Dave Greiner - January 2005
Creating a successful online community is one of the most sought after and elusive goals in a company's online strategy. Some organisations budget huge sums of money to perfect online community strategies as they seek to build customer relationships that create loyal consumers.
In my experience however, small and medium business can develop productive and lucrative online communities on even the smallest budgets. I can tell you right now, you don't need large sums of money and complex strategy.
To illustrate my point, let's use a client of ours as an example.
Imagine I owned a bridal store. Being an unmarried young male, that's probably a pretty long stretch, but stay with me. Now, imagine that almost 1,000 brides-to-be call in to chat to me and other brides about their wedding every day of the week.
You're probably picturing a huge bridal store with dozens of staff. What if I told you I managed this store by myself as a part-time job. Sounds crazy, but that's just what a web site we developed for The Bride's Diary has allowed them to do.
The Bride's Diary has managed to gradually build this community from zero to more than 4,000 active members in a little more than a year by using a number of simple tools, including:
'My Wedding' - Members Only Area
To encourage customers to become members of the site, we developed a number of wedding planning tools such as a guest list manager, table seating planner and budget planner. We also added members only deals and the Bridal Buzz message boards. To access these tools, brides-to-be had to become My Wedding Members.
By offering valuable tools and content behind a sign up process, we dramatically increased the number of members signing up. If they opted in, these members could then be cross promoted to via the email newsletter.
Bridal Buzz - The Message Board where men dare not tread!
What woman doesn't get excited about her wedding day? Get a few brides-to-be together and the conversations grow exponentially. Our solution capitalised on this with Bridal Buzz, a hugely popular group of message boards where topics like flower arrangements, reception venues and wedding vows are discussed feverishly by thousands of members. This ensures a huge amount of repeat traffic to the web site.
Switch I.T. has developed a number of cost effective message board components that can be integrated into any site in less than a day.
The Bride's Diary Email Newsletter
To keep their members abreast of the latest bridal news, events and products, Switch I.T. also developed a great looking email newsletter allowing The Brides Diary to send information to their members in-house.
Every form on the site has an opt-in to join the newsletter, which is growing at almost 500 new subscribers every month. By using Switch I.T.'s Synergy Mail email newsletter software, The Bride's Diary can keep in touch with their members for next to nothing.
That depends. It's important to remember that this combination of tools won't work for every business. If you're interested in finding out what tools will let you build a successful online community for your own web site, contact the Switch I.T. team for an obligation free proposal.