Promote brand advocacy
A brand advocate recommends your brand and products, and continually returns to purchase from your store again and again. Advocates build momentum for your brand, as they promote your content and thus help you acquire new leads.
By activating their networks through word-of-mouth, brand advocates can bring down your marketing costs and increase revenue, sometimes without even realizing it. Let’s dive into how you can drive advocacy with a few concrete examples:
Delight VIPs
Create a VIP welcome flow with messaging that delights loyal shoppers. This is a great opportunity to share exclusive deals and ask VIPs what they love most about your brand.
Collect reviews
Automatically collect reviews from shoppers and reward them for submitting a review. Send clear follow-ups that thank them, share a discount, and provide additional support as needed.
Gain referrals
You can also grow your subscriber list with a referral flow. Integrate your referral and loyalty platforms with Klaviyo so that all of your data is in one place. Then, build more personalized messages that spur referrals, like this quick push notification to VIPs.
Drive advocacy through flows
Now that you understand the sheer power that advocacy can have for your business, let’s learn how to transition casual customers into long-term brand advocates. First, you must identify who among your customers may be a great brand advocate (e.g., a VIP). Then, set a series of flows live that encourage brand loyalty, including: review, VIP, and referral flows.
Automate a VIP welcome series
VIP flows nurture your most valuable customers. What you consider “valuable” may vary based on your business, but we usually define a VIP as someone who purchases frequently or who recently spent a significant amount on your store.
Below is an example of a VIP segment that includes those who has purchased from your store at least 3 times in the last year:
Next, use this segment to build a segment-triggered flow, welcoming loyal shoppers to a VIP community.
Goal: Reward and nurture valuable customer relationships.
Best practices:
- Thank them for their loyalty, letting them know that their support matters to you.
- Be transparent about what it means to be a VIP. For instance, if you offer special incentives for VIPs, such as free shipping on all orders, tell them when they reach VIP status. If you plan to send VIP campaigns for early access to products or exclusive offers, let them know to expect these rewards going forward.
- Include a survey in your flow to better understand what they love about your brand and what they’d like to see in the future.
Build this flow using Klaviyo’s pre-built template. Search for VIP in the flow library. Here’s a basic example of what a VIP welcome flow can look like for avid readers who shop frequently from an online bookstore:
Follow up with reviewers
Delight customers who leave a review with messages that directly relate to their feedback. In particular, make sure to follow through on any incentives you offered in your review request.
Pre-requisites: enable Klaviyo Reviews in your account before proceeding.
Goal: Follow up with anyone who leaves a review with relevant messaging.
Best practices:
- If you promote an incentive in your review request flow, deliver that reward once someone submits a review, regardless of if the review was positive and negative.
- Promote complementary items that the reviewer may be interested in.
- Provide support to low star reviewers (e.g., open a customer service ticket for them; or share details about your company’s return policy).
Build this flow using Klaviyo’s pre-built template. Search for review reward in the flow library. You have the option to choose from 2 possible review follow-up flows: one that provides a discount to reviewers and one that does not.
Acquire new customer referrals
Referral flows can have a variety of triggers, but their purpose is always to empower customers to market your product directly to people they know are interested. Thus, this flow will build brand awareness through word-of-mouth.
Pre-requisites: While you can encourage customers to refer friends directly through Klaviyo, if you’d like detailed reporting and the ability to send follow-up promotions (such as, "Give $10, Get $10") a third-party referral tool is highly recommended. Explore a list of tools that integrate with Klaviyo on our Tech partner directory.
Goal: Increase brand awareness and the number of first-time purchasers.
Best practices:
- Share information about your referral program in your welcome series, dedicated campaigns, on-site landing page, and more.
- Identify top candidates for referral messaging. For example, after someone leaves a positive review, you can trigger a flow to thank them and ask them to spread the word. Alternatively, create a segment of repeat purchasers and ask them to tell their friends about your brand via a segment-triggered flow.
- Build message content that feels personal and genuine; a text-only email can perform well.
- Keep your message short and to the point: thank them for their support and tell them how they can share your brand with their friends.
- Provide an incentive for submitting a referral and clear instructions around how to refer a friend (e.g., a link or clear referral code).
Because this flow requires you to use another tool outside of Klaviyo, you will need to build this flow from scratch. Use a metric-triggered flow that is triggered once someone submits a referral.