To be successful at social media, it is no longer enough for merchants to simply blast the same offers and messages to hundreds — or thousands — of consumers simultaneously. Now, consumers are seeking personalized and relevant messages that are tailored to their wants, needs and even geographic locations.
The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, which has more than 928 locations worldwide, sells specialty coffee and teas to beverage enthusiasts. In addition to a thriving café business, the company sells products online and in a variety of stores, including Amazon and Costco.
With the primary goal of better engaging these customers and nurturing long-term relationships, the retailer partnered with MomentFeed, which is designed to help businesses optimize local social presence and engagement. Since the beginning of the partnership in 2012, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf has seen an 83% monthly increase in local social reach.
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As a result of the MomentFeed implementation, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf also saw the following results:
- 136% increase in local Facebook fans;
- 46% increase in social impressions for locations; and
- 36% lift per month in local engagement.
“Our individual stores are the backbone of our company and it’s important for us to have a vehicle for our fans to check in or comment on a location that is a part of their daily lives,” said Patrice Anderson, Director of e-Commerce and Online Marketing for The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. By allowing customers to check in to a Facebook page for a specific location that they have “developed a relationship with everyday,” it helps the retailer “personalize the brand experience.”
Initially, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf worked with MomentFeed by using the PinSync tool, which helps businesses correct and optimize location data and local pages on Facebook, Foursquare and Instagram, among other social networks. This process included getting the proper infrastructure in place to ensure effective local social engagement with customers, according to Anderson. “Prior to that, we were limited in our ability to engage at the local level.”
Using MomentFeed, the retailer has been able to establish and better control social presence for all of its locations. The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf now can acknowledge its fans and respond to individual posts and photos submitted by consumers. Additionally, the retailer now can share photos being published across social networks “that are unique to those locations to continue to personalize their store experience,” Anderson added. “Local relevance and authenticity is key when utilizing these social-local channels.”
Using Social Contests To Connect With Consumers
Because location data is up to date and synched, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leave has more accurate and complete data regarding who is visiting specific locations and engaging with the brand at a local level.
Prior to working with MomentFeed, “we had quite a few incorrect and duplicated listings,” said Amber Lopez, Associate Manager of e-Commerce and Social Media. “This meant that the data we were getting was not representative of the real engagement levels we were experiencing at a particular store location and several fans were not getting our messages because they had liked unauthorized duplicate pages.”
Now that The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf has an accurate, real-time view of social feedback being generated across channels and at specific locations, the retailer can curate and re-publish user-generated content more efficiently.
Specifically, the retailer is leveraging Instagram contests to encourage consumers to submit photos of their experiences with The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. “We have run quite a few Instagram contests that have been going increasingly well,” Lopez reported. For one contest to promote its Coffee To Go/Office Coffee catering program, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf asked fans to tag photos of themselves in their office showing their love for the brand.
“The winning entries received a gift card for their office to further enjoy our coffee,” Lopez said. “We are able to review photo entries for these contests by sorting photos by the hash tags that are assigned to them. MomentFeed made it quite easy for us to view the tagged entries all at once when it came to selecting a winner.”
The social media team continues to track all photos being submitted on social networks so “we can choose to curate and share these photos with all of our followers or individually respond to these customers to let them know that we appreciate them,” Lopez said. “MomentFeed pulls in not only hash tagged photos from our fans but also the ones that are just location-tagged, which are not surfaced anywhere else.”
Overall, the photo and video contests are designed to encourage fans to “capture their beverage experiences or the feeling they get from for a chance to win special rewards and prizes,” Anderson added. However, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf continues the conversation through live Twitter and Facebook chats, which “allow us to not only keep an open line of dialogue to our beverage specialists but to get an idea of what our customers are asking for on a day-to-day basis when it comes to our beverage offerings.”
