Turning 1 Customer Into 3: Strategies To Turn Happy Customers into Brand Evangelists and Promoters

Stage 1 – Make a Purchase

Phase one of the customer advocacy curve is to get them to make a purchase. Right? They have to actually be a customer if there’s going to be a referral program. If not, they don’t know why they should tell someone to come to you because they haven’t experienced any value from you.

Stage 2 – Share on Social

The second step is they need to share or mention you on social. We’re going to talk a lot about micro-commitments – small steps to move people along  the curve. Remember it hurts to ask too soon so we need to know they’re going to say yes, so how do we do that? How do we insure they’re going to say yes? We walk them down a path and if they don’t do a small portion of   it, we don’t ask for the next step until they do. So, after someone makes a purchase, the best thing you can get them to do is mention you on social.

Not say, “Go buy from this person!” but just mention you or your brand in some way.

Stage 3 – Write A Review

Then we’re going to move on and ask for a little smaller commitment. We are going to ask them to write a review. This is great on physical products, but it works no matter what you’re selling. If you’re an agency, if you’re a service,

if you’re selling information or training, it doesn’t matter. Facebook reviews, Google reviews, Amazon reviews, if someone shared you on social let’s get them to say something nice about the experience that they had.

Stage 4 – Submit a Testimonial

The next step in the process, is they need to give a testimonial, a customer story or maybe a case study. We’re walking them down the phases of becoming a brand advocate and then a promoter, right? They need to do some things first before we jump right in and ask them to send their friends and family.

Stage 5 – Join Referral Program

Then, after someone’s submitted a testimonial and done these other things, now it’s the appropriate time to ask them to join a referral program because they’ve proven that they’re willing to buy from you, to talk about you, to share their experience. Now we can take the step to ask them to really get in there and go from advocate to intentional promoter. And that’s what we’re looking for: a conscious shift from “I’m willing to say nice things about this brand”

or if someone asks for a referral “I’m willing to then refer this brand,” to “I’m going to intentionally and proactively go out and tell the masses about this brand.”

What if your customers did that? What if every customer you had, or what if one in five customers you had, it became their mission to indoctrinate the world to your existence. What would happen to your business? Think it’d get bigger or smaller? Bigger of course!

Stage 6 – Refer a Sale

Now we can bring the customer to the final stage – getting them to refer a sale. After they’ve done the other things, and after they’ve joined a referral program and they refer a sale, now we’re going to really dive in because what you have is a promoter.

What you have is someone who has moved from customer to intentional promoter of your brand. But how do you do it, right? How many times   does that just happen in your business? Is it one in a hundred? Is it one in a thousand? Is it the customer that’s coming to you and saying, “Is there any way I can promote your brand?” No, this doesn’t happen organically.

Five Steps to Turn Customers into Advocates and Promoters

When it comes to bringing your customers through the advocacy curve from purchaser to an advocate who consciously promotes your brand, there are five steps apply to your business to make this happen: identification of the trigger, then comes enabling, rewarding and perpetuating it, and finally getting them to repeat the behavior.

So, let’s start by quickly going over those steps and then we’ll take a deep

dive into each one.

The first thing we need to do is identify the trigger. There’s a triggering event for someone moving through that advocacy curve. There’s some triggering event that happens after someone makes a purchase to indicate they’re willing to share you or your brand on social. And then there’s a triggering event of that share that tells you it’s time to ask for a review and then when you get a review. There’s a triggering event that says, “Okay we need to move to the next step.”

To move to the next step of encouraging the trigger, we have to figure out, “What is the triggering event? What is the thing that happens that makes them willing to talk about you or your brand socially?”

Think about this for a second. When was the last time you woke up, maybe you had a long night, maybe you pulled an all-nighter and worked really hard? Or maybe you had a few too many drinks, and you woke up and you

looked like a special kind of rough? I mean hairs all jacked up, or for the

ladies your makeup didn’t come off before you went to bed – and the first thing you thought was, “Hold one, lemme get a picture of this, I gotta post  it to social media.” Right? We don’t do that, we only post brand-elevating things to social media (in this case, thinking of ourselves as the “brand”).

When was the last time you boarded a Southwest flight, you’re in the middle and the very back, and you were like, “Hold on, #lessthancoach.” You don’t do that. No one does that. If it’s not brand-elevating or status-elevating, we don’t put it on social media.

How can you make your customers have an elevation of status by sharing something of yours? It’s not: look what I just bought. That’s not an elevation of status unless you’re a luxury brand and then that’s still just a humble brag. Once we identify the trigger, we need to encourage and enable the trigger. We know what it is that they feel that indicates they’re ready to do something. Now, we need to be able to encourage it because remember,  this isn’t happening organically in any of your businesses. No customer’s like, “Well I’m here on the customer advocacy curve and I think by the end  of the day if I play my cards right I can get to the end!” You’re just not that important in their lives.

The next thing you need to do is reward the trigger, right? Small rewards, micro-commitments, these are the things that take customers from customers to brand advocates to intentional promoters. And then you need to perpetuate the trigger, right, and we’ll talk about that as well.

And then the final step is to get people to repeat the process. So once someone makes the first referral sale, you don’t want to stop there, right?

Whatever you give them, whatever you reward them with after they’ve referred the first sale, that’s just taking them from a one-time promoter and figuring out, “How do we get them into a constant promoter of my brand?”

So, there’s the steps and instead of just leaving you with them to try to figure it out on your own, let’s go through and break them down one by one. Sound good?

Step 1 – Identifying the Trigger

To identify the trigger, you must answer this question, and this is a big one so please pay attention. When is your customer most excited about you, your product, your service, or your brand? Remember, we’re trying to figure out triggers.

What is a triggering event that would be an organic transition from a way they feel to getting them to speak about you publicly? How do we get them to feel something and then they’re willing to talk about you in a way that

is status-elevating? How can you encourage them to share that excitement publicly, so their friends see it?

Remember, we’re not going from purchase to “Why don’t you go tell all your friends about me?” We’re going from purchase to “Why don’t you talk about me?” There is a big distinction between the two – both in terms of the actual actions they take, and the level of commitment.

Back to the customer value journey. What we’re talking about is the excite phase, right? Your very first job is get the customer to admit sometimes to themselves, sometimes to themselves and publicly that they’re excited about your product or service.

Our lives have gotten so boring and we’re used to just being bored and unexcited that sometimes we need to tell someone like, “Isn’t that exciting? Like holy crap, that is exciting! How did I not realize that?” Sometimes the person that needs to be excited about you and your brand, they need to know is them. And all you have to do is tell them to be excited.

Before we move forward, let’s take a step back and talk about the three heights of customer excitement, because without this feeling of euphoria, it will be hard to get them to take the desired actions we need them to that will move them from buyer to active promoter.

Three Heights of Customer Excitement

There are three times within the buying process where people experience heightened emotions and a feeling of excitement: immediately after making the purchase, immediately after they receive the product (or get it home), and immediately after receiving the promised benefit.

Each of these produces a euphoric reaction, due to the release of what Loretta Breuning refers to as “Happy Chemicals” in the brain.

Purchasing releases chemicals and we get happy because we gave our money away in exchange for something else. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it’s true. The first time your customer is the most excited about you or your brand is the second that they’ve made a purchase. They are super excited, right?

The second they’ve made a purchase they know that this is going to solve all their problems, make them skinnier, more attractive, richer, whatever it is.

This is a point in which they believe whatever you told them, and they haven’t yet received the value, but they’re the most optimistic that they will. So, the first time that someone is experiencing this excitement is right after they’ve made a purchase.

Now, the second time your customers are most excited is immediately after receiving the product or service. Some of you guys have digitally delivered stuff, some of you guys ship things in boxes, some of you guys are service providers. Now, if you’re going out and actually providing a service, how do you maintain excitement if you’re providing services from purchase to end result? The first excitement comes from ordering your service, knowing that you are “on the way” to giving them what they need from you. If you’re in a service industry — maybe you’re an agency, maybe you go through and you do an audit and you provide the report of findings — they’ve now started to receive something and the future that you’re providing is becoming clearer, bringing the second wave of excitement.

From there we come to the point at which your customer is the most excited about you, your product, or your service — immediately after receiving the promised benefit. Now for most people, this is also the hardest to target.

The highest level of excitement is not when they bought it, it’s not when they got it, it’s when they received the promised benefit.

When did they go “aha, I get it!”? Because that’s what we’re watching for. If

we could watch our customers, we’re watching for their eyes to light up, we’re

watching for them to go, “It did it! It worked! I got it, I get it. Yes!”

And that’s when we need to step in and say – “Hey, why don’t you talk about me on social?” – when they are at this peak of euphoria.

Right, again they didn’t wake up and go, “Wow I look like crap today, let me get a quick selfie.” If your product or service hasn’t gotten there yet, they still feel like their “before” state, not their “after” state. They still feel like they did when they determined that they needed a solution that you could provide     but haven’t given yet. So, you have to be careful about when you’re asking, remember, right now you just want them to share or talk about you on social. That’s it. Alright, that’s it. You can’t expect them to do it on their own. This is not happening organically.

Remember, while you’re sitting here a new customer is not buying going, “Well gosh, I don’t feel like I paid enough for this product or service so I might as well give him a shout out to my followers.” That’s not happening. You not only have to prompt them to do it, you must do it for you.

E-commerce gets this. What I don’t see is enough people who aren’t in

e-commerce doing it. The second that they make a purchase, remember, that’s their first point of super excitement. Chemicals have been released, they’re excited about you and your brand, and depending on what you’ve sold, it could be somewhat status elevating, so prompt them to share it.

The thank-you page, the confirmation page, this is the #1 place to begin the customer advocacy journey, the customer advocacy curve happens right here. If they can share with one click that doesn’t drive back to something that they feel is going be weird to share.

Here’s what I love about the best strategies, right? They’re simple, not easy. Simple, not easy. Simple, but so many people are not doing them. Have a Shopify website? This could be implemented if you’re using Shopifier, as in the image above. Use a different platform? I bet you there’s 15 plugins that could do this in just a few minutes. Most of these have simple settings that have a built in “reward” system. What do they get? What do they share, what do they get?

Now, you need to make sure that when you’re creating your share images for after a purchase, that the reward is status elevating. That the message is status elevating. The best way to do that is something along the lines of, “I got you this deal.” Because remember, we all hang out with people who like the same things we like. So, if they’re making purchases, whether it’s

digital, whether it’s physical, whatever the product or service you’re selling is, more than likely the person who bought it has friends who would also like it. Because we hang out with people who like the same things that we like.

We have to reward them though. In the example above, the reward is 5% off for the person that you share it with, but they’re also incentivizing the person who share it because it feels good to get their friends a deal. When choosing the reward, you have to make sure the incentive is appropriate.

So, is that status elevating for you? Maybe it’s not status elevating, but you just made someone feel loved. Wow, I’m such a good person. I didn’t just make “someone” feel loved. Who did I make feel loved? Sandy, Sandy feels loved because I took two seconds. I went to Instagram, I know I’m supposed to go to Instagram because it tells me, and I just mention Sticker Mule.

Now, if they’re smart, the second that I did that they would reply and then move me down that advocacy curve, because that’s what we’re trying to figure out to do. Remember, what’s that triggering event? Well for Sticker Mule, they ought to be following social media anytime someone mentions that and shows a picture of their sticker. They should know that that customer is moving down that advocacy curve and they need to quickly ask for the next step. Remember, how do you perpetuate it? Sticker Mule has it figured out.

Stick a card in the box when you ship something and ask them at the second point of excitement to talk about their brand.

Step 2 – Encourage and Enable the Trigger

So, next you have to answer this question: how can you elevate your customer’s status and make them feel like they’re a part of something bigger by engaging with your brand? This is super important, remember, we’re not posting our “less than coach” experiences on Facebook for all our friends to see.

Let’s take a minute to talk about enabling promotion.

How do we do this? Create and promote a brand hashtag for your business. Hashtags are powerful. People like them. They’re silly and you can’t really always tell where one word stops and the other one starts. Who doesn’t like things like that? Ask for feedback, right? We’re enabling promotion because we’re moving them down.