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
In April, we began work on redesigning the look and feel of the Six Circles platform.
The aim? We want to enhance the user journey and experience on our platform for all.
This will help purposeful community engagement become easier than ever before, whatever your brand’s long-term goals.
Future Roadmap
In April, we made a number of platform updates that will be pushed live in the coming weeks.
These include:
The ability to upload PowerPoint files to a resource
The ability to choose the frequency of your email digest (choose from weekly, fortnightly or monthly)
The ability to add the latest resources to your email digest
The constant evolution of our platform enables your business to stay at the forefront of community engagement.
We 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 Pages section within your admin area.
Did you know?
You can customise all the current pages across your platform, giving you the tools to tailor how your community platform looks and feels.
Better yet, you can even create additional pages, giving you more opportunities to personalise the platform to best reflect your business.
How to use this feature
Within the Pages section of your admin area, you’ll see the screen is broken down into two sections.
Section one displays a full list of all pages that are currently present on your platform (this includes our feature pages). Should you wish to add content to any of these pages, or include a dedicated banner image for a particular page, all you need to do is hit the ‘edit’ button. From there, simply add the content and, as soon as you hit save, all changes will be pushed live – easy as that.
The second section within the pages area clearly displays your header and footer links. This gives you the ability to reorder or rename your pages across the platform. Should you want a link to guide your members to an external site (for example, your main website or a learning portal), all you need to do is click the ‘add’ button and include the relevant URL and title for the link.
As well as editing existing pages, we’ve seen more and more of our clients take advantage of our new page creation tool – you can find this in the top right of your pages admin area. Within a few clicks, you can create a new page that your members can view on your platform, This could be an About Us page, a Meet the Team page, or a dedicated page to highlight a main focus within your community at present. Whichever direction you choose, this page creation tool is all you need to get creative.
With the ability to better customise and personalise your platform, purpose-driven community engagement has never been easier than it is when using Six Circles.
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.
Content marketing is all the rage right now, and for good reason. When carried out with the right know-how, creating valuable brand resources can be an incredibly useful way to fulfil your brand objectives.
But how exactly does this work?
Today we’re exploring exactly that, detailing 6 ways you can utilise your business’s content to drive results.
With an innate understanding of content purpose, style and form, you can begin adapting your content to meet short-term and long-term goals.
Allow us to demonstrate…
Improve brand awareness
Brand awareness is a core brand objective – but isn’t something that happens overnight.
That’s because it’s about more than consumers simply recognising your logo – true brand awareness means that your audience understands your brand and what it represents.
How do you get this across to consumers? Content!
Look to regularly produce topical content relevant within your industry and relevant to your target audience. Of course, you also need to ensure this content is suitably branded in order to accurately project your brand image and successfully drive your brand objectives.
Ask yourself:
Is this written in the brand tone of voice?
Is this topic relevant to brand and audience?
Does it reflect who you are and what you’re about?
If you answer yes to all the above, you’re onto a winner. Keep creating content and resources in a similar manner to steadily assert your brand within your field.
Build trust and credibility
Brand awareness and brand credibility often go hand-in-hand.
But while creating well-branded content in itself will help you build awareness, it’s creating high-value content that will help you build trust.
So how do you create high-value content that emphasises the credibility of your brand? Demonstrate your expertise.
From case studies and testimonials to how-to guides and industry insights, there’s a whole host of avenues for you to explore here. Champion the mantra of ‘show not tell’ to demonstrate this most effectively.
Anyone can declare themselves to be ‘industry leaders’ or ‘industry experts’, meaning consumers won’t trust you on claims alone. To fulfil your brand objective, prove it through the creation of in-depth, high-value content that provides genuine value and demonstrates authentic knowledge.
Where possible, look to include unique expert insight too – supplying customers with valuable information that can’t be sourced elsewhere is a sure-fire way to quickly build your brand’s credibility and subsequent trust.
Stand out from the crowd
We hate to break it to you, but you’re not the only brand creating content.
You’d be forgiven for assuming, then, that with so many resources out there, the practice of content marketing for your brand will quickly become obsolete.
But that doesn’t have to be the case.
If your competitors are steps ahead of you in content production, all is not lost. Instead, ask yourself what you can do differently – making standing out from the crowd one of your business objectives.
For example, perhaps you’ve identified a topic that’s important to your audience. But whilst conducting your research, you notice a competitor has already covered it… and covered it well, too. This isn’t the red flag you may think it is, though.
Rather than finding a new topic or simply replicating what’s available elsewhere, don your creative cap and think about how you can bring a fresh approach to an old topic.
By championing unique and, where possible, entertaining content, you’re more likely to stand out from the crowd – and more likely to drive better engagement as a result.
Nurture leads
With the right strategic approach, content and resource production can be a powerful tool in fulfilling brand objectives for nurturing leads.
Doing this successfully relies on one fundamental aspect: understanding your audience.
If you haven’t already, look to conduct comprehensive audience research. Dive into the data you have at your disposal, creating audience personas around your common demographics.
It’s important not to skip the detail in this step. Knowing your audience entails more than simply knowing their age bracket, gender and location. In addition to these core elements, look to ask yourself:
What are their habits and behaviours?
What are their common pain points?
How will they interact with my product or service?
This will then enable you to begin tailoring the content you produce – in particular, targeting customers at the ‘top of the funnel’.
Through some simple reverse engineering, your audience research will allow you to track common customer journeys back to the initial point of interest. From here, create content that aligns with this point in a customer journey.
The thinking here is simple: become a customer’s go-to source of information from the off, and continue to create relevant content for every step of their journey. Do so successfully, and by the time a customer is ready to make a purchase, your brand has already done most of the leg work.
Increase sales
This brings us nicely to another purpose of content production and undoubtedly the most common of brand objectives: increasing sales.
If you’ve nurtured your leads through the creation of relevant resources for each step of their journey, then this is the final piece of the puzzle.
It’s important to note here that this isn’t a case of simply creating sales-driven content. On the contrary, resources that are overtly sales-focused in nature actually tend to drive customers away – it’s why there’s been such a surge in transparent marketing in recent years.
Instead, once more place the focus on value. Again paying close attention to the sales funnel, create content that aligns with the last stage of the customer journey.
This is where a powerful and strategic call-to-action comes into play. Think carefully about your word choice and link destinations – in many ways, this is your last chance to pitch. Ensure it isn’t an in-your-face sales approach, but instead a logical and natural path that a user wants to follow after engaging with your content.
Build your community
If you’re creating resources specifically for the audience that matters to you, you’re well on your way to building a brand community.
If your brand is the heart of your community, then your content is its body. Well-crafted resources will help generate, nurture and grow a community around your brand – this should be a brand objective of any business.
So what constitutes a well-crafted resource? Well, wherever possible you want to keep the conversation open – this means creating content that interests, inspires, educates and engages.
Content thoughtfully created for your audience with these elements in mind will keep them coming back for more, steadily growing a community as a result.
The benefits of this speak for themselves. From customer service to product development, brand communities are a hugely valuable asset to businesses big and small – which means getting your content right is key.
As brand community experts, we wanted to ensure businesses were able to share their content to better inform, educate and entertain their community. That’s why the Six Circles platform includes a handy ‘resources’ feature that enables a quick and easy solution to purpose-driven community engagement. Get in touch to find out more and request your free demo today.
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
In February, our new, structured email notification centre and further improvements to our email digest went live. More notification integration has now been included in the second wave of updates to this work, including alerts for:
New forum discussions
New direct message
Connect request accepted
New event created
New event approved
New news story created
New news story approved
New promotion created
New promotion approved
In addition to our notification expansion, we’ve also included some additional Zapier integrations this month, such as:
New user (including custom attributes)
Update user (including custom attributes)
News story created
Future Roadmap
In March, we’re working on the final wave of updates to our new notification centre, meaning you can expect notification integration for the following soon:
New resource added (for admin and members)
New poll added (for admin and members)
New subscription sign up (for admin)
New member sign up (for admin)
The rapid evolution of our notification centre gives you even greater control over more aspects of your community 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 resources feature.
Did you know?
On the Six Circles platform, you have various ways of sharing resources with your community.
How to use this feature
When adding and sharing a resource for your community to access, there are a number of options available to you.
Firstly, you can easily upload a wide range of file types, allowing your community to instantly download and gain access to the resources with minimal fuss.
You also have the ability to create your resources within the Six Circles platform itself, meaning the content be viewed directly on the platform.
A popular approach we’ve seen from organisations in recent months is the use of video content to bring resources to life. Because of this, you can now embed videos from sites such as YouTube and Vimeo directly into the resources you create within your Six Circles community platform.
With the ability to better inform, educate and entertain your community through a range of resources easily added to your platform, purpose-driven community engagement has never been easier than it is when using Six Circles.
You’ve got your fully functioning online store with all the bells and whistles. Your product quality is sky-high. Your product range is vast. Your web traffic is coming in thick and fast. But those coveted conversions just aren’t taking care of themselves like you expected them to.
Rest assured you’re far from alone in this situation. Sales objections plague businesses large and small, from time-honoured brick-and-mortar to digital’s cutting edge.
With a colossal, ever-expanding spectrum of options available to consumers, particularly in the ecommerce world, it’s natural for a few of the countless decision-making criteria to work against you. Taking a proactive approach to handling objections in sales – by eliminating them – is the key to making your offering as persuasive as possible.
Let’s dig into a handful of the most common ecommerce sales objections businesses are facing today to help you make converting a no-brainer for your customers.
The price isn’t right
It may not be that your products are overly expensive and don’t provide value for money – although competitive research is always recommended so you can be confident of your position within the market. Matters of price constitute sales objections for many reasons. Online shoppers can be cautious when it comes to taking a punt on a new product, and they may well use price point as the final decision-maker as to whether to take that leap.
We’re not suggesting you slash your profit margins to ribbons in the name of competition, though. Instead, why not introduce an exclusive discount for first-time customers? Something as simple as ‘10% off your first order’ can flip that switch and remove any price-related sales objections in one fell swoop.
The competition is fierce
In crowded sectors, market saturation can be the enemy of conversions. With a multitude of competitors offering comparable products to yours – perhaps at a more attractive price point or with more convenient delivery options or enhanced features – it’s only natural that this stiff competition will bring with it various sales objections.
There’s little value in chasing your competitors’ unique selling points – you need to identify and embrace your own. By establishing what separates your product range or brand ethos from that of your competitors – such as product longevity, convenience factor or even company ethics – you can begin to set your business apart from the competition and make overcoming objections an easy sell.
Your website’s slow off the mark
Site speed remains an undervalued yet vital contributing factor to ecommerce conversion rates. Slower page response times have a direct impact on page abandonment and, if your website is below par in the speed stakes, you’re leaving your business open to sales objections galore.
Leveraging accessible, user-friendly online tools such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights, you can benchmark your site speed and find actionable fixes to be picked up with your development team. By reducing load times, you’ll be able to streamline the entire browsing experience for your customers and make buying on the go quick and easy – a necessity in the golden age of mobile shopping.
The trust isn’t there
Trust plays a pivotal role in the decision-making process when it comes to buying online. With so many comparable offerings to weigh up, a sense of authority and trustworthiness is often the final piece of the puzzle that trumps any sales objections.
Building trust among your audience takes time through continuous contact, as you slowly but surely prove your worth and earn that sale. But there are a few tried and tested ways to evoke trustworthiness during a user’s first encounter with your website. Positive reviews and ratings are a great place to start, so make sure these pull through to your product pages to give shoppers peace of mind that they’re following in the footsteps of previously satisfied customers.
Delivery options are a deal-breaker
Convenience reigns supreme in the current ecommerce climate, as online shoppers have come to treat fast, low-cost shipping options as an expectation rather than a bonus. Even if your products are competitively priced, delivery options are the final hurdle that could present sales objections users just can’t get past.
Extortionate delivery costs and slow or inconvenient shipping processes are both common conversion barriers that could lose you sales that were otherwise in the bag. If this feels a little close to home, consider expanding your delivery options to include Click & Collect if possible, and offer choice when it comes to delivery days, time windows and costs.
Their money’s no good here
How frustrating would it be to find out that the reason you were losing sales was because you’d refused customer payments? If your ecommerce website fails to accept some major payment methods, the fact is you may as well be turning customers away at the point of sale. Naturally, this is one of the more valid sales objections held by online shoppers.
As well as accepting multiple currencies, it’s crucial to accommodate a variety of preferred payment methods beyond traditional card payments – from PayPal and Klarna to Apple Pay and Google Pay. The broader a range of payment options available to your customers, the more convenient it’ll be for them to complete their purchase.
At Six Circles, our Stripe integration feature takes the hassle out of handling online payments. Helping your community members to effortlessly pay for events, packages, subscriptions and more, this feature is just one of the many ways we make overcoming objections easy for members of your community.
Ready to find out more? Our holistic community engagement platform is packed with slick features and must-have tools to make growing your community a breeze. Get in touch with the Six Circles team today to explore our platform for yourself with a free demo.
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
In January, we were excited to welcome a new member to the Six Circles family. Meet Thomas Mannix…
Getting to know you
Thomas is joining our sales team as a Business Development Executive. With a background in the software industry, Thomas is bringing plenty of exciting knowledge and experience to the table!
Growing up, Thomas wanted to be a detective. Now, fuelled by a champion combo of steak, chips and peppercorn sauce, he’s using those investigative skills to detect new opportunities to further grow our already expanding client base.
As a Middlesbrough FC fan, he’s used to his fair share of disappointments – luckily, his new chapter at Six Circles won’t be one of them!
Future Roadmap
Here’s what exciting new developments and updates are in the works for the rest of Q1:
Newly structured email notification centre
Our newly structured email notification centre is now live, along with some further improvements to our email digest.
But that’s not all – further updates will be added over the next few weeks, allowing you to tailor notifications relating to features across the platform.
Private groups within the forum area
We’re excited to let you know that the private group integration within the forum area is now live! This allows you to create closed areas for specific members, giving you greater control than ever before.
With all of these exciting developments, be sure to keep an eye on the Six Circles platform throughout February to be the first to find out more.
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 Stripe integration feature.
Did you know?
You can handle payments within several different areas on the Six Circles community platform.
How to use this feature
If you’re looking to handle payments online and move away from manual processes, we can activate Stripe integration – this will feed payments directly from your platform straight into your own bank accounts.
This allows members to pay for events, packages and even subscriptions, all through the platform, with ease – keeping them on your platform instead of navigating to an external page (where that precious engagement may be lost!).
But that’s not all. This handy integration can also be utilised by admins to capture payments for any features that you wish to monetise within your community. Take the member offers/promotion area, for example. Thanks to our Stripe integration, a member can now submit an offer, then pay to have it promoted on your platform. Alternatively, you could set a fixed price for members who wish to publish their own polls or news stories on your platform – the important part is that you’re in control.
With the ability to monetise more elements of your community area, purpose-driven community engagement has never been easier than it is using the Six Circles platform.
Marketing promotions can be a super-effective way of bolstering your brand exposure and positively affecting your all-important bottom line – but running successful promotions can be a challenge.
Luckily, we’re here to come to the rescue, offering up 6 ways to ensure your promotion is a resounding success, keeping your brand community happy in the process.
Know your audience inside-out
Of course, knowing your audience is marketing 101 – but when it comes to running marketing promotions, understanding the different segments of your wider audience is key.
Many promotions adopt the mindset that casting the widest net possible is the best course of action. After all, if you reach enough people, eventually, some of them will convert – right? Probably. However, this is an incredibly inefficient way to run a promotion, and is sure to produce far less impressive results when compared to a more strategic and better targeted campaign.
With this in mind, look to reach a targeted, relevant audience for your promotional campaign. To do this effectively, conduct audience research to better understand them. Who are they? What are their pain points? What is their lifestyle?
This more comprehensive understanding of audience segments will enable you to better target your promotions by knowing what type of promotion will incentivise members of your community. As such, you’re likely to see far higher conversion rates, and this innate understanding of audience preferences and incentives can even inspire future sales promotion ideas.
Know your goals (and measure them)
Without clearly setting out your goals and knowing how to accurately track and measure them, how will you ever judge whether your promotion was successful?
This is particularly important, as no two promotions have the same goal. When mapping out what you’d like to achieve, be sure to consider the bigger picture, too. Is your goal simply to drive initial sales, or is your promotion designed to reap longer-term rewards such as customer retention or an increased average spend?
Establish your goal, regardless of whether it’s short-term or long-term, and identify the relevant metrics needed to measure your success. This will help you identify what works and what doesn’t – reacting accordingly where needed – to the benefit of your campaigns both now and in the future.
Champion exclusivity
Consumers like to feel special.
Considering that, look to utilise the psychology of exclusivity to your advantage, playing on FOMO (fear of missing out) and other triggers. What do we mean by this? Don’t just run a promotion such as a free gift – instead, make that free gift available for a limited time, or in limited quantity.
Doing this will incentivise your community to act on your promotion, and fast.
Promote, promote, promote
Sure, your promotion serves the purpose of attracting customers to your brand and service, but have you considered how you’ll attract attention to the promotion itself?
Successful sales promotion ideas rely on engagement, meaning you need to ensure your community and wider audiences know about it.
Remember: visibility is key to ensuring a worthwhile return on investment, so look to advertise your promotion like you would your products or services. From in-store signs and posters to blog posts, social media posts and emails, look to explore a range of physical and digital avenues for maximum coverage.
Demonstrate genuine value
Of course, to properly incentivise customers to engage, successful promotions must offer genuine value.
Utilising audience segmentation, ask yourself what types of offers provide authentic value to your customers. Sure, that free gift with every order is a nice idea, but does your audience really want that gift?
Find that precious middle ground between providing your audience with the utmost value and what you can feasibly afford to give them. Doing so will ensure a more effectively optimised campaign – both in terms of audience value and, just as importantly, cost-effectiveness.
Review, critique and learn
When mapping out your sales promotion ideas, never go in blind. Aside from your audience information, look to also utilise lessons learnt from past campaigns. What worked and what didn’t?
With this in mind, be sure to schedule a review of your marketing promotions at the end of each cycle. Not only is this the best way to obtain valuable insight into the success of your promotion, but it also helps you provide more real-time, personalised promotions in future by reactively fine-tuning your approach.
Now you’re armed with the right know-how, your marketing promotions are sure to be a resounding success time after time – it’s all about understanding what incentivises your community and giving it to them.
The promotion feature on the Six Circles community engagement platform gives you this level of control. With the ability to tailor promotions to different community members, customising brand communications has never been easier. Request your free demo today.
Happy New Year! Before the doors closed on 2020, there was plenty going on behind the scenes here at Six Circles HQ and on our ever-evolving community engagement platform. Here’s the roundup…
Company News
In December, we were excited to welcome a new member to the Six Circles family. Meet Lucy Bramwell…
Getting to know you
Lucy is our new Business Development Executive, joining the sales team to help us continue to grow our client base.
Often found with a black coffee in hand, Lucy loves finding new plant-based recipes to cook in her spare time, posting her creations on her Instagram ‘foodie’ account.
Fuelled by noodles in any shape or form, Lucy is sure to be a great asset to our team (and we’re hoping we’ll get to try some of that scrumptious cooking, too!)
Future Roadmap
Here’s what exciting new developments and updates are in the works for the quarter ahead.
Newly structured email notification centre
Our newly structured email notification centre and improvements to our email digest are now in the final stages of development. We’ll see all of this launch by the end of January.
Private groups within the forum area
The development of a private groups function within the forum area is also in the final stages, with this also set to go live by the end of January.
With all of these exciting developments going live this month, be sure to keep an eye on the Six Circles platform throughout January to be the first to find out more!
We’re busy finalising Q1’s roadmap, but we always welcome any suggestions on what you would like to see on the Six Circles platform. With this in mind, why not send in your ideas to support@sixcircles.co.uk? We always 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 Promotions feature.
Did you know?
As well as listing standard promotions on the Six Circles platform, you can now also set up tiered promotions and categories to help your members search for promotions relevant to them.
How to use this feature
Our promotions feature gives you greater customisation control than ever before.
Simply turn on tiered promotions from your admin panel, where you’ll find 4 options available – platinum, gold, silver and bronze. Once activated, you’re able to set different values against each tier, creating more ways for you to generate new revenue streams from within the promotions area.
You also can create your own categories for your promotions area, allowing your members to easily filter down the promotions by regions, sectors or promotion types, for example.
With the ability to tailor promotions to specific audiences, community engagement has never been easier than it is using the Six Circles platform.
Online brand communities can often be understated in their effectiveness in keeping customers happy, loyal and engaged – and more often than not, this can spell great news for your profit margins.
With this in mind, today we’re looking at 6 reasons why a brand community can help to give you that competitive edge, increasing your sales and improving your customer retention all the while.
Brand ambassadors emerge
One important consideration to have in mind from the off is that not every customer you have is part of your brand community. Some customers will shout louder about you than others, while some customers won’t shout about you at all.
Enter brand ambassadors.
Communities spearheaded by trustworthy brand ambassadors can help organically grow a following from your customer base. These people will not only be active within the community, but also active on social media, sharing your posts, starting conversations and the likes. And because your brand ambassadors are transparent and authentic, they’re more likely to obtain the trust of others, helping build your community and, subsequently, your brand as a result.
Fuels business growth
The math is simple – successful communities attract more custom. Mature brand communities can even attract as much as 70% traffic from search engines, providing you with the ideal opportunity to reach valuable users.
To ensure you’re effectively aligning yourself with the intent of these users, ensure your brand community is a rich informational hub. This will enable users to find solutions within the community, building brand trust and awareness as a result. Of course, this all amounts in fuelling the growth of your business by expanding the potential of your organic reach.
Emphasises customer care
Brand communities champion customer care, which when done correctly, can pay dividends on your overall profit margins.
Meeting customers on their terms and having readily available answers for all queries is a sure-fire way to impress, increasing the likelihood of customer retention as a result. Of course, it’s key that customer service teams are trained on community etiquette and best practices, but resources spent on this aspect of your brand community can bring significant return in the long run.
Saves company resources
New and old members can ask questions, make connections and solve problems within a brand community – all without consulting a member of your immediate team. Why is this a competitive edge? Well, by ensuring your brand community is self-serving, it frees up company resources – whether that be through your members’ organic creation of content or through the ability to source solutions to problems and queries themselves.
Of course, the benefit here speaks for itself. More resource at your disposal means more attention spent elsewhere in the business, giving you a competitive edge by enabling you to become more proactive and reactive.
Enables customer-centric innovations
One of the biggest advantages boasted by brand communities is the ability to encourage brand-consumer conversations.
With this in mind, seeking input from community members is common ground for a lot of brand communities – and while these thoughts, opinions and inputs always hold some objective value, they can be cleverly utilised for significant gain. For example, seeking customer feedback enables you to better align your new products, processes and innovations with the wants and needs of your audience. Why is this important? Because it’s a data-driven way of ensuring your meeting the wants, needs and expectations of your audience, likely boosting your sales all the while.
Emphasises the ‘human’
It is becoming more and more common to see AI bots answering user queries online. While this is sometimes a very cost-effective way to tackle customer service, it can also be implemented so badly that customers take their business elsewhere. Delivering a community service that combines the benefits of automation with human content is therefore the winning ticket, ensuring transparent and authentic brand-customer interactions.
Leading communities are ones that are now able to combine these two elements successfully. Doing so will ensure you obtain and retain consumer trust, giving you a competitive edge over those companies stuck in older ways.
Ready to begin brand community building to find that competitive edge? Get in touch with Six Circles today and request a free demo of our community engagement platform – with our platform, establishing your brand community has never been easier!
Testimonials
“Since incorporating the Six Circles software to further grow our network, we have seen a vast increase in new members and interaction and we are attributing both to the ease of the site’s functionality.
For us, our marketing is now tailored more specifically and effectively due to the inclusion of useful analytics which allow us to form a better understanding of what our members really want.
We would wholly recommend Six Circles to organisations wanting to offer their consumers a platform to meet others, voice their opinions, publish industry news and receive an inclusive and enjoyable customer experience.”
The Mussel Club
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