How Papier built a community of loyal fans

#stationeryaddicts unite.

Community is powerful at Papier. Their followers are obsessed with stationery. Their customers love their products.

Keeping this active community is a huge part of Brand Director Sophie Agar’s job. Last year, Sophie chatted to us about how Papier has built and continues to delight its community.

Read on to learn Sophie’s secrets…

Become besties with your customers

Find out everything about your customers. Then, build a community of dedicated fans.

What do they read? Where do they shop? What podcasts do they listen to? Which influencers do they follow?

When you find out, focus on them. Think of new ways your products could fit into their lives.

Papier talks to their customers whenever they can, surveying them at least twice a year. They’ve discovered that 85% of them are women. Instead of trying to attract more men, Papier is doubling down to really gear marketing towards their target market.

This approach also allowed them to come up with new products to fit into their customers’ lives. Noticing customers who’d previously used Papier for their weddings were coming back for baby announcements, the team designed products to fit their changing needs.

Only post stuff that gets traction

Papier has 250K followers on Instagram, who are mostly stationery addicts. This audience didn’t respond well to Papier’s wedding products or photo products, so they stopped posting about them. Now, their grid is filled with product content because that’s what the audience wants.

Tap into existing communities where you can. For Papier, this meant leveraging the #stationeryaddicts hashtag to find potential new fans and sharing UGC.

Try new things out. Ask your followers questions. Test and learn.

Your brand + an awesome partner = dream products

Work with authentic partners to wow your customers.

Product collaborations are a key part of Papier’s strategy. They work with more than 60 partners to curate collections that can’t be found elsewhere, from household names like Moomin to up-and-coming designers.

Collaborating with other brands and artists brings new perspectives, new audiences and extended reach for Papier’s products.

If it works for your brand, a product collab can be a great way of building out your community.

Keep brand at the heart

Think about the whole customer experience. Where can you remind them of your brand throughout?

Lots of Papier products are gifted. With this in mind, each piece of stationery becomes marketing material with a CTA on the back, encouraging the recipient to check out Papier.

Little touches can help reinforce brand messaging too. Papier’s packaging is beautifully designed to stand out. Each bundle comes with a Papier-branded note reminding customers to snap a pic for social media and tag #lovepapier.

The result? #lovepapier has more than 3K posts. Customers post pictures of their parcels and regularly share videos of unboxing on social.

How can you weave your brand into each step of your customer journey?

 

Leverage your diehard fans

Create a loyalty programme to reward your best customers. But think about what you actually want this group to do. Do you want to encourage repeat purchases? Or reward those who leave reviews?

Papier’s loyalty programme began by offering free delivery and early access to new collections, but these perks didn’t have much impact on their bottom line. Now, they reward customers who tell their friends, leave reviews or give feedback on new products.

Every time someone refers a friend Papier now gives them store credit which can be built up. They’ve found this far more successful than offering money off as it encourages customers to buy products they wouldn’t normally try.