Nothing compares to your brand advocates. 

From leaving positive reviews, to clicking “Like” where it counts, to casually recommending your app to friends and family, these are the champions that are actively helping to move the needle for your brand. But if you need proof, here are a few reasons why advocacy is so important to every marketer’s quarterly goals:

  • The average social media user is connected to 600+ friends, family, and colleagues (SocialToaster)
  • 76% of individuals surveyed say they’re more likely to trust content shared by “normal” people than content shared by brands (Adweek)
  • A customer who is “totally satisfied” delivers 2.6x as much revenue as one who is “somewhat satisfied”  (Solution IP)
  • A loyalty increase of 7% can boost lifetime profits per customer by as much as 85%, and a loyalty increase of 3% can correlate to a 10% cost reduction (Brand Keys)

There are several tactics that you can use to inspire greater loyalty and lift your bottom line in the process. Here are four proven ways to convert average users into loyal advocates, and increase likes, shares, testimonials, positive ratings, and more for your brand:

Develop People-First Campaigns 

Loyalty and trust are deeply human responses to deeply human experiences. Customers have to feel strongly acknowledged, connected, and understood by a brand before they can ever become an advocate for one. They have to see the verifiable quality in your interactions with them, and experience the consistency of those interactions over time. 

For these reasons, it’s important to view your connections with customers as real relationships, just as you would a friend or a relative, and tailor every journey to fit that view. And like with any relationship, you’ll want to remember the little things—individual interests and preferences, favorite items, past behaviors, birthdays, anniversaries, and more—and use these data points to shape your outreach to them. Because any brand can say “Hi Debra!” but not every brand will remember that Debra’s favorite item just came back in season and she had a new user discount she still hasn’t used. Combine that with optimal send-times offered by Swrve, and you’re looking at a winning campaign.

Why does this work so well? People like to know that you care enough to pay attention to the smallest of details, and are actually using them to help make life a little easier. Swrve collects first and third party data in real time across systems for this exact reason—we want to help you support your customers in deeply relevant ways. And we’re not limited to only see the outer shell of a new event like other solutions; Swrve targets and triggers on granular details inside the event (like “searched for red leather shoes twice in May”) to achieve greater relevance across people-first campaigns.

Be Present for Every Milestone 

No one’s staying loyal to an app that can’t keep up with them in their times of need. The average person simply won’t wait for a brand to recognize who they are or where they are in their journey, let alone wait more than a minute for 1:1 service. 

For this reason, real-time responses are no longer an option. We live in the age of Amazon’s real-time and hyper relevant product recommendations, Netflix’s curated content libraries, Uber’s real-time driver locations and trip estimates, and Credit Karma’s in-the-moment credit score updates and personalized card offerings. Similarly, your brand must have the ability to register new events and behaviors in milliseconds, and react intelligently, in a way that truly delivers value, within the exact instance of customer interaction. This is the difference between a two-star app rating and a five-star one.

For enterprise brands with vast global audiences, being omnipresent in real time, all the time, can seem like a tall order, if not an impossible one. But with a solution like Swrve in your arsenal, it’s far from it. Our platform processes over 14 billion data points daily to allow brands to quickly send relevant links, rewards, discounts, updates, and more to the right users at exactly the right time. 

Reimagine Customer Satisfaction Surveys

You probably dislike surveys as much as your customers do. More often than not, teams are brainstorming ways to bribe customers into taking them, dangling a carrot via email that only ends up getting a 1% completion rate. There are two reasons why they’re such a pain for teams and customers alike: they’re typically delivered on an inconvenient channel at the wrong time. 

Advance your approach to collecting satisfaction insights using satisfaction surveys sent with real-time relevance. This approach helps brands gage the impact of their experiences exactly when a customer is most likely to engage. In practice, this can be an entertainment brand delivering a survey at the exact time a customer is leaving a concert venue, or a mobile game delivering survey as soon as a user completes a new level (or, conversely, goes more than two days without using the app), or an airline delivering a survey the very instance travelers arrive in a new city. It’s all about seizing opportunities with a quick and convenient way to gain feedback. And it’s all possible in Swrve.

Take a few cues from Swrve customers to optimize your request for ratings:

Act on a Customer’s Propensity to Churn

A wait-and-see approach to campaign performance simply isn’t within your best interests. Customers simply have too many options for you to “hope for the best.” When something’s not working to meet their expectations, you’re leaving the door wide open for them to leave and never return again. 

Having a way to measure the clicks, conversions, and traction in real time allows you to take action when it matters most to your bottom line. That’s why Swrve offers real-time performance assessments to help teams stay aware and up to date on all vital campaign metrics. In addition, Swrve uses machine learning to identify the mathematical patterns in your customers’ behavioral data, creating a churn propensity score for every customer in your app. You can combine these churn scores with other behavioral and contextual criteria to determine the best route forward in a campaign.

So let’s say you have a group of customers with high churn propensity scores who have not responded to your last two campaigns. With Swrve, you can easily target these users with a special discount and an exclusive invitation to your loyalty program. It’ll be a win-win: you’ll have successfully inspired them to make a purchase and opened the door to repeat purchases, and they feel more valued by your brand, which inspires greater loyalty down the line. 

Each of these tactics are sure to help you exceed customer expectations and drive deeper, more valuable loyalty to your brand. And if you’d like to see real-time relevance happening across journeys in action, sign up to join one of Swrve’s weekly demos today.