Customer advocacy
Read time: 5 minutes
In today’s online ecommerce environment, retaining your best customers is tough. You’re competing for every second of your customer’s time and attention, so failing to differentiate yourself or providing an inadequate customer experience will see you waving goodbye to lots of valuable customers.
You can stop this from happening.
And the things you can do to hold on to more of your customers don’t have to be expensive or complicated. If you use a bit of imagination and understand your customers well enough, you can intervene before they lapse.
Advocacy marketing has some fantastic techniques that will help you keep more customers active for longer and get lapsed customers buying and building your brand again.
See your customers as advocates, not just buyers
Before you start panicking about lapsed customers, evaluate whether they’re actually lapsed at all.
Just because they haven’t bought anything in a while, that doesn’t stop them from being highly engaged fans of your brand. There’s a multitude of reasons why someone might not be ready to spend money with you right now, from already having everything they need to uncertainty over their disposable income. Even so, they may still be actively promoting your brand to their friends and on their social networks.
So how do you know who has genuinely moved away from you and who is still loyal but just not spending right now?
One simple way is to monitor and collate customer feedback. That means collecting everything from customer service interactions to social media comments into one report to understand who’s happy, satisfied and talking you up.
Tally this with sentiment analysis from things like NPS surveys and you can identify who your biggest fans are. This understanding means you can target your messaging more effectively. With a little more nurturing, those customers who love your brand will stick around for longer and tell more friends in the process.
Improve engagement with your loyalty scheme
Intelligent use of a loyalty scheme can provide a huge boost to your retention efforts. The more customers engage with your loyalty programmes, the more they feel part of your brand and the less likely they are to shop elsewhere.
You can reward customers with loyalty points for taking advocacy actions such as referring friends or becoming an NPS promoter.
Then check how many of these loyalty points your customers redeem to gauge how much of an impact your loyalty programme is having on retention.
Once you have this information, you can run loyalty experiments to see what pushes the engagement rate up, providing you with a roadmap to improved loyalty and retention.
Reimagine your VIP programme
Showing your most valuable customers how much you appreciate their business has always been a cornerstone of retention. And with advocacy marketing, you can expand your thinking about who your VIPs are.
Hint: they’re not necessarily the ones who spend the most money with you.
Customers who love your brand so much they recommend you to all their friends ultimately represent much more value to your business than those who only spend big themselves.
Extended Customer Revenue (ECR) data lets you see which customers are referring the most and what the total value of this referral activity is. You can use it to re-engineer your VIP segments.
ECR data lets you see which customers have referred the most. So craft bespoke experiences for customer advocates to reward them for the revenue they’re bringing to your brand.
For example, you could invite high-referring customers to exclusive events, offer previews of new collections, and give them early access to sales. A little bit of recognition goes a long way and feeds the enthusiasm of your brand fans.
Use first-party data to make your customers feel special
Whatever rewards and loyalty incentives you decide to offer, adding a personal touch makes them much more impressive.
For example, you could reward customers in high ECR segments with birthday gifts or send a handwritten note to create personalised experiences that increase customer loyalty, encourage positive brand mentions on social media and boost lifetime value.
Use predictive segmentation
Ok, so maybe this one sounds quite complicated! But the intuitive interface in the Customer Advocacy Intelligence Platform and the expert help on hand from our team make setting up predictive segmentation a simple task.
And once it’s set up you can identify which customer advocates are likely to churn over the next 12 months. Creating customer segments based on likely behaviour allows you to take action to stop it.
With enough data, timely messaging and the right offers and promotions, you can retain more customers who slip into the danger zone.
Conversely, segments based on predicted ECR allow you to identify those customers who have the potential to bring in huge value through their recommendations. Using predicted ECR to build customer segments means you can maximise their value to your brand with messaging and rewards that nudge them in the right direction.
The other big advantage of predictive segmentation is that you can trigger actions when certain conditions are met, automating your CX and catching those customers who may otherwise have slipped through the cracks.
Create moments of customer delight
All these techniques build moments of delight into the customer experience. If you can engage with your customers on a personal level, showing them you value their loyalty and appreciation of your brand, you’ll create a unique and compelling customer experience that keeps your customers coming back again and again.
If you're already a Mention Me client and you’d like to speak to us about building your own Advocacy Marketing Plan to drive more value from your customer base, speak to your CSM. For clients without a CSM, get in touch here.
If you're not a client but you want to get serious about engaging your biggest brand fans and optimising your customer retention strategy, Mention Me’s Customer Advocacy Intelligence Platform can help you.
Our team of experts have worked with over 500 leading brands to deliver major increases in referrals, revenue and customer retention. Our innovative platform is transforming the way brands view their customers and the value they can bring to their businesses.
To understand how to deploy customer advocacy marketing for your brand, watch a demo of the world's first Customer Advocacy Intelligence Platform:
Share:
Share:
