---
title: "Share Book"
module: "9"
type: reference
order: 0
draft: false
---

**Chapter 15**

**Step 9: SHARE – Igniting Your Customer Advocacy Engine**

**The Email Sam Didn't Act On**

Three weeks after a customer received her new sofa, she sent Sam a short email. It read:

*"Just wanted to say — we've had the sofa for three weeks now and the whole family loves it. My sister-in-law is asking where we got it from."*

Sam typed back: *"That's amazing, thank you so much!"* and moved on. He had orders to pack. A delivery to schedule. A supplier to call.

A week later, the sister-in-law had never found the store.

She had asked the customer for the name. The customer had said "I'll send you the link" and then forgotten. The sister-in-law had done a Google search, found three other furniture stores, bought from one of them.

Sam never knew any of this happened. The customer wanted to advocate. She had the words in her hands. The moment was alive, and then it passed. Not because anyone was unhelpful. Not because the product was wrong. Because Sam didn't have a system. No referral link. No review request. No way to make the easiest possible thing — telling one more person — actually easy.

When he described the lost sister-in-law to Anthony, he said it like bad luck. Anthony didn't let him. "That wasn't luck, that was a gap in your shop," he said. "A customer stood there with her hand up, ready to send you another buyer, and you said *thanks so much* and went back to packing. You had the warmest lead you'll ever get and no way to catch it. Your happiest customers are already selling for you, Sam. You're just not giving them anything to hold." Sam had been thinking of referrals as something you hope for. Anthony was describing something you build.

That is what SHARE is about.

It is not about marketing. It is not about growth hacking. It is about building the infrastructure that lets the goodwill your customers already feel become visible to the next customer who needs exactly what you sell.

---

**We stand at the final step** of the Elevate Ecommerce Framework. You have built the FOUNDATION, mastered HOOK, deployed the GIFT, sharpened your SELL, run NURTURE sequences, executed UPSELL, and empowered customers through EDUCATE. The customers you have taken through this framework are not just buyers — they are successful users of your product who have been supported, educated, and delighted at each stage.

Now, in **Step 9: SHARE**, you activate the most powerful and cost-effective growth engine available to any business: word-of-mouth advocacy.

**The Objective:** To systematically encourage and facilitate the sharing of positive customer experiences through reviews, testimonials, referrals, case studies, and user-generated content — creating a compounding cycle that fuels further growth and makes every subsequent step of the framework more effective.

---

**Why SHARE Is the Ultimate Growth Accelerator**

In an era of ad blindness and deep consumer scepticism toward brand messaging, peer recommendations and social proof are marketing gold. A systematic approach to advocacy delivers leverage that no ad budget can replicate:

1. **Unmatched credibility.** A genuine five-star review from a real customer is exponentially more persuasive than the best copy you will ever write. It increases the perceived likelihood of success for every new prospect who reads it.

2. **Reduced acquisition costs.** Referred customers convert at higher rates and cost less to acquire than cold traffic. Reviews improve ad performance. Strong Google profiles improve organic search placement. The math compounds quickly.

3. **Enhanced brand reputation.** Consistent social proof builds authority in your category — not from what you say about yourself, but from the accumulated weight of what customers say about you.

4. **Invaluable feedback.** Reviews and testimonials contain rich insight into what customers value most. That insight feeds back into every earlier step.

5. **Compounding growth.** Each happy customer who shares brings in new customers who have the potential to share in turn. The flywheel accelerates — but only once you build it.

Neglecting SHARE means leaving your most potent marketing asset untapped. Your best customers are already willing to advocate. They just need to be asked.

---

**Why This Step Fails**

Most businesses that fail at SHARE do not fail because they have poor products or unhappy customers. They fail for one of five specific, fixable reasons.

**Failure Mode 1: Waiting for reviews to happen organically.**

Satisfied customers are silent by default. The average Shopify store receives reviews from 1 to 3 percent of its purchasers — spontaneously, without being asked. Not because those customers are indifferent. Because leaving a review requires initiative, and initiative requires a reason to act. A satisfied customer has no reason to act; they got what they paid for. The only exception is a customer who is *exceptionally* delighted — or, more commonly, *exceptionally* annoyed. This is why review platforms skew toward extremes when businesses don't actively solicit them.

The ask changes everything. Sixty-eight percent of customers who rate their experience 9 or 10 out of 10 will leave a public review if asked directly and promptly. Not some of them. Not the enthusiastic ones. Sixty-eight percent of promoters, systematically asked, within the right window. The gap between 1 percent and 68 percent is not a quality gap. It is a process gap.

**Failure Mode 2: Asking at the wrong time.**

Ask immediately after purchase, before the customer has received and used the product, and you get shallow responses. Ask 45 days after delivery, and the emotional peak has faded — the memory is still positive, but the vivid specificity that makes reviews compelling is gone. The customer has mentally moved on.

The window matters. More on the timing principle below.

**Failure Mode 3: Making sharing too hard.**

The most common review request email goes something like: "We hope you're enjoying your purchase! We'd love it if you could leave us a review on Google." There is a logo. There is a warm sign-off. There is no link.

The customer reads the email. They think: yes, I'd actually be happy to do that. They close the email, open a browser tab, search for the business, find the listing, scroll to reviews, see a sign-in prompt, realise they're not near their Google account, and close the tab. The review never happens. The customer isn't lazy — the process cost more than the motivation could carry.

Every friction point between "yes, I'll do this" and "done" removes 15 to 20 percent of the people who would have followed through. Link to the exact review form. Remove every step that isn't clicking and typing.

**Failure Mode 4: Not amplifying the proof you collect.**

You spend three months building a review profile. You now have 50 Google reviews averaging 4.7 stars. Those reviews sit on a platform that your website visitors never see unless they go looking. You have not embedded them on your product pages. You have not pulled the best quotes into your Facebook ads. You have not used the language your customers naturally reach for to describe your product — the exact words that would resonate with people who are exactly like them.

Collected social proof that is not amplified is wasted. Collection is only the first half of the system.

**Failure Mode 5: Treating every customer the same.**

A first-time buyer who just received their order gets the same review request as a loyal customer who has purchased three times and just completed your full onboarding education. The same template. The same offer. The same ask.

This is the wrong frame. The loyal customer is ten times more likely to respond to a referral invite. The new buyer needs more time before they can speak with confidence about the product. The customer who gave you a 9 on your NPS survey will leave a review if asked — the customer who gave you a 7 probably will not bother. Segment your ask. Send it to the right person at the right moment with the right level of investment.

---

**The Framework Mechanics: How Advocacy Actually Works**

To build a system that works, you need to understand the mechanics beneath it.

**Cialdini's Social Proof — and the Flywheel Effect**

Social proof works because people use the behaviour of others as a shortcut for decision-making. When a customer sees that 83 other people have bought this product and rated it 4.8 stars, the risk calculus changes. The proof signals: other people who made this decision were right to make it. You can be right too.

But here is what most discussions of social proof miss: amplified social proof creates a flywheel. More reviews make the next sale easier. Easier sales bring more customers. More customers mean more potential advocates. Each review you collect makes it marginally more likely that the next review will come. This is not metaphor — the conversion rate on products with 50+ reviews is measurably higher than on products with 10, which is higher than on products with 0. The reviews do not just signal quality; they *compound* it.

**The Net Promoter Logic**

Not every customer is equally likely to share. The Net Promoter Score framework identifies three groups: Promoters (9–10 out of 10), Passives (7–8), and Detractors (1–6). Promoters will advocate if asked. Passives will not bother, even if they're satisfied. Detractors will share, but what they share will hurt you.

This has a direct implication for how you run SHARE. Broadcast review requests are inefficient — you are asking Passives and potentially Detractors alongside the Promoters who are actually likely to help you. A targeted ask, sent to your highest-scoring customers, produces better response rates and better reviews. It also means your review profile improves faster, because you are drawing from the pool of people who have the most positive things to say.

How do you identify Promoters without running a formal NPS survey? Look at your data. High-ticket repeat buyers are almost certainly Promoters. Customers who replied positively to your EDUCATE content. Customers who sent you an email saying they loved the product. Customers who tagged you on social. These people are not hiding. They have already shown you who they are.

**The Three-Part Advocacy Formula**

Every advocacy system — reviews, referrals, UGC — requires three things to work:

*Experience + Ease + Encouragement.*

Experience: the customer must have had an outcome worth sharing. This is not SHARE's job — EDUCATE, NURTURE, and the product itself are responsible for this. But SHARE cannot rescue a poor experience. The advocacy engine is downstream of everything you built before.

Ease: the customer must be able to share with minimal friction. One click to the review form. A pre-written referral message they can paste. A hashtag they can use. The moment you require more effort than the customer's motivation can sustain, you lose them.

Encouragement: the customer needs to be asked — directly, personally, at the right time. Without the ask, most people do not translate goodwill into action. This is not a character flaw in your customers. It is human nature. The ask is the trigger.

Remove any one of the three and the system fails.

**The Timing Window**

Empirical data on review requests is consistent: emails sent 7 to 14 days after confirmed delivery outperform those sent immediately by roughly double in response rates, and outperform 30-day-delayed requests by a similar margin.

Why? Immediately after purchase, the customer hasn't experienced the product fully. They cannot write a specific, credible review because they don't have specific, credible experience yet. At 30 days, the emotional peak has faded — the excitement of receiving something new has normalised into the background of ordinary life. At 7 to 14 days, the window is ideal: the customer has used the product, formed a clear opinion, and still has the experience vivid in their mind.

For furniture specifically — which has a delivery-to-assembly-to-living-with-it arc of roughly 3 to 5 days — day 10 after confirmed delivery sits in the sweet spot. Long enough that the customer has arranged it in their home and had opinions form. Short enough that the experience is still rich and immediate.

**The Word-of-Mouth Amplification Math**

The numbers are worth making concrete. A 2 percent referral rate on 100 customers produces 2 free acquisitions per cycle. A 5 percent rate produces 5. At a customer acquisition cost of €200 — which is conservative for furniture — a 5 percent referral rate saves €1,000 in ad spend for every 100 customers.

Now compound that. Those referred customers, having come through a peer recommendation, convert at higher rates and tend to have higher lifetime value. They are more likely to become Promoters themselves. They are, in the most direct sense, pre-qualified by the person who sent them.

The referral program does not need to generate dozens of new customers to pay for itself. It needs to move the needle a few percentage points to deliver a return that no paid channel can match.

---

**The Review Gap: Why You Have Fewer Reviews Than You Deserve**

Here is the number that should make every ecommerce business owner uncomfortable: the average Shopify store receives reviews from 1 to 3 percent of its purchasers. Spontaneously. Without being asked.

Here is the second number: 68 percent of satisfied customers will leave a public review if they are asked directly and promptly.

The gap between 1 percent and 68 percent is not a quality gap. It is a process gap. The businesses sitting at 1 percent are not worse than the businesses at 68 percent. They just haven't asked.

This is the review gap, and closing it is the single highest-leverage action available in the SHARE module.

**The Timing Principle**

When you ask matters almost as much as whether you ask. Ask too early — immediately after purchase, before the customer has received and used the product — and you get vague, underwhelming responses ("delivery was fast") rather than substantive reviews about the product experience ("the mortise and tenon joints are perfectly fitted, this table is exactly what I hoped for").

Ask too late — 30, 45, 60 days after delivery — and two things happen. The emotional peak of receiving and using a new product has faded. And the customer has moved on mentally. Asking them to revisit a purchase from six weeks ago feels like homework.

The evidence is consistent: review request emails sent 7 to 14 days after confirmed delivery outperform those sent at 30 days by roughly double. For furniture that needs to be assembled and lived with, the 14-day mark tends to be the sweet spot. The customer has used the product. They have formed an opinion. The experience is still fresh.

**The Platform Selection Principle**

Not all reviews are equal, and not all platforms matter equally to every business.

Google reviews affect local search visibility. If your customers find you by searching "handcrafted dining tables Dublin" or "furniture maker near me," Google is your primary platform. A business with 14 Google reviews and a 4.8 rating will appear in local pack results — the map-based listings that appear above organic search results — where a business with 2 reviews often will not.

Shopify product reviews affect on-site conversion. When a visitor arrives on your product page having never heard of you before, reviews are the primary trust mechanism available to them. A product with 47 reviews converts at a measurably higher rate than the identical product with 3 reviews, even if the average rating is similar.

Trustpilot reviews affect paid advertising performance. Google Shopping campaigns can display aggregate star ratings alongside product ads — but only when you have enough verified reviews through an approved partner platform.

Pick one primary platform based on your dominant acquisition channel. Build volume there first. Add secondary asks once the primary platform has meaningful traction. Diluting effort across three platforms means none of them reach the volume threshold where they change customer behaviour.

**The Counterintuitive Truth About Reviews Versus Testimonials**

Many business owners conflate reviews with testimonials. They are different instruments, and understanding the difference explains why reviews are ultimately more powerful.

A testimonial is curated. You select the quote. You choose which customer to feature. The customer who reads it knows — consciously or not — that you would not have published a negative one. The testimonial is filtered through your interests. This limits its persuasive ceiling.

A review is public and unfiltered. A potential customer reading your Google reviews knows that you did not select them. They know they are seeing an unedited sample of real customer opinions. This is precisely what makes them persuasive.

The worst thing about having only 2 reviews was not that Sam's rating was uncertain. It was that 2 reviews do not confer legitimacy. A potential customer seeing 2 reviews thinks: are these real? The psychological threshold for "this business is legitimate and people genuinely use it" is somewhere around 10 to 15 reviews — enough that the sample feels representative rather than curated.

Sam crossed that threshold in four weeks.

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**The Most Common Mistake: Asking Without Making It Easy**

The single most common failure in review collection is not the failure to ask. It is the failure to make the ask effortless.

Your review request email must do five things:

**One — include a direct link.** Not a link to your homepage. A direct link to the review submission form. For Google, this is a specific URL that opens the review dialog directly. Generate it once, test it on mobile, and use it in every email.

**Two — specify the platform.** "Leave us a review on Google" removes ambiguity. The direct link removes the navigation.

**Three — prompt them on what to write about.** A blank text box is an obstacle. "Could you tell us what the table looks like in your home, and whether it was what you hoped for?" gives them a starting point without telling them what to say.

**Four — use a subject line that tells them exactly what the email is.** Don't be clever. Don't tease. Sam's review request arrived with the subject line: *Quick favour: can you tell other people about your experience?* His open rate was 61 percent. The clarity of the subject line is why.

**Five — keep it short.** Three sentences is enough. Context (what they bought), the ask (would you leave a review), the link (click here). The longer the email, the more it looks like a campaign and the less it looks like a genuine request from a person who appreciates them.

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**The AI Leverage: Prompts SH1 and SH2 in Practice**

This is where the AI Prompt Playbook saves you real time — not in strategy, but in drafting speed and amplification volume.

**Example 1: The Review Request Sequence (Prompt SH1, worked)**

SH1 is a ROCKET prompt. The Role and Objective are pre-written into the template — *you are a customer-advocacy copywriter; write three tonally distinct review-request emails for an NPS promoter, each with a direct-link placeholder.* Sam's job was the CONTEXT fields.

**CONTEXT fields Sam filled in:**

- Business: handcrafted solid wood furniture, Dublin, direct-to-consumer
- Customer avatar (Emma): homeowner, mid-30s to mid-50s, cares deeply about her home, made a significant considered purchase
- Trigger and timing: day 10 after confirmed delivery, sent only to NPS promoters (9–10)
- Primary review platform: Google (drives local-pack visibility for "furniture maker Dublin")
- Brand voice: quiet confidence, warm but not chatty, never urgency tactics
- Three angles to test: warm-and-personal, concise-and-direct, social-impact

**Output SH1 returned — the three subject lines:**

Variation A (warm): *"A quick note — and a small favour, [First Name]"*

Variation B (direct): *"Your Google review would mean a lot — here's the link"*

Variation C (social): *"Could you help someone else find furniture they'll love?"*

The first 100 words of Variation A — the one Sam used:

*"Hi [First Name],*

*I just wanted to check in and say thank you. It means a lot that you chose us for something as personal as your home, and I hope the [product] has settled in exactly as you imagined.*

*I have a small favour to ask. Would you be willing to leave a short review on Google? It takes about two minutes — and for a small business like ours, it makes an enormous difference to other people in Dublin who are trying to find furniture they can trust.*

*Here's the link: [direct Google review link]*"*

What AI does well here: producing multiple tonally distinct variations quickly, keeping the language natural rather than corporate. What needs your judgment: whether the timing is right for this specific customer (a customer who had a delivery delay should not get this email until the issue is fully resolved), and whether the warmth matches your actual voice and relationship with the customer.

**Example 2: Turning One Review Into Three Marketing Assets (Prompt SH2, worked)**

SH2's Role and Objective are pre-written — *you are a social-proof editor; reformat one genuine review into assets for three different surfaces without inventing anything.* Sam pasted the review into the CONTEXT.

**CONTEXT fields Sam filled in:**

- Source review (verbatim, Google): *"Absolutely stunning quality. We ordered a custom dining table in oak and it's the centrepiece of our whole room now. The craftsmanship is genuinely something you notice — guests always ask about it. Delivery was careful and the communication was excellent throughout."*
- Asset 1: Facebook ad headline, 30 words max, cold audience
- Asset 2: Instagram caption, 80 words max, sounds like a proud owner
- Asset 3: website pull quote, 25 words max
- Hard rule: don't invent anything not in the review

**Output SH2 returned (the three assets, verbatim):**

**Facebook ad headline:** *"'Guests always ask about it.' — Custom oak dining table, made to order in Dublin. See what's possible."*

**Instagram caption:** *"'The craftsmanship is genuinely something you notice.' This oak dining table was made for a family who wanted their kitchen to feel like the heart of their home. Custom sizes, real wood, made here in Dublin. If you're thinking about a piece for your home, we'd love to hear what you're imagining."*

**Website pull quote:** *"The centrepiece of our whole room — guests always ask about it." — Google Review*

What AI does well here: extracting the emotional core of a review and reformatting it across different surface constraints without losing the authenticity. What needs your judgment: whether the testimonial is being represented accurately (the AI will sometimes compress in ways that subtly change the meaning), and whether the tone matches your brand voice after light editing.

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**The Psychology of Sharing**

Why do satisfied customers take the time to share their positive experiences? Understanding the motivations helps frame requests effectively:

- **Reciprocity:** If you have delivered exceptional value, customers often feel a natural inclination to give back. The EDUCATE investment pays dividends here.
- **Identity expression:** Sharing a positive review aligns with a customer's self-image as a smart consumer who makes good choices.
- **Altruism:** Many customers genuinely want to help others facing similar challenges by recommending a solution that worked.
- **Status:** Sharing a beautiful room featuring furniture they discovered first carries a kind of curation cachet — especially for interior-conscious buyers.
- **Incentives:** Not the primary driver for authentic sharing, but well-structured referral rewards provide a useful nudge for customers who were already inclined to mention you.

Making the act of sharing easy, timely, and low-friction converts all of these motivations from latent to active.

**Systematizing Review and Testimonial Collection**

Don't leave gathering social proof to chance. Implement systems:

- **Automated post-purchase requests:** The workhorse. Use your email platform (Klaviyo, for most Shopify stores) or a dedicated review platform (Judge.me, Loox, Yotpo) to send requests automatically after a period calibrated to your product's usage window. Test timing — 7 to 14 days post-delivery for most physical products, 30 days post-onboarding for products requiring a learning period.

- **Targeted testimonial outreach:** For high-value customers or those who provided exceptional NPS scores, personalised outreach for a detailed testimonial is worth the extra effort. Offer a specific question to answer, not a blank canvas.

- **Leverage positive support interactions:** After resolving an issue successfully, consider a gentle ask — if a customer thanks you effusively after you solved a problem, that is a moment of genuine goodwill. A brief response that includes a review link converts real warmth into public record.

**AI Acceleration: The Playbook Prompts**

- **SH1 (Review/Testimonial Request Emails):** Generates tailored copy for review requests. Provide the product context, the customer segment, the review platform, and the timing — the AI produces personalised variations ready for light editing.

- **SH2 (Social Proof Snippet Generation):** Paste in a genuine positive review and specify the target format. The AI extracts the core message and reformats it for the surface you need.

- **SH3 (Referral Program Invite):** Drafts emails inviting customers to join your referral program, including pre-written sharing messages customers can copy and paste.

- **SH4 (Case Study Outline):** Structures the questions needed to elicit a detailed customer success story — situation before, process using your product, measurable results.

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**SH1 and SH3 in Practice: Sam's Exact Emails**

The ROCKET prompts are designed to take Foundation data — what you know about your customer, what they bought, what stage of their journey they are in — and produce emails that sound like they came from a person, not a campaign.

Sam fed SH1 his product context (handcrafted solid wood furniture, Dublin, typical customer profile: homeowners mid-30s to mid-50s, emotionally invested in their home), the customer segment (NPS promoters, 9–10 rating, contacted within 14 days of delivery), and his primary review platform (Google). He made one specific edit: the subject line. The AI draft proposed "We'd love your feedback." Sam changed it to: *Quick question about your new table.*

The body of the email:

---

*Hi [First Name],*

*Thanks for taking the time to rate your experience with us — it genuinely means a lot to hear that you're happy with the piece.*

*I have a small favour to ask. Would you be willing to share a sentence or two about your experience on Google? It takes about two minutes, and it makes an enormous difference to a small business like ours — especially for other people in Dublin who are trying to find furniture they can trust.*

*Here's the link: [direct Google review link]*

*If you want a starting point: what does the table look like in your home, and is it what you hoped for?*

*Thanks again.*

*Sam*

---

That was the entire email. No header image. No footer menu. Just a personal message from a named person, asking a named recipient for a specific thing, with a direct link and a prompted question.

Sam sent it to his 22 NPS promoters. Fifteen opened the email. Twelve left reviews. Even measured against the full send — 22 people — a 55 percent completion rate is more than seven times the industry spontaneous rate.

For SH3, the referral invite, Sam followed up one week later. He acknowledged the reviews and introduced the offer: €100 store credit for the referrer, 10 percent off for the new customer.

Three customers responded. One texted her sister. One posted in a neighbourhood Facebook group. One emailed a colleague who was renovating. All three referrals placed orders within a month.

None of this required Sam to do anything beyond sending the initial invite. The customers wrote their own messages, in their own words, to the people they already knew.

**Sam's first month with SHARE, in two numbers: 12 reviews and 3 referrals.** Twelve public Google reviews from a man who had two when the month began. Three paying customers who walked in through someone who already trusted him — at zero acquisition cost. He didn't run a campaign. He didn't spend on ads. He asked the people who already loved the work, and made it a two-minute job to say so. The review count moved his Google rating into local-pack territory; the three referrals proved the loop could feed itself. One month. One email each. Two numbers that compound.

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**Sam's Transformation Arc**

Over the 90 days that followed, Sam built a systematic SHARE infrastructure — not all at once, but piece by piece.

First, he set up automated review requests in Klaviyo. Sent on day 10 after confirmed delivery. Friendly tone, direct link to Google Reviews, one prompted question. No header image. His response rate settled at 31 percent — far above the industry baseline. His review count moved from 23 to 87. His Google star rating moved from 4.1 to 4.7. He started appearing in local pack search results for terms he had monitored for two years.

Then he set up a referral program via ReferralCandy. €30 store credit for both parties — the referrer and the new customer. Simple to explain, easy to share. He promoted it once via email and added a mention to his post-purchase sequence. Eight percent of customers referred at least one person over the following quarter. Fourteen new customers arrived through referral in three months — at zero ad spend. At his average customer acquisition cost, that was over €2,800 in saved marketing budget.

Then he started amplifying. He pulled his three best Google reviews and used the quotes in his Facebook ads — verbatim, attributed. His click-through rate on those ads improved by 40 percent compared to the benefit-led ads he had been running. Not because the ads were more polished. Because seeing a real person's words in a real person's voice was more persuasive than anything Sam could write about himself.

By the end of the quarter, SHARE was not a task on his list. It was a system running in the background, producing reviews and referrals and ad copy without requiring his constant attention. He had built the infrastructure. The infrastructure was doing the work.

---

**Amplifying Social Proof: Turning Feedback into Marketing Assets**

Collecting reviews is only half the battle. Strategically leveraging them is where the compounding begins.

- **Website integration:** Display star ratings and review snippets prominently on product pages, category pages, and your homepage using review platform widgets. Create a dedicated testimonials section. Reviews that only live on Google do not help the visitor who lands on your site having never heard of you.

- **Sales copy enhancement:** Weave compelling customer quotes directly into your SELL page copy to support benefit claims and address objections. The language real customers use to describe your product is the most resonant language you have.

- **Advertising creative:** Turn strong review snippets into ad copy and visual elements for HOOK and NURTURE campaigns. Social proof ads consistently outperform purely benefit-driven ads — especially in cold audience targeting, where the customer has no prior relationship with your brand.

- **Email marketing:** Include testimonial snippets in NURTURE sequences. A customer who has received three emails from you but not yet purchased is more likely to convert after reading a peer's experience than after reading another benefit-focused message.

- **Social media:** Share positive reviews, customer photos, and case study highlights regularly. Your review profile is not just a trust signal on third-party platforms — it is content.

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**Building a Referral Engine**

Empower your happy customers to become active marketers.

**Choose a structure.** Double-sided incentives (both parties rewarded) tend to outperform single-sided ones — the referrer is more likely to share when they can present the offer as a gift to the person they're referring, rather than as something that primarily benefits themselves.

**Make sharing effortless.** Provide customers with a unique referral link or code that is easy to copy and share via email, message, or social. If they have to work to give you new customers, they will not bother.

**Choose a platform.** ReferralCandy, Friendbuy, and Smile.io handle tracking and reward fulfilment automatically. A simpler alternative for smaller stores: unique discount codes tracked via Shopify, with manual credit issued. Start simple and automate as volume warrants.

**Promote the program.** Include calls-to-action in your post-purchase email sequence (within the EDUCATE phase, after the customer has had time to experience value), on account dashboards, and in your referral invite email to high-NPS customers.

---

**Leveraging User-Generated Content**

Encourage customers to share their own photos and videos.

- **Run hashtag campaigns.** Give customers a specific tag to use when they share photos of your product in their home. Feature the best ones on social media (with permission). Furniture sits in a beautiful space — the best UGC photographs themselves.

- **Feature customers.** Highlight customer photos on your website and social channels. Always obtain explicit permission before reusing customer content in marketing.

- **Make it easy.** Communicate the hashtag clearly in your post-purchase packaging. A physical card with the tag and an explanation of how you feature customers is low-cost and high-return.

UGC provides authentic, relatable social proof that polished brand imagery cannot replicate. A photo of someone's living room with your table in it, shot on an iPhone, surrounded by their actual life — that is more persuasive than a studio shoot.

---

**Common Variations: How SHARE Differs by Context**

SHARE is not one-size-fits-all. How you run it depends on what you sell and who you sell it to.

**High-ticket furniture.** At price points above €500, a star rating alone is insufficient. Buyers at this level are making considered, emotional decisions. A photo of a beautifully styled room — real, not staged — beats a 4.8 average. Personalised outreach for detailed testimonials is worth the investment: a 300-word customer story about how they chose the piece, how it changed the room, what guests say about it is a sales asset that will perform for years. Case studies with photos should be treated as content pieces in their own right.

**Low-ticket accessories.** At lower price points, volume is your leverage. Automated review requests scale well and should run for every buyer, not just your Promoters. UGC hashtag campaigns work particularly well here — the product is shareable at a social level (a throw, a lamp, a rug styled with an existing piece), and the barrier to sharing is low. Focus on building your review count to the threshold (50+) where it materially improves conversion.

**B2B interior designers.** For trade customers, the case study is the gold standard — not a consumer review, but a professionally framed project showcase. "Designed by [Designer] using [Sam's furniture]" is a referral mechanic that serves both parties: it positions the designer as a taste-maker and gives Sam a credential in the trade market. Co-create the case study; offer to write the first draft from a brief they provide. The designer gets content; Sam gets a case study that speaks directly to other designers.

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**Closing the Elevate Growth Loop**

The beauty of the SHARE step is how it feeds directly back into the beginning of the framework.

Reviews and testimonials provide proof elements for your SELL pages and compelling angles for new HOOK ad creatives. Referrals drive highly qualified, high-converting traffic directly into your GIFT or SELL steps, often bypassing the entire ATTRACT phase entirely. Feedback contains the raw language and specific concerns your customers bring to a purchase decision — language that should flow back into every piece of copy you write, every FOUNDATION you revisit, every HOOK you test.

This is not just the end of the framework. It is the mechanism that fuels its next iteration.

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**The Loop Closes Here — And Opens Again**

SHARE doesn't just end the cycle. It powers the next one.

Every review makes your HOOK more credible. Every referral skips the entire ATTRACT phase. Every case study becomes your best SELL-page content. The framework isn't a straight line — it's a loop that compounds. Each pass through it, the floor rises. The cost of acquisition falls. The quality of customers improves, because people who come through referral are pre-qualified by someone who already knows and trusts you.

Sam started at €8,000 a month. He's running all 9 steps now. Not perfectly. Not all at once. Some of the systems are still manual, some are still early, some will need revisiting as he grows. But he is running them systematically — and that is the whole game. Not perfection at any single step. A complete loop, improving with each rotation.

He'll hit €25,000. Not because a single campaign worked, or a single month was exceptional, but because he built a system that turns satisfied customers into evidence, and evidence into new customers, and new customers into satisfied customers — without starting from zero every time.

And when he does hit it, he'll do it again. That's what the framework is for.

Not to get lucky once. To build the loop.

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**Chapter 15 Action Summary**

- Audit your current review count and identify the gap between what you have and what your satisfied customers could produce if asked.
- Identify your Promoters — high NPS scores, repeat buyers, customers who have engaged with your EDUCATE content — and build a targeted review request sequence for them.
- Set up automated review request emails timed to day 10 post-confirmed delivery. Direct link. Short. Prompted question. Plain text.
- Choose one primary review platform based on your dominant acquisition channel. Build volume there before adding secondary platforms.
- Set up a double-sided referral program. Email your Promoters with the invite. Make the sharing mechanism a single link.
- Pull your three strongest reviews and use the quotes in your Facebook ads, your product pages, and your SELL copy.
- Create a simple UGC mechanism — a hashtag, a physical card in packaging — and feature the best submissions publicly.
- Recognise how SHARE feeds the next pass through the framework. Every review, every referral, every case study is not just a marketing asset — it is fuel for the next cycle.

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*Your happiest customers are already your best salespeople. The reviews Sam earned in those first four weeks didn't cost him an ad budget — only the nerve to ask the people who already loved the work. Build the system. Ask the people. Close the loop. Then run it again.*
