Word-of-Mouth Marketing

Imagine your friend buys her clothes from a particular brand and she blabbers about how that brand offers amazing clothes at affordable prices. You would trust the word of her mouth and even though you haven’t ever bought from that brand, you will give it a try because you trust the word of mouth of your friend. This is an example of word-of-mouth marketing in the physical world. In a virtual world or we could say in the world of eCommerce, word-of-mouth marketing is done via customer reviews, organic social callouts, and influencer marketing. 

When a buyer who has bought a product from your eCommerce website gives feedback about it on the internet, it indirectly influences the decision of the visitors on your website to buy from your store, this is what is referred to as word of mouth marketing.  The reviews are very important to every eCommerce store. 

Imagine you want to buy a product from a website that you have never bought from before, wouldn’t you scroll down the webpage and read how the other customers have reviewed that product, and won’t those reviews influence your decision of buying from the website? That is how important word of mouth marketing is for eCommerce stores, you can lose or gain customers based on it. 

Types of Word of mouth marketing

Word of mouth marketing can be done in two ways -

• Organically - Here your customers are really happy with your product and naturally end writing positive reviews about it on your website. Sometimes the customers are so satisfied with the product that you have sold them that they post on social media platforms about how happy they are after buying from your store.
  

• Paid Targeting - You can pay influencers to market your products on their socials, which will attract their followers to your website.
  

Benefits 

Word-of-mouth marketing can be very beneficial to your business and thus its importance must not be overlooked. It not only helps you acquire loyal shoppers and organic brand ambassadors but it also helps you increase the sales of your eCommerce website organically. Reviews and ratings, reward programs, influencer marketing, awesome customer service, surprise gifts, etc. are all parts of word-of-mouth marketing. 

Word of mouth marketing helps in creating awareness about your brand which is majorly achieved by viral content that creates a hype about your products in the market among the customers. 

Netflix uses this strategy to tap its users into binge-watching trends by strategically launching full seasons just in time for the winter holidays and creating the kind of content that people talk about.