15 Brands Reveal Their Secrets to Creating Lasting Customer Relationships

March 17, 2022

The Hawke Method is here and Erik and the Hawke Media team couldn’t be more excited for you to read it. This book is a culmination of all the years of experience, hard work, and trial and error, not just for Erik, but for the Hawke Media team and all the partners who made this book possible.

We are excited and honored to thank all the partners that made The Hawke Method possible, with decades of combined wisdom between them all.

If you haven’t picked up a copy of The Hawke Method, do so here! The book is on shelves now and we are excited to get to share it with you.

While you wait for your copy to arrive, we’ve pulled all the best nuggets of wisdom dispensed by our partners in the book. Each partner shared a tip that falls under the three principles of marketing that Erik centered his book around. They are:

Awareness
Nurturing
Trust

Our partners had unique perspectives on these principles that only they could offer. Here’s a sneak peek at the exclusive knowledge they shared in the book.

Awareness

Taboola

Taboola is an expert in native advertising. They know that the best content fits in on the medium where it is posted, but still stands out on its own merits.

But they also know that this isn’t the most important part. While you want your advertising to look like it belongs, you don’t want it to blend into the metaphorical wallpaper. They recommend creating content that stands out using these principles:

Distinct/eye catching images/videos
Honest but exciting headlines
Post-click copy is relevant and effective
Test the efficacy of content

Meet customers when they’re open to discovering something new, and give them something truly new to cultivate awareness. Taboola calls this the moment of next.

LTVPlus

In The Hawke Method, LTVPLus recommends proactive customer service and engagement rather than reactive to create awareness.

If you are constantly solving problems your customers come to you with, it’s unlikely you will even have the time to create an improved customer experience.

Anticipate your customers’ needs and reach out to them in advance.

You can do this by utilizing relationships with other brands, recommends LTVPlus. Through these partnerships, brands can scale awareness together by leveraging one another’s audiences, while also providing superior customer service experiences.

Carro

Carro is the king of cross-selling, which is how brands can create more value for their customers and their partners by selling to customers across brand lines.

There’s a saying “if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go further, go together.” That’s definitely the case for cross-selling and the partnerships associated with it. Partnerships are powerful tools to building awareness through mechanisms like cross-selling.

Fifth Avenue Brands

Fifth Avenue Brands knows that nothing beats a good PR campaign.

A PR campaign that is successful, like when a third party news outlet picks up your brand story, fosters an immense amount of awareness.

Anytime a prospective client googles your brand, they’ll see it featured on the news outlet, instead of just seeing your branded material. This is one of the most effective ways to create awareness because it allows a brand or individual to reach outside of their

Nurturing

Klaviyo

It’s unlikely you would build a house with your own money on land owned by another. Yet brands do this time and time again, by building up their outreach channels on social media platforms in particular.

Remember the good old days of early social media where brand pages got massive organic reach? Then, as platforms like Facebook realized what they were selling, reach became almost impossible for business pages unless you bought ads.

You want to own the relationship between you and a customer, which is impossible when you build that relationship on someone else’s land. Klaviyo encourages nurturing using email and SMS to build direct relationships you own.

Postscript

This brand recommends using SMS to reach and nurture prospective clients. Not only is this a channel you own (as mentioned above), but also you are reaching a much less cluttered, more personal platform than a channel like email.

In The Hawke Method, Postscript recommends getting on board now, as brands have a once in a decade opportunity to reach customers somewhere where most brands aren’t.

Smile.io

Loyalty programs surprise and delight your customers and help nurture continued relationships even after the sale. The objective of loyalty programs is to bring loyal customers back to your store.

To do this, you need to figure out the perfect percentage to give back to loyal customers. Too high and you risk not making enough profit. Too low, and you risk creating a loyalty program that doesn’t incentivize repeat purchases.

Smile.io recommends a good rule of thumb: make it possible for customers to redeem rewards after the second or third purchase for the top efficacy. Loyalty programs can incentivize first purchase and nurture repeated buyer intent.

Omnisend

Choose email as the best channel for ROI, which translates to efficient and low cost nurturing. Email marketing drives 25% of revenue for the ecommerce industry.

Omnisend knows that email marketing is one of the most valuable channels, providing an ROI of $42 for every $1 spent. If you aren’t seeing those results, consider how you can change or improve your email strategy to nurture customers before and after the sale.

ReCharge

This partner knows that proactive objection-handling and customer service increase customer lifetime value (CLTV) and average order value. It also helps in nurturing customer relationships during and after the sale.

ReCharge does this through transactional SMS that allows merchants to communicate with customers to give them important information like: their order is shipping, gives them the choice to swap products, skip a shipment, or increase their order. That’s how you nurture customer relationships.

Octane AI

Deep, satisfying relationships start with open, accessible conversation, which is the key of nurturing. That’s why Octane AI exists. The company enables consumers to ask questions, receive personalized recommendations, and more. This creates a quick, accessible connection between consumer and brand, which nurtures better relationships.

Yotpo

Yotpo understands customer loyalty and knows that while some loyalty programs can be designed to only meet the needs of 30% of customers, they can also be designed to engage a much larger audience.

Customers who earn loyalty points are 3x more likely to make a second purchase compared to those that don’t. That’s the definition of post-purchase nurturing. Why haven’t you started a loyalty program yet?

WEVO

WEVO knows that most efforts at optimizing conversions fall flat. But using a customer experience platform to derive the source behind the lack of conversions is integral to truly successful nurturing.

WEVO is in the practice of looking at what is, asking why customers aren’t engaging, measuring conversion against industry benchmarks, and using those insights to drive more conversions.

Cohley

Cohley wields influencer marketing as an iteration of user-generated content and believes you should too. User-generated and influencer driven content nurture better customer relationships because your brand messaging isn’t coming directly from your brand, it is being presented by actual individuals. This creates buyer intent and eventually leads to greater trust in your brand.

Trust

Trustpilot

Along those same lines, reviews are key for brands looking to sell better. Reviews on third-party sites like Amazon foster a lot of trust, because consumers know they’re less likely to be tampered with.

Trustpilot recommends that brands engage with both positive and negative customer reviews, because this is one of the most effective ways to build trust in your brand.

Arka

Arka is a brand with a cause. The company provides sustainable shipping solutions for brands all over the world and has helped many brick-and-mortar stores get online sustainably. They know that trust is built by being both transparent and having sustainable practices to back up that transparency.

There’s a reason we partnered with these brands to help other companies grow. They know how to make and keep a customer. Plus, they give great advice. We encourage you to check them out if any of the tips they provide hit home.

If you like these marketing tips, you can read more about the three principles of marketing and hear more from our partners in The Hawke Method, available at retailers now.