Survey: Facebook gains importance for customer acquisition
Washington, D.C. - While paid search and email marketing still top retailers’ list of effective customer acquisition channels, social media has moved up the ranks to become an important tool for engaging with and attracting new customers. According to the State of Retailing Online 2015 report, conducted by Shop.org, Forrester Research Inc. and Bizrate Insights, 25% of retailers surveyed cite Facebook as a top acquisition platform. Underscoring retailers’ heightened use of social to complement search, email and affiliate marketing tactics, 58% are increasing their year-over-year spend on social media marketing, second only to the number of companies who are spending more on search engine marketing (63%). When it comes to paid social media specifically, half (50%) of retailers surveyed say they are spending more this year than last year on paid Facebook options, such as promoted posts and paid ads; YouTube came in second with 29% saying they will spend more on paid options for the video website, followed by Pinterest (27%), Twitter (22%), Instagram (20%) and Snapchat (6%). The study also found that merchants surveyed rank online marketplaces in fifth place for effectiveness among customer acquisition tools, and 32% are spending more on this marketing tactic this year than last. On average, retailers surveyed allocate 16% of their digital marketing budgets to online marketplace initiatives and operations, second only to search engine marketing (33%), which is on par with search Furthermore, this year retailers are prioritizing site redesigns for smartphone (55%), tablet (46%) and desktop (41%), and are also enhancing product pages and improving the checkout process across devices, among numerous other improvements. To that end, 63% of retailers surveyed increased their online merchandising budgets this year compared to last, while almost half (49%) also increased their online merchandising staffing.
