In recent years, the consumer landscape has evolved, changing the way brands think about their marketing strategies and wider customer relationships.

With consumers expecting more than just a transactional experience, community building has emerged as an invaluable tool for accelerating growth.

And this trend looks set to stay.

That’s why, today, with the new year well on the horizon, we’re exploring 6 reasons you need to build a brand community in 2022.

There’s power in people

Traditional digital advertising tactics are becoming less effective.

Whether it’s consumers becoming numb to a constant flurry of ads or an increasing distrust (and even boycott) of scandal-ridden Facebook, brands are understandably anxious to diversify their marketing spend.

But focusing on yet another channel isn’t the answer. Instead, focus on people.

In today’s consumer market, there’s power in people. From influencers and ambassadors to friends and family, consumers view the opinions and referrals of real people as the most reliable trust indicators.

What easier way to spread the good word about your brand than building a brand community that actively wants to do it for you? Nurture your customer relationships correctly and you’ll likely be repaid with loyalty and referrals – the very foundation of growing a community.

Customers love a cause

Accounting for approximately 40% of global consumers, Gen Z has overtaken millennials and boomers as the largest consumer group.

This has significantly reshaped the consumer landscape. Why? Because ​​members of Gen Z tend to make purchasing decisions based on connection, ethical responsibility and an expression of self.

76% of Gen Z have bought a product to support issues that brands support, and another 67% have (or would) boycott a brand whose values clashed with their own.

Embracing a social cause that aligns with your brand’s values is a powerful way of engaging and growing a brand community in 2022 and beyond. Just ensure you’re doing it the right way – exploiting a cause is a sure-fire way to lose your community’s support.

The hard sell is less effective

If the past couple of years have taught brands anything, it’s that brands must be flexible to pivot their message.

A hard sell, one-size-fits-all approach just doesn’t have the same impact anymore – especially in times of turbulence and unfamiliarity.

Instead, you need to be finely attuned to your audience, understanding their real-world needs and challenges. The focus is on providing value – do that and the sale will follow.

Community building is one of the most impactful ways of consistently demonstrating value. It allows you to keep your finger on the pulse and understand your audience in real-time to provide genuine value.

Consumers expect authenticity

Storytelling is becoming increasingly commonplace in modern business and modern marketing. But storytelling alone isn’t enough – for it to be effective, it needs to be authentic.

A brand story shouldn’t be created for customers, it should be created with customers. The modern consumer wants to feel a part of the brand, and recognising customers’ individual experiences and telling their stories is a powerful way to achieve this.

What better way to discover and amplify customer stories than with a thriving customer community that encourages participation?

Data is invaluable

Your customer community can be an invaluable source of data.

Whether it’s sentiment analysis, surveys and feedback, or members’ personal information, your community provides your brand with a whole host of actionable data.

This data can be used to inform a more optimised and targeted business approach, from the products and services you offer to the way you approach your branding and marketing.

Look to analyse any and every data point available to you – think engagement metrics, customer demographics and the likes.

This all amounts to a brand that better serves its community by more directly addressing the wants, needs and expectations of its members. In turn, this accelerates your community (and brand) growth.

The community building trend is accelerating

Community building isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

In fact, in a recent community intelligence marketing report, 70.4% of brands reported having an active community. On top of that, another 26.3% expressed a desire to build one.

With today’s consumers expecting more than just a brand, harnessing a customer community is becoming an increasingly powerful way of meeting consumer demands.

So, community building in the new year may be more than a good idea for your brand – to remain competitive, it may well be a necessity.

At Six Circles, community building is our passion – and our first-rate community engagement platform has made it easier than ever before.

Get in touch today to request a demo and see for yourself how we can help you take full advantage of brand community building in 2022.

If you’re a business owner, you might already know that content is key to building a brand community.

In fact, you might even know why content is key to building a brand community.

But do you know what content is key to building a brand community?

There’s a whole host of different content types at your disposal, and knowing which ones your customers really care about can be vital to keeping them coming back for more.

Luckily for you, we know a thing or two about brand community building here at Six Circles.

That’s why, in today’s post, we’re exploring the 6 main types of content your customers want to see, so you can shout louder about the content most likely to engage your audience and fulfil your goals.

Blog posts

Customers care about your blog posts.

That’s as long as you have a solid blogging strategy, of course.

Whether you’re creating keyword-optimised posts for SEO or just offering up some off-the-cuff top tips, your topic should always be dictated by the wants and needs of your audience.

Contribute to a popular topic, offer fresh insight and perspective, solve a common issue – whatever your audience’s trends and behaviours dictate.

This ensures, even when writing for search engines, the audience is still at the forefront of any strategic blog post creation.

So, providing you’ve created informationally-rich and high-value content, your customers don’t just want to know about it – they need to know about it.

Newsletters

Newsletters are super effective in building a customer community.

Your brand should be the heart and soul of your customer community. It defines who your community is and what it stands for.

So, keeping your members informed on the latest internal news is key to strengthening the relationship between customers and brand.

For them to embrace your identity and values, they need to know how you embrace them yourself. With this in mind, look to update your customer community on what you’ve been up to and where you’re heading, as well as any internal updates important to your brand.

Think of your customers as an extension of your team. This will form a closer connection between brand and customer, creating the impression that you’re all on a journey together.

Newsletters don’t have to be too regular, either – see how we do it once a month!

Case studies

Customers love case studies.

Case studies and testimonials act as your trust indicators. You’ve told your customers all about your brand, product or service – now it’s time to show them it in action.

To successfully build a brand community, it’s vital that you earn your customers’ trust. Case studies do this in two ways.

First, consumers respond positively to real-world examples – they begin to relate their pain points to the ones you overcome in your case study. Secondly, consumers are more likely to trust third-party opinion and testimony – it’s the reason review sites like Trustpilot are so popular.

Customers want to see case studies to establish, affirm or build their trust in your brand. So, look to share any you have at your disposal, and get into the habit of writing regular case studies upon the completion of projects, big and small.

News articles

Members of your community are more than likely to be interested in your industry and the topics close to your brand’s heart.

So, sharing relevant news stories can be an effective way to keep customers engaged.

We’re not just talking clicks here, either. News stories are more likely to spur community members to comment and contribute, sparking discussion and/or debate.

As long as it’s kept civil, this sort of active engagement can be great at strengthening community relationships and boosting its popularity.

Interactive content

Interactive content is like having a cheat code for engagement.

From polls to quizzes, surveys to interactive infographics, consumers can’t help but engage with interactive content.

So much so, a mammoth 81% of marketers agree that interactive content is much more effective at grabbing people’s attention than static content.

Engagement is key to the evolution of your brand community. No matter how big your community is, if members aren’t engaged, they’ll stop coming back for more.

A static brand community serves no purpose to customer or business, so ensure your community building remains effective by producing and sharing quick-win interactive content.

Video

Video content has been on a sharp rise in recent years for good reason.

1/3 of all online activity is spent watching video – just think about that statistic for a second. It’s little surprise, then, that demand for video content is so high.

With viewers retaining 95% of a message when they watch a video (compared to 10% when they read a message), it’s also little wonder why 85% of businesses use video as a marketing tool.

Video content is a win-win for all parties. Customers get user-friendly, easily digestible and attention-grabbing content, and businesses get an effortlessly engaging and goal-driving content marketing avenue.

So, look to incorporate video into your content marketing strategy to keep your community growing.

Knowing what content your community wants is only half the battle. For an engaged and purposeful brand community, you need to know what content types your community wants, too. Use the above tips to help you on your way, keeping a constant eye on engagement metrics to learn what does and doesn’t work for your specific community.

Here at Six Circles, community building is what we’re all about. That’s why we’ve made it easy to shine a spotlight on specific content using the featured content tool on our community engagement platform.

Get in touch today to request a demo and see for yourself how we can help your content go further within your brand community.

Adaptability and versatility are key to the success of any business – you only need to look back at the last 18 months to prove this.

The digital revolution was only further accelerated by the pandemic, and we’ve seen more and more professionals embrace technology as part of their everyday working life.

Digital solutions can boast a range of benefits when it comes to your market research, too. For example, they can transform your focus groups to unlock greater potential and more actionable outcomes for your business.

Online focus groups provide an effective means of amplifying your audience’s feedback to ensure your brand is surpassing expectations and staying attuned to your brand community. 

That’s why, in today’s post, we’re exploring six benefits of hosting your next focus group online, finding innovative ways to meet consumer demand and understand customer opinions.

Cost-effective 

Hosting focus groups online can offer financial benefits to your business when compared to face-to-face alternatives.

From travel expenses to space rental, in-person focus groups can quickly become an expensive practice for your business. This places extra pressure on extracting the most valuable input possible from your participants to justify the cost.

When hosting your focus groups online, this pressure is removed – you’re able to host on free video software such as Zoom or Google Meets, or even in private discussion areas on your community platform.

This all amounts to a less intensive back and forth between moderator and participants, which is likely to inspire more transparent and insightful feedback as a result (and all for a fraction of the cost to your business).

Not only that – with the money saved by hosting your focus group online, you may even have the funding spare to action the outcomes of your focus group for the same price it would’ve cost to conduct the research face-to-face.

More efficient 

From start to finish, online focus groups are objectively more efficient than their in-person counterparts.

For starters, you’re able to arrange virtual focus groups with less notice – this means clients, moderators and respondents don’t need to carve as much time out of their schedule or make travel arrangements. This enables your business to be more versatile, arranging focus groups quickly and reactively whenever the need arises (such as following an unforeseen change in your industry, for example).

Online focus groups also ensure outcomes can be communicated and actioned more efficiently. Real-time participation can be documented in an instant and, when held on community platforms, can be accessed collaboratively by all of those who need to be in the know.

All of this contributes to a more optimised process, helping your business to extract more value from each focus group you host.

More diversity  

The purpose of a focus group is to facilitate the sharing of opinions and perspectives of consumers on a brand, product or service.

The importance of ensuring diversity amongst your participants therefore speaks for itself – the greater range of perspectives you can invite, the better your understanding of consumer attitudes will be.

When hosting an in-person focus group, geographical restrictions play a role in the types of participants you attract. Of course, this isn’t the case when conducting a focus group remotely – participants can come from anywhere, enabling you to better represent the entire scope of your target audience.

Because of the geographical restrictions of an in-person focus group, the pool of participants available is naturally smaller. This can make it statistically harder to ensure your focus group is ethnically diverse. Again, virtual focus groups provide a solution to this problem, helping you to better represent a wider range of cultures and audience backgrounds, ensuring you paint a more rounded picture of audience reception as a result.

More valuable input

Not only do virtual focus groups boast a better pool of participants – they tend to generate more valuable input, too.

This is because, generally, participants feel more comfortable partaking from home. With physical barriers removed and an aspect of anonymity preserved, participants are less inclined to feel intimidated by group discussions or feel nervous about expressing a negative opinion. 

The more comfortable your focus group is, the more critical and transparent their contributions tend to be. This can be incredibly valuable to brands – not only will the feedback be more honest, but it may also contain fresh community perspectives you haven’t yet considered.

A modern method 

Virtual focus groups are also a great way of bringing your brand (and your business research skills) well into the 21st century.

By embracing modern research methods, you’re positioning your brand at the forefront of your industry in the eyes of your community and wider consumers. Hosting your focus groups on a community platform will only further this perception by embracing contemporary best practices – blurring the line between community and brand.

By embracing technology in your focus groups, your engagement scope increases substantially, too. With the ability to engage a larger number of participants at any one time, you’re able to enjoy the best of both worlds: quantitative data supported by qualitative insights directly from your community.

Encourage community participation

As we just touched on, hosting virtual focus groups can be super effective in blurring the line between community and brand.

By being able to amplify more voices within your community (thanks to the extra accessibility of hosting your focus group online), you can strengthen community engagement by not only telling your audience you hear them, but showing your audience you hear them. 

With this in mind, don’t be afraid to shout about it when you’re hosting an upcoming online focus group to let willing participants know how and when they can get involved. This all amounts to encouraging more community participation from your members, driving greater engagement and more worthwhile contributions as a result.

Focus groups have long been a tried and tested method for business research, but, with so many benefits on offer, now’s the time to bring this practice into the 21st century. Begin hosting your focus groups virtually to begin reaping the rewards of more valuable community input today.

Here at Six Circles, community engagement is our bread and butter. That’s why we’ve made it easy to host virtual focus groups within the forum and private threads area of our community engagement platform. Get in touch now to request a demo and see for yourself how your brand could unlock the power of community building.

When your brand builds a community, the shared experiences and collective impact can enable customers to feel seen and heard by your brand in a distinctive way. Better yet, it makes them feel a part of something.

We’ve covered all of the hows and whys of building your community here on the Six Circles blog before. But with your community established, it’s all too easy to slip into a false sense of security, kicking back in the belief their work is done.

But that isn’t the case.

Without consistency, strategy and the right amount of know-how, your community can quickly become old news and engagement can swiftly begin to dwindle.

With your community established, the next step is to strengthen it. 

That’s why, in today’s post, we’re exploring six ways you can strengthen an existing community to keep your members active and engaged in the long term.

Start with your team

Your brand identity is the foundation of your community – it’s the core of who you are and what you do. After all, without a clear and established brand identity, how will you relate or appeal to customers?

With this in mind, you’ve likely ticked some of the right boxes when creating your brand identity, from brand voice and tone to design and style.

However, with the emphasis often being placed on the customer-facing elements of this identity, internal factors can often be overlooked. In particular, your company ethos.

Your company ethos should encompass your brand’s traits, goals, mission, vision and community. This entails creating a company culture where employees are not only aware of your identity, but also actively embrace and champion it in their day to day.

The benefits here at twofold. Firstly, you can ensure consistency across the board – every engagement and interaction will be driven by the same values and attitudes to create a cohesive brand experience.

Secondly, and just as importantly, you can ensure these experiences are authentic. Today’s marketing-fatigued consumers have become increasingly insensitive to old-school marketing approaches in the vein of ‘who can shout the loudest?’. Capitalise on this by ensuring an authentic and distinctly ‘real’ brand experience at every opportunity.

Embrace a social cause

One effective means of strengthening your brand community is to make your community go further. As we’ve already touched on, community members want to feel part of something bigger, and one particularly effective way of achieving this is through embracing social causes. 

This isn’t merely a case of jumping on the latest bandwagon, though. Again, customers are seeking authentic experiences within your community, so choose to champion a cause that aligns with the core values of your brand.

How exactly you embrace this cause is up to you. Whether it’s through donations of a profit percentage or simply an awareness campaign, the trick is to ensure your chosen cause is one your community will engage with.

Provided you’ve built your community on the right foundations, you’ll find this is easily done. Your values should already resonate with your community members, meaning any cause that aligns with the values of your brand likely aligns with the values of your customers, too.

Incentivise participation 

Sometimes, all it takes is a little nudge in the right direction.  

Incentivising participation is an effective way of strengthening your brand community in little to no time. The logic here is simple: the more reasons a member has to engage, the more likely they are to do it.

Of course, it’s key that any incentive is sustainable over time. Building a community is all about retention, so consider how you’ll incentivise not just one-off engagement, but long-term engagement. 

From competitions to loyalty schemes, take the time to survey, poll and research your audience to better understand what incentivises them.

Respond and nurture 

Engagement is all very well and good but, if this is a one-way street, your community will soon lose interest.

While organic, customer-driven community engagement is the dream of any brand, this doesn’t mean you should step away and leave your members to it. On the contrary, actively participating in your community ensures customers view your brand as central to their community experience. 

To do this, ensure you remain responsive to queries, problems and concerns, nurturing each and every customer interaction towards your desired goal.

Of course, this requires your community members to know both how and where to reach you. So, strive to be as accessible as possible to your community members, whether that’s a dedicated customer service number, a responsive social media team or private chat functionality on your community platform.

Champion versatile content 

The best way to keep an audience engaged? Keep them interested.

The easiest way to strengthen your brand community is to give customers a reason to keep coming back for more. If you’re posting repetitive, outdated or uninspiring content, community members will quickly switch off – the novelty unfortunately doesn’t last long.

This makes it vital to pay close attention to what you’re offering your members – in particular, what’s incentivising them to return. We’ve already touched on how to incentivise participation when it comes to engagement and conversions, but the easiest way to incentivise over a longer period is to, quite simply, give your customers what they want.

Keep creating fresh, varied and valuable community content that offers genuine benefit to the reader – you can learn all about how to do that right here. 

Give it time 

Community building doesn’t happen overnight. 

To ensure the longevity of your community, build it organically – and give it time. Strengthening your community isn’t about finding short-term gains; it’s about building long-term relationships through authentic growth.

Strengthening your community requires you to understand your brand and audience on a deeper level. Take the time to conduct thorough audience research, map out realistic business goals and develop a strategic approach to achieving them.

Only then will you be able to begin strengthening your community in a natural, sustainable way. Sure, you’ll likely pick up some quick wins along the way, but never mistake these for a job done. Strengthening your brand community is, in fact, a never-ending task – it requires ongoing maintenance in order for you to truly reap the rewards.

The importance of strengthening your brand community shouldn’t be ignored – ultimately, it means more loyal customers for your brand. The trick to getting it right? Keep authenticity, strategy and organic growth at the forefront of your community goals.

Need a helping hand establishing, strengthening or growing your brand community? Here at Six Circles, that’s our speciality. Get in touch now to request a demo of our state-of-the-art community engagement platform.

It’ll come as no surprise to hear that customers receive a lot of emails. 

And when we say a lot, we mean a lot. In fact, the average number of unread emails in an inbox at any given time is 200.

So, if your brand is embarking on email marketing campaigns, is all hope lost? Not at all! It’s all about sending the right type of email, or to put it more bluntly, sending emails your customers actually care about.

A mammoth 99% of consumers check their inbox every single day. But with emails having an average open rate of just 20.56% – combined with the fact that nearly 22% of engaged customers open an email within the first hour of it being sent – the need to entice, engage and satisfy your customers through email is clear for all to see.

Here are six ways you can utilise purposeful email marketing to grow your community.

Welcome messages

Whether welcoming a new customer following their first order or thanking a new subscriber immediately post-signup, welcome emails serve two distinct purposes.

Firstly, they provide reassurance to the customer – their signup was successful, their account has been created, their order has been confirmed.

Secondly, welcome emails can serve as a warm embrace to new members of your community. Introduce who you are, what you’re about and why your customer should join you. Do it right, and you may have sparked a new long-lasting relationship.

The proof’s in the pudding when it comes to welcome emails, too. More than 8 in 10 consumers will open a welcome email, generating 4x as many opens and 10x as many clicks as other email formats.

With this in mind, seize the opportunity to inspire customers and drive action – whatever form that desired action may take.

Promotional offers 

‘Customers like promotions’ is perhaps email marketing’s worst-kept secret.

But the fact of the matter is that customers like promotions so much that promotional emails are an all-but-guaranteed way to bolster your open rates, click-through rates and, ultimately, conversions.

Email marketing is often the most lucrative channel to shout about any promotions on the horizon. That’s because your email leads have already expressed some form of interest in your brand, whether through signing up to your newsletter, placing orders or being an active member of your brand community.

However, it’s key to remember: no matter how much customers like promos, nobody likes spam. 

With this in mind, don’t overload customers’ inboxes with ‘sale, sale, sale’. Instead, find a creative way to communicate friendly reminders about sales and offers that doesn’t feel spammy or intrusive.

Ensure every email is offering something unique and valuable to your customer. For example, if you’ve already notified a user of a sale, don’t notify them again until there are new products, further reductions or some other additional incentive.

Discount codes 

Businesses often think they know exactly what their customers want. In fact, according to a recent survey, 84% of small businesses are “very” or “extremely” confident they know what their customers want.

Yet the data suggests otherwise. While small business owners placed customer wellbeing check-ins at the top of their customers’ priority lists, the customers themselves begged to differ – with 67% placing coupons and discounts at the top of the list.

So, what’s the appeal of a discount code? Well, to state the obvious: customers like money off. But the advantage discount codes hold over promotional offers is the element of personalisation they allow.

If you’re promoting a discount code to a specific segment of your audience, make sure you shout about it. From rewarding high-value customers to working to win back disengaged ex-buyers, ensure your customers know that you’ve targeted them specifically. 

The advantages of this are twofold. Firstly, consumers like exclusivity – don’t be afraid to play up to this by including words such as ‘exclusive’, ‘secret’ or ‘personal’ in your email content. 

Secondly, consumers like personalisation. By telling them why they’ve received a code, you’re offering a tailored brand experience that’s likely to win more community members as a result.

Personalised suggestions 

On the topic of personalisation, according to a recent survey by Bluecore, 74% of baby boomers believe email is the most personal channel to receive communications from brands. This is generally agreed across generations, with 72% of Gen X, 64% of millennials and 60% of Gen Z believing the same.

With this in mind, don’t be afraid to get personal in your emails as a means of driving engagement and growing your community. Not only that – with 70% of millennials being frustrated with brands sending irrelevant emails, personalised emails are a sure-fire way to demonstrate relevance and, most importantly of all, value.

How do you do it right? Drill down into your customers’ behaviours, interests and habits and use this as your inspiration.

For example, 56% of online shoppers are more likely to return to a website that recommends products. So, based on your customers’ previous browsing and order history, why not suggest similar or complementary products and services? Alternatively, if customers are engaging with particular content, why not recommend further relevant resources and information?

Cart abandonment 

Cart abandonment emails provide a tried and tested means of driving email engagement. Why? Because customers care about them!

Cart abandonment emails hold a trump card – your customers have demonstrated some form of intent. Whether they intended to buy later or simply forgot to buy at the time, cart abandonment emails are a friendly nudge often welcomed by customers.

This is another great way to demonstrate personalisation to your community. Cart abandonment emails are unique to that specific customer’s browsing habits, and even something as minuscule as a cart abandonment email can make a customer feel important.

Once more, the stats only strengthen this point. 45% of cart abandonment emails are opened, with an average click-through rate of 21%. Of those who clicked, a huge 50% of users then go on to make a purchase, proving that cart abandonment emails can be super-effective in driving sales and retaining customers. From there, it’s up to you to nurture them retained customers into community members. 

Customer service 

Lastly, never underestimate the importance of high-quality customer service in your email communications.

Customer service can make or break your business. Good customer service can help to retain customers and incentivise them to become community members (even if they had a bad initial experience), whereas bad customer service is often enough to drive a consumer away from your brand forever.

With that in mind, always ensure you’re placing value and efficiency at the forefront of your customer service. Even if you utilise chatbots or landlines, ensure any public email account is being monitored regularly so any customer queries or problems can be addressed as a matter of priority. 

As a rule of thumb, make sure you’re always providing an unquestionably positive experience through quick responses and open communications every step of the way.

Purposeful email marketing can be a powerful way to grow your brand community – it’s all about sending the right emails at the right times.

At Six Circles, our recent email digest improvements give you greater control over your email content than ever before. To learn more about how this freedom can help you to build your brand community, get in touch today and request a demo of our platform.

Ping.

Every day, we receive an influx of push notifications across our mobile and desktop devices. In fact, the average US smartphone user receives 46 app push notifications per day.

With so much competition, you’d be forgiven for assuming that push notifications have begun to lose their pulling power. But this isn’t true – it’s all about knowing how to utilise them the right way.

That’s why, today, we’re exploring 6 undisputable reasons your brand shouldn’t be ignoring push notifications when it comes to engaging (and re-engaging) your customer community.

Effortless marketing

Marketing isn’t easy.

But as opposed to more traditional methods of marketing, push notifications enable you to sell and upsell at very specific touchpoints. For example, whereas alternate methods of marketing require you to target a generic stage of the sales funnel, notifications enable you to target specific points of the user journey based on their micro-behaviours. This means you’re able to stay in touch with your community far more efficiently and with a greater sense of subtlety that will feel less intrusive to your customers.

Send real-time reminders and updates that encourage your customers to engage in your desired way. These updates could relate to new products, sales or special offers to name just a few – the trick is to provide an incentive that means users can’t help but click.

Better targeting 

Push notifications can be targeted to specific users, making them ultra-effective in retargeting and re-engaging dormant users.

Has a particular user been inactive or unengaged for a period of time? A push notification is a great way to remarket your brand by simply reminding them you’re there – often, that’s all a customer needs.

This simple reminder works wonders with semi-engaged customers, too. From cart abandonment nudges to tailored reminders based on browsing history, there are plenty of ways push notifications can be used to ensure that conversion makes it over the line. 

Simple personalisation 

Personalisation is all the rage right now. So much so that it’s almost become an expectation from customers – consumers expect businesses to care more about them as an individual. 

Unsurprisingly, personalised content receives far greater engagement. In fact, a huge 80% of customers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalised experiences. 

So, look to personalise your push notifications wherever possible. It can be something as simple as including the customer’s name in the content or, for best results, you may look to personalise your push notification campaigns by analysing user behaviours and preferences.

Real-time delivery 

In today’s digital world, so much is instantaneous. Isn’t it about time your marketing efforts caught up with the times?

Real-time delivery enables you to heighten the sense of urgency among your customers, playing on psychological triggers such as FOMO to inspire action in users. Limited time offers and low stock notifications work particularly well in these instances.

Plus, with the average consumer spending a shocking 50 days on their smartphone per year, you can rest assured your customers will see your notification. All that’s left is ensuring your content is powerful enough to drive the engagement you want to see.

Improved efficiency 

From resources to blog posts, emails to newsletters, we don’t need to tell you that content takes time.

Push notifications, on the other hand, prove you can reap maximum rewards with minimal content. Providing you get your message right (through a combination of data-driven strategy and on-brand messaging), push notifications can be an incredibly efficient way to market and engage.

After all, the focus here should be on delivering a powerful and succinct message in as few words as possible. This should save you internal time compared with the content and design of other communication methods, all while providing just as much (if not more) positive engagement. 

More engagement 

One of the greatest benefits of push notifications is that they demand to be noticed. 

Though the success of channels such as email speak for themselves, you’re always running the risk of your message being lost amidst a stuffed inbox. Push notifications, on the other hand, will appear on users’ screens – and best of all, it won’t disappear until they’ve next engaged with their device.

Compare this with the email marketing process, for example. Whereas you need to utilise the power of an irresistible subject line to entice users into reading your content, with push notifications, the content’s ready and waiting. Without having to worry about click-through, users are far more likely to engage.

Here at Six Circles, we’ve seen our push notification feature help brands tailor how their platform engages their members. To learn more about how this could help your business, get in touch with Six Circles today and request your free demo of our community engagement platform.

Whether you’re an ecommerce or B2B business, trade body or nonprofit organisation, your brand can benefit from best-practice email marketing.

From amplifying brand awareness to securing, nurturing and converting leads, email is a channel capable of single-handedly transforming first-time site users into loyal, long-time brand advocates.

That is, if the emails themselves are up to scratch.

If you’re new to the world of email marketing, you should know now that you’ll be in constant pursuit of perfection from your first email to your last. There are always new optimisations to be made, new variables to test, and new data points to harness.

There are, however, a handful of essential features that are the foundation of any great brand email. Together, these elements form your recipe for email marketing success from your very first campaign.

Here are those key ingredients.

A tantalising subject line

The first element of your email a user is exposed to is the all-important subject line.

This is your opening gambit. The promise you make to users about what’s contained within your email and why they should care.

Your subject line should be punchy, succinct (no more than 9 words or 60 characters) and reflective of the contents of your email. This gives users maximum incentive to open the email rather than leaving it unread and unloved.

While the impact of emoji use in subject lines is limited, appropriate usage can catch the user’s eye, emphasise your message and convey relevant emotion. Just don’t go overboard with emoji use or your email could scream ‘spam’.

A user-friendly layout

When it comes to marketing email layouts, don’t give users any unnecessary work to do. Layouts should be clean, digestible and engaging. They should adhere to the same user experience (UX) best practices as any page on your brand’s website.

Overwhelming the user with a crowded email design without any clear visual hierarchy is a sure-fire way to see click-through rates plummet.

Your written content and any supporting visuals should be laid out so that they’re immediately visible and effortless to consume and navigate. Leave room for white space and let your key messages do the talking.

Concise, on-brand copy

The essence of any brand email is the copy used to communicate your message.

First, there’s your preview text (or preheader), which will appear right alongside your subject line in users’ inboxes. This is your opportunity to expand on the promise made by your subject line. Give users more context as to the contents of your email and incentivise them to look inside.

Like your subject line, your preview text should be succinct, sparking curiosity and providing a clear incentive for users to open the email. Importantly, though, it should complement your subject line rather than duplicating any elements. This way, you can squeeze maximum value out of the limited space available with these teasers.

Once users have opened your email, it’s on you to communicate your message in a clear, concise, impactful way that reflects your brand’s tone of voice. Not only that but the needs, preferences and behaviours of your audience, too.

Use direct address (think ‘you’ and ‘your’) wherever possible to give the email a personal touch and involve users in your narrative.

Waste no time in getting straight to the point. Use a conversational tone where appropriate to build rapport with users. Never use 100 words when 10 will do the job.

Relevant, high-quality imagery

Think of multimedia content as the companion to your carefully crafted email copy.

Imagery in email shouldn’t be an afterthought. Copy and imagery should be relevant to one another and should be mutually supportive in order to truly enhance your email’s message.

Authentic brand imagery is the ideal, whether branded graphics or relatable, real-world photography of your product, service or team.

Naturally, though, not all businesses will have high-quality branded assets at their disposal, or access to a professional photographer. In these cases, you may need to go to plan B: copyright-free stock photography.

Just be sure to keep relevance front of mind when selecting stock imagery for your emails. Having irrelevant visuals that confuse users rather than strengthening your message is worse than having no imagery at all.

The key is to only include imagery where it supports the message of your email. And don’t forget to honour your brand identity through your use of colour, shape and typography in your email campaigns.

Clear, convenient links

Clicks are a primary measure of any marketing email’s success, making the right links a vehicle for successful email marketing.

From informational links that expand on your email’s topic (such as links to blog posts and white papers) to transactional links users can click to access relevant product or service pages, links are the navigational tools that help users end up where they need to be.

But there are also the secondary links to think about, like clickable buttons for your brand’s social media accounts. Oh, and those links you’d rather no user clicked, like the dreaded (yet vital) ‘unsubscribe’ button.

Whatever its purpose and destination, every link in your email should be clearly visible and accurately labelled so that users are left with no doubt as to where they’ll end up.

The golden rule for linking in emails is to keep primary links within the main body of your email to an absolute minimum. Every new avenue you open to users distracts from your email’s call-to-action.

An irresistible call-to-action

The ultimate goal of any email marketing activity is to inspire subscribers to take action. The nature of that action can vary wildly from one business or organisation to the next – but the fact remains that every effective marketing email has a clear and defined purpose.

This is where your call-to-action comes in.

Your call-to-action is your email’s rallying cry. The step every user should feel compelled to take after reading the contents of your email.

Whether you’d like users to shop now, sign up, download, donate, volunteer, get in touch, learn more or get started, your brand has a primary call-to-action that defines how users interact with you.

Give every email a clear objective and point all messaging towards this overarching call-to-action. This way, you can make answering this call feel like the next logical step rather than a fulfilling of duty.

Together, these must-have marketing email elements can help your brand to surprise and delight subscribers for years to come. You’ll always be chasing higher open and click-through rates – such is the nature of email marketing – but this best-practice base will get you off to a flying start.

Our community engagement platform includes a library of effective email templates to take the hassle out of finding a layout that works.

Streamline your email marketing activity forevermore by joining our tribe. Get your free demo of the Six Circles platform now.

What is a brand identity? A logo, a colour palette, a set of values, a way of doing business? 

The answer…all of the above. Your brand identity can’t be expressed within a single element of your business. Instead, a powerful brand identity is an amalgam of who you are, what you do and how you do it.

Your brand identity is your way of communicating with the word. A strong, well-positioned brand is key to the success of any business, as it forms customers’ perceptions of your brand and drives their experience with you.

So, how do you build a brand identity that’s seamless from one touchpoint to the next? Consistency.

Let’s explore not only why this consistency is so important, but how you can pull it off for your brand.

Think visually 

Your brand’s aesthetic is one key ingredient of your overall brand identity. 

As the first things to catch an audience’s eye, visual elements such as your logo, typeface and colour palette shouldn’t just look good – they should also embody your brand, and project what it represents.

Let’s start with colour. You should be thinking clean and flexible when opting for your brand’s colour palette – consider how adaptable your choices will be across different formats, for example. This will ensure consistency is achieved from the off, with your website, social feeds and forums seamlessly complementing one another.

To find the right colours for your brand identity, think about the emotions your palette elicits – do these emotions give users the right gut feeling about who you are?

Next, consider your typography. Of course, this isn’t something you’re always in complete control of – take social media captions, for example (where these networks’ own standardised formatting dictates how all text appears). Where you do have the freedom of typography, though, look to embrace a style that sets the tone of your brand.

From website headers to document titles, think logically about where best to incorporate your branded typeface – and use this to best effect where it counts. The trick is to ensure that each visual element of your brand contributes to a cohesive visual identity.

Refine your user journey

When you think of ‘design’, you’d be forgiven for assuming the focus was solely on visuals. 

However, service design can also be an integral part of implementing a consistent brand identity.

To borrow this great analogy from Marc Fonteijn, imagine two coffee shops side by side. Each sells the same coffee at the same price – service design is what influences a customer to choose one over the other.

Service design entails a whole lot of research. It involves getting to know the ins and outs of your audience – their habits, their behaviours, their pain points – and uses these as the foundation for any design decisions.

Service design also takes into account the experiences of all other parties connected to your business – your suppliers, your employees, your marketing team and the rest – to establish must-have features from the perspective of both brand and customer.

This makes collaboration the key to understanding both in-house and outward perceptions of your brand. Armed with this understanding, you can perform the necessary adjustments to create a targeted and satisfying experience for all involved.

The result? Cohesive user journeys across various formats and devices – mobile apps, websites, social media feeds and brick-and-mortar stores – to create a holistic brand experience.

Perfect your tone of voice

You’ve probably heard the term ‘tone of voice’ thrown around often in conversations about branding. That’s because it’s one of the primary facets of your brand identity. 

Your tone of voice is the style in which your brand communicates. As such, it should embrace your brand’s personality, values, purpose and vision – easier said than done.

Pinpointing your brand’s tone of voice requires a thorough understanding of both your brand and audience, so spend the necessary time taking a deep dive into user data and personas to get to know who your brand is communicating with.

Use your findings to inspire your tone of voice. Pay particular attention to the words you use and the way you use them. At a minimum, you should be able to define:

• Your diction
• The formality of your tone
• Your syntax 

From here, look to create detailed guidelines on your tone of voice to ensure consistency across all communications.

Tailor your blog content

Blog content is often overlooked as a brand identity tool, but, with your tone of voice established, your blog content can be an effective way to reassert who you are and what you do.

The key is to think about the types of topics you address. With a clear picture in mind of your brand’s personality, values, purpose and vision, ask yourself how these drive the sorts of conversations you want to be involved in.

Approach this from two angles. Firstly, that of the topics themselves. Are you creating blog content on topics that matter to your brand?

Secondly, think about the approach you take. If you’ve landed on a fun and informal personality for your brand, is that matter-of-fact how-to guide going to embrace this brand identity? Probably not.

That’s not to say you should actively avoid these formats or topics, though. It’s about being creative and finding the angle that’s unmistakably you.

Let’s say your fun and informal brand is positioned within the tech industry. As we’ve already agreed, a matter-of-fact ‘how to set up your X’ guide is unlikley to hit the mark. To bake your brand identity into the angle, consider a more vibrant take on the same topic: ‘the technophobe’s guide to not breaking your X’, for example.

See how easy that was?

Embrace your values 

We’ve already touched on how important your brand’s core values are.

This is because they define who you are as a brand. When it comes to building a consistent brand identity, this becomes particularly important – everyone needs to be on the same page as to who you are and what drives your brand forward.

To better understand how these values contribute to your brand identity, break them down and consider the influence each has:

• Social values – if your brand has a philanthropic stance, how will this impact your tone? Do you need to operate or communicate in a certain way? 
• Epistemic / functional values – if you’re driven by the validation of a mission, how will your brand identity affect your brand’s authority and success?
• Emotional values – are you driven by a specific belief or feeling? If so, how will your brand identity reflect with this position?

It’s important to note that this shouldn’t be left to interpretation. Find objective answers and detail them in your brand guidelines to ensure consistency across the board.

Know when to show off your brand identity

With a cohesive brand identity set in stone, don’t fall at the final hurdle. You need to know when to show it off and how to show it off.

Champion the mantra of ‘show, don’t tell’, embracing visuals, values, designs and content to create an all-encompassing brand identity that can (and should) feature in each element of your business.

The skill is in making sure you don’t overdo it. Whether it’s the amount of colour in your palette or the amount of content you churn out on a monthly basis, it’s always best to opt for quality over quantity.

Now, for the matter of how to show off your brand identity.

Never underestimate the power of subtlety. A consistent brand image isn’t about plastering your logo and brand colours here, there and everywhere. Instead, it’s about igniting the subconscious with enough familiarity and connectedness that the user always feels immersed in your brand’s world.

Our online community engagement platform is the key to giving your brand identity a whole new dimension.

To learn more about how the Six Circles platform could enrich your brand, get in touch to request your free demo.

Customer convenience is one of the most important elements of community engagement, but can too often be treated as an afterthought.

The fact of the matter is that convenience dictates the ratio of pleasure to pain in any given customer journey.

Convenience can have a major influence on a customer’s desire to engage with your business and participate in your community.

That’s why, in today’s post, we’re honing in on 6 customer convenience hacks you should be looking to incorporate into your business to keep customers coming back for more.

Put accessibility first

You wouldn’t deliberately ignore an entire segment of your audience – this is How Not To Build A Brand Community 101.

But if you’ve failed to make your business digitally accessible, that’s exactly what you’re doing. 

Remember: the internet is for everyone.

Inclusivity has rightly been pushed up the digital agenda in recent years. Recognising your business’s built-in biases and working to remove these is paramount in order to avoid excluding any customers from your community.

While the exact steps you should look to take will vary depending on your product or service, some staple examples include audio integration for written content and sufficient use of colour contrasts to accommodate visual impairments.

Offer flexibility 

In today’s digital age, online capability is growing rapidly. 

On one hand, this is great news: businesses now have more options than ever before in terms of tailoring their products and services to customer demands.

On the other hand, this can have its drawbacks – in particular, it can lead to increased customer expectations. 

In a world where customers expect everything, how do you accommodate? Flexibility! 

This doesn’t mean remaining versatile enough to cover each and every avenue – we daresay this is all but impossible.

Instead, look to remain flexible in terms of reacting to customer trends and behaviours.

To do this, dive head-first into any customer engagement data at your disposal. The trick is to identify any hurdles your customers are currently facing when interacting with your business, and making the necessary adjustments to overcome these hurdles.

For example, if you can see customers are utilising your search function for extended periods, this may indicate that your search functionality is too broad.

In the name of convenience, adding filter options to help customers narrow their search will help to streamline navigation and create happier customers. This is exactly what we did on our own community engagement platform recently!

Don’t do too much 

As we’ve touched on already, you simply can’t do it all. 

If you ignore your data and take a more generalised approach to customer convenience, you may, in fact, be responsible for the opposite: creating an inconvenient customer experience that hinders your chances of retention.

How? By overcomplicating their journey.

Sure, that new chatbot integration ensures your business’s website is keeping up the times, but is it serving any real purpose? If your data tells you that customers are already sourcing the customer service they need, the addition hasn’t improved convenience in any real way. 

On the contrary, it may have actually created inconvenience for your customers by slowing down your webpage, for example.

Keep it simple

Ensuring any content can be easily understood by your audience is crucial to a convenient user experience.  

The logic here speaks for itself: by communicating in a style your audience can easily understand, you’re ensuring they absorb maximum value each and every time. 

Why is this convenient? Well, user-friendly content should leave customers with fewer questions and more information than when they started. This creates a more efficient experience that helps to form a stronger bond between customer and brand.

To make your content as user-friendly as possible, place your focus on readability, tone and style. Again, this requires you to know your audience, so don’t phone in that data dive. Instead, immerse yourself in your average user to understand their reading ability, common syntax and the like.

After all, how do you expect your community to engage unless you’re speaking directly to them?

Don’t skip the detail 

It’s important not to mistake simplicity for a lack of detail.

User-friendly content is all about communicating all of the information needed – and no more – in the simplest way possible.

Never omit important information your customers will need – this will only create further inconvenience by leaving questions unanswered (or even provoking more).

For example, perhaps you’re an ecommerce retailer fresh off the back of a new product launch. You upload a high-quality product image and, in the name of convenience, kept the accompanying product description short and sweet. After all, the customer can get a pretty good impression of your product from the picture, and it saves them the effort of having to read a block of text, right?

Wrong. 

The best practice for customer convenience in this example would be to include a detailed, easy-to-understand description. Why? Your content will inevitably tell a story the picture can’t.

This makes your product description a valuable tool in preempting and addressing customer queries, delivering convenience for all involved.

Provide solutions 

Convenience is defined as ‘the state of being able to proceed with something without difficulty’.

With this in mind, the best way to maximise customer convenience is to position your brand as problem solvers.

What problems are you solving? Well, that depends!

Analyse how your community is engaging with your brand at present, and identify common pain points, queries and hurdles. These can take many forms, from direct questions about your business’s operations to broader queries around your industry as a whole. 

From there, look to provide the solution. Again, this will vary depending on your business and audience, but common examples include everything from regularly updated FAQs to how-to guides in the form of blog posts.

When it comes to customer convenience, it pays to know your audience inside and out. Familiarise yourself with customer habits and behaviours, then adapt to ensure you’re prioritising their needs at every stage in their journey.

Get this right, and you’ll be well on your way to building an engaged brand community. To learn more about how to nurture and grow your community, get in touch with Six Circles and find out more about our community engagement platform.

Here’s your monthly roundup on everything Six Circles, from what’s happening behind the scenes to what’s to come on our ever-evolving community engagement platform…

Company News

Getting to know you

We’re thrilled to welcome Saad Charif Tribak to the Six Circles team. Saad is our new frontend developer, bringing with him a wealth of experience and expertise.

Dad, film fan and Salsa dancing extraordinaire, Saad’s jumped right in and has been enjoying the fun and fast-paced team environment. We’re excited to see how he can help us transform the Six Circles platform over the next 12 months – and we’re excited to see those dance moves, too!

Roadmap

In March, we implemented a number of small updates to our community engagement platform:

• Settings update – you can now update your browser icon to match your website
• Categories update – you now have the ability to reorder your categories however you want, as opposed to the previous A-Z listing
• Forum update – the category page will now be ordered by recent activity, meaning the group with the most recent discussion will move to the top

We also brought a number of feature updates to the platform this month:

• Permissions update – new permissions have been added, giving you the ability to grant members permissions (depending on their roles or subscription) to see certain feature pages
• Notifications update – new notifications have been added around altering members of a new poll, resource or package post. The platform now also notifies admins of new subscriptions and member signups

We’re always following our roadmap here at Six Circles – it’s what keeps us on the right track in evolving our platform to make community engagement easier and more effective than ever before.

We always welcome any suggestions on what you’d like to see on the Six Circles platform over the coming months. Why not send your ideas to support@sixcircles.co.uk? We’d love to hear from you!

Feature Spotlight

Each month, we’re shining the spotlight on a different feature of the Six Circles platform to ensure you’re always getting the most out of what we have to offer. This month, we’re focusing on the Connect area.

Did you know?

On the Six Circles platform, you have multiple ways of displaying custom attributes within a profile, allowing you to improve your filter search area.

How to use this feature

To be granted the ability to create additional attributes within a member’s profile, you’ll need to be an admin.

The types of additional attributes available to admins include:

• Free text box – any and all content added is now searchable
• Drop down selection box – members can select an option pre-set by the admin
• Multiple selection tick box – members can tick multiple options that apply to them

This gives you the ability to capture more information on your members, as well as providing your members with greater search options when trying to filter new connections within the Connect area of our platform.

With the ability to better explore connections, purpose-driven community engagement has never been easier than it is when using Six Circles.