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Consumers are responding enthusiastically to a new service that lets them buy goods from and otherwise interact with brands via social media in sports stadiums, through TV ads, and other venues, according to results released Monday by Chirpify, the Portland, Ore.-based company that announced the service in September.
The service relies on so-called action tags to let users interact with sellers. A Chirpify user who wants to buy a pair of shoes from a TV commercial, for example, might tweet #Buy#RedShoes in response to the ad. A car enthusiast who wants to try out a new automobile would tweet #TestDrive#NewCar. Chirpify’s tags work with Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Buyers use stored credit card credentials or a PayPal account.
The tags are now appearing in sports arenas and on TV and will soon start appearing on billboards and at bus stops, Kevin Tate, Chirpify’s chief revenue officer, tells Digital Transactions News. “We’ve been blown away by the adoption for product marketing and even for content activation,” he says. Three-year-old Chirpify’s service had been confined to social networks before expanding to physical-world venues with the action tags.
The numbers the company released Monday indicate more than 300,000 consumers used the action-tag service to buy or sample a product, enter a promotion, or buy premium content from the launch in November through January. Some 65% of action-tag users followed through to either buy a product or enter a promotion (Chirpify requires first-time users to fill out a form to give payment and shipment details, a step not all users complete). The campaigns also spawned some 50 million earned media impressions—a measure of word-of-mouth on social networks that monitors where and how often the campaigns are mentioned.
The first tag on a TV commercial, launching at the end of last month, generated as many as 5,000 tweets per hour, according to the numbers. Chirpify will not identify the advertiser but says the commercial offered first-time access to a new product. Tate says so-called exclusive products or services work best when paired with the “buy” tags. The advertiser, he says, is trying out the service and wants time to evaluate it. “For a lot of guys, this is a secret sauce,” he says.
Responders have been overwhelmingly mobile users, with more than 60% using a smart phone, Chirpify says. The 20 or so brands using the service include Adidas, AT&T, Forever 21, Lenovo, Sprint, and TaylorMade.
Chirpify has been pleased with the response so far. “We’ve seen real success with action tags on TV and at live events,” Tate says. “This represents an opportunity to brands [to say to customers], ‘If you want to do more than talk, if you want to buy, here’s how you do it.’”
In fact, he says, Chirpify is starting to promote subscription plans that allow advertisers to run a series of campaigns for a fixed quarterly or annual fee. Current pricing is $2,500 per tag per month. Payment processing costs 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction. “We’re excited to see the longer-term commitments,” Tate says.
Beth Robertson, an independent payments-industry analyst, says Chirpify is trying to leverage the consumer’s urge to make impulse purchases when seeing products or services he wants. That can generate more sales for merchants but also drive some users deeper into debt. “That has pros and cons,” she says. “Things like this can get people into trouble.”
Still, the action-tag service appeals to consumers who like to use social media to talk about products they’ve bought or would like to buy, she says. “There are people who like to incorporate social media into their buying decisions,” she notes.
Some 62 million U.S. consumers have bought something on a social network in the past 12 months, according to Javelin Strategy & Research, a Pleasanton, Calif.-based research firm, with most purchases being of physical rather than digital goods.
