Among the many Facebook marketing and business tools that the company has released in the past few years, one of the favorites of the average Facebook user is the Offers feature. The Offers feature is that which allows users to get discounts from brands and businesses on Facebook whose page they have liked. All the user has to do is claim the offer by clicking the Get Offer button, and an email will be sent to the user with more information on said offer. Seeing great results with the Offers feature, Facebook has decided to test a new version which will allow users to shop immediately, get reminders before promotions end, and it will also allow users to choose when they want to share offers, or if they even want to.
According to Inside Facebook, a spokesperson from Facebook announced that the company is working with just a few retailers around the world in this test, and that no other pages will be affected during the testing period. For most pages, offers will continue to appear in original format during the testing period.
The hopes with this new version of Offers are to get users to take better advantage of the feature; making Offers a big part of running a brand Page on the network. Hopefully, the new version will be more successful in leading users to bring in direct sales for retailers. At the same time, the new version will help users quite a bit, reminding them to actually use the Offers being presented to them while allowing them more control over the sharing of their shopping activities.
According to the article from Inside Facebook, this is how the new version will work differently from the current:
For e-commerce offers in the test, users will see two buttons: “Shop Now” and “Remind Me.” Previously, users could only select “Get Offer.” When users click “Shop Now,” they will be taken directly to a retailer’s website. When they click “Remind Me,” users will be sent an email and at a later date will be reminded with a notification on Facebook. It is up to each retailer when they will remind users about their promotion, but they can only send one notification per offer.
Although this feature will be great for Facebook users that enjoy receiving offers on Facebook, the true aim of this new version seems to be increasing conversions for Facebook marketers. By ultimately increasing a user’s number of paths to purchase, it may turn out that they are more likely to do so. According to Inside Facebook, Facebook has said that 42 million users on the site have claimed an offer at some point, regardless of how many have redeemed them afterward. Either way, the success from Offers is there, and Facebook is trying to make the most of it for marketers. Inside Facebook writes, “Enabling users to visit a retailer’s site directly from an offer and sending them notifications to remind them to make use of the offer could reduce the number of offer claims that don’t lead to sales.”
