Mindset
It starts with us choosing not to see this as a challenge, but rather, a missed opportunity for those prospective customers who have yet benefitted from your products or services. You see, there’s a reason why you have your current customers— it is because you are providing something of value— and delivering to their expectation. So if your current customers are buying from you, why not those in their network?

Keeping Your Promises
How do customers perceive your brand today? Are you meeting expectations? Does your product or service spark joy? Are your customers actually expecting more? If so, deliver them! This is because your customers is giving you the permission to play in that space— to live up to those expectations. Deliver and win them (and their friends) over. Failing to live up to your brand promise on the other hand is a surefire way to lose that trust very quickly. In this day and age where consumers are spoilt for choice, your authenticity and ability to gain trust and credibility are more important than ever. They not only serve to differentiate you from your competition, but it also promotes loyalty and advocacy.

Next Steps
As mentioned above, one of the keys to unlocking new customers from your existing ones is to first make sure you are consistently delivering on your brand promise, as perceived by your customers. The way to determine that is is through what is commonly known as a Voice-of-Customer (VoC) Satisfaction Survey. VoC is a great vehicle to gather qualitative feedback from your customers about their experiences. Using an eCommerce business as an example, you may want to conduct a VoC survey at different points of a customer’s journey. Here are some of the most common use cases:

• chat support (Did support manage to solve their problem? Was the experience pleasant?)
• website and ordering (Was it easy to find products? Is the site intuitive? Were they able to complete the primary purpose of their visit?)
• post-purchase/delivery (Did they have to wait long? Were there adequate prompts from purchase to product delivery?)
• product (How are they loving it?)

You many use tools like Survey Monkey or Jotform to help you create the survey, but here are some specific questions to ask:

How satisfied are you with the product you’ve ordered from [your brand]?

How likely are you to recommend [your brand] to a friend or family member?

Follow by:

What is the most important reason for the score you selected?

Now that you’ve conducted your survey and collected some responses, what are they telling you about your brand, product and service? Do you have adequate statistical significance (at least 5% of your total customers responding to they survey)? And if so, did you get at least a 7.5 in satisfaction? If not, what were some of the common pain points experienced by your customers?

Once you are able to determine those and when you are on your way to at least a 7.5 in CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) score, it’s time to ask for the referral!

Referral Marketing
Depending on your business model, you want to create a referral program that is a win-win for both your referrals (existing customers) and you. For example, is a “Give $X, Get $X” program suitable for your business? It depends. Do you have sufficient margin to afford such a program? Do your customers prefer to be more discrete about it? For example, some customers can be incentivised to refer, but they want to be able to stay anonymous. How do you accommodate that? A poorly designed referral program may also be subjected to abuse (e.g., customer referring themselves in order to get a better offer).

One thing to note is there will always be abuses but the trick is to keep the abuses and associated lower than the overall revenue/profit the program brings.

If you own an eCommerce site today and need help driving more customers using your existing database, talk to us.

Written By : Edward Lim ( Principal Consultant for Data Analytics)