As mentioned in the Reputation and Conversion stage, getting reviews and testimonials is crucial for your product success. Don’t hesitate at all to reach out to your previous customers. If your product has helped them, they are most likely going to be willing to leave a review that you are able to make use of as this creates a loop of your cycle.
The customers that review your company and leave a testimonial are your advocates. You need to consider what makes your customer feel like they are being a part of a community. This way they will most likely leave a review even without asking.
You may consider setting up a corporate blog, surveys, discussion groups, focus groups, or just simply gain a decent amount of followers on a social media platform and let your customers interact by posting non-sales content, that makes the community active on those platforms.
Your company should offer personalized feedback to your customers even after the purchase phase. This helps your customers to become loyal to your brand and turns your customers into your brand ambassadors.
95% of consumers say customer service is a crucial factor in their purchasing decisions and their feelings of satisfaction with a purchase, while 50% of customers make additional purchases from a firm following good quality customer service experiences
If you manage to create a customer community, some of your advocates may turn into promoters. While you may proactively use your advocate testimonials, promoters create referrals and actively promote your product based on their own unique experience.
The key goal of creating a working customer community is to increase the engagement of a buyer and improve your social proof, while also enhancing your SEO ranking.
It has been estimated that just about 1/3 of customer interactions come from advertisements. Today’s marketing environment is largely consumer-driven. This means that every business model that wants to become successful in its field should develop ways to help authentically meet consumers on their customer journey.
Build community, educate and up-sell
Having your customers in the newsletter is nice, but imagine how many newsletters do you read. You want to create community which engages with you on basically weekly bases. Use:
- Linkedin posts and articles
- Linkedin groups
- Slack channel
- website forum
- or even facebook groups
You can use these even before closing the deal to convert the leads.
In these channels, you want to educate the customers about how to use your solution, what are the updates, how to troubleshoot it, what are the possibilities, and finally about your other complementary products which the clients can buy as well.