Word of Mouth Marketing: Examples and Strategies to Transform Your Business
Word of mouth marketing is a marketing strategy that encourages customers to share their brand experience with others.
Consider this scenario: David wants to buy a trekking backpack. He casually mentions this in a conversation with his friends, and they recommend a brand they have been using and are happy with.
He then decides to purchase a backpack from the same brand his friends suggest.
This is the power of word of mouth marketing.
Globally, around 88% of consumers trust recommendations from someone they know more than any other channel.
While you can use robust strategies to increase brand revenue, building customer trust and loyalty in modern marketing can be challenging.
With word of mouth marketing becoming the new social media platform, here are strategies and examples to raise your brand reputation, build consumer trust, and influence your business results.
What is Word of Mouth Marketing?
Word of mouth marketing (WOMM) is the buzz and brand awareness created when your existing clients share their brand experiences with others, influencing their decision-making.
This type of marketing is the unscripted and genuine conversations that happen between people, whether in person, on social platforms, or other marketing channels. WOMM is typically spontaneous, which makes it a more reliable form of marketing than regular brand communication to build customer trust.
You can use email marketing, social media marketing, or any promotional tool to stimulate word of mouth.
Benefits of Word of Mouth Marketing
It’s easy to assume that WOMM is associated only with interpersonal communication. In reality, word of mouth marketing can be integrated into any form of marketing to enhance organic growth. For example, Neilson Group’s survey shows that host read ads in podcasts had a brand recall of 71%, increasing purchase intent, trust, and recommendation intent.
WOMM is highly influential and drives people to act, because:
- It builds customer trust and credibility: People are more likely to trust recommendations from friends, family, and peers than brand messages. Since WOMM comes from genuine experiences, potential clients tend to perceive your brand as trustworthy.
- It’s a cost-effective marketing channel: WOMM empowers existing customers to talk and share their valued experiences with the world. The costs of such are pretty low or – nil.
- It offers exponential reach: A single happy and valuable experience from a customer has the potential to go viral and attract like-minded prospects. Viral marketing is also known as word of mouth marketing, and can amplify social media and email marketing reach.
- It increases customer loyalty: When customers strongly feel about your brand and recommend it to others, it boosts brand credibility and increases repeat business.
- It enhances conversion rates: Word of mouth marketing leads to positive first impressions about your brand, increasing the likelihood of higher conversions.
- It boosts online visibility: User-generated content, social media mentions, and positive reviews contribute to better brand visibility and engagement.
Consumers can share their opinions and experiences for various reasons, such as to help their loved ones make the right choice or benefit from a brand incentive.
From a marketing perspective, understanding the intentions behind people’s positive or negative word of mouth can be challenging — but not impossible.
Let’s start with the psychological principles that govern WOMM.
The Power of Word of Mouth Marketing
People indulge in a chain of information before making a purchase, often relying on other people’s unfiltered experiences to guide their decision-making. And word of mouth isn’t exclusive to the advertising and marketing industry — for example, 70% of Americans depend on the advice of others when going to a new doctor.
To truly harness the power of word of mouth marketing, it’s essential to understand the psychology behind why people let outside information influence their purchase decisions.
There are a few possible scientific explanations for why WOMM works:
- Customers are more empathetic: Word of mouth arises when consumers feel the need to provide the correct advice to their loved ones, altering their consumption behavior.
- It simplifies decision-making: Many consumers trust their near and dear ones enough to let them make a choice. It also avoids the process of research and information overload for these shoppers.
- There’s more trust in familiarity: People are naturally drawn to familiar surroundings, things, and people. Word of mouth marketing can increase a sense of familiarity, guiding users to trust the information coming from their pre-existing relationships.
Word of mouth marketing is beyond facts and figures — it involves emotions and empathy.
Many users share positive reviews, centered around real life stories and examples, stirring fear of missing out (FOMO) in many prospects.
This is a key differentiator when comparing traditional marketing methods and WOMM.
Effects of Word of Mouth Marketing vs Traditional Marketing
Businesses usually aim to provide the best possible customer experience to retain existing clients and convert leads. While the usual ways of marketing, such as content marketing or social media marketing, can be effective, WOMM relies on peer-peer conversations, making it more unique.
Let’s examine the aspects that make traditional and word of mouth marketing different.
| Aspect | Word of Mouth Marketing | Traditional Marketing |
|---|---|---|
| Source of message | Consumers | Brands |
| Control over influence | High | Low |
| Cost | Low | High |
| Reach | Potentially high, but unpredictable | Wide and measurable |
| Credibility | High | Considerably low |
| Speed of spread | Rapid, especially with social media | Slower |
| Measurability | Difficult to quantify | Easier to measure with KPIs |
| Target audience | Specific and niche | Broader when compared to WOMM |
| Long-term impact | High as it builds trust and credibility | Moderate and depends on campaign effectiveness |
With WOMM, consumers are entirely in control of the information and marketing channel, making it an effective tool. Like any traditional marketing method, WOMM has key components that come together to produce a positive impact on potential clients.
Key Components of an Effective Word of Mouth Marketing Strategy
Consumers do not generally have a commercial interest in spreading the word about your products or services. Yet, they do the marketing for you. In this case, how does your brand return the favor?
You can use the following components to increase impact and make customers feel more valued:
- Exceptional customer service: Consistent problem-solving correlates with brand reputation and consumer trust. Exceeding customer expectations can spark interesting thoughts and conversations about your brand.
- Genuine brand communication: Often, customers can sense if a brand genuinely solves their problems or is just trying to sell. Honest and transparent brand communication increases customer trust, retaining more of them.
- User-generated content: Acknowledging and engaging with people who share their content can encourage them to share their views with the world.
- Referral and loyalty programs: Offering an incentive for sharing their stories urges more consumers to partake in WOMM.
- Community building: Hosting events, creating forums, or engaging in two-way communication can foster a sense of community.
- Memorable brand experiences: People are more excited to talk about experiences that are unique and engaging. Creating fun and memorable product experiences can persuade more consumers to talk about your brand.
Combining these 6 components can encourage natural conversations about your brand. You can also use different types of word of mouth marketing to turn more of your consumers into brand advocates.
Types of Word of Mouth Marketing
Word of mouth is a broader term, and can be positive, negative, experiential, electronic, intentional, organic, or amplified.
The table below demonstrates the types of word of mouth marketing that generate buzz and influence consumer behavior.
| Type of Word of Mouth Marketing | How it Works |
|---|---|
| Organic WOMM | This type occurs naturally, when people share their experiences without an incentive or advantage. |
| Email marketing | Sending reviews and testimonials through emails can enhance customer relationships and encourage them to spread the word. |
| Buzz marketing | This type of WOMM stirs excitement amongst customers through different campaigns. |
| Referral marketing | It incentivizes customers to share their brand experiences. |
| Social media marketing | It builds a community and shares customer reviews and testimonials. |
| Viral marketing | This type of marketing relies on quick spread of messages and meets marketing goals. |
| Blogging | Consumers may publish their reviews and testimonials on their websites or other blogging platforms. |
| Emotional marketing | Messages focus on specific human emotions, urging customers to respond positively and share their stories. |
Organic word of mouth might be the hardest to achieve and take more time since no incentives are involved. However, you can still highlight the specific benefits of collaborating with your brand.
We’ll review more of the strategies in the next section.
Amplifying Word of Mouth Marketing: 6 Key Strategies
Consumers are exposed to anywhere from two hundred to a thousand sales messages a day, according to a study by Silverman (2001). Now, if your prospects were to make a purchase decision, they would likely prefer a friend or family member’s recommendation rather than commercial communication.
Rather than leaving WOMM up to chance, show empathy and creativity by using any or all of the strategies below.
1. Use Word of Mouth Triggers
Triggers are anything that makes your customers feel special or taps into their emotional senses. For example, you can set up emotional triggers, such as joy, by encouraging customers to share their best moments with your brand.
Additionally, incorporate sales storytelling in your emails. Sending consumers a brief brand history or interactive emails with an incentive can maximize the chances of participation and word of mouth.
There are varied triggers, and we’ll review the main ones in the table below.
| Trigger | Element | How to do it |
|---|---|---|
| Emotional | ‣ Surprises ‣ Joy ‣ Anger ‣ Sadness | Offer unexpected and delightful experiences, such as inviting a celebrity to your product launch. |
| Cognitive | ‣ Novelty ‣ Problem solving ‣ Curiosity | Highlight solutions and include interesting stories in your WOM campaigns. |
| Social | ‣ Social proof ‣ Community ‣ Sharing | Provide an opportunity for consumers to connect with others. |
Ensure to provide exceptional customer experiences that will make your brand memorable.
2. Target Opinion Leaders Through Advertising
Testimonials given by famous people or industry leaders are respected and trusted better. Advertising can be an effective marketing channel to reach opinion leaders and urge them to share their thoughts.
Based on your audience’s needs, get testimonials from big names in your industry. For example, if your target audience loves to play sports, collecting testimonials from key sportspersons can instill trust in your brand.
Using celebrities in your campaigns is another form of stimulating influence. Some companies choose to endorse celebrities, while others use their CEO or president to alter consumer decisions. Including the founder in your campaigns shows your brand values, customer satisfaction, and loyalty.
3. Encourage User-generated Content
UGC promotes the idea that something is more desirable because other people like it. Social media holds terrific potential to encourage more customers to post their content by running giveaways or sharing incentives.
Provide clear instructions so people don’t send random content, making your brand look pushy. You can also develop a hashtag for an exclusive event or product launch and encourage users to share content by using it.
4. Give Customers Something Great to Talk About
Whether it’s inviting a former president to your VIP event or sponsoring pajama parties for the customers, doing something unique will have more people talking about your brand.
For example, if you run a beauty salon, you can offer food, music, and soft drinks to customers who visit. This elite experience will make customers spread the word about your unique brand services.
5. Deliver on Your Promises
If you promised free shipping in your promotional email but failed to deliver it, customers will likely have a negative brand image. Generally, negative word of mouth is the result of poor service, poor product quality, or misunderstandings with consumers.
Ensure to satisfy customer expectations by firmly sticking to your promises and delivering them on time.
6. Set Up Feedback Channels
Ratings and reviews are the new word of mouth. Encourage customers to share their positive feedback by rewarding them. Collect and display reviews and ratings on your websites, social media accounts, and online marketplaces.
Allow creativity and empathy to guide your word of mouth marketing strategies. If you need more inspiration, check out our list of WOMM ideas next.
Exciting Word of Mouth Marketing Ideas
Sometimes, staying in tune with the current marketing trends can be daunting and lead you to face higher competition. However, when you know to respect people’s time and emotions, they are more ready to share their brand experiences.
Use these 8 word of mouth marketing ideas to create a great name for yourself:
- Host unique events: Create immersive event experiences to draw more customers in and help them share their encounters with others. Adding personal details to each customer interaction can go a long way in helping you achieve your WOMM goals.
- Incorporate guerilla stunts: Whether it’s drawing sidewalk chalk art or flying drones, offer memorable experiences, so people immediately start talking about your brand.
- Send unexpected gifts: Beyond email coupons, delight your loyal customers with surprises tailored to their preferences. For example, a skincare brand can send newly launched product samples to its active customer base.
- Create a unique unboxing experience: Creative packaging can urge customers to post stories about their unboxing phase, enhancing your brand reputation. Include eco-friendly packaging to highlight your brand beliefs and principles.
- Host challenges and contests: Create engaging hashtag challenges and persuade customers to post using the hashtag. You can offer a prize for the most creative entry.
- Make a limited-edition product: Use scarcity to your advantage by releasing a limited-edition product. People who got their hands on your product first will likely share the exciting news with their social media followers and family.
- Set up a pop-up store: Allow customers to engage in person with your brand by setting up a unique pop-up shop. For example, an ice cream company can create an ‘Ice Cream Museum’ with Instagram-worthy installations and encourage people to try their new flavors.
- Bring back old campaigns: If a specific campaign garnered more love, bring it back with a twist. For instance, a snack brand can bring back a discontinued flavor and ask customers to share their happy moments.
Real-world Word of Mouth Email Marketing Examples
A good word of mouth marketing strategy is social, respectful, and evergreen. The below email examples are straightforward and incentivize customers to improve word of mouth.
1. Sundays — Customer Review Email
Sunday’s word of mouth review email example is the perfect way to get explicit love from customers. The email starts with an adorable puppy image and moves to compelling email copywriting. It finally rewards the customers for writing an honest review.
You can mimic this strategy to incentivize customers without sounding pushy. Ensure to follow proper email branding and be in sync with your brand personality.
2. Barrista & Co — Free Gift Email Example
Barrista & Co uses plain email campaign templates to grab the customer’s attention. The white background and an envelope with a black circle intrigues customers to check out the gift.
This is a classic example of encouraging word of mouth through emails — the brand uses personalization and interactive elements to make the customer’s experience memorable.
3. Verso — Survey and Poll Email Example
Verso, a skincare brand uses effective word of mouth emotional triggers through email marketing to accumulate responses. The email begins with a skin care image, urging customers to join the brand’s skincare journey.
The email then points to a question, allowing people to track back their progress with skin care and share their journey with others. The email survey helps the brand record product performance, while helping respondents understand their skincare progress.
Sending different types of emails to convince customers to post their thoughts can help, but it’s equally important to track your word of mouth marketing efforts.
Measuring the Impact of Word of Mouth Marketing
Monitoring word of mouth campaigns will provide a glimpse into customer preferences, product performance, and an overview of customer expectations. Overhearing customers online and offline can help you highlight specific product attributes, increasing customer loyalty and revenue.
These 8 metrics and tools can help you assess your WOMM results:
- Net promoter score: This metric measures customer loyalty by asking them how likely they are to rate your brand on a scale of 1-10.
- Social media mentions and engagement: Track how often your brand is mentioned in social media platforms along with the engagement levels (Likes, shares, comments, hashtag uses).
- Referral traffic: Monitor the traffic that comes to your website or landing page through links shared by customers, blogs, or social media.
- Customer reviews and ratings: Review the ratings on platforms such as Google, Yelp, or Amazon.
- Viral coefficient: Measure how fast your existing customers bring in new customers. It shows how viral your product or campaign is.
- Share of voice: Analyze your brand mentions and compare them to your competitor’s using social listening tools.
- User-generated content: Measure the content created and shared by users on different marketing channels.
- Customer retention and loyalty metrics: Monitor retention performance and compare them after implementing WOMM strategies.
Combining quantitative metrics such as social media mentions and qualitative metrics like review sentiment can give you a comprehensive view of your WOMM performance.
Campaign Refinery and Word of Mouth Marketing
Campaign Refinery is a reliable email marketing platform offering the highest email deliverability rate on the market. After helping thousands of happy customers achieve higher revenue, we still believe in good words from clients and the positive impact they create for our business.
We have helped numerous email marketers and businesses of all sizes with:
- A 600% increase in inbox placement,
- A 72.76% increase in email engagement rates.
Our satisfied clients were kind enough to show us appreciation and support by dropping their genuine thoughts.
Word of mouth marketing is a powerful and credible medium to grow your business. Whether it’s sending a survey email or gifting your loyal customers, our pre-made email campaign templates speed up the process.
You can then measure the impact of your WOMM through our birds-eye-view analytics dashboard. If you need help with technical aspects of email marketing, our team is available 24/7 to assist you.
Amplify your reach with the best deliverability and powerful email marketing tools — apply to join us as a customer today!
