A cottage industry of services has appeared over the last year with the goal of helping you optimize your Instagram photos to convert your followers into paying customers, and these offerings are growing to meet the needs of everyone from small businesses to multinational corporations.
These platforms provide a great opportunity to optimize your Instagram sales conversions, but how do these Instagram conversion platforms work and what are the results for the pioneering brands that are already using them?
Shoppable Instagram
Image via: hi.photoslurp.com
Shoppable Instagram is a product provided by Photoslurp, a visual marketing and e-commerce platform launched in 2014 hailing from Barcelona, Spain. They are aiming to bring Instagram conversion tools, currently the domain of large companies like Target to small and medium businesses.
I spoke with Photoslurp co-founder Ben Heinkel to learn more about how their Shoppable Instagram platform works, and what results their clients are seeing.
Shoppable Instagram slurps (pun intended) all of your Instagram photos from your feed, and the product images and the customer's product catalog are pulled and curated daily to provide an up to date landing page that customers will land on when clicking the link in your Instagram bio.
The landing page includes all of your Instagram photos, and when a potential customer clicks on a photo on this landing page, they're taken to a page where they can buy the product in the image or buy from a list of similar products linked to that image.
You can see Shoppable Instagram in action over on the Fashion Pills Instagram account.
In terms of metrics, they measure their client's visitors, clicks, click-through rate, conversions, conversion rate, and also provide individual photo metrics to help you identify which photos are driving the majority of your sales.
Ben reports that their customers are seeing a 60% - 65% click-through rate and that they are working on a report for the end of the year that will tie their customers' results back to conversions and sales as well, but those figures aren't yet available.
Like2Buy
Image via: go.curalate.com
Like2Buy is Curalate's solution to linking Instagram traffic to revenue for e-commerce companies.
The service works similarly to Shoppable Instagram, customers are provided with a landing page which contains their Instagram photos and directed to include the link to the landing page in their Instagram bio.
Clicking on a photo on the landing page will bring shoppers to a page that features similar products or special offers. For example, clicking on Target's recent photo of a skeletal dog dressed as a hot dog topped with mustard brought me to a page where I could shop pet costumes.
Unfortunately I've already missed my chance at 15% off of M&Ms, but tying offers into these landing pages is a brilliant move by Target to help drive more conversions from their Instagram traffic.
Curalate has launched with big brands like Nordstrom, GAP, and Target and "reports an 80% increase in click-through rate from the Like2Buy page to product pages, when compared to a regular link."
Instagram conversion platforms are helping big brands and small businesses turn a platform that already converts well into a powerhouse for their e-commerce efforts and really start to optimize Instagram conversions.
