Charlotte Russe Inc. has figured out a way to turn its more than 477,000 Instagram followers into customers.
Using visual analytics and marketing vendor Curalate’s Like2Buy product, the youth-oriented apparel retailer is driving shoppers from the visual-focused social network to its site.
Here’s how Like2Buy works: When an Instagram user clicks on Charlotte Russe’s profile page she can bring up a gallery of Instagram photos that, when clicked, go to the item’s product page. Consumers can also use the “My Likes” function in the Instagram gallery that lets them save items they like, but aren’t ready to click and buy, for later.
In the first six weeks that it used the tool, the retailer drove 13,000 clicks to its web site, says Kristen Strickler, the merchant’s social media and public relations manager. The vendor says that shoppers who click to retail sites via Like2Buy spend 32% longer on the merchants’ sites. And the conversion rate for shoppers clicking from Instagram outpaces the retailer’s average 1.2% conversion rate, she says.
Those clicks have led the retailer to change the way it uses Instagram, Strickler says. “Instagram is no longer just about branding for us,” she says. “Because of the nature of Instagram, it has always been harder to track our followers’ behavior. But we’ve seen that our followers want to shop.”
Charlotte Russe, No. 393 in the Internet Retailer 2014 Top 500 Guide, has also discovered that shoppers are more likely to click when they see clothes laid out in an ensemble or on a regular shopper rather than a model. That’s led it to adjust the images that it shares. At the same time, the retailer began posting three times a day rather than just twice a day. The result was more clicks.
“We’ve gotten a better idea for what our followers are looking for and what it is that will trigger them to go to the site and make a purchase,” Strickler says.
Finding ways to drive shoppers to buy via Instagram is particularly important for Charlotte Russe, she says, because the retailer’s customer base skews young. 48.6% of its customer base is 35 years old or younger, according to Internet Retailer’s Top500Guide.com.
Curalate’s says it charges $1,000 per month for Like2Buy.