Bon-Ton Makes Social Content Shoppable

Social media is becoming an increasingly important part of retailers’ digital strategies. Facebook reported to have 1.32 billion daily active users in June of this year. Additionally, Instagram has 700 million active monthly users on its platform.

With this kind of reach, it’s a no-brainer for brands and retailers to showcase their products on social media sites. However, it’s been difficult to connect the content that gets shared to actual sales. Curalate, a platform which help consumers discover their next purchase, is working to solve this problem. Last month, the company introduced Curalate Showroom, a solution that turns a brand's social sites into shoppable content showrooms.

Nearly 70 brands, including David’s Bridal, Forever 21, Lowe’s, Sephora, and Bon-Ton, have started using Curalate Showroom. On average, these brands have already seen a 53 percent reduction in bounce rate and 45 percent increase in time on site. Consumers engaging with Showroom on the brands’ social posts also discovered up to 60 times more products than what was depicted in the actual social post.

In the interview below, Travis Garski, social strategist at Bon-Ton, gives insights into how his company is using Showroom, as well as the business benefits it's seeing.

Total Retail: How is Bon-Ton using Curalate Showroom?
Travis Garski: Showroom helps us create engaging and shoppable content across a variety of channels, including Instagram and Snapchat.

We've also seen great success by combining Showroom with our new fashion solution, Style2Go, whereby each week our five stylists showcase a new look. We create a carousel ad that includes the five Style2Go looks. Then, instead of including the URL directly to our website, we include the Showroom URL. This allows mobile users to shop the looks in a unique and engaging way, while still allowing desktop users to shop normally.

TR: How are Bon-Ton's customers interacting with its shoppable social channels? How does this differ from how consumers were interacting before?
TG: Showroom elevates the mobile user experience for our shoppers, keeping them engaged for longer compared to the current, native social media platform experiences on mobile. What's more, the combination of Showroom and Style2Go allows us to showcase a complete “look” to our shoppers, exposing them to a wider range of our products.

TR: What business benefits is Bon-Ton seeing by making its social channels shoppable?
TG: With a combination of a targeted audience with Showroom for Style2Go, we've seen our mobile users spend more time shopping on site with an increased clickthrough rate, resulting in a 70 percent decrease in cost per click from our previous period when we weren't using Showroom.

TR: Why is Bon-Ton focusing on a social commerce strategy?
TG: Mobile provides one of our highest traffic sources for our online store, and we want to provide the best shopping experience for those customers. Curalate Showroom has allowed us to take one of our more successful online fashion initiatives, Style2Go, and turn it into an engaging and interactive mobile experience.