
9 Examples of Customer Appreciation Strategies for Ecommerce Brands
When you expressing your gratitude as a brand, your customers feel more valued. Here are 9 ways to thank your customers while building loyalty and word of mouth!
Why do people share? It's a more complicated than you might imagine.
As retailers and entrepreneurs, it's all-too-easy to reduce sharing to a simplistic, mechanical function that customers "will simply do". And we would be completely wrong. There's a reason why word-of-mouth marketing is the best and most trusted by consumers.
The New York Times' Customer Insight Group did a study on the Psychology of Sharing [PDF Link] and identified the 5 following motives:
1. To bring valuable and entertaining content to others
2. To define ourselves to others
3. To grow and nourish our relationships
4. Self-fulfillment
5. To get the word out about causes and brands
At ReferralCandy, we put together a SlideShare to help you think more deeply about these motivations. Keep scrolling for a textual summary!
The New York Times Consumer Insight Group worked together with Latitude Research to understand why consumers share content online. The process combined in-depth interviews, a weeklong sharing panel and online surveys for quantitative analysis.
The broad conclusion? Sharing is all about relationships.
In the modern context, there is an incredible amount of content, media sources, and distractions all competing for attention. Within this context, sharing becomes a form of information management, by curating the most valuable or relevant content, or by endorsing a particular brand or source.
Editor: We created an infographic with over 40+ successful examples of brands who generated effective word-of-mouth marketing. Click the thumbnail to check it out!
When the information is shared, it benefits the relationship by improving our social standing or by providing utility to the network. And, in fact, the interplay of these motivations results in six personas segmented by the New York Times research:
As a short summary:
Sound familiar? This has strong echoes to Jonah Berger's work on the psychology of word-of-mouth, as well as the principles behind word-of-mouth advertising and why customers talk.
The report concludes with recommendations and key insights for brands to influence sharing:
Think of these 5 motivations, and the goal of nurturing relationships, as starting points for evaluating your customers' desires.
Your product and your content has to resonate well with at least one of these motivations before your customers will share.
An easy way to help customers share about your brand or business is to incentivise sharing with referral rewards, offering cash or discounts for purchase. Get set up in minutes a referral program for any store.