You have the best customers on the planet who love using your products or services and who, if prompted, will be more than happy to share their joy and satisfaction with others. When potential customers consume stories from joyful and satisfied customers, it builds trust and helps convert them to buyers too.
Once a person becomes a buyer and your customer, they can, in turn, do the same thing – thus bringing you even more like-minded customers into your marketing funnel.
The truth is, using customer stories to build trust is a no-brainer that you need to start doing. Thankfully, you can make the process of encouraging the stories, collecting the stories, and using the stories mostly automatic once you know how.
· Create a Survey – For every single freebie, product, or service, develop a short questionnaire or survey that you send to them automatically via email after they’ve had enough time to use their purchase or experience your service.
· Set Up a Landing Page for the Survey – Set up the questionnaire or survey on a landing page, and send the link to your customers. Using a landing page is beneficial as it looks professional and allows you to cross-promote more of your content and products to them.
· Develop an Autoresponder Series – Using your email autoresponder service, set up an email series to start making them think about the benefits of using your product or service, including tips to make it easier for them to implement it. Finally, after enough time has passed, link them to the survey.
· Segment Survey Participants – When your customer does click through and answer the survey questions, ensure that you segment them. This way, you know they did it and can send them other information, such as inviting them to higher-level events, interviews, webinars, and more.
· Set Up One-On-One Interviews – The people who answered the survey who are highly satisfied customers can be turned into fans by inviting them to participate in a series of case studies where you interview them and talk about their success. Hint: These are the people you also want to invite into your affiliate program.
· Collect and Publish the Stories – When you do collect amazing stories and experiences of your customers, don’t keep them to yourself. Share them on your blog, share them on your sales pages, share them on social media, and run ads using their stories as the basis of the ad.
· Promote the Stories – It’s not enough to just publish the stories. Make sure you also promote all the content you’ve generated through the process on your blog, on guest blogs, in magazines, newspapers, webinars and so forth. Let everyone know about the stories.
· Repeat – For every single new customer you earn, do it all again. When you automate the system, it’s going to be a lot simpler for you to collect the information. All you’ll have to do is check up on it and publish it as it’s received.
Most of your customers will be happy to answer questions and be interviewed when they are thrilled about your products or services. However, you’ll probably get a lot more response if you find a way to incentivize them such as by offering discounts, referral commission, or other methods to encourage them to share their stories of success.
The more you make story collection part of your process, the more successful you’ll be in collecting, publishing, and promoting them to help you build up trust.