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13/11/2013 by
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3 Ways To Automate Your WOM Marketing With Social

Running an eCommerce site isn’t for the faint hearted. WOM and Social Marketing, are a few of the components which need to be managed at any one time.

Running an eCommerce site isn’t for the faint hearted. There are a number of components which need to be managed at any one time. From stock control to partnerships with suppliers, the work never ends. Thankfully when it comes to marketing your online business, there are ways to automate certain aspects of your word of mouth marketing. In this story I will cover 3 different ways you can automate your word of mouth marketing. <h2>1. Outsource your social marketing</h2>

From stock control to partnerships with suppliers, the work never ends. Thankfully when it comes to marketing your online business, there are ways to automate certain aspects of your word of mouth marketing. In this post I will cover 3 different ways you can automate your word of mouth marketing.

1. Outsource Your Word of Mouth & Social Marketing

automate social media

Working with a social media agency or virtual assistant is one way to free up valuable time and in affect automate your social media marketing.

Most business owners are hesitant to the idea of outsources social media marketing but time is money and a virtual assistance from India or the Philippines is much cheaper on a per hourly or per job basis than the average Westerners hourly income, plus you will free up a few hours each week where you can concentrate on building your business.

I highly recommend that you have whoever is assisting you with this use Buffer for both publishing and scheduling posts to your social media accounts.

One of the cool features that Buffer has is a way to highlight text and post it with Buffer. You can have your virtual assistant use this feature to share mentions of your brand on your social profiles by simply highlighting mentions on Twitter, Facebook and other locations and scheduling them as posts via Buffer.

Another great tip is to use IFTT and create a recipe that whenever a tweet or post is sent with a specific hashtag, to save the post in Evernote. This way you can see exactly which posts are being shared and collect a list for your own record.

2. Turn Product Reviews Into Social Reviews

One of the best ways to leverage word of mouth as an eCommerce site is through the use of social reviews. Social reviews are product reviews which can be shared to social networks for added exposure to drive new traffic to your site.

The best social reviews solution out there for eCommerce sites is Yotpo which not only helps eCommerce sites generate tons of product reviews, but makes it easy to use these reviews to increase traffic and sales.

A service like Yotpo will help you convert your customers into reviewers and make it easy for them to share these reviews to their friends and family on social networks.

A product review that is shared either by the reviewer or the store owner could be seen by tens of thousands of people as it spreads throughout the social network. When the reviews are clicked, the person who clicked the review is taken to the relevant product page and this may lead to a sale.

There are a number of ways to get your customers to write product reviews for you:

  1.  Let your existing customers and social communities know that they can write reviews of your products via your site.
  2. Incentive them with coupons (built in feature of Yotpo).
  3. Create a dedicated page on your site that contains all your reviews and include the reviews widget so visitors can write their own reviews.
  4. Feature your best reviews in a dedicated blog post and on your social networks – this will indicate to your fans and followers that they might be shown to the whole community if they write reviews of your products.

 

3. Set Up Automated Email Flows For Your VIP Club Members

email automation

There are a number of automatic email services like customer.io and Vero that you can use to set up an email funnel for customers that join your VIP club.

By automating this process (and through clever A/B testing) you will be able to increase return visits to your site, overall engagement and ultimately more word of mouth. Make sure you are treating the customers that join your club like gold so they will be more likely to spread the word about your amazing club.

I recommend setting up multiple flows and splitting them among your members. This way you will be able to understand which flow works best and overtime you will optimize your flows to maximize their impact.

This method is not yet widely used by eCommerce store owners so get going and set up your first campaign today.

What About You?
How do you automate your marketing activities? What pros and cons did you find and what are the results?

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About The Author
Justin Butlion is the Content and Social Marketing Manager of Yotpo. Justin loves to blog about eCommerce, online marketing, web development, and entrepreneurship. Check out his latest posts in the Yotpo blog or contact him directly at [email protected].

Images courtesy of Brandmanagement.com, Pardot.com and blog.muhive.com.