How to use Instagram to build Brand and Customer Loyalty?

We all know about Instagram and its popularity and it should not be strange if someone says that Instagram is one of the most engaging social media platforms.

If we talk about the eCommerce industry, Instagram has more than 80 percent of eCommerce brands present in it.

Well, being on a social media platform like Instagram is understandable, but has anyone thought about the commercial benefit behind their social presence? How do they earn from it? How do they utilize their social presence to attract their audience?

“Embedding Instagram feed on website” is one of the main reasons and the most common answer to the above questions.

Brands and customers manage to build their image and sustain their loyalty with the help of Instagram in many ways. To understand how they do it, let us first try to comprehend the relation between Instagram and eCommerce.

Related: – Beneficial Impacts of Embedding Instagram feed on Your Website

Relation between Instagram & eCommerce

Instagram is basically a social media network that now is taking a shape of visual commerce platform, whereas eCommerce is an industry in which commerce is done electronically, often with the help of social media aggregation tools and user-generated content.

Now as we have a basic idea about both, let us find out how we as an eCommerce business owner can measure customer loyalty on Instagram?

How to measure customer loyalty on INSTAGRAM?

Customer loyalty is actually a product of regular and responsible service. The more prompt and actively you serve your customers, the more loyal your customers would be.

How to identify which customers are loyal? And first of all, what does it mean by loyal customers?

So, a loyal customer would be the one who engages, responses, and checks your profile or website on a regular basis.

And you can check the number of such customers up to an extent on Instagram itself through its metric features.

Once you have a business Instagram account, it provides the metrics for the number of engagements, likes, comments, shares and saves on every single post.

On average, 20 percent of engagement is considered a good engagement. Mathematically, the number of engagements when divided by the total number of followers and then multiplied by 100, is the engagement rate of your Instagram profile.

You can turn your regular customers into your loyal customers

Customers appreciate and like it when the brand they choose would reward them something in return.

You can earn your regular customer’s loyalty by incorporating them into your business at a small level.

Find out such customers that comment, like and share your posts on a regular basis and ask them to collaborate with your brand.

Make sure they have a better taste of social media and so a better sense of engagements and then choose them to be your local ambassador for a particular range.

This privilege will get you the customer loyalty towards your brand and will surely enhance your user engagements through positive words-of-mouth and recommendations.

Brands utilize their Instagram presence for loyalty

Instagram is a potential eCommerce platform and every 8 out of 10 brands today are trying to make their presence remarkable in it.

Instagram’s commerce friendly interface and functionalities make it one of the best platforms for the eCommerce industry. And its social popularity makes it full of quality user-generated content, which later becomes a source as well as a way of creating brand loyalty in customers.

Embedding Instagram feed on the website is a way of creating user engagements and the concept of utilizing Instagram’s user-generated content is a win-win for both the customers and brands simultaneously.

By embedding Instagram feed on website, brands can showcase their recognition by displaying user-generated content to the audience. The benefit of utilizing user-generated content is that the audience starts trusting the brand due to its genuine global range.

Once the brand showcases its Instagram-generated content on its website, the website visitors start dwelling more on the website than they ever used to. Because now, the brand has already set an example of loyalty by displaying them real visuals for their product on website but not paid and manipulated one.

Related: – How to use Instagram Hashtag Feed or Explosive Business Growth

Genuineness of UGC becomes a source of loyalty

Brand loyalty and customer belief are no doubt the outcomes of the quality of the product. But they are also about how the brand showcases itself. Is the brand using any manipulation in convincing the customers? Or is the brand trying to overshadow its lacunae with the help of an editing or creating artificial content?

The process is quite simple in a way, that firstly, a Brand creates an Instagram account, then the random users and followers do tag and use the hashtags related to the brand in their posts. As a result of which, a user-generated feed forms and takes a shape, which is then embedded on websites to gain an audience’s belief.

If the brand is showcasing scripted content for its promotion, it may not bring as many engagements as it can with genuine user-generated content.

User-generated content has the potential to influence at a global level in one attempt. The only thing necessary to learn is how to utilize it in a smarter way?

Related: – Grow Your Social Media Marketing efforts using Facebook Messenger Chatbots

Ecommerce Brands use Instagram as a visual platform

Today, the audience finds it obvious to find any brand on Instagram, and strange to not find one on the same. Because people expect the presence of an eCommerce brand at least on a visual platform like Instagram.

Instagram allows converting your content into a shoppable one by just clicking or swiping up. And this commercial functionalities of Instagram have made it the best suitable network for eCommerce.

As far as brand & customer loyalty is concerned, people find it quite familiar if they find the same product that they’ve purchased as a UGC on their brand’s Instagram account.

Connect with customers and ask them to leave their reviews

As an eCommerce vendor, one should also keep this in mind that every individual on Instagram can be pivotal for business growth.

As actions like raising the flag, and reporting any account or content, an exchange of word-of-mouth, and forwarding are very easy to perform in social media like Instagram.

That means a customer can very easily influence the other either positively or negatively.

Therefore, a brand should connect to the customers in an interactive manner so that not a single customer would choose to take a negative course of action for the brand. Ask them to leave their genuine reviews,

The fact that builds brand & customer loyalty is that the brand has offered such a platform to its fans and followers, in which they can exchange or submit any of their views.

Additional benefit: Traffic exchange from Instagram to website and vice versa

When you embed Instagram feed on your eCommerce website through a visual commerce tool, you can choose to either hide or display the username from the UGC.

On choosing to display the username in the feed, the traffic from the website will try to find your Instagram account, which will raise your engagement on Instagram account too.

The vice-versa is also possible when you have converted your Instagram content into shoppable, through which you can redirect your Instagram traffic to your website in just a click.

How brands manage to do so?

As far as customer loyalty is concerned, brands, apart from saving themselves from creating content, also leaving their loyal image by displaying them original and user-generated content.

Many popular brands have managed to build their customer loyalty through Instagram. Having a renowned image in the industry, they get their user-generated content from all the renowned personalities. And this, not only saves them from investing for content creation but also ensures the brand and product value in front of the public.

They are able to do this because they have utilized Instagram and its offerings effectively. Embedding Instagram feed is an option that Instagram itself offers because even Instagram understands the worth of this feature.

There are multiple ways in which you can also embed your Instagram feed into your eCommerce business website and create customer loyalty by showcasing them the genuine UGC like plugins, Instagram aggregation tools, Instagram’s self-embedding option, etc.

Conclusion

Instagram is one of the most wealthy networks in terms of eCommerce friendly UGC, due to which it becomes an appropriate eCommerce social media network.

Also, on Instagram, the user-generated content consists of hashtags, usernames, and keywords only, due to which it becomes easy to curate the content on the basis of them.

Instagram, being a visually strong network, is a like-a-like thing for eCommerce especially. Thus, one should not delay in utilizing Instagram and take advantage of its eCommerce-friendly functionalities to create customer loyalty, especially if one owns an eCommerce business already.

Anne Griffin

I’m Anne Griffin and I’m a digital marketer and technical writer. I’m passionate about exploring and writing about innovation, technology, and digital marketing trends.