Your fans are involved in dozens of transactions every day, online and off. Whether it’s grabbing coffee before work, buying a movie ticket, or picking up groceries, transactions are constantly occurring.
Most order processes are the same – a mundane sequence of entering personal information, selecting a shipping speed, and getting a verification email a few seconds later.
As a word of mouth marketer, this should set off an alarm.
With thousands of companies doing the exact same thing, a single innovative or quirky variation to your order process could make the difference between a company that creates conversations with their fans and a company that doesn’t.
Start out by highlighting one or two aspects of your order process that could be retooled. You don’t have to reinvent the system — take a look at your return policy, online interface, or packaging to see if there’s something you can change to make it remarkable.
How a word of mouth supergenius does it:
College students love Chegg for their cheap textbook rentals, free shipping, and eco-friendly business philosophy.
Chegg believes that renting a book instead of buying it new helps save trees. This isn’t just their corporate mission statement, the company actually functions around this core value. For every book they rent, they plant a tree in return.
As the customer finishes their transaction, Chegg presents a world map and asks the customer to pick a country or region to plant their tree in. It’s a simple, visual way of engaging during the transaction process and giving back to the community at the same time.
Customers can then tell the world what they did by linking their Chegg transaction to their Facebook profile or Twitter account.
