JanSport and social shopping
JanSport, maker of backpacks and outdoor gear, already had a Facebook fan page. Like many marketers, it grappled with the issue of how to make it work harder. "What do you do after you've built this great community? You can't browse our site or buy anything on Facebook, so how do you bridge those two together?" asks Laurie Heller, marketing communications manager for JanSport.
In April, JanSport.com launched Facebook Connect technology from Fluid, a marketing agency that specializes in what it calls social shopping.
"We know that the biggest influence on purchase is the opinion of family and friends, so we want to get their opinion before they leave the JanSport site," says Fluid CEO Andy Lloyd. Sure, you could email your friends with a link to the product, but you'd have to wait for response. With Fluid, visitors to the ecommerce site can choose to share a product on Facebook, and also to search the network to see if any friends have rated or commented on the product. When you share, the product automatically shows up in the Facebook feed, where an average of 120 people in the network will see it -- along with an attractive icon showing the product.
JanSport visitors who interact with the Fluid application view an average of 58.9 percent more product pages during their shopping sessions and spend 147.6 percent more time on the site than the average site visitor.
"This allows us to leverage our success on Facebook and engage the community on JanSport.com," Heller says.
