From Awareness to Conversion – Acquisition Communities

So far in this series we’ve highlighted Employee Communities, External Social Networks and Support Communities.  Today we will focus on Acquisition Communities; a term we use at AvectraLabs. This community type may also be called Prospect or Lead Communities.

The purpose of the Acquisition Community is simple: Conversion. This approach is to generate awareness of your value to prospective customers, capture their information (with approval), engage them to connect with you in your community, with the ultimate goal of customer conversion.

The term “customer” is interchangeable with words such as Member (for member-based organizations), Donor (for fundraising or advocacy), and Employee (for recruitment efforts), etc. The key element of an Acquisition Community is not to launch a community with an existing user base, but to build it through external engagement efforts.

Here are a few specific steps you may choose to guide you through the process:

Step 1) Build Awareness

External engagement efforts may include a series of campaigns to build awareness and drive recruitment to your community. The most popular external campaigns include Social Registration and Sign On. This effort involves building awareness to a prospect with meaningful content publicly accessible on your website, blog or Facebook. The prospect then interacts with the content with either a comment, rating, survey response, or any other opt-in exchange.

Step 2) Capture / Register User

Before the interaction is complete the user must connect their Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter account and in doing so authorizes your community to capture their information and registers them as a user. Keep in mind this happens seamlessly to the user, as they never leave the website they’re currently visiting. In the background you have registered the user in your community, captured their social interests, photo, and inserted demographic data into your CRM.

Step 3) Engagement

Now that you know a few things about the user including their social interests via social integration, their recent interaction with your content, and most importantly- how to reach them on their terms; you can begin the engagement process. The key here is keeping it conversational and relevant. By this time, you understand your audience to some degree; you know what they like, and are clued in as to why they are interacting with you.  Make them feel at home on your site; stay focused and encourage participation.

The first contact is not the time to sell.  It’s a time to excite and reach out. Make your inquirers feel special. Get them to like you by offering something of value.  Be creative, passionate and inspirational throughout your interactions.  Ask questions – start a conversation. After a few points of contact with your audience, you can invite them to participate or get more involved in a campaign on your website with a business goal of conversion.

Step 4) Conversion 

Conversion can be a few things… a request for information, an agreement for a sales call, filling out a full community profile, or inviting other friends to participate in the internal (acquisition) community. Regardless of the conversion, you must focus on the means to your end (conversion). If at this point you've done a good job of engaging and creating rapport... don't blow it with a typical hard sale. Keep your goal and the campaign clear and simple to the user. Reward and/or recognize them for successfully completing your conversion goal.

Some other references we like here at Avectra include:

• www.involve.com. See the Walmart facebook page. Embedded within the Walmart face book page are acquisition-like widgets that have an online community behind them.
• eBay has found they increase conversion rate of transactions when their users are community members vs non-community members.
• Another good article with examples about lead-communities here by Paul Chaney (@pchaney).

A few other considerations to this Social Registration / Sign On / Acquisition approach is about privacy and disclosure. The method behind our approach here requires you to fully disclose what data you are accessing, and what you plan to do with this data. As you probably know, most people don't read the Terms and Conditions or Privacy Policies. That's the scary thing. Personally, I give assent to my info being used and abused left and right, just to have access to the latest web app or the ability to save a few seconds of logging in with a separate password. There are some moral and ethical issues here. For example what if the user disconnects their Facebook account from being linked to your community? Does that mean you have to delete and remove the data? There's a lot of gray lines here and this issue will certainly become a much more important one as access to our data becomes more prevalent and our control over it diminishes. Can we really trust the vendors to do the right thing?

I know Avectra spends a lot of time and thoughtful energy in considering the avenues, ways and means to ensure the protection and privacy of our users' data, but not all companies do so. Avectra has an immaculate reputation of earning our customers’ trust because of our high standard of reliability.

Hopefully, these few tips have challenged you to build a solid foundation for your Acquisition Community.   

No doubt a valiant effort will require some long hours and hard work... 

Gordon B. Hinckley once said, “You cannot plough a field by turning it over in your mind.”