10 Steps to Turn Top Customers into Brand Advocates
- Laura Henderson
- Feb 4, 2020
- 4 min read
Updated: Aug 14, 2020
The Unconventional PR marketing channel is often a haven for untapped potential that most business owners or marketing leaders underutilize. It takes a little legwork, but can result in a huge spike in retention and customer lifetime value. And these techniques are not just for B2B customers that often expect personal interaction. Perform these steps with your top B2C customers and watch how impressed they are. Quickly you will be creating brand advocates and benefiting from peer to peer recommendations and free advertising.
First Things First
Who are your top customers? You have to know who they are before you can enact the steps to turn them into a customer for life. A good rule of thumb is to download or create a customer list of your top 100 customers (you can keep it to 50 if your business is young or your average product value is very high). Determine the list based on customer order revenue over a period of time. Depending on the age of your business, repeat purchase rate, or the seasonality of your products, you may want to set the time frame to multiple years, one year or just the current season.
Include on the list per customer any relevant historical or personal data you've previously collected such as contact information, order volume, order dates, product preferences, etc.
Tip: If you have the data to calculate the average lifetime value of your 100 Top Customers, do so. This data is an important motivator when it comes to justifying any time and effort you spend cultivating the relationship with your top customers.
Unconventional PR Steps that Work
These steps are generally performed by a sales or customer service team or anyone that is both familiar with your brand's services or products and comfortable communicating with your VIP level customers. You can choose to do some or all of these steps over a period of a few weeks or months; the more you do, the stronger your relationship will become with these customers and the more success you will have in building long term customers and brand advocates.
Personally call and get to know each customers on the list. This call can be as simple as a quick call to introduce yourself and thank them for being a valued customer. It may also include a question to gain any important feedback such as "How was your last order experience with us?" or "Is there anything we could be doing to serve you better?" Note: It is important to review the customer's order history or status prior to the call to prepare yourself for any questions the customer may ask you.
If your business uses any segmentation survey questions generally asked during the customer account set up process that remain unanswered by the customer, be sure to ask the question while you have them on the phone and update that information in your system or on your list.
Make notes of any feedback they offer or additional data collected during the call.
Mail a personal thank you note to each customer. Include a special promotional gift or sample product if possible.
Study the list or keep it on hand, so that if any of these customers call you can recognize them immediately. Many CRM or account tools will do this work for you and flag accounts as top or VIP accounts.
Offer these customers a special phone number or email that gets special and expedient attention.
During the holidays or your peek season, personally call them to ask them if they have any special order or delivery needs. This can be coupled with a special promo/coupon code for a discount on their next order.
During the holidays, send a hand written holiday card with a gift card or special promo code.
Go the extra mile for them any way you can; with special pricing, order processing upgrades, promotional discounts etc.
After you take these steps to strengthen the relationship many of your top customers will have already spread the word about how much they love your brand and how attentive your customer service team is, but it never hurts to ask. Offer each customer an affiliate status/code or a referral bonus if you have the ability to. If not, call each customer and ask them to share your brand with others that they feel would benefit from your products or services. Follow up with those that agree sending them a branded email that they can easily forward on to their contacts. Offer them a store credit or special discount code on their next order in advance for doing so. Not only are you highly likely to gain new customers but almost assuredly another order from a continued happy and top customer.
Tip: When using promo codes, be sure to use unique codes so that you can track the effectiveness of your Unconventional PR efforts. Reporting and analyzing the code usage over time will also give you great insight into the engagement trends of your top customers.
One more thing
Now that you have all this great feedback from your most valuable customers, don't just let it be words on a screen or page. Make sure you respond accordingly and make applicable improvements or adjustments within your business. If you gain any significant time or cost saving insights from a particular customer, be sure to send them a personal thank you note/gift.
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