The most successful retail subscription companies see the value of tapping into social media apps’ wide audiences, while underperformers tend to abstain from these platforms.
The most recent installment of PYMNTS Intelligence’s Decision Guide series, “The Retail Subscription Features That Make Top-Performing Merchants,” pulled from a September survey of 188 subscription merchants to understand, among other matters, what the top-performing merchants do to keep them ahead of the rest.
The results revealed that 80% of top-performing merchants offer social media sign-ups, while only 7% of the bottom performers do the same. As such, it seems, making one’s offerings available via these popular platforms is strongly linked with merchants’ success.
Many consumers use social media platforms for product discovery, if not for purchases. The report “Tracking the Digital Payments Takeover: Monetizing Social Media,” which drew from a survey of nearly 3,000 U.S. consumers, revealed that 43% browse social media to find goods and services, with Facebook, Instagram and TikTok yielding the highest conversion rates.
However, the same study found that only 14% of consumers ultimately purchase those goods and services through social media platforms. As a result, subscription merchants must understand that while social media plays a role in engagement, the final purchase decisions often occur outside these platforms.
In an interview with PYMNTS posted in June, Marie-Elise Droga, head of global FinTech partnerships at Visa, explained how social media commerce has picked up in recent years.
“COVID came and put [social commerce] on steroids,” Droga said. “There are north of 300 million individual creators out there, and they are ever global in nature. As financial institutions wake up to the opportunity, they need to treat creators as [small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs)] through the lens of the financial services they develop.”
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