How to Turn Customers into Loyal Brand Advocates

As a website owner, there’s a lot you can do to promote your business. However, two thirds of your audience are unlikely to trust anything you say about your own products or services.

That’s where brand evangelists come in. If you can convert your fans into enthusiastic ambassadors, they’ll do all of the hard work for you – and likely get far better results.

In this post, we’ll discuss what brand evangelists are and why they’re important. We’ll then show you how to turn fans of your product, service, or blog into brand advocates. Let’s get started! 

An Introduction to Brand Evangelists (And How They Can Benefit Your Business)

Despite the religious connotation, today the term evangelist has expanded to mean any person who is a particularly loyal customer. Regardless of whether you’re running a WordPress website, preparing to launch a clothing line, or trying to find new customers for your restaurant, evangelists can be invaluable. 

As a business, every conversion is a success, but evangelists are in a league of their own. Evangelists are loyal fans who will always choose you over the competition. These long-term customers are essential for ensuring that your venture thrives. 

Even better, these enthusiastic supporters are happy to mention your business to others. There’s evidence to suggest that a recommendation from a friend or family member is far more persuasive than celebrity endorsements, review sites, or advertising. In this way, evangelists can help grow your business and earn you additional sales. 

Given their willingness to engage in conversations about your products, many brand evangelists are eager to interact with you on social media and in comment sections. They may also be happy to share your content with their own followers. All of this can generate invaluable organic advertising and create a buzz around everything you do. 

How to Turn Fans of Your Product/Service/Blog into Evangelists (10 Ways)

Whether it’s singing your praises on social media or recommending you to their nearest and dearest, brand evangelists are your most loyal customers – and your most effective marketers. With this in mind, let’s look at how you can inspire devotion in your target audience. 

1. Understand Your Audience

Evangelism starts with happy customers. If you’re going to provide a five-star experience, it’s vital that you have a deep understanding of your target audience. 

You can analyze the people who visit your site using a tool such as Google Analytics. This can help you learn more about them, including their geographical locations, how they arrive at your site, and the content that holds their attention: 

If you have a Facebook page, this platform provides lots of information about your social media followers. To access this data, navigate to your business page, scroll to the Insights section, and click on See All:

This will take you to the main Insights dashboard, where you’ll find a wealth of useful data. For example, you can learn more about the people who are viewing your page and interacting with your content:

Once you have this insight into your audience, it’s a good idea to create a customer persona. This is a fictional representation of your visitors. 

With this persona in place, you can design all of your content to appeal to that specific user. This is a simple but effective way to provide a consistently positive customer experience.

2. Ask for Feedback

Just because your audience is silent doesn’t mean they’re satisfied. In fact, 91 percent of unhappy customers leave without raising a complaint.

With this in mind, it’s smart to actively ask your audience for their feedback. This will enable you to identify any potential issues before you start losing fans. By continuously evaluating and refining the customer experience, you can maximize your chances of transforming casual visitors into enthusiastic brand evangelists.

The good news is that 76 percent of consumers are happy to review your business – all you have to do is ask. There are lots of ways to request customer feedback, but many businesses send follow-up emails after a successful conversion. Here, it may help to use an email automation platform such as MailPoet:

It’s also a good idea to monitor your Net Promoter Score (NPS). This is a one-survey question that asks respondents to rate the likelihood that they would recommend you to a friend or colleague. 

You can ask this question in the form of a popup that appears whenever someone visits your site. In this way, visitors can send you invaluable feedback with the click of a button:

You can add a NPS popup to your WordPress site using the Measure NPS block. In your WordPress dashboard, simply navigate to the page or post where you want to ask this question, and insert a new Measure NPS block:

To view your results, navigate to the Crowdsignal website and sign in using your WordPress.com credentials. You can then click on the View Results button to view your NPS score:

On this screen, you’ll find a report displaying your overall score, completion rate, and the number of responses you’ve received. You can analyze individual submissions by selecting the Participants tab. 

3. Interact With Your Customers

One of the most effective ways to convert customers into evangelists is to build a relationship with them. Fortunately, social media means that it’s never been easier to make this connection. 

By continuously interacting with your followers across social media, they’ll start to feel that they have a personal connection with your brand. It’s important to ensure that your interactions are always positive. This may involve trying to solve a customer’s problems, liking their comments, or posting an enthusiastic response. 

Depending on your target audience, you might even use humor to make your brand appear more approachable:

You can also build relationships with your audience by encouraging them to submit User-Generated Content (UGC). This is any content that’s created by a person who isn’t an official representative of your business. For example, you might encourage your visitors to submit guest posts, or to tag you in photos featuring your products:

You might even request UGC as part of a social media contest. For example, you could challenge your audience to submit a recipe featuring your cookware products. You may even ask for something completely unrelated to your brand, such as a photo of the customer’s furry friend in celebration of National Pet Day:

By promoting this UGC on your site and social media profiles, you can make your customers feel acknowledged and valued. In addition, if your audience sees lots of positive UGC, it may improve their perception of your brand – and perhaps even encourage them to become brand evangelists themselves. 

As an added bonus, all of this UGC can boost your conversions. According to a study by TurnTo Networks, 90 percent of consumers claim that UGC influences their purchasing decisions more than email marketing and even search engine results. 

4. Build relationships with your customers

Relationship marketing is a must for building customer loyalty. By speaking directly to customers on social media, sending customized email messages, networking offline, and hosting in-person events, you’ll begin to build meaningful relationships. That’s the first step in converting your audience to brand advocates.

But remember, building relationships takes time. You don’t become best friends with someone overnight; similarly, you won’t create an army of advocates after just one networking event or email campaign.

5. Incentivize your audience

Some brand advocates are happy to recommend your business without any additional incentives—their genuine excitement is all that motivates them to talk up your brand to their family and friends.

But many customers need an extra incentive. To encourage more people to become advocates, incentivize loyal customers by offering discounts. You can also create an online contest that could drum up excitement about your brand and bolster your word-of-mouth marketing.

6. Connect with influencers

Influencers are also a useful tool when it comes to brand advocacy. If the word “influencer” makes you think of A-list celebrities who earn thousands of dollars per Instagram post, think again: some of the most valuable influencers aren’t the most famous.

Look for influencers in your niche who are already talking about your brand, and find ways to deepen relationships with them. For example, if your company creates organic pet treats, look for influencers who are already raving about your treats on their blogs or social media pages. Influencers in your niche can become your most valuable brand advocates, even if they have modest followings, and can help spread the word about your business to their audiences.

Brand advocates are a major boon to any business so when communicating with advocates, or with any customer, remember to always be genuine. By building relationships based on honesty and sincerity, you’ll earn your customers’ trust and their advocacy for the long-haul.

7. Reward Your Best Customers

Everyone likes to feel appreciated, and your customers are no exception. Social media interactions and UGC contests can prove that you see your audience as people, rather than potential sales. Most customers will also enjoy being rewarded for their loyalty.

A tangible reward can give happy customers the final nudge towards becoming enthusiastic evangelists. These rewards can be long-term and ongoing, such as loyalty programs where the person receives points for every purchase. They can then redeem these points against a purchase, or they might even unlock exclusive resources once they’ve reached a certain threshold:

Other rewards might be one-offs. For example, you might offer customers a discount for renewing their subscriptions. 

Depending on your business, it may make more sense to reward actions that don’t involve making a purchase. For instance, if you run an online forum, you might acknowledge your most engaged members with a badge that they can proudly display on their profiles.

Making your audience feel special may be as simple as acknowledging their birthdays. This small act can convince customers that you see them as people and not just dollar signs. 

Tracking dozens or even hundreds of birthdays doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, you can use a modern email platform such as Mailchimp to automate the entire process.

Essentially, anything that makes your audience feel special or sets them apart from the crowd can help promote evangelism. This can be a grand monetary gesture or a simple email – or anything in between. 

8. Practice Five-Star Customer Service

If you can improve your customer service, then you should notice a reduction in your churn rate. In fact, almost 70 percent of churn occurs due to poor service. Therefore, providing five-star customer service is vital for the success of any business. 

However, it’s also the most direct contact you have with your audience. This means it’s the perfect opportunity to convert consumers into brand advocates. 

When it comes to delivering excellent customer service, speed is everything. According to studies, 82 percent of consumers expect a response within ten minutes.

In an ideal world, everyone will have the resources to run a 24/7 customer service hotline, but this isn’t always feasible. The good news is that there are alternative ways to offer around-the-clock support.

Many blogs, websites, and businesses produce a wealth of self-help resources. This may include engaging blogs, video tutorials, knowledge bases, and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):

Your customers can access these resources at any time of the day or night. There’s even evidence to suggest that many people prefer to search for the answers themselves, rather than reaching out to a live sales representative. In fact, 40 percent of consumers now prefer self-service over human contact.

In addition to self-help resources, you may want to consider using a chatbot. By adding a chatbot to your WordPress.com website, you can ensure that your audience always has a minimum level of customer support. 

There’s various WordPress chatbots to choose from, including the Tidio plugin. This popular chatbot is mobile-friendly and completely customizable:

Alternatively, you can build your own bot. This may sound complex, but there are services to help you out, including HubSpot’s marketing plugin and the Botisify platform. 

9. Display testimonials from your customer advocates

Certain WordPress.com themes boast a testimonials feature to showcase customer satisfaction right on your site. You can filter through themes to find ones that contain this feature under the Feature tab by clicking Show all.

Ask satisfied customers or clients for permission to display their names, images, occupations, and locations. For maximum impact, ask them to share the following information:

• Their situation and why they used your products or services
• Any of your direct competitors that they considered, and why they decided that you were the best option
• How your product or service specifically solved their problem
• Any additional benefits they noticed from using your products or services
• A call to action encouraging others to try your products or services as well

10. Create useful content that’s easy to share

One surefire way to get people talking about your brand is by giving them something to talk about. You can do this by writing consistent, quality content that’s relevant to your audience. Get them involved in the process by requesting questions that you can answer through blog and social media posts.

To increase your exposure, use the social media buttons that are built into most WordPress.com themes. You can add them manually by using the social icons widget.

Conclusion 

Today’s consumer tends to view advertising and marketing in a negative light. The good news is that this suspicion doesn’t extend to brand advocates. If you can successfully level up your loyal fans, they should have no problems winning over your target audience.