcast channel and Facebook is where we seek customer engagement. I know a lot of people who’ll say we’re missing a trick with Twitter but for the time being our core focus is Facebook as that’s where we have the momentum.
Have you come across any problems using social media? For example, were there any immediate barriers to entry for you? Do you find it difficult to measure/quantify your activity?
Plenty of problems! But nothing that we haven’t been able to control by being open and truthful with our users. In terms of measurement we monitor engagement and referrals/sales on a regular basis and I feel that gives us a pretty good picture of what’s going on.
Have you come across any misconceptions or myths surrounding social media that you would like to comment on – especially for those considering using social media marketing for the first time?
I really don’t think there’s any rules to social media, just give it a go! Social media makes it very easy for people to make negative comments and you’ll always find people out there who’ll knock your efforts. Decide on your strategy, stick to it and in the words of feelunique.com CEO Aaron ‘crack on!’ If you’ve got something worth listening to or engaging with you’ll come out on top.