Improving your WooCommerce Store
We’re in a 30-part series on improving your WooCommerce store. If you’ve missed any part, here are the first three posts:
In each of those posts we’ve talked about engaging your customers – either bringing them or keeping them at your site. Today I want to share a simple tip for how to help your customers function as evangelists for you.
In other words, here’s how you can help your customers become effective word-of-mouth marketing specialists for your store.
Let’s get clear about your marketing challenge
The first thing we have to get clear about, when it comes to marketing and your store, is that most of what you write won’t be believable from the perspective of new customers.
This isn’t because you write bad marketing copy, though I know some people who do. No, that’s not the issue. The issue is that people have stopped believing marketing copy. They don’t believe you but it’s not because of you.
They don’t believe you because too many marketers have lied. Too many have used tricks – all kinds of them – to create ways to get people to click and/or buy, and everyone has learned to be extra careful. So we all step into new stores with a lot of apprehension and a baseline attitude of suspicion.
That’s your problem. We’ve all be programmed to ignore your marketing promises.
So if we won’t trust a store owner, who do we trust?
We trust ourselves. And since we’ve picked our friends, we often trust them (as a natural extension of ourselves).
So what you want, if you’re a store owner, is to figure out a way to leverage your customers to share the good news of your store with their friends.
Because while those friends won’t believe your marketing copy, they are more likely to believe their own friends.
And that’s where tip #4 comes in – use your customers to share the good news of your store.
Have you set up a WooCommerce Affiliate Program?
Some of you have never heard of an affiliate program. Let me explain it in the context of this tip. A WooCommerce affiliate program is one that allows you to create custom URLs for your customers so that they can share products from your store with their friends.
These custom URLs are tracked so that your system can either deliver benefit to the new customer (their friend) or to your current customer. It can be in the form of a discount for their friends, or a small payout to your existing customer (as a thank you for making the recommendation).
The affiliate program, like AffiliateWP, integrated with WooCommerce automatically and tracks every custom URL, plus every click, to see if a purchase was made and then takes the next step.
The good news is that if you’ve never set up an affiliate program, you won’t have to worry. AffiliateWP does its work behind the scenes – making you an affiliate guru without having to do a lot of work (and you’ll have to do absolutely no coding at all).
My favorite version of this tip
Several years ago my team was selling real estate agent software online. We put an affiliate program in place, but we never called it that. We called it the “Refer a friend” program. And what made it work was that we knew our customers were going to have to renew their own software the following year.
So we decided that for every friend they recommended (that resulted in a sale), we’d give them 20% of the sale as a thank you.
The result was a “Recommend our product to 5 friends and your next year’s license is on us” product promotion that went really well. Our customers looked good making a smart product recommendation, and they got to keep using the software for free the following year (saving them money).
Get AffiliateWP today!
The truth is you can buy a lot of different versions of AffiliateWP from their site. But I recommend the Pro version because of the Pro add-ons that come with it. You’ll want to check those out because there are some incredible features there that make the price tag worth it.
But regardless of whether you purchase AffiliateWP or you decide to use another solution, I highly recommend that you look into creating a simple way for your existing and happy customers to share the good news.