Consumers and brands connecting through online communities is the new way of enhancing consumer experience. Already brands are building communities that consumers can interact and share.

One such brand is SEPHORA with its BEAUTY INSIDER COMMUNITY. The member-only mobile and online platform seek to have a platform for beauty-lovers to find inspiration, ask questions and get recommendations in an unsponsored, real-time, ‘real-talk’ social setting. This is an opportunity for clients to ‘Beauty Together’. SEPHORA has effectively leveraged on the online community to unlock new levels of customer engagement and experience. SEPHORA online community has features such as the ‘home tab’ where clients can build their custom profile, choose preferred groups and engage in relevant questions or conversations. There is also ‘the profile’ where clients display their personal interests, beauty characteristics, groups, looks. This enables them to easily connect with other groups. Another feature is ‘the groups’ tab that shows clients ways to discover content tailored to their individual interests and connect with like-minded members. ‘Conversations’ tab showcases the active beauty topics allowing clients to have a real-time talk about beauty tips, network and search popular conversations. ‘Gallery’ tab is a place for clients to post and browse photos and videos from members complete with product recommendations.

The importance of brands and consumers connecting through a community is increasingly becoming vital not only for optimizing returns but also for enriching customer shopping experience. With online communities, customers build a journey that makes experiences essential, intuitive and fun to use. A community is essential for those members that crave a high level of connection and gain inspiration from other people like them and whom they can trust.

Shoppi can also help consumers to choose the best products through its own community which integrates aspects of social, insightful and fun shopping. One of the ways is through allowing customers to chat with other customers in an online, mobile friendly environment. In addition, customers are able to have advanced search features in order to find what’s on trend. Shoppi has already intergraded aspects of social shopping by enabling customers to browse their favorite choices by showing products and content that is based on consumer preferences. Furthermore, customers can communicate with vendors and fellow shoppers in order to get best dealsfollow trends and stay updated. To make the community more helpful Shoppi can help develop deeper connections through expanding the Shoppi App for iOS and Android to offer features such as ‘conversations’ ‘groups’ and ‘conversational shopping’. These features help consumers to choose the best products based on their own preferences, which can easily be analyzed through interactions within the community.

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