Emplifi’s Platform Drives Social Commerce
When Emplifi upgraded its social commerce cloud last month, the goal was to empower brands to create more shoppable content across social media channels. The upgrades help bridge the gap between social media marketing and ecommerce to drive conversions and revenue for clients, the company said.
Zarnaz Arlia, CMO of Emplifi, said the upgrades couldn’t have come at a better time: just before the 2023 holiday season. By bringing together user-generated content (UGC), ratings and reviews, influencer marketing content, and live-video, the platform is primed to help clients capitalize on the expected $80 million in U.S. spending across social commerce in the next two years.
Social commerce is a sub-section of e-commerce and is a shopping experience that can drive purchases that come directly from a customer’s activity on a social-media platform. Back in January, Accenture reported that social commerce is a growing trend in the U.S. but is most activated in China and Russia.
A unified customer-engagement platform that uses digital- and social-first strategies, Emplifi helps build online communities for some of the world’s largest brands with retail locations around the world, not just the U.S.
In 2021, Jones Soda Company used the Emplifi platform to deploy a video-powered UGC campaign. The videos were showcased on the brand’s site via Emplifi and turned into an AR experience on real-life soda bottle labels. Customers used the Jones Soda app on their smartphones to activate UGC videos on the bottles as part of the brand’s “Reel Labels” campaign. The campaign drove DTC commerce because Jones Soda gave visitors the option to buy products directly from each piece of UGC displayed on its website.
The craft sodas are also sold at retail throughout North America in convenience and grocery stores such as TJ Maxx and Dollar Tree.
McDonald’s, Ford Motor Company, and Delta Air Lines are among the more than 20,000 brands that use the Emplifi platform across major social media networks and digital platforms, including Google, Meta, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, and Snapchat.
“Brands can quickly identify and integrate their strongest performing social media content into ecommerce experiences that accelerate the shopper’s journey and yield higher conversion rates,” Arlia said. “UGC tends to be the preferred means for delivering shoppable content.”
Arlia explained that Emplifi’s social commerce cloud makes it easier to for brands and their marketing partners to identify and curate effective UGC for product pages and social posts. The cloud’s enhanced functionality such as “in-stock only” UGC album filters help brands serve up shoppable content for products available and ready for immediate sale.
The cloud also incorporates out-of-the-box email templates for marketing teams to implement so that customers can search and filter relevant product ratings quickly and easily.
According to 2023 research from UGC vendor PowerReviews, 77% of shoppers include websites with ratings and reviews in their customer journey. Amazon, retail websites, search engines, and brand websites are the most popular places for consumers to look at reviews. Even for products they have never before purchased, consumers are likely to read reviews.
Emplifi’s social commerce cloud contains capabilities to track, manage, and communicate with influencers. The feature also includes analytics and tagging on Instagram and Facebook so that they can see the true ROI of their influencer marketing campaigns.
Finally, the social commerce cloud also enables sales activations via livestream shopping. Brands can use the “live page” API to manage the shoppable video content on their owned websites.
“And they can do so without a heavy lift from their web development team or back-end support,” Arlia said. “The API requires no coding changes, so brands easily swap out video content on their site.”
