Put a front to your Store

We have taken a step further into creating a more complete experience for our eCommerce business users to use. What have we improved you may ask? Well, somethings that might add that little bit of zest into your Facebook SocialStore.

Customizable front for your store

Highlight specific items on the first page that your users view. Add a video, custom images and links to further personalize your SocialStore. You are also able to add on our custom widgets, Featured Products and Most Liked. Featured Products allows you to choose which products that you want to highlight to your users as your popular choices. The Most Liked widget has another important function, it shows which products users find most popular and want to recommend to others. Research has shown that people tend to refer to what others do or buy when they are unsure, and its the same for social shopping. With more recommendations in the form of Likes, people will trust the authenticity of the item more.

featured products

Multiple angles of your products

Now you are able to showcase multiple images (max. of 3 images) to cover the angles of your product. Front, back and side profile, now you can show them various angles and give your customer a better visualization of your product, enhancing the viewers trust in your product. There is nothing like seeing the real thing for itself, but you can definitely come close to it.

View the number of your products bought

The point of having a store online is to generate more exposure of your products, and ultimately lead to more purchases. In your account dashboard, besides being able to see most likes, most views and most comments, now you are able to see most buys. This is a great indicator for conversion, and you will be able to see which of your products are the most popular.

We thank everyone for their suggestions as we continue to improve BlinkCampaign. Anything that you think your help improve your eCommerce business, drop us a mail! We are always happy to hear your views and if it is for the better good for all your businesses out there, we will definitely incorporate it into our system. Keep those suggestions coming!

Incorporating Social Shopping with SocialStore

As we all know, more and more people are spending more time on Facebook. Just based on studies about the top country population using Facebook, Singapore, on average Singaporeans spend 38 mins 46 sec (dated Aug 2011) on Facebook.

So what do people do on Facebook and how does that relate to online shopping? Research has shown that an amount of 56% surveyed have visited various retailers’ Facebook page to find out about online or offline sales and promotions, and also 25% of an average shopper’s time online is spent on the social media network. With such a high percentage of interest, wouldn’t you as a retailer want to make it easier for your shoppers to have access to your products and promotions?

Enter SocialStore, bringing your E-commerce storefront to Facebook. You will be able to import your product inventory with product description, pricing, image and even SKU number. You can even set a special discounted rate just for your fans, giving them an incentive to be your fan.

Setting up your store

install app

So how do you go about setting up your store? First click on the SocialStore tab, you will be asked to connect to Facebook first. Click on it and install the SocialStore. This will populate the SocialStore tab onto your Facebook page.

Go back to your SocialStore tab, you will be informed that you currently have no product and you will be able to upload your products by .CSV format or by adding manually.

Adding products to SocialStore

Should you have a long list of products, uploading a .CSV spreadsheet of your products would accelerate your upload process. To view a sample .CSV file, click here.

Store Settings and Layout

Next we come to the store layout. First you would be able to upload a custom header banner image (.JPG, .GIF or .PNG) into the system. The maximum width for the header would be 520px.

SocialStore Layout

After you have uploaded your products, next up would be to customize your store settings and layout. There are two templates that you can choose from, Grid or List. Should you have a lot of products, a Grid view might suit your page and your users will be able to surf through more products quickly. Should you want your products to display more details straight out, the list layout would suit you.

Like all of our SocialPromotions and SocialApps, you will be able to Fan Gate your SocialStore, give your fans a special privilege and also perhaps a special fans only pricing. This will entice users to be your fan.

Facebook share settings

This is a simple and yet crucial section to update. This is where you setup the post that streams into your fans’ wall when the SocialStore is shared. There are 4 things that you would need to key in and upload.

Sharing post

Firstly its the post thumbnail. This can come in the form of .JPG, .GIF or .PNG format. The crucial thing to note is that it must be 90px width and 90px height. Next are the post title, post caption which must be a short description of not more than 100 characters, and lastly a post description. This is where your marketing message needs to strike a cord with users, engaging them to click and see what your SocialStore has.

Once those 3 portions have been completed, your SocialStore is ready! Its that simple and effective. Have a go at it and try it for yourself, leverage on the amount of exposure Facebook can bring to your products as you bring your storefront onto Facebook.

For previous users: Key changes in BlinkCampaign v4

The BlinkCampaign today launched a major upgrade to the platform, introducing a whole new bunch of features, and essentially evolving the app from a white labeled email marketing platform for agencies, to a full-fledged social + email marketing platform for agencies and marketers alike.

Here’s some of the major changes that’s happened.

Social Campaigns

Promotional CampaignsPerhaps our biggest enhancement was the roll out of the social media campaigns module. With integration to Facebook, our social campaign module offers great stuff such as coupons, deals, and contests, that you can create and publish to a standalone website and to your Facebook Page.

Contacts

What you have come to know as your subscriber lists are now known as contacts. Apart from website sign ups, you’ll have the ability to built a larger contacts list through your social campaigns. This will allow you to leverage on social media to not only grow your contacts list, but create a greater buzz around the web through the social mediums + email. You’ll also get fancy graphs to chart your contacts growth over time.

Sample Report

The contacts list has also been split into a “Master List”. The master list integrates into your Facebook account to allow your Facebook Fans’ and users’ info to be synced back into your contacts list. You’ll still be able to upload and create ad-hoc lists under what we now term as “Sub Lists”. You can use sub lists to send email campaigns, but you won’t be able to sync your Facebook account with them.

Facebook Apps

Facebook AppsBlinkCampaign now has Facebook apps for you to install on your Facebook Page. For a start, we’ve launched a Landing Page and Signup app.

The Landing Page app allows you to customize a spiffy looking landing (or welcome) page for your Facebook Page.

Our Signup app allows you to put a signup form directly onto your Facebook Page. As you’d expect, the signups go straight back into your contacts list, providing you with another avenue to get more contacts and data.

Email Campaigns

Functionally, not much has changed for the email campaign portion. We’ve just collapsed all the email features under an Email Campaigns module. All the functions that you’ve previously enjoyed are still there and we’ll be looking to provide a major upgrade to the contents editing module some time in Q3.

Other Changes

Apart from the obvious structural changes in the navigation, we’ve also brought in the features previously found in the agency module of BlinkCampaign v3. These includes a dedicated Systems Settings menu where you’ll setup your email authentication, custom domain and Facebook connection settings.