Tips for creating brand advocates with eCommerce email marketing

Positive word-of-mouth marketing can be difficult to achieve, but your brand advocates can help with this. There are many ways to build brand advocacy, and email marketing is one of them.

Here, we share our tips for creating brand advocates with eCommerce email marketing to help you implement this into your email strategy.

What is a brand advocate?

A brand advocate is someone who supports your business and promotes your brand through word of mouth. Several groups of people can be brand advocates, including your customers, employees, and business partners.

Essentially, you’re looking for people who will say positive things about your company, speak from experience, and are happy to share these thoughts with others. Brand advocates don’t always need to be incentivised. Still, if you’d like something specific, such as an honest review about a new product, you might like to send free samples to a selection of advocates in exchange for their feedback.

How can brand advocates help your eCommerce business?

Brand advocates are an important part of growing the reputation of an eCommerce business. They can share positive reviews, create user-generated content, and refer people to your website. Customers make particularly great brand advocates as they are unbiased, meaning that they’re trustworthy and anything they share will be honest.

Brand advocacy can also help to build a community among your customers and anyone else who interacts with your company. This makes people feel like they’re part of something and gives them a sense of belonging – both of which will create an affinity between them and your brand. Having a community that you can turn to for feedback is extremely powerful when it comes to future planning, especially when they’re returning customers who have lots of experience with your brand.

Building advocacy through email marketing

eCommerce email marketing is a simple, cost-effective way to distribute information and create your very own brand advocates. There’s a variety of ways in which you can implement this, so you can choose the options that best suit your brand.

Here are some ways to ensure that you can get the most out of your emails when it comes to building brand loyalty and encouraging people to spread the word about your company.

Provide value

As with all eCommerce email marketing, every communication you send must provide value. This can be achieved in many ways. Firstly, share information that your subscribers won’t be able to get anywhere else. This could be new product details, engaging company updates, or exciting industry news.

Providing value in your emails will help you to build brand advocacy as customers appreciate useful information and no one likes just being sold to, so make sure your content is a mix of value and sales. By giving something to your subscribers rather than consistently trying to sell to them, you’ll be seen as a credible company that people will be proud to advocate for.

Gather feedback

Asking your email subscribers for their feedback shows that you appreciate their opinions, which is another effective way to show them that they’re valued. Plus, gathering feedback will help you to highlight what you’re doing well, what you could do better, and anything new that your customers would like to see from you.

There are lots of ways to ask your customers for feedback as part of your email marketing strategy. You could provide a link to a form, create a poll that appears in the email, or direct people to a review page or one of your social media channels to leave their feedback. Positive responses can then be used as part of your wider marketing plans.

Refer a friend

Sharing a refer a friend program is a good way to encourage your subscribers to tell their friends, families, and social media followers about your brand. You don’t need to offer a huge incentive. It could be an increasing discount based on how many friends they refer, a voucher when they’ve referred a certain number of people or an entry into a monthly prize draw for every person they refer.

Refer a friend is something that you can promote across your email campaigns to ensure that you reach as many people as possible. You could have a dedicated footer highlighting the scheme, or a link to a refer a friend landing page on your website. Don’t forget to be clear about how they enter and how their referrals are tracked.

Share testimonials

Positive testimonials are priceless for any eCommerce company. Individuals are more likely to trust a testimonial from a loyal customer than they are a marketing message, so it’s important to gather as many as possible. Testimonials could be about one product in particular, the customer service you offer, a great eCommerce shopping experience, or even your company values.

You can ask for testimonials in your email communications and share them via this channel too. If you have a company newsletter, testimonials are a great feature to include – especially if you’ve been sent a customer photo to accompany their kind words. Photos help to break up email text but also add a layer of credibility.

We hope that you’ve found our guide to creating eCommerce brand advocates using email marketing helpful. We’d love to support you in building email campaigns that gather information from your subscribers and help you share the positive feedback, reviews, and content you receive.

For information about how we can support you and your eCommerce email marketing activity, contact us today. We can help you build email campaigns that gather information from your subscribers and help you share the positive feedback, reviews, and content you receive.

To discover more about the different ways in which eCommerce email marketing can positively impact your sales, take a look at our News page.