Original article: Practical Ecommerce

If you haven’t already done so, now would be a good time to start thinking about a customer driven marketing approach. Prospective customers continue to remain skeptical about their purchasing limits and will require more persuasion to convince them otherwise. The nice thing about having a customer driven approach is that it’s completely affordable, it reassures other customers who are unfamiliar with your product and it lets your existing customers feel empowered. We’ve had success in using a couple of these methods to sell our services to clients on our website. Below are 4 examples of how you can take advantage of your companies greatest asset, your customers:

1. Customer Testimonials/Interviews/Case Studies

Sharing positive reviews will help reassure great quality and satisfaction in customer experience.
In turn, there will be a better chance someone will make that transaction instead of clicking away. In our studies , we learned that getting a second opinion is a large part of the decision making process. By remedying the insecurities a shopper might have while picking between products, testimonials can help push them in your favor.

Take for instance Highrise, an online CRM application developed by a company, 37signals. Their website is full of quotes, testimonials, and even video case studies. These different forms of customer feedback serve to communicate how “people like me” are happy customers. So happy, that they were willing to spend the time to tell others how happy they are with the product. 37signals also provides a great blog entry on how they produce the video case studies on their site. It’s a great starting point for those looking to differentiate in that sense.

Zappos has approached customer testimonials in a number of different ways that will be also be covered in the other sections as well. Just focusing on testimonials, you will discover Zappos supports both textual and video testimonials. There isn’t anything displayed for their video testimonials just yet, but their list of textual entries goes on for miles. At a glance, all I can see is love, and that’s a good thing.

“Yay for me and more yay for you!!! Love, love, love you guys!” Susan T

Scan your emails for this kind of response, or ask your customers a couple weeks after they have made a transaction for a testimonial. There isn’t a definitive number that will indicate a tipping point in your volume of responses, but I’d wait to gather at least 10 before posting any to be on the safe side. Having the 10 will be more compelling for others to submit their own than seeing just 1 or 2.

2. Customer submitted photos

Help others visualize how your product exist in the real world.

Threadless.com didn’t always have photos of their T-shirts taken by nice digital SLR cameras with well lit backdrops. Before it was their diehard fans with small point and shoots who wanted to reenact the shirt’s design in real life. The evolution has shown how much people care about the production level of this kind of marketing.

Each photo contains a gallery of everyday people who show off their beloved shirt in their homes as a happy camper. These are people who we can relate to in photographs. In a way, it shows what the product is like under realistic terms. The result is setting the expectation of what the product will be like once the person gets it. What makes this work well is that all the people wearing the T-shirts are very happy people who obviously are happy with their T-shirt. It’s an authentic experience that many people can relate to.

3. Customer generated videos

Outsource your creativity to those who love your brand as much as you do.

Video Link
The popularity of video has worked its way into the world of commercials where the tools required to create and distribute have become as easy as writing an email to grandma. By encouraging your customers to produce this kind of creative work, you begin to have marketing material that comes from your customers themselves! That’s a huge step beyond the testimonial. Producing a video shows care, loyalty and authenticity that engages viewers on a deeper, emotional level.

A fan by the name of Nick Haley created a video using materials from the Apple website, and produced a short commercial for the iPod Touch that now has over 2 million views on YouTube. The video was so successful that Apple officially bought and adapted it from the freshman student’s original version, which is essentially the same thing. “User-generated content owes part of its popularity to the age group’s increasing agility at working with video and audio tools at home to mimic what television studios and advertising agencies do for hefty fees.” [http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/11/business/ads.php]

4. Setting Tags or Keywords

Encouraging a common set of keywords will help your customers know how to link to you. Whether your customers are on Twitter, Facebook, blogging or Flickr, you can make it easier for everyone to talk about the same thing and find it. Each one of the above listed sites all share a common control, the use of keywords, or “tags.” These tags in a way help categorize the conversation they are having online. For instance, if someone has updated their status on Twitter that’s positive towards your company’s customer service, they can add a tag “acmecompany” to it so others know that it’s in context to your business. Here’s how it works:

Twitter and Facebook use a tagging system where the tag itself (your company or product’s name) proceeds a “#” symbol. These are called hashtags and have grown to become the de facto method of categorizing status updates. An example would be

“Love the customer service. Quick, easy to work with and friendly! #acmecompany.”

Similarly, social media sites like Flickr and Delicious can use both hashtags as well as regular tags – without the “#” – to assign a category.

By providing a controlled set of tags for your customers to use as the “official” tags, all the feedback becomes much more findable, traceable and ultimately helps boost your business’ SEO.

Dangers and risks in giving customers control

There are however, dangers and risks involved by entering into a customer driven approach. The control you previously had now becomes partially reliant on what your customers say. In some examples, you may not want everything that people say on the website. It will take time to understand the kind of media your customers are generating (if at all) and how that will impact your business’ brand. For each of the above examples, carefully look at what already exists out there and take care in managing the communication your customers have once you have decided to engage.

Skittles is an extreme example where they have given complete control over to their customers in their online marketing where each “page” of their website is a window to a social media site. All video content is a result of their YouTube page, while their “friends” are a result of their Facebook page. Twitter users took advantage of this approach and created a site that brutally ridicules the company for their intrepid move. Users uploaded photos and wrote status updates that no company would have wished to be associated with. So again, tread carefully.

In our experience, having customers tell the story of our research findings, especially through video, has been invaluable in our business when convincing clients. They feel much more engaged and excited by the time the reel ends. I hope that you find similar successes in your business using a lot of the exciting web technologies that continue to evolve every day.