All store owners want to build long-lasting relationships with our customers. We're all looking to boost SEO, and we're all looking for for more referrals.
We've developed a unique approach to accomplishing all three at once.
This is a tactic that was inspired after listening to a podcast with Neil Patel on the podcast Smart Passive Income. We've put our own spin on it and it's worked incredibly well for us in the past two months. We hope you implement this and find value in it.
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Tracy and I run our own e-commerce stores on Shopify. One of them is Mermaid Pillow Co (www.mermaidpillowco.com) where we sell sequined mermaid pillows that come in 15 different colors.
Like many store owners that launch a new e-commerce store, we couldn't even be found in the first 20 pages of Google or any other search engine when we went live in March. Our only traffic came from running Google and Facebook Ads campaigns, which drove a few sales, but we knew we needed a strategy for driving organic (free) traffic.
So in June, after listening to the podcast mentioned above, we created our own strategy. In just two months it's significantly boosted our SEO, drove thousands of organic referrals and dozens of sales, and strengthened our relationship with our existing customers.
Specifically, we jumped from Page 25 in Google to Page 1 over the past few weeks, and we're getting better each day. (Update 8/14/2016: We now rank between position #5-#8 for "mermaid pillows" in Google and seem to bump up 1-2 positions every two weeks.)
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Here's what we did: We simply interviewed our customers.
We would ask our customers 4-5 questions about the product they purchased: why they purchased; how they use it; where they use it; and we would ask them for a couple photos.
Here's a copy of the email to one of the customers:
Then we'd take the customer's answers and photos and copy/paste them into a blog post. We would then take a quote from the article that contained our keywords (mermaid pillow) and this would become the title of the blog post/interview.
Shown below is the blog post we created based on Tammi's email above - it's titled "My grandchildren love mermaid pillows..."
Finally, we sent a link of the blog post to the customer. In every case, they loved it.
Naturally, customers began sharing their interviews on Facebook, Twitter and even their own personal blogs. To encourage this, we sent follow-up emails to each customer simply asking them the following:
"If you liked the write-up we did on you, would you mind sharing it on Facebook, your blog, or your favorite social media platform? To this day, every single one of the customers has shared their article.
Here are the results:
1. Loyal customers. We've created more loyal customers. Many of them re-purchased immediately after we posted the blog. Many of their friends and family members have since purchased. Many of them have asked if we could interview them for our blog.
2. More Referrals. We've received thousands of new visitors to our store because of the links our customers have shared to their interviews from Facebook, Twitter and their blogs.
3. Better SEO. This has created dozens of inbound links from Blogs, Facebook, and Twitter which has helped push us to the first page in Google in about 3-4 weeks for our keyword mermaid pillows.
But maybe the biggest benefit of all us this:
In the process of doing this we have learned so much about who are customers actually are and why they buy our pillows. This has helped us better identify our audience and narrow our marketing to target a very specific audience.
We encourage you to give it a try on your own store. If you have any questions please feel free to email me (tomsailors@me.com). I'll be posting a follow-up article detailing exactly how we accomplished everything above, and why it takes us less that 20 minutes to post a customer interview from beginning to end.