Internet - The World Wide Web
Getting Your Customers To Do Your Marketing

Getting Your Customers To Do Your Marketing For You

The technologies of the Web give you powerful ways to encourage word-of-mouth referral business and make it even easier for those referrals to take place. Combining promotions that are a win-win for the existing customer and his or her friend will help your customer base grow without excessive incremental costs.

The advocacy or community stage of Web marketing is important from two perspectives. One is that this stage offers you an opportunity to create a feeling of community among past customers and Web site visitors. This feeling of community can create feelings of loyalty that transcend any temporary pricing or availability advantage your competitors might offer. By creating a feeling of community, you can encourage your visitors to become your advocates, making return visits to your Web site a regular habit, —as well as provide visitors to your Web site with the tools they need to recommend your business to an ever-increasing pool of new prospects.

More important, the advocacy stage offers the potential of changing your business model to take new advantages of the speed and information density that the Web offers. Rather than starting all over with a new business model aimed at the transaction stage, the community stage provides you with an opportunity to explore new avenues for safely evolving and transforming your business rather than “rolling the dice” and possibly losing everything by trying to embrace e-commerce too early.

Advantages of Referral Business
There are two main advantages to business generated by word-of-mouth referrals. First, similar to the previous reinforcement stage, the advantage of community marketing is that it offers you an opportunity to create something out of nothing. At the community stage, there is little obvious end-user demand. Your previous buyers are presumably satisfied. Yet, by approaching them during this period of relative calm, you can convert inactive customers, and their friends, into active buyers. Using e-mail and information, you can ignite an urge to buy where none presently exists.

Since e-mail and the Internet do not involve expensive telemarketing, printing, addressing, or postage costs, your pricing can be extremely competitive at this stage since your customer acquisition costs are so low. Instead of acquiring a customer by running an expensive magazine, newspaper, or television ad, your only cost is in posting a special page on your Web site and sending out e-mail to your previous customers directing them to send their friends to this page.

Second, word-of-mouth advertising benefits from credibility. Advertising is always viewed as, well, advertising. It is never completely trusted. This is in contrast to recommendations from a friend who has previously purchased from a firm. Because word-of-mouth recommendations are so trusted, prospects who visit your Web site or place of business are presold on your competence and professionalism. There is likely to be less price resistance or resistance to your recommendations. They’re easier sales, in other words, which might, in some cases, translate into higher margins.

Selling Tools
The starting point for converting customers into advocates is to think in terms of providing selling tools for your customers. This involves providing previous customers with both the selling tools they need to recommend your business as well as incentives that make it worth their while to recommend your business to their friends.

These selling tools might be as simple as e-mail announcements sent to previous customers that you invite them to forward to their friends. The e-mail would contain a link to premium content pages on your Web site that contain money-saving coupons.

The premium page of a restaurant could contain special menu items and allow two couples to eat for the price of one. Visitors would be invited to print out the Web page and bring in the coupon. Vacation destinations, too, could provide similar incentives for couples to invite along another couple.

Another example of advocacy in action would be e-mail sent to previous customers offering discounts or other incentives when their friends register their e-mail address on a special page of your Web site or make a purchase based on the forwarded e-mail. The key is to develop a system that makes it easy to track new visitors to your Web site who were recommended by a current customer and reward the customer for the recommendation.

* Source - Streetwise Relationship Marketing On The Internet
              Create one on one bonds with prospects
              and customers and keep them forever