Snug started with a light-bulb moment nearly three years ago when founder, Rob Bridgman experienced all the fun of buying a new sofa. It took nine weeks to arrive, didn’t fit through his door, and the company didn’t allow returns. An industry demonstrably ripe for disruption.
The first Snug sofa – Europe’s first ‘sofa in a box’ – was delivered soon after, and the company has continued to defy small doors, narrow hallways and previously impassable staircases ever since, building a primarily eCommerce model. And, as the heartbeat of the home, sofas are right up there with smashed avocados and sunsets for social media gold. Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, TikTok have been key elements in Snug’s marketing strategy from the get-go.
“We came to StoryStream initially to talk about our rights management solution,” says Aysen Miller of the Snug social media team. “As the number of social media mentions from customers increased, it was starting to put a lot of strain on a largely manual rights management system, and so we really needed a scalable, automated, GDPR-compliant solution moving forward.”
Snug are very much a digital-first, disruptor mindset and so the conversation with StoryStream quickly evolved to incorporate eCommerce, alongside digital rights. Snug – who place a real emphasis on celebrating their community of customers – were enthusiastic about trialling StoryStream’s platform to further strengthen the connection between social media marketing, UGC and sales.
Engagement bounces upwards
Snug’s StoryStream gallery – @snugsofa in the wild – a mixture of User Generated Content, Snug social community content – was an instant hit, with their home page bounce-rate showing a 50% reduction in the first month. The stat encouraged Snug to push the StoryStream module higher up on the home page, where customer engagement would become even more instant.
“The Snug brand is very much friendly, conversational and engaging,” says Vicky Watters of Snug’s eCommerce team. “And so the StoryStream Snug social gallery is a natural fit, delivering really authentic, engaging, dynamic content.”
When Snug saw the immediate impact of the StoryStream home-page gallery on dwell time, engagement rates and bounce-drops, it was agreed to extend it across category and product pages.
AI filters and structures social media assets
“This is where our eCommerce AI capabilities really start to pay off and deliver a more scalable roll-out,” says Business Development eCommerce Director at StoryStream Mal De Silva. “We can match content to a specific product or category of products down to SKU-level. When we locate content, a new feed is automatically activated for that product – without having to put a script on to every single product page – and the content feeds directly into the relevant eCommerce site pages. It’s a truly dynamic, intelligent, automated system, which delivers a lot of operational efficiencies, freeing up social, marketing, eCommerce teams from many labour-intensive tasks.”
“Buying a sofa online is obviously a more involved journey than your average online purchase,” says Mal. “With Snug – who already do so much to help customers overcome those traditional barriers to purchase – the initial on-site engagement figures we’re seeing are very promising, and we are now looking to measure StoryStream’s influence on KPIs right across the buyer journey. When a customer orders fabric samples, for example, that is a big indicator of intent to purchase, and so measuring where and how UGC has helped to influence that will help us to introduce ways of optimising sales conversion.”
