Empower Your Best Customers

How exciting would it be if you could bottle up and share the excitement your best customers have for your product/service/content?

This year advertisers have more ways to empower their customers than any point in history.

People who love you most, your ‘Raving Fans’, can share their passion with each other (and potential customers you’d like to meet).

Tony Hsieh of Zappos.com Empowers His Customers

Tony Hsieh was already a wildly successful Internet millionaire when he started Zappos.com, an online shoe retailer, in 1999.

Tony says:

I’d rather spend money on things that improve the customer experience than on marketing. We run the warehouse 24-7–it’s not very cheap or efficient, but it allows us to get the shoes out more quickly. We have a 365-day return policy with free shipping both ways.

That’s just the beginning of empowering Zappos.com customers.

Tony authors a blog that is open for comments.

He uses Twitter to answer questions, complaints, and messages of thanks.

If you’re a Zappos.com customer with something to say, the company empowers you from the very top of the ladder.

Make a Bold Move to Empower Customers

YouTube and online video are growing in popularity and more users are creating their own homemade videos.

You can give customers an inexpensive video recorder to shoot their own testimonials and real life examples of how they use your product or service.

Here’s how to do it:

Buy 10 (or one, 100, or 1,000) video recorders for less than $200 a pop.

I own a Flip Mino because it’s ready to use out of the box, has no cables or cords, and includes the YouTube uploading software inside the camera.

Give your raving fans a tutorial describing how to use the camera and encourage them to have fun shooting real life interaction with your product.

You can upload videos to YouTube and share them across the online universe in display advertising too.

I understand empowering your customers as giving them a voice to share their love for your business/product/service in a way that is fun and irresistible to them.