Case Study: How Growave helped SM Global Shop to work on their relationship with customers

It takes a lot of effort to make an online store blow up and stay successful, and we here at Growave are always happy and proud to be a part of that growth. Today we want to share a story of SM Global Shop - one of the fastest growing online stores that we have worked with. We spoke with the Co-founder of SM Global Shop Daniel Kim, asking him to tell us about his store and here's what we learned.

SM Global Shop is an online store that sells official SM Entertainment fashion merchandise. They have partnered with SM Entertainment to provide official K-Pop apparel and accessories to spread Korean culture globally. Fans of K-Pop groups like EXO, NCT127, Girls' Generation and Red Velvet go absolutely crazy about SM Global Shop as the majority of their sales support SM Entertainment Artists and all album sales from SM Global Shop officially count towards the Billboard Charts. 

It’s phenomenal how a lot of the items in the store sell out very quickly and fans often pre-order these items or wait for restocking. This shows just how loyal SM Global Shop’s customers are, as the brand has built strong  relationships with them.

The K-Pop explosion

K-Pop is a multi-billion dollar industry and undeniably a unique phenomenon. It recently managed to shock people around the world with their sudden explosion in popularity. And on the wave of K-Pop globalization, SM Global Shop saw an opportunity and took over the niche.

Daniel Kim started this brand to bring the latest trends of SM Entertainment K-Pop merchandise to the US and international market, with hopes of expanding it to the whole world. This is what Daniel says about how it all started:

"Due to the recent popularity of K-Pop internationally, I found that there was a high demand from fans to bring their favorite K-Pop products around the world. I saw this as a huge opportunity and decided to take the risk with Urban Coconut (who holds the SM Entertainment license) and we co-founded SM Global Shop together one year ago. Since then, we’ve managed to grow into 1.2million fans on Facebook from around the world with a website generating 400,000 sessions monthly.”

One of the biggest challenges for SM Global Shop was the enormous amount of fake products that claimed to be the official SM entertainment product. Daniel and his co-founders decided to differentiate themselves from the competition by working together with SM Entertainment directly and getting certified label stickers on each of their products. Through this partnership, they were able to help out artists through royalty sales from product sales as well.

Just in case you are wondering how to make your own stickers.

On working with Growave

Speaking of Growave, Daniel mentioned how pleased he was with the multi-functionality of the app - as it combines reviews, rewards, social login and wishlists in one place - which helped the brand on several fronts: 

“Through reviews, we were able to build social proof on our products, and through rewards, we were able to keep our customers happy.”

He also mentioned that Growave was pretty easy to integrate with the other apps of the brand:

“I remember I didn’t know how to integrate the flows to work with Growave, plus our email marketing software Klaviyo, but your support team was very helpful.”

Finally, speaking of his relationship with customers, Daniel emphasized that the app had helped the brand to improve emotional connection with its audience, so often hard for the well-established brands to keep up as they scale up:

With Growave, “we were able to really work on our relationships with our customers and think of more creative ways to interact and reward them.”

Let’s Talk Numbers

To take a case in point, we asked SM Global Shop about the effectiveness metrics of our app on their customer engagement. Here's the short rundown.

In 10 months that we have worked together, the brand has rewarded its customers with over 27 million points with the help of our Loyalty Program. Customers have created accounts, placed orders and shared the brand on social media to earn the points, increasing their engagement as a result.

And out of those 27 million, more than 5.2 million points were then spent, making for a 20% redemption rate. This shows the sheer effectiveness of such programs on customer engagement, which in turn leads to longer customer lifetime value, brand trust and repeat purchases.

Suggested reading: How to Set Up a Loyalty Program on Your Shopify Store

Social Login and Reviews. While using this feature, SM Global Shop has got over 100k members in their Social Login program as well as over 13 thousand reviews to their products.

Wishlists. A feature that lets customers to save their favorite items in a list, it helps brands to analyze the trends in customers' interest in their products. It also helps increase the brand's revenue by letting customers to  come back to the saved items for a later purchase. And only during the last several months, more than 156 thousand items were added to wishlists on SM Global Shop’s store.

Automated emails. Work as a reminder to purchase things that customers liked but didn't buy or couldn't find in stock. During a short period of time while integrating with Growave, more than 34 861 automated emails were sent out to the customers with more than 67% open rate. Email marketing for e-commerce is a powerful tool. Email works across all stages of a customer journey and has one of the best returns on investment when comparing all digital marketing channels.

Referral program. Increases your organic social outreach by letting your customers earn points or get discounts by referring new buyers to your store. The referral traffic number for SM Global Shop is 2300.

Seeing these numbers, we are proud to see SM Global Shop achieve such phenomenal success. We hope they will grow more and continue their mission - making it easier for fans all around the world to purchase authentic beloved artists’ goods!