The Power of Evangelist Marketing (Zappos.com)

I have written before about evangelist marketing, see here. At the time I was extolling the virtues of Evernote and Skitch. In that post I mentioned a man synonymous with the concept @guykawasaki. I recently saw an article in businessweek, where both @guykawasaki and @tferris (author of 4 hour workweek, a must read book) were advocating the use of Evernote. I imagine their evangelist marketing resulted in a bigger spike in Evernote users than mine did! Still felt good to be ahead of two people I greatly admire in the technology adoption lifecycle. I believe that evangelist marketing is becomming more and more importnat for companies. The reason for this is the advancements in social media, in particular twitter and blogs have lead to the development of celebrity bloggers and tweeters. Individuals with many followers and readers can reach a large audience almost immediately. So far example I really do think that @guykawasaki and @tferris have had an impact on Evernotes usage. Evangelists can now spread the word quickly to thousands of people.

One company which has seen the importance of evangelist marketing and made it one of its core values is Zappos.com . Zappos is an online store selling footwear and clothes. It was founded in 1999 and is now the biggest online shoe store with gross sales of over a billion dollars in 2008. In this clip from PitchTV Tony Hsieh CEO of Zappos expalins that the money the company would spend on paid for advertising is instead spent on customer service. Zappos has very few regular advertisments and prefers to rely on peoples word of mouth for their marketing strategy. Their goal is that customers have such a good experience using their service that they become evangelists and promote the brand to others.

How strongly do they feel about good customer service? The right hand side of their homepage is devoted to their company culture and emphasises the importance of the relationship with customers. How good is there customer service?

Zaz Lamarr is a Zappos evangelist.

On her personal blog Writing, Cooking, Life Zaz describes her experience shopping with Zappos

“One bright, extraordinary note in all of the sad stuff of the last few weeks - in May we had ordered several pairs of shoes from Zappos for my mom. She’d lost a lot of weight, and her old shoes were all too big. She had a whole new wardrobe of clothes in pretty colors, that fit, so I wanted her to have some pretty shoes that fit, too, when I took her up to Oregon to stay where her sister is. Out of seven pairs, only two fit. Not bad considering she’d never been this thin, so I was winging it, and the return shipping is free.

The rest were here waiting to be returned. Because of various circumstances - lost label, my mom being hospitalized and me being away, the shoes were never sent back. There’s a time limit on the return of 15 days. Remember this. When you do a return to them, they pay the shipping, but you have to get the shoes to UPS yourself. Remember this, also.

When I came home this last time, I had an email from Zappos asking about the shoes, since they hadn’t received them. I was just back and not ready to deal with that, so I replied that my mom had died but that I’d send the shoes as soon as I could. They emailed back that they had arranged with UPS to pick up the shoes, so I wouldn’t have to take the time to do it myself. I was so touched. That’s going against corporate policy.

Yesterday, when I came home from town, a florist delivery man was just leaving. It was a beautiful arrangement in a basket with white lilies and roses and carnations. Big and lush and fragrant. I opened the card, and it was from Zappos. I burst into tears. I’m a sucker for kindness, and if that isn’t one of the nicest things I’ve ever had happen to me, I don’t know what is. So…

IF YOU BUY SHOES ONLINE, GET THEM FROM ZAPPOS.

With hearts like theirs, you know they’re good to do business with.”

Quite simply they have the best customer service of any company. Tony Hsieh on customer service “Customer service is an investment, not an expense. The goal is to create lifelong relationships with customers, Hsieh said. That’s why Zappos doesn’t measure call times; it’s also why the merchant will even refer customers to a competitor when it’s out of an item. Sounds risky, “but when they need another pair of shoes, they’ll go to Zappos,” 

“You need to actively manage your company culture. Hire people based on how they will fit into the culture, Hsieh said. Zappos is all about customer service, so employees need to understand that and be willing to do what it takes to provide excellent service. “If you get the culture right, a lot of the other stuff will take care of itself,” he said.” 

And when Zappos do actually advertise, they do it awesomely!!

Security box for shoes at airport!