Customer evangelists are a business marketing person’s dream. Customer evangelists love your product, your service and your company. They tell everyone they know how they cannot live without your widget or service. Customer evangelists become your unpaid sales force. What’s not to love? Unfortunately, back here on earth, these angelic customers do not always let you know that they’re your raving fans.
Business owners and business marketers must (sigh) work to uncover these enlightened human beings (customers). But this is your lucky day! Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users blog has a terrific, comprehensive post on what to do and what not to do when finding/nurturing your customer evangelists. I agree with Kathy 200 percent on how not to find/nurture customer evangelists. Read her complete post (and list of useful comments) for great insights on dos and don’ts for recruiting evangelists.
Kathy talks about not ever paying someone to evangelize about your product—a complete no-no in our, emerging be authentic-or-die economy. She points out importance of giving your evangelists tools to spread the word. On the topic of tools, you must meet Betsy Weber (Betsy’s blog is here), who recruits customer evangelists at TechSmith. They’re a small, progressive company (makers of Purple Cow-cool Screen Capture product, Snagit) that has mastered the art of authentic care and feeding of evangelists. Here is a post I did with Betsy Weber’s 5 Tips for Creating Customer Evangelists. Enjoy!
Has anyone out there found other tips or tools when recruiting evangelists? I’d love to hear them.
Absolutely true. Each client that you can convert into an ‘evangelist’ or ‘raving fan’ is worth more to the marketing of your business than just about any other effort you can make. Give phenomenal service.
Thanks, Dawud. Any ideas how you can most easily recruit raving fan customers into evangelists? Do you ask them to refer you to others? Or do you wait for your raving fans to become evangelists in their own time?
Cynthia