Jewelry has always been a people-first business. Despite the current challenges, jewelers are finding creative ways to keep the lines of communication with customers open, even without seeing them face-to-face.
New opportunities: WhatsApp
When Covid-19 hit, Amir Ali saw his clientele plummet. Ali is CEO of Prince Diamonds and Icedrip, two stores in the Mall at Stonecrest in Lithonia, Georgia. Forced to pivot, he and his team implemented a new sales funnel that has kept business going and attracted new customers from outside their local area.
“Who would have expected people would be excited to buy jewelry during a pandemic?” he remarks.
That excitement is due in part to the new sales approach. It begins on Instagram with product photos that ask buyers to direct message (DM) for more information. If the lead is qualified, Ali’s team continues the conversation through WhatsApp Business.
WhatsApp started out as a cost-free alternative to SMS, but in 2018, the Facebook-owned brand launched a commerce-focused app that operates as a mobile storefront. It includes a business profile that allows users to share information
with their customers, such as a description, email and website.
To Ali’s surprise, using WhatsApp has been successful, with far higher sales than he would have expected under the circumstances. His team uses the app to tag potential leads, send custom product orders, and even complete sales. It’s also a way to send mass advertising messages, such as for free ring cleanings, which have helped bring people back to the stores. In addition, the retailer is using it to reach out to customers on a one-to-one basis to ask how they are and offer support.
Another advantage of the platform is that it acts as the stores’ de facto customer relationship management (CRM) program. “This situation is new for us, and we’re constantly learning and optimizing our systems to better reach our customers,” Ali says.
That reach is improving all the time, and the new approach has been so successful that even when things return to normal, his team plans to continue having personal conversations with customers via WhatsApp.
“We aren’t always reaching out to [customers] to make sales with WhatsApp,” says Ali, “but we’ve realized this personal connection makes people more likely to spend.”
Open communication: SMS
The move toward increased personalization is also driving more businesses to use SMS for customer outreach. But this isn’t mass-market, one-size-fits-all bombardment.
Megan Crabtree, president of Crabtree Consulting, says it’s more of a “Hey, we were looking at these earrings and thought they would be something you love” type of conversation. And it’s a discussion many customers are enjoying.
Text messages have a very high open rate, especially compared to emails. That’s probably because there are instant notifications for SMS, and people don’t like having an unread message icon on their phone. The open rate can reach up to 98%, versus 20% for emails, according to Campaign Monitor. SMS also has a quicker response rate — 90 seconds on average compared to 90 minutes for email — which means customers and businesses can hold a real back-and-forth conversation. However, they can also be used for more than just basic messages.
When Crabtree worked as a diamond buyer, she would finish an online consultation with a potential client and then send them custom videos via SMS.
“I closed sales that way, including sales upward of $55,000, because consumers felt like they had had an in-store experience,” she says.
These days, with stay-at-home orders still keeping people from visiting jewelry stores, an increasing number of jewelers have discovered the value of texting. “The response rate is out of this world compared to a phone call,” asserts Crabtree.
Still, some team members have difficulty using text messages, she says, especially less tech-savvy ones who might not be comfortable communicating with customers via SMS. In addition, with many personnel working from home, some stores are reluctant to give remote inventory access to their staff. This limits how much they can sell, no matter which channel they use.
Switching channels: Chatbots
In that vein, retailers might consider keeping their staff from talking to customers altogether and instead use a chatbot.
The best-known jewelry-industry chatbot was created by New York-based start-up Rare Carat to make the diamond-buying process easier. “Rocky” guided users through the 4Cs and used natural language processing to answer thousands of diamond questions.
Following infrastructure changes on Rare Carat’s website, however, human gemologists have replaced Rocky in answering clients’ questions.
“Good old-fashioned human connections make more sense in our business, at least given where technology stands,” says Rare Carat founder Ajay Anand.
That’s not always the case. Using a Facebook Messenger chatbot and ad campaign, The Pearl Source, an e-commerce pearl retailer with a showroom in Los Angeles, California, generated over $64,000 in revenue during the 2019 holiday season — from a $5,000 ad spend.
Adrian Dorobantu, founder of One Step Social Ads, created the chatbot, which had a simplified and personalized conversational commerce (c-commerce) approach. After clicking on an ad, users saw an image with their name on it in Facebook Messenger. They received a 15% discount code, and the bot then guided them toward the best-selling products from each category.
Along with the immediate sales boost, Dorobantu says the benefit of using the chatbot was the database the company created of people guaranteed to be interested in the brand and the products. “Once you have a database like this, you can tell Facebook to find you more people like these and sell your products to them, since they are the right audience,” he notes.
The evidence backs him up. The Pearl Source made as many sales through social media in April and May as in the previous six months combined, including the successful holiday period.
Whether it’s SMS, WhatsApp or Chatbots, the way companies are talking to their customers and potential leads is changing. While an SMS or WhatsApp approach is easier to implement than a chat strategy, businesses must keep the conversation going, and they have to keep it personal. If they don’t, they risk being left behind.
Article from the Rapaport Magazine - July 2020. To subscribe click here.