By getting shoppers to participate in an online video contest on YouTube, The Wet Seal Inc. has helped to attract a growing base of shoppers who create personalized virtual outfits on WetSeal.com and drive up conversion rates, says Dayna Bateman, senior strategic analyst at Fry Inc., which works with the retailer on e-commerce design projects.
The Wet Seal, No. 326 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, ran a contest in July and August that offered Wet Seal gift card prizes worth up to $500 to contestants who produced the most popular videos telling why they needed a Wet Seal back-to-school fashion makeover. The retailer instructed contestants how to upload their videos to YouTube.com.
The Wet Seal itself picked five finalists among the customer-generated videos, judging them partly on their popularity on YouTube, then posted them on WetSeal.com. In the next stage of the contest, which is still ongoing, visitors to WetSeal.com can submit outfits created in the site’s interactive “My Boutique” section to go with the makeover request of one or more of the videos. The retailer has instructed visitors to tag each outfit to only one of the videos.
Participants can also see and vote on each of the submitted outfits. The creator of the outfit with the most votes and the creator of the corresponding video will each win a $500 Wet Seal gift card; the outfit and video in second place will get $250, third-place, $100.
The contest is a good example of how a retailer can leverage online videos, social networks and community sections of their web sites—combining the volume of traffic on a site like YouTube.com with the strength of a retailer’s own brand and customer base on its own web site, Bateman says.
“In the old days, a retailer’s web experience was confined to its own domain, but with the social web boundaries are very fluid,” she says, noting that participants and viewers of the Wet Seal contest easily connected the YouTube experience to WetSeal.com. “There’s no disconnect between posting videos on YouTube and being in a Wet Seal contest.”
The video traffic has helped Wet Seal encourage visitors to generate more than 100,000 custom outfits on WetSeal.com since the retailer launched its Boutique and Runway outfit-creating sections in April. Visitors to these sections convert to buyers at twice the rate of shoppers who don’t visit them, Bateman notes.
Bateman and Adam Silverman, director of e-commerce for The Wet Seal, will speak at the Internet Retailer Web Design ’09 Conference, January 19-22 in Miami Beach, in a session entitled “Leveraging social technologies strategically in your site design."
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