Every company has evangelists — customers that fully believe in the service that you’re providing and will gladly do their part to help promote it for little or no compensation. Evangelists will post talk about you Facebook and Twitter, they’ll mention your company to their friends and family, and they’ll talk about you in forums and blogs. These super-customers are the best possible marketers for your company, much better than anyone you could ever hire. Identifying these customers is absolutely critical in today’s world of social media dominance and word of mouth marketing.
5 Tips For Finding Your Evangelists
1. Review your email campaigns.
Email service providers like Mailchimp provide pretty decent statistics about which of the users on your mailing lists are actually opening your messages and clicking your links. Specifically in Mailchimp you’ll want to look for 4 and 5 star users. These are the users who are most engaged with you and your message. If you have a lot of 4/5 star users then you can just focus on 5 stars. This will vary a bit depending on how many contacts you have in your lists and the amount of interaction that you get. Other mail service providers should have similar reporting, so you should theoretically be able to find your evangelists with them as well.
2. Check your customer support ticketing system.
As a normal part of your customer support process you should keep track of exceptionally satisfied customers. Anyone that says they would like to be notified of future promotions or sales should be noted as well.
3. Monitor your survey results.
Similar to #2, if you send out customer satisfaction surveys then you can identify the customers who are most enthusiastic about what you’re doing. These will be customers who answer your survey very positively and volunteer their contact information to you.
4. Social media monitoring
Do you consistently see a few users talking about your brand more than others? These users can be invaluable in helping you spread your message through Facebook, Twitter, etc.
5. Give a little something back
Since these are your top-tier customers you should consider giving your evangelists some sort of gift when they join your new mailing list. A gift card or something along those lines. These customers would most likely join your list for nothing, but there’s no reason no to reward them. The value they can bring to you over the long-term will be far greater than whatever cost is associated with giving them a thank you gift.
What’s Next?
Once you’ve identified your evangelists you should try to pare them down a bit. Make sure that the users that you invite are going to be the absolute best that you can get. This is definitely an instance of emphasizing quality over quantity. I can’t imagine any company needing more than 50 evangelists. You should start a mailing list, separate from your regular lists, just for evangelists, and invite your chosen few to join it. Always make sure you allow the evangelists to signup for the list themselves, using a double opt-in process.
In future articles I will talk more about how to utilize your evangelists.
Do you keep a list of evangelists for your company? How do you leverage your evangelists? Comments welcome!
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