The Best Way to Reach New Customers is Through Their Friends & Family
For nearly half of consumers (45%), the first time they hear about a retailer they’ve never purchased from is through friends and family, according to a new study by Yes Marketing.
You may be spending vast amounts of getting your message across to as many new consumers as possible. But when it comes down to it, the best advocate for your brand isn’t an influencer face-of contract or a megabucks marketing campaign, it’s an ordinary consumer who’s already a brand fan.
In “The Retail Shopper’s Journey to Loyalty,” Yes Marketing surveyed over 1,000 retail shoppers and found that word-of-mouth recommendations significantly outweighed other sources, including product review sites (8%), influencer recommendations (4%) and news sites (2%) when it comes to driving brand awareness.
This can work negatively, too, with 69% of consumers having avoided shopping with a retailer they’ve never purchased from before because of negative feedback from family or friends. The findings indicate that building trust and goodwill with customers early on is crucial for marketers.
Yes said that this means building trust early on is crucial but how do you do that? Well, “comprehensive product information and message relevance” are among the top factors that build trust with a new retailer. Some 36% of survey respondents said having enough product information is the number one driver of trust in retailers they’ve never shopped with before.
Yes CEO Jim Sturm said: “To win over sceptical customers, retailers must convince consumers that their products are valuable and that their brand is trustworthy, especially in industries like luxury goods, home furnishings and electronics where the price tag is higher and consumers purchase less frequently.”
Interestingly, a third of consumers (33%) say relevant brand messaging is the most influential marketing factor when choosing to purchase from a retailer for the first time. Across channels, 32% of consumers say they receive marketing messages too frequently from retailers they’ve purchased with, and more than a third (36%) say they receive too many emails. Only 7% felt that they receive marketing messages too infrequently from retailers they’ve purchased with.
Credit: Yes Marketing, WGSN, Rafel Bestard