When looking for new business, we often overlook the simple tactics that can drive HUGE growth. One tactic I’m very partial to and have had great success with is something called social sharing. It’s a way to thank your customers for using your service or buying your product, ask for their feedback and leverage them to recruit their family and friends all within one simple process. Let’s take a look at how this all works (I’m using an example of an organization I worked with but have blurred out the company name for privacy):
Step 1: Send your customers an eye catching, beautifully designed email that will encourage them to open it. Too often we send our customers boring text emails with no graphics that discourages them from opening it. I suggested to the owner of this company to have an actual picture of himself to better connect with them. It’s also unique and fun. Here you will ask for your customers feedback (we used the Net Promoter Score as the survey metric but any survey type will work).
Step 2: If a customer rates you 0-8, we consider this an opportunity to improve, a text box will automatically replace the image. The radio button (definition here), which is the 0-10 scale, is intelligent enough to recognize what score the customer is selecting to ask a secondary question, “What would company XYZ need to do to earn a better recommendation?”
Step 3: Once the customer clicks submit, a window will pop up stating that the organizations management team will review the customers comments. This is your opportunity for customer retention as the comments will be directed to the email account of your choice.
Step 4: Let’s say your customers do the opposite and rate you 9 or 10, you want to gather their feedback as well to understand what your organization is doing well. Again, the radio button is smart enough to recognize that the customer is a ‘promoter” and will ask, “what does company XYZ do particularly well to earn your recommendation?”
Step 5: This is where the revenue and customer acquisition is! When you have a raving fan, leverage them to recruit their family and friends by directing them to their social media networks. As the saying goes, “a happy customer can tell 5 people in the real world and 1000 in the virtual world.” We think 1000 sounds better.
Here we used Homestars (a Canadian based home renovation review site), Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. The customer simply has to click the icon and the comments that they recorded in Step 4 is automatically populated for them which is very simple. Don’t ever make your customers work for you.
Step 6: This is what will appear if the customer selected the Facebook icon. What you are seeing here is an Application Programming Interface (API) with the ability to add even further comments in the “write something…” text box. When the customer clicks “share link” their message will be blasted to everyone within their social media networks. Anyone who sees the post, tweet etc. will be able to click the link and it will automatically direct them to the organizations website. Since the new customers is referred by a trusted friend, they are more likely to convert into new business for you.
There you have it, a simple initiative that is an absolute must for organizations of any industry and size.
Develop, deploy and watch the revenue and new customers come in.
To learn more about social sharing and how to implement it within your business, contact me at michel@fcgrp.com.
