Social Validation Drives 30% Increase in Conversions for Wanted Shoes

Wanted Shoes has been at the forefront of Australian fashion-footwear since first opening their doors in 1979—and have remained at the cutting-edge of the industry ever since.

The brand has amassed a sizable social following and was keen to fully benefit from this by integrating social components into its highly-trafficked e-commerce site.

Wanted Shoes has a highly engaged and passionate social audience. The company’s marketers believed that empowering customers to showcase their own social content alongside content from models, bloggers, celebrities, designers, and Wanted Shoes’ official accounts would be well received.

The challenge was twofold: give website visitors a unique way to browse the Wanted Shoes catalogue, while providing the social validation they crave at the point of purchase. With 77% of shoppers citing social exposure to a product as a key source of product information (Nielsen, 2013), social validation is critical to e-commerce success.

Research shows that shoppers want to see products in real-life scenarios (“I like these shoes… but how will they look with blue jeans?”). A searchable, filterable, interactive social catalogue within Wanted Shoes’ website offers customers a new, organic way of finding products they like. Using UGC on its own site also helped Wanted Shoes to provide social validation and encourage consumers to make a purchase.

To give website visitors a unique way to browse its catalogue, Wanted Shoes used Stackla to aggregate social content from Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

As social content is aggregated in Stackla, items are tagged based on brand name mentions in hashtags or in the body of the post.

Curating content from labels, brand ambassadors, and customers, Wanted Shoes put a social spin on designer lookbooks with a concept called Street Style.

Hovering over social content reveals links to buy the exact shoe displayed or shop for other shoes from the same designer.

Like all eCommerce retailers, Wanted Shoes saw opportunity to increase revenue by harnessing the power of social validation at the point of sale.

92% of consumers trust earned media (like social media posts) more than any other form of advertising (Nielsen, 2013). Augmenting professional product photography with customer photos from social networks adds a powerful trust factor at the point of sale. Stackla widgets are embedded on each individual product pages, with smart filters ensuring social posts matching the product are displayed.

Powering Street Style with highly engaging social content rather than traditional, professional product photography produced fantastic results. Users who navigate through the Street Style social catalogue are 30% more likely to purchase than users who visit pages of the site that do not include Stackla-powered UGC widgets.

“e-Commerce conversion for anyone that visited the Street Style page is significantly better than the site average.”

says Jennifer Christodoulou, Marketing Manager at Wanted Shoes.

“With a bounce rate of just 5%, it’s the most engaging page on the website. 95% of users click through to specific product pages. We have no doubt that the social catalogue certainly does assist in the overall path to purchase.”

Christodoulou believes that social content is the key to increasing customer confidence at the point of purchase:

“Stackla puts us ahead of the trend. The audience, our customers, can share content and enjoy a shortened path to purchase. Our customers trust their peers, and this is proven by the results we’re getting with Stackla, driving social sharing as well as purchase”