What should we all be doing as digital marketers?

PANIC! Is the first word that springs to mind if you believe the press and all the doom and gloom, house prices falling by £100k in an hour, £80 gazillion of handouts for desparate bankers and free office space for those poor hedge fund managers. What is the world coming to?
Well, back in the real world, we all need to eat, albeit in a slightly more frugal way, clothe ourselves, again conservatively and actually have some fun, obviously not too much though.

But, what does this actually mean though for those of us in the digital space.

Well, its simple, we have to attract interest over and above all other mediums (Print, tv and radio) and set ourselves aside from the competition. Then we have to make sure those punters that have come to our site don’t disappear at the site of a checkout. So we have to make sure the proposition is fit for purpose, priced correctly and does what it says on the tin when it is delivered.

Now here is the rub, what most of us do at this point is fire and forget.

A  customer who has just bought from you has just entrusted you with their time, personal details and money. If (and it’s a big if) they are happy with the purchase, why not ask them to tell someone about it. For many reasons advocacy seems to be a bit of a dirty word, perhaps it’s the British stiff upper lip or bad technology or just lack of appreciation of how powerful getting existing customers to recommend you can be.

So, lets cover off the first thing, the stiff upper lip. At these times (i.e. recession) the one thing people want is something for nothing, and there is nothing more powerful than Marks and Spencers vouchers. Don’t ask me why, they somehow have more appeal than straight forward cash and are more convenient to send to clients as a thank you. So, if you are looking to reward customers for recommending your goods or services, use some sort of voucher scheme – they are also cheaper than the cash alternatives!

On to the second reason NOT to reward advocacy, technology. There simply is no reason why this has to be a barrier, unless you are still using DOS and a 3 page site showing the head of IT smiling on the front page! A simple advocacy schem can be a simple as sending an email after the purchase and saying pls forward this on to as many people as you want and for every purchase that uses the click through and buys something, you (Mr Customer) will get rewarded. Although open to abuse, as long as you factor the cost of acquisition in to your marketing plan, let people abuse it, a £10 CPA is a lot cheaper than a £50 one from an affiliate. Second method is to make this more complex and some sort of refer a friend within their account page can be used. So the customer journey would go something like this. Customer purchases the goods, you send them an email with a link to their account, on the home page of their account, there are 5 email boxes which allows them to fill in their friends email address. You then send an email with a unique code, if they click and buy you reward the original referrer.Simple.

The third element is really the hardest to quantify, UNTIL you have tried it. As ever the beauty of the web is try before you buy, suggest to senior management that this is a good idea, trial it and see the benefits.

There is of course the less direct approach and that is to do with customer reviews, but that will have to wait until next week.

Notes to editors;
Chris Carter is an industry expert in e-marketing and available for consultancy, radio and TV interviews on the power of the web. Chris has worked as a senior ecommerce professional in Barclays, Royal Mail and Investec.