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Word of mouth is as strong as ever in today’s digital age. Recommendations from friends and family are the second most common way people discover apps. Moreover, personal recommendations are more powerful frames of reference since they are an individual testimony of why an app is worthwhile (or not). When it comes to marketing and recommendations, one of the best ways to increase your reach is to use tactics to increase your app’s virality. To make your users passionate enough for an app to go viral you must tap into and focus on your users’ emotions. Experiences that make people feel something, whether it is happy, sad, shocked etc, are the experiences that resonate with users. These are the experiences that they are most likely to share (whether in person or online) and talk about with friends and colleagues. Ultimately, you should consider your users to be potential brand ambassadors and aim to harness and empower this potential. A happy user has the ability to champion your app, give you rave reviews, and shout about it to everyone they know. It is important to understand how to create happy users, what incentives to offer and also how to transform unhappy customers into happy ones. Here are a few key tips:

Transform unhappy customers into positive brand opportunities

The first step to creating a brand ambassador involves listening to your customers, and providing stellar customer service. Acquiring users is just the tip of the iceberg for your app’s success, you have to give your customers a reason to come back. Specifically, the people who leave reviews are generally those with extreme experiences (whether good or bad). With stellar customer service you can turn the bad experiences into good ones by listening to user complaints, handling them appropriately, and then politely prompting the user to testify to testify to their good experience. This will allow you to transform your unhappy customers into a PR opportunity, thereby improving your brand image publicly and getting ahead of the competition. A happy customer can be encouraged to leave positive feedback and reviews on the app store and on social media. In addition, stellar customer service will help to ensure that customers keep coming back, and recommend your app to friends and family. It is also important to make sure your app is based on a service-driven business model. There is nothing worse than an unanswered complaint left to fester and damage your brand. Deal with them early.

Create compelling loyalty programs

Your main aim when it comes to your app is to nurture your users, increase their lifetime value (LTV) and ultimately make them more loyal, sticky and profitable. A great way to do this is to reward them for their loyalty. Monetary rewards have been found to be the most important rewards for members, and of the monetary awards, discounts were by far most important. Loyalty programs are a particularly effective tool for Millennials, and many Millennials admit that they would change where they shopped if it meant getting more rewards. When building a loyalty program it is also important to make it easy for users to share their participation with others easily (whether on social media or by simply and easily signing up friends and family).

Incentivize sharing

Understanding your users is key to making them passionate enough about your brand to share your content. Use interaction on social media, exciting competitions and gamification to keep your users engaged. A good example is Luminosity, which gamifies brain training and lets you track your progress against your previous efforts as well as those of others to create a sense of competition. It is important to make your users care about your stories, so stick to meaningful and powerful content and avoid “filler” stories. In addition, on a technical level, sharing should be incredibly simple. If it takes more than a few swipes or clicks to share content on Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp or other social networks, most people will simply give up and lose interest.

Surprise and delight your users

It may sound obvious but surprise and delight are often overlooked in favor of functionality or even security. And although functionality and usability are critically important, focusing on them does not mean that you should disregard the opportunity to surprise and delight users on an ongoing basis. To prevent this from happening, you can start by paying special attention to microinteractions. These are the small and seemingly “insignificant” interactions users have with your app when they switch screens, share a link or set a preference. Yet do not overlook these mini-user-experiences of your app; make them intuitive and match them to your users, and don’t be afraid to borrow from existing microinteractions that already work well. You should also be sure to personalize your app both on the micro and macro level. Users do not want to be treated as just another generic customer. A great way to do this is to add a bit of humor or a few surprises. Just think of all the bizarre questions and answers you can get from Siri that are above and beyond its functionality. For example, try asking “is santa real”, and see how Siri responds. Try applying similar wittiness to relevant instances within your app.

Create a habit

In Nir Eyal’s book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, he explains that the real way to increase engagement and capture attention is to tap into users’ habits and create behavior that is easily repeatable and leads to variable rewards. Hooked is a great book for practical insights into creating addictive and habit-forming user behavior and gives plenty of actionable advice on how to transform an app into a product that users love and are passionate about. The book analyzes the techniques used by some of today’s top brands such as Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest and is a must read if you want to transform your users into brand ambassadors.

Given the power of word of mouth in today’s digital landscape, every happy user has the ability to become a brand ambassador. Some happy users become brand ambassadors on their own accord, but many can be implicitly prompted by the valuable tactics outlined.

Have you employed any additional strategies to turn your users into brand ambassadors? We would love to hear the deets. 🙂

This article was originally posted on Product Maven’s.

How to turn your app’s users into brand ambassadors was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How to turn your app’s users into brand ambassadors

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