E-Retailers Use Online Forums to Create Customer Loyalty

Unaffiliated forums are becoming a rare breed

Retailers who have created online forums say they generate traffic, provide valuable customer feedback and build loyalty. They are relatively inexpensive to build, and successful forums are not costly to maintain, in large part because engaged forum members take responsibility for monitoring content.

Four married couples in the U.S. all met at the same place. They weren’t high school sweethearts. They didn’t find each other in college or at church or at a bar.  They met in the online forum of Bodybuilding.com.

“Opposites attract” is not the rule in online forums. The goal of a forum operated by an e-retailer is to bring together people who share the same interests and in turn create a customer base so loyal it rivals the strongest marriages.

Bodybuilding.com built its online forum just two months after it opened shop in 1999, and the forum now has more than 1.1 million members who create 1.3 million posts and 67,000 discussion topics, or threads, every month.

“It’s about becoming the place where people come to talk and learn and meet,” says CEO Ryan DeLuca. “We want to be known as the destination not just for product and content but also to meet others interested in the same things. If I had to pin our continued growth as a company on one thing it would be on building our community online.”

Retailers like DeLuca who have created online forums say they generate traffic, provide valuable customer feedback and build loyalty. They are relatively inexpensive to build, and successful forums are not costly to maintain, in large part because engaged forum members take responsibility for monitoring content.

But forums aren’t for every merchant. They have proven most successful for e-retailers that sell products to people with a passion—pet owners, for example, versus office supplies buyers.

“Enthusiast businesses have a more passionate relationship with their customers,” says Jon Holmquist, chief marketing officer at J.C. Whitney & Co. and general manager of its Stylin’ Trucks e-commerce business, which is testing an online forum and plans an official launch in the fall. “Still, every business has a relationship with its customers, and customers want to have a voice, and businesses need to hear that voice. Online forums are a way to accomplish this.”

Before the dawn of the Internet, people looking for others with similar interests had limited options. Guys into bodybuilding could make acquaintances at the gym. Quilters could meet through a local quilting club.

But the web made possible discussion boards, forums and social networks that attract likeminded people from around the globe This ability to bring people together is at the heart of online forums, which are read by 28% of consumers on at least a monthly basis, according to Forrester Research Inc.’s 2007 Social Technographics Online Survey, which canvassed more than 10,000 U.S. Internet users.

Forums are inexpensive to build and maintain, retailers say. The build is easy because the structure of an online forum is inherently uncomplicated—text entries that branch out from other text entries with slots for uploading images.

Fabric.com paid what it describes as a minimal amount for forum software from vBulletin to create its Sew to Speak online forum. Ongoing costs primarily are a bit of time each week from staff sewing experts who monitor the forum and provide answers and guidance. “The forum has not been a drain on financial or human resources,” says Laurie Eady, marketing director at Fabric.com, which launched its forum in early 2006 and averages 20 new threads and up to 100 new posts a month.

“Overall it doesn’t cost much at all,” Holmquist says. Stylin’ Trucks used software from ONESite Inc. to build its forum. “We have to devote some resources to it like staff monitoring and I.T. maintenance, but this amounts to a very small amount of money.”

Because it runs one of the largest online forums, Bodybuilding.com spends more. About $50,000 a year goes into I.T. maintenance, staff time and additional servers. DeLuca says the gains a retailer will realize from an investment in an online forum can only be measured over an extended period.

“When you’re helping people find what they want and understand what they need to know and meet new people, you’re creating goodwill that you just can’t measure,” he says. “This is a long-term investment that will take some time and a relatively small amount of money, and it’s worth far more than you invest.”

Building a community

When launching a forum, there are many ways e-retailers can prime the pump to elicit participation by customers. First up is promoting the forum on the e-commerce site and in e-mail marketing, retailers say. From there, in-house staff must take the lead by seeding the forum with content as well as questions.

“In the beginning we had employees start a lot of threads, especially about controversial topics to get people talking,” DeLuca says. “One topic was: ‘What do you think about female bodybuilders?’ That got people all riled up.”

Bodybuilding.com then reached out to pros and industry experts, asking them to create topical threads and be active members of the community. “This only helps them because it gives them more of an audience to show their expertise,” DeLuca explains. “The audience benefits from that expertise, which helps fulfill our mission of helping people reach their goals.”

Fabric.com launched Sew to Speak without a name. It decided it would let customers name the forum as a way of creating buzz and getting the ball rolling. Results exceeded expectations, Eady says.

“We used different spots on the web site and in e-mail marketing to advertise the contest, linking customers to a spot in the forum where they could suggest names. Then we set up a poll in the forum where people could vote for the top five we selected. Letting customers name it gave them more ownership of the forum,” she says. “We primed with posts, as well. Our expert sewers on staff got in there and did seeding.”

During the test phase for Stylin’ Trucks, 100 staff members, family and friends are using the forum, seeding it for when it launches to the public in the fall. It also plans to promote the forum on its MySpace page. Additionally, it will be pressing the flesh.

“We’ve printed cards we’ll hand out at shows and races that promote the online forum on one side and the MySpace page on the other,” Holmquist says. “We’ll also use answers from our customer service staff and content from our FAQs to create posts to prime the pump.”

Holmquist adds that for retailers of products about which people are passionate, customers will begin adding material quickly. “It’s primarily a matter of getting them there,” he says.

Monitoring the crowd

Once customers are there and posting, e-retailers must monitor forums to make sure questions are answered, delete inappropriate content, and harvest insights into what customers like and dislike about the company, its offerings and its web presence.

There are five staff members at Fabric.com monitoring and participating in the forum. They come from the marketing, merchandising and customer service departments. Some were selected because of their extensive sewing experience, enabling them to best relate to forum members and their needs, Eady says.

Members routinely answer other members’ questions, a fundamental of all online forums. It’s up to the e-retailer to watch for posts that members cannot answer, or posts for which it wants to chime in. It is also common on forums for members to monitor posts for inappropriate material. After a time, members feel a sense of ownership of a forum and want to protect it, Eady says.

Bodybuilding.com has two people dedicated to its online forum, one full-time and one part-time. It also has 20 forum members who work as volunteer moderators. Many forum members are so enthusiastic that the post of volunteer moderator is a coveted spot, and DeLuca says he routinely gets e-mail requests from members who want to play that role.

To become a moderator, a Bodybuilding.com forum member has to have been a member for at least a year, have posted at least 10,000 times—posts range in size and can be brief comments or responses—and have a good reputation in the community. DeLuca rewards volunteer moderators with discounts at the e-commerce store.

Sharing power

Moderators have the authority to delete posts and ban users. But the forum system backs up all entries and tracks what all moderators do. If a moderator makes a mistake or a call the e-retailer disagrees with, posts can be restored and members reinstated.

Members must provide a valid e-mail address linked to a user name to become a member of the Bodybuilding.com forum. To ban a member, Bodybuilding.com staff or volunteer moderators remove the user name from the forum system and ban that e-mail address. Bodybuilding.com also tracks the IP addresses of those banned to prevent them from re-registering under a different e-mail address.

Fabric.com follows a similar protocol for removing abusive forum members, but Eady says there have been few problems. “We don’t really interfere; we haven’t had to,” she says. “People who sew are a pretty tame crowd.”

Tame or lively, forum members can be a boon to e-retailers in several ways. These include insights into products carried, increases in site traffic, improvements in customer service and improvements in natural search results.

For example, in a couple of cases customers reacted strongly to new products at Bodybuilding.com, saying they could be abused by teen bodybuilders. “The manufacturers’ guidelines said nothing about that, but forum members felt strongly,” DeLuca says. “They said we should put a warning on them and say very specifically what the product is really intended for. And that’s what we did.”

Enthusiasts often link to forum threads, which can boost traffic and search engine rankings. “We’ve been getting people who post a link on Digg.com to an interesting thread,” DeLuca says. “This gets us not just more traffic to the forum and the store but more registered users who post more content, filled with keywords and inbound links for the search engines to crawl.”

Ultimately, online forums are first and foremost a tool to engender powerful customer loyalty, retailers say. “The implementation of Web 2.0 tactics, creating a solid community, sets you apart from your competition and keeps your customers coming back,” Eady says. “Our goal is to be first in their mind. If they have a question about a fabric or an issue to be resolved or a sewing tip to share, we want them to feel Fabric.com is not just a great place to buy a product but a destination where they can find a like-minded community.”

bill@verticalwebmedia.com