In my last post I lied. I said:
“when operating an online business you don’t have the luxury of a ‘set place’ where potential customers congregate all day, every day – like a shop.”
You do. It’s called twitter.
From the first days of launching BRANDiD we have consitently found that a majority of our customers are generated from twitter. Like the high street, twitter provides a place where thousands of potential customers are congregating every day – you just have to find them. Or help them find you.
The ones that do are your means to helping others find you. So we always try to make impression; carry through our brand’s tone of voice to make sure we get noticed; go that extra step to please. Twitter provides a platform for people to talk about your business, but first you have to talk to them.
We had our first exchange with Craig Dennis, a super-talented front end developer and interac
tion designer, on twitter when we were still a subscription services for mens’ basics. It made such an impression on him that he even wrote a blog post about it.
He became a valued customer and we’ve continued to have some banter across the twittersphere from time to time. In our latest back and forth, we noticed Craig tweet that he was looking for a t-shirt.
BRANDiD now allows customers to buy any item, from any brand – our Masculine Algorithmic Learning Engine (M.A.L.E.) does all the ‘shopping’ and presents you with six options via email that you can purchase in one-click by adding to your tab.
So obviously M.A.L.E. responded, pronto, and the conversation below followed:
By engaging with Craig in this short exchange (at 11:30pm, on the bus, on the way home from work) @arush & I had stumbled upon something awesome: order via tweet. For customers who have their credit card on our system, all they have to do is ask M.A.L.E. for a recommendation of an item they are looking for. Normally this would happen on our site, but why not via twitter? We got the chance to test it out a few minutes later when Craig tweeted:
Craig received an email from M.A.L.E. soon after with a variety of options for each of the items to make up the oufit he wanted. All he had to do was ask M.A.L.E. No shopping required. If he wanted a cheaper coat, or different colour chinos, a tweet with some feedback would result in another email with more suitable chinos.
This is where the power of twitter really kicks in. By doing something special for a customer; by going out of our way to try and delight him, we provided a chance for BRANDiD to get noticed.
This tweet resulted in some of our other customers testing out ‘order via tweet’ and as we continued to fufil the demand, and show customers how simple it was to #ShopLikeaMan, more people sent in requests to M.A.L.E.
Currently, only our beta customers can shop via tweet – but if you want to join the family and #ShopLikeaMan you can jump the waiting list by signing up and adding a card to your account here.
We’re encouraged by the feedback we’re getting from customers and are continuing to find ways to innovate to make it as simple as possible for men to get the clothes they need without having to go through the hassle of shopping. We’d love for you to join the ride.
Building BRANDiD 