How to Create Customer Evangelists? • 7Boats

Having evangelists for your products or services, is the best possible type of customers one can have. They are not loyal to your products, but are passionate about it and will be thrilled to recommend you. Better yet, they are best communicators you can have as well as your public defenders, especially in difficult times. Another benefit of having customer evangelists is that they are ready to forgive assuming your mistakes were honest. They are the hyper-repeat customers who believe “you have their best interests at heart.”

Thus, it is utmost important to develop such customers. They can help your business to succeed in unimaginable ways. Almost all the big brands enjoy evangelists including Amazon, Apple and Netflix. Here are few tips to create such customer evangelists:

Understand your customers:

This is the first and one of the most crucial steps to crate brand evangelists. You need to understand and develop detailed insights about your customers to determine their needs and expectations. You can conduct qualitative interviews with existing as well as prospective customers. And don’t forget to interview the customers of your competitors – it is essential to understand what made them loyal to that particular brand and if they would like to explore other alternatives available.

Your market is the best source while creating an effective message from your campaign. You need to master the language that resonates strongly with your targeted audience, and interviewing your customers will help you to do the same. The message comes from your customers and thus, it will help you to attract their attention. So start asking them strategic questions to discover the most effective marketing message for your business.

Create an emotional language for your marketing message:

Develop a simple and lifestyle-oriented marketing language, based on your customer insights. And don’t forget to make it emotional, if you want to create an impact. For service providers and B2B companies, focus your language on the ways you can improve your client’s condition. It should make salient statements, and not just stating features and technical specifications. This is one of the basic marketing tips, which is also followed by social media channels and public relations agencies. Remember the mission statement of Facebook? It has nothing to do with Facebook’s features or other technical aspects. It reads – “Giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected” – a simple, emotional and lifestyle-oriented message.

Identifying the proper marketing platforms:

Once you have developed a powerful and effective marketing message based on the aforementioned points, you need to communicate them on the proper platforms. The followings are some of the online platforms that you need to focus on:

Mailer campaigns
Social media channels
Media resources like bloggers, editorials, forums etc
Product package

To frame a successful mailer campaign you need to prepare a detailed list of your customers include their name, phone number, address, and email address. Also, collect the similar details for your competitions’ customers to communicate directly with them.

Many overlook the potential of the product package; they rather focus on the product manual. Product package provides a great opportunity for communicating with potential customers and let them know how you can improve their lives. And include your success stories in the product manual. Tell your customers about the various features of your product, and the way they improved the lives of millions of people out there. If possible, include some testimonials of the real life people.

Apart from the aforementioned platforms, you can use other media to start communicating your marketing message. All you need to do is think out-of-the-box to utilize them for creating customer evangelists.

Engaging and empowering your customers:

It is essential to engage your existing and potential customers in a dialogue. It can be a tweet, a Facebook comment or an email conversation for building rapport. Starting your own blog is also a good idea for engaging customers in a transparent dialogue where everyone can participate. Also, empower your customer evangelists to shepherd your message. Allow them to write guest posts and reviews on your blog. This way, you can tell your customers that have an ownership and your customers will feel proud about it.

The concluding note:

If developing customer evangelists is tough, maintaining them is far more challenging. You need work hard and continue to provide innovative products for maintaining your market position. Every marketer is craving to crate customer evangelists to leverage upon the word-of-mouth marketing. Thus, it is fierce competition and you don’t have the luxury to slow down your pace, even after creating quality number of evangelists. If your customer evangelists ever feel being neglected or overlooked, it won’t take them much long to shift their loyalty. The rule is simple, gather qualitative insights about your customers and musket; create a simple, yet powerful marketing language, and communicate effectively on the right platform to continue to enjoy the services of your evangelists.