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Welcome back to Growthnotes; a weekly publication that touches useful subjects for the modern marketer.

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This week →

💬 The rise of conversational commerce
A simple and effective way to bring back human touch to shopping experiences online.

📲 Rapid community growth by GymShark
Deep dive into how GymShark grew their athletic clothing brand online by building a community to keep customers engaged.

📦Sampling as a way to grow your LTV
Unsure about launching new products? Learn why and how sampling can help introduce your audience to them and test waters.

📦 Sampling as a way to grow your LTV

Launching or adding new products to your catalog is always risky.

Will your audience like them? Will they buy these products? How much will they be willing to pay for them? This is where sampling can help.

Sampling is the process of introducing your audience to new products by adding smaller versions of them (samples) to their existing order deliveries.

Waitrose, a UK supermarket, introduced kiwi berries by adding free samples to orders placed for the trusted blueberries.

How does this help?

• Offers a delightful post-purchase experience - who doesn’t like freebies and surprises?

• Boosts product discovery - without having to run ads

• Builds trust - imagine getting to try something before paying for it!

Make Your Website Accessible to Every Holiday Shopper

97% of the internet is inaccessible to people with disabilities — and that can have a big impact on your bottom line.

Download our 2022 Holiday Retail Guide to get quick, actionable steps you can take today to make sure your website is accessible to the one in four US adults living with a disability.

💬 The rise of conversational commerce

If you're a fan of buzzwords, then you're going to love conversational commerce, a term coined by Uber’s Chris Messina in 2015; in a nutshell, conversational commerce refers to the integration of e-commerce and messaging apps, like Facebook Messenger, SMS, WhatsApp.

Human-to-human (H2H) is a people-centered company model that has revolutionized how we interact with consumers through marketing. The baseline is; it increases sales:

• Surveys have found that 80% of consumers pay more to get a better experience

• Consumers are no longer only looking for products or prices - they want a positive experience

• Conversational commerce, also known as chat commerce unleashes the potential of conversation to sell products - think, retail store experiences, but online

• Global spending of conversation commerce channels set to equal $290 billion by 2025

• Live chats are said to increase conversion rates by 20%; conversational commerce enables live conversations at scale

Here’s how to get started ↓
First, here’s an example of conversational commerce in action by H&M:

Identify your target audience
Who does your business sell to? What products do they value the most? What help do they need in making a purchase? What channels do they use?

Understand the different types of conversational commerce

• Live chat: Most commonly used channe to engage with brands to seek support. The caveat is that it requires live agents.

• Chatbots: We’ve all had conversations with some.

• Messaging apps: Using apps like Messenger, WeChat, WhatsApp and SMS to enable instant messaging with consumers. These allow for the use of memes, GIFs, videos and emojis to make the conversations more natural and personal.

• Voice assistants: Think, Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa or even Siri. While still an uncharted territory, they can offer fast answers.

Take note of what you can automate
Remember, the back and forth of chats may seem easy to manage but can quickly get out of hand. Identify your FAQs to automate queries.

Find a conversational commerce solution
Look for a conversational commerce platform that easily integrates with your CMS to set up automations. Some of the popular solutions include Jumper.ai, Gorgias and Tidio.

Engage, measure and optimize
How many consumers are initiating conversations? Which channels are getting used the most?

Note:
As you start to use conversational commerce channels and explore automations, you may see a difference in performance. While some may lead to higher engagement, others are leading to more sales.

📲 200% YOY growth

How GymShark built an online community to grow its athletic wear brand

💫 Highlights

• A sportswear empire valued between £300M and £400M

• 193% compound sales growth over three consecutive years

• Founder, Ben Francis, personal net worth of $10M, Forbes 30 Under 30

• Annual turnover of approx. 261 million British pounds (July 31, 2021)

• Global search volume of 2.7M worldwide (organic branded traffic, what?)

• #gymshark has over 12,228,902 posts (and growing by the minute) on Instagram alone

• One of Nike’s biggest competitors

Let’s take a second to see how they grew so rapidly 👇

🏋️‍♀️All you need are 1000 true fans
On a podcast by Shopify, Ben Francis states how all a brand needs is 1000 true fans who genuinely care about and love their products. Their feedback can go a long way in improving what you offer to others in the same demographic.

📣 Influencer marketing, but make it micro
Instead of following the traditional approach of working with celebrities and global influencers, micro-influencers have been their blueprint for growing a small biz.

Here’s why:

• Average engagement rate of 3.86% (mega-influencers see only 1.21%)

• Genuine following on the basis of content (and not, peer pressure)

• Easily relatable and hence, more trustworthy

• Amazing way to build goodwill

They also use influencer content in their ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram - pictures and videos - to make their brand more relatable.

These UGC ads usually outperform studio quality content, as people aren’t blind to them.

Understanding these different data points will allow you to create a strategy that works.

This isn’t to say GymShark does not work with mega-influencers. But their campaign focus for them is more around brand awareness, instead of driving sales!

TLDR; when working with influencers, leverage micro, macro and mega accounts. Have different goals and objectives from the campaigns you drive with each!

💞 Build a community online
A study by HBR states loyalty is built through a community and not rewards. GymShark is living proof! But they’ve further added a layer of smart segmentation to create directional and driven communities.

Gymshark operates multiple Instagram accounts that each reflects a different audience segment. This allows Gymshark to create tailored content that feels more personalized to each subculture.

This has led to over 12M posts around #gymshark (as of us writing this newsletter), and 2M around #gymsharkwomen on Instagram:

💡 Takeaways
Gymshark is one of the very few fashion and accessories brands for athletes that has grown this rapidly - and consistently over the years.

But even as they continue to reach new heights, Ben Francis has kept the brand consumer-first. This has helped them build a community of loyalists that continue to not just support, but also grow with the brand - despite the innumerable options available to them. Your clients are your marketing.

This has in turn helped the brand meet the changing consumer needs proactively and stay out of the black hole of offering endless discounts to meet sales goals!
Collaboration and community for the win. 🏆

BITE SIZED →

📦 How ecommerce is keeping consumer markets afloat in tough times: Changing with the economics

😎 TikTok launches in-app shops - A big nod to social commerce