5 Reasons you should integrate your e-commerce site with Instagram

5 Reasons you Should Integrate your E-Commerce Site with Instagram

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The increasingly popular social networking and picture sharing platform, Instagram, recently crossed 1 billion monthly active users. Out of these 1 billion users, 400 million users log in to use the platform on a daily basis and are active followers. These figures put the social networking website at the forefront of the social media marketing.

Source: statistica

These figures are significant because 68% of the Instagram followers regularly engage with the brands that they follow on Instagram. This in comparison with Facebook (32% engagement) is a very high number that every marketer or business should take into account when running their online business.

Recently, there has been a huge uproar in the marketing circles regarding Instagram changing its algorithm to show the best posts first and hence restricting visibility of those who are new on Instagram or on a smaller scale.

Kevin Systrom, Instagram CEO and co-founder says:

“On average, people miss about 70 percent of the posts in their Instagram profile feeds.”

This has various implications for the marketers and businesses especially e-commerce industries. According to E-commerce CEO, average order value generated from Instagram is $65.

For an e-commerce business, this is a huge market that has not yet been flooded by the marketers and businesses. Instagram holds huge potential for the e-commerce businesses worldwide and now facilitates the businesses with multiple features etc. In this article, we will discuss five reasons why you should integrate your e-commerce site with Instagram.

1.The ‘SHOP NOW’ BUTTON CAN BE USED TO DRIVE TRAFFIC:

Since November 2016, Instagram has introduced a ‘Shop Now’ button in the advertisement options. The ‘Shop Now’ button that can be placed directly under the post of the website is a great tool to drive traffic towards your website by linking the button to your e-commerce website. Instagram now has an option to create an album within the post, which is a great way to show-case multiple products to the users available on your e-commerce website and then re-direct the traffic towards your e-commerce store where you can successfully convert them.

Presenting a product in a cool way to the users is an effective way to generate traffic to your website. Considering that the feature allows you to display up to 10 posts in an image carousel, the new ‘Shop Now’ button is really a gift from Instagram to the marketers and businesses alike.

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Clicking on the button leads you to an in-app browser, so it is a great way to generate impulse sales. Shoppers are at ease considering that they don’t have to leave the app to shop and the action can be performed within the in-app browser by Instagram.

2. INSTAGRAM STORIES AND LINKS IN THE STORIES:

Instagram stories are a great way to engage with your audience on the platform. With the new Instagram algorithm, not all of your followers might see the content that you post on their feeds. Instagram stories, if used correctly, can build your brands image. It is a great way to connect with your audience, attract new followers and encourage sales. There’s a 15 second limit on the story you post, so the business has to be creative with regards to the content that they’re posting.

Before we divulge further into this topic, let’s take a look at the following stats:

96% of the US Fashion brands are on Instagram and if you look at the top 100 brands in the world, 90% are present on Instagram. There are several metrics and features that Instagram has now made available to the businesses to use within their stories. Location-based stickers, Hashtags in the stories, time stickers and weather stickers are few of the most popular stickers that are used in the stories posted by the users. There’s an additional feature to ‘Swipe up.’

With this feature, the users can swipe up and go to a particular web address or a website. Some brands apply this technique to take the user to the shoppable page. As shown by the infographics below, 56% of the businesses link the product page in their stories. Since most of the users do not make a purchase on their first visit to the website, this is a great tool to generate traffic, THAT TOO FOR FREE! YES! You’ve spent a lot of hard work and time to build your audience. You hold every right to redirect the traffic from your social media accounts towards the money-making pages. Integrating your website within the Instagram stories is a really cool and effective way to generate the clicks necessary. Once the visitor has visited your website, you can always remarket your product to them through dynamic advertisement and generate sales.

3.EMBEDDING INSTAGRAM ON THE WEBSITE

Websites have a provision to embed the Instagram feed through various plugins or widgets. There are numerous advantages of embedding your Instagram feeds into your e-commerce website, which is why it has become one of the most popular e-commerce trends in digital marketing. Let’s briefly talk about them here:

· CHANNELIZING INSTAGRAM TRAFFIC

An Instagram plug-in or a widget allows you to embed the Instagram feed onto your website. This facilitates conversation, socializing and helps the visitors on the website to connect with your brand. Instagram feeds soak in the web traffic allowing the users to spend more time on your website. If the feed is embedded in an attractive way, it increases the brand awareness through user-generated content including reviews and comments.

· USER GENERATED CONTENT

Driving your user-generated content from Instagram to your website is another way to add authenticity and create the reliability factor for the visitors. User-generated content usually comes from the most loyal customers, and it is an amazing way to provide authentic content that increases the brand awareness. For a new visitor that is visiting your e-commerce website for the first time, it would be a great source to find the reviews and engage in the conversation. User-generated content can be tracked through a specific hashtag on Instagram, or if the user tags the brand in their picture/video, it can be embedded on the website too.

· MODERATE YOUR CONTENT

Although there is an option to connect your Instagram feed to your website but the business should be careful to embed the content. Moderating the content on the website to root out irrelevant content and only displaying the content that is relevant to the customers and the visitors is aesthetically pleasing. Take control, scrutinise and filter content that would cause damage to your brand identity.

· INSTAGRAM FEEDS ADD VIBRANCY TO THE WEBSITES

Adding an instagram feed to your website adds colors to it. The embedded feed not only helps the customer see your brand’s social media but also helps them humanly connect to the brand. You can also display the pictures of some loyal customers and capture their beautiful moments wearing/using your product. This will be heartwarming to see and, for a new visitor, this creates an instant feeling of brand loyalty.

If the brand is investing time, energy and money in maintaining their social media presence and making it an integral part of their marketing campaign, it only makes sense to embed their Instagram account on the website for the simple reason explained above. Let your brand live a little and let your Instagram breathe some fresh air into your e-commerce website.

4. INSTAGRAM POSTS BUILD TRUST

It is a very well-known fact that user-generated content is more popular among the customers and helps build trust. It happens more often than not that users generate content and the brand curates the content. These user generated pictures convert because they help build trust for the user shopping experience. Content from the past buyers helps influence the visitor’s shopping decision.

Although potential buyers would love to read reviews, research shows that visual content is very influential when it comes to making purchase decisions.

This is not just limited to this but the shoppers also voted to see the user generated content instead of the content created by the brand itself.

These two surveys are proof enough that the user-generated content helps establish trust among the shoppers. You can show a gallery of photos by the customers using the product in various settings alongside the product photo. This is a super effective way to instill trust in your potential buyers and a really cool way of integrating Instagram with your e-commerce website.

Also Read:- How businesses use Instagram stories

5.INSTAGRAM PHOTOS CONVERT

Instagram photos convert better than the normal generic brand commercial photos because of simple photography principles. To support this statement further, let’s take two pictures out of GAP’s marketing campaign. One of the pictures is from their outdoor marketing campaign, and the other is from their Instagram.

The above is an example of a classic brand advertisement but below take a look at a photo from their Instagram.

The Instagram photos create a visually appealing human element and are more likely to convert than the classic brand ad. People usually post their happiest content on Instagram including meals, time spent somewhere, vacations, relationships etc. Taking this route, the brands get to create visually appealing storytelling route to connect better with the customers. Having Instagram integrated with your website is certainly going to help in this regard. Building trust and customer royalty for the first time visitors.

Author Bio:

Sohail Rupani is a senior SEO strategist at PNC Digital, a digital marketing agency based in Orlando. He specialises in SEO and SEM techniques. He is passionate about technology and loves to analyse the tech industry in his spare time and stay in touch with the latest happenings. He also writes technical articles about SEO and digital marketing. Follow @sohailrupani for more updates.

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